GAIL EVANS (BLACK) vs MARTA RAMOS (LATINA) - 2 WOMEN, 1 CHOSE TO GET OUT OF POVERTY (GAIL)

#JOBS


GAIL EVANS (BLACK) vs MARTA RAMOS (LATINA) - TWO WORKING WOMEN, ONE CHOSE TO GET OUT OF POVERTY (GAIL):

BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT LAZY AND WE CAN'T BE REPLACED BUT WE STILL NEED REAL JOBS.

DEMOCRATS LEARNED THE HARD WAY IN 2016 THE BLACK VOTE STILL HAS POWER.


Sources: NY Times, Youtube


***** To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now


ROCHESTER — Gail Evans and Marta Ramos have one thing in common: They have each cleaned offices for one of the most innovative, profitable and all-around successful companies in the United States.

For Ms. Evans, that meant being a janitor in Building 326 at Eastman Kodak’s campus in Rochester in the early 1980s. For Ms. Ramos, that means cleaning at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in the present day.

In the 35 years between their jobs as janitors, corporations across America have flocked to a new management theory: Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy.

The $16.60 per hour Ms. Ramos earns as a janitor at Apple works out to about the same in inflation-adjusted terms as what Ms. Evans earned 35 years ago. But that’s where the similarities end.

Ms. Evans was a full-time employee of Kodak. She received more than four weeks of paid vacation per year, reimbursement of some tuition costs to go to college part time, and a bonus payment every March. When the facility she cleaned was shut down, the company found another job for her: cutting film.

Ms. Ramos is an employee of a contractor that Apple uses to keep its facilities clean. She hasn’t taken a vacation in years, because she can’t afford the lost wages. Going back to school is similarly out of reach. There are certainly no bonuses, nor even a remote possibility of being transferred to some other role at Apple.

Yet the biggest difference between their two experiences is in the opportunities they created. A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory. When she eventually finished her college degree in 1987, she was promoted to a professional-track job in information technology.

Less than a decade later, Ms. Evans was chief technology officer of the whole company, and she has had a long career since as a senior executive at other top companies. Ms. Ramos sees the only advancement possibility as becoming a team leader keeping tabs on a few other janitors, which pays an extra 50 cents an hour.

They both spent a lot of time cleaning floors. The difference is, for Ms. Ramos, that work is also a ceiling.

Eastman Kodak was one of the technological giants of the 20th century, a dominant seller of film, cameras and other products. It made its founders unfathomably wealthy and created thousands of high-income jobs for executives, engineers and other white-collar professionals. The same is true of Apple today.

But Kodak also created enough working-class jobs to help create two generations of middle-class wealth in Rochester. The Harvard economist Larry Summers has often pointed at this difference, arguing that it helps explain rising inequality and declining social mobility.

“Think about the contrast between George Eastman, who pioneered fundamental innovations in photography, and Steve Jobs,” Mr. Summers wrote in 2014. “While Eastman’s innovations and their dissemination through the Eastman Kodak Co. provided a foundation for a prosperous middle class in Rochester for generations, no comparable impact has been created by Jobs’s innovations” at Apple.

Ms. Evans’s pathway was unusual: Few low-level workers, even in the heyday of postwar American industry, ever made it to the executive ranks of big companies. But when Kodak and similar companies were in their prime, tens of thousands of machine operators, warehouse workers, clerical assistants and the like could count on steady work and good benefits that are much rarer today.

When Apple was seeking permission to build its new headquarters, its consultants projected the company would have 23,400 employees, with an average salary comfortably in the six figures. Thirty years ago, Kodak employed about 60,000 people in Rochester, with average pay and benefits companywide worth $79,000 in today’s dollars.

Part of the wild success of the Silicon Valley giants of today — and what makes their stocks so appealing to investors — has come from their ability to attain huge revenue and profits with relatively few workers.

Apple, Alphabet (parent of Google) and Facebook generated $333 billion of revenue combined last year with 205,000 employees worldwide. In 1993, three of the most successful, technologically oriented companies based in the Northeast — Kodak, IBM and AT&T — needed more than three times as many employees, 675,000, to generate 27 percent less in inflation-adjusted revenue.

The 10 most valuable tech companies have 1.5 million employees, according to calculations by Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute, compared with 2.2 million employed by the 10 biggest industrial companies in 1979. Mr. Mandel, however, notes that today’s tech industry is adding jobs much faster than the industrial companies, which took many decades to reach that scale.

Many of the professional jobs from those companies in the 1980s and ’90s have close parallels today. The high-paying positions setting corporate strategy, developing experimental technologies and shaping marketing campaigns would look similar in either era.

But a generation ago, big companies also more often directly employed people who installed products, moved goods around warehouses, worked as security guards and performed many of the other jobs needed to get products into the hands of consumers.

In part, fewer of these kinds of workers are needed in an era when software plays such a big role. The lines of code that make an iPhone’s camera work can be created once, then instantly transmitted across the globe, whereas each roll of film had to be manufactured and physically shipped. And companies face brutal global competition; if they don’t keep their work force lean, they risk losing to a competitor that does.

But major companies have also chosen to bifurcate their work force, contracting out much of the labor that goes into their products to other companies, which compete by lowering costs. It’s not just janitors and security guards. In Silicon Valley, the people who test operating systems for bugs, review social media posts that may violate guidelines, and screen thousands of job applications are unlikely to receive a paycheck directly from the company they are ultimately working for.

And the phenomenon stretches far beyond Silicon Valley, where companies like Apple are just a particularly extreme example of achieving huge business success with a relatively small employee count. The Federal Express delivery person who brings you a package may well be an independent contractor; many of the people who help banks like Citigroup and JPMorganservice mortgage loans and collect delinquent payments work for contractors; and if you call your employer’s computer help desk, there’s a good chance it will be picked up by someone in another state, or country.

Apple emphasizes that its products generate many jobs beyond those who receive a paycheck from the company directly. The company estimates 1.5 million people work in the “app economy,” building and maintaining the mobile applications used on Apple products. Apple stores in 44 states tend to offer more generous pay and benefits than is standard in the retail industry. And it is growing quickly, including far from its California headquarters, such as with 6,000 jobs in Austin, Tex., at an average salary of $77,000 a year, and many more indirectly through what it says is $50 billion in annual spending to suppliers in the United States.

“We’re responsible for creating over two million jobs in the U.S., across all 50 states,” said an Apple spokesman, “ranging from construction, customer care, retail and engineering to app development, manufacturing, operations and trucking. All Apple employees, whether full time or part time, are eligible for benefits and stock grants. We’re also fortunate to have skilled contractors that contribute to our products and services daily, along with over 9,000 suppliers in every state.”

Perhaps the biggest indictment of the more paternalistic approach taken by an earlier generation of corporate behemoths is that, Kodak, despite having been an early innovator in digital photography, is a shell of its former self. After a bankruptcy and many years of layoffs, the company now has only 2,700 employees in the United States and 6,100 worldwide.

But it is also clear that, across a range of job functions, industries and countries, the shift to a contracting economy has put downward pressure on compensation. Pay for janitors fell by 4 to 7 percent, and for security guards by 8 to 24 percent, in American companies that outsourced, Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University found in a 2010 paper.

These pay cuts appear to be fueling overall inequality. J. Adam Cobb of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Ken-Hou Lin at the University of Texas found that the drop in big companies’ practice of paying relatively high wages to their low- and mid-level workers could have accounted for 20 percent of the wage inequality increase from 1989 to 2014.

The same forces that explain the difference between 1980s Kodak and today’s Apple have big implications not just for every blue-collar employee who punches a timecard, but also for white-collar professionals who swipe a badge.

Forklifts vs. 3D Maps

Phil Harnden was coming out of the Navy in 1970 when he applied for a job at Kodak, and soon was operating a forklift in a warehouse. He made $3 an hour, equivalent to $20 an hour today adjusted for inflation. That is roughly what an entry-level contracting job testing software pays.

The difference between the two gigs, aside from the absence of heavy machinery in Apple’s sleek offices, is the sense of permanence. Mr. Harnden put in 16 years operating forklifts before he left in 1986 to move to Florida. When he returned 10 years later, he was quickly rehired and even kept his seniority benefits.

In interviews, tech industry contractors in Silicon Valley describe a culture of transience. They can end up commuting to a different office park that houses a new company every few months; in many cases 18 months is the maximum a contractor is allowed to spend at one company.

“I would rather have stability,” said Christopher Kohl, 29, who has worked as a contractor at several Silicon Valley companies, including a stint doing quality assurance on Apple Maps. “It’s stressful to find a new job every 12 to 18 months.”

For Silicon Valley’s contracting class, there are reminders large and small of their second-class status. Contractors generally do not receive the stock options that have made some midlevel Silicon Valley workers wealthy over the years, nor the generous paid time off for vacation, illness or the birth of a child. The health insurance plans tend to be stingier than those that the tech giants they serve provide for their direct employees.

The smaller reminders can be just as telling. One former Apple contractor recalled spending months testing a new version of Apple’s operating system. To celebrate the release, the Apple employees they’d worked closely with on the project were invited to a splashy party in San Francisco, while the contractors had beers among themselves in a neighborhood pub.

The compensation these white-collar contractors receive puts them squarely in the middle rungs of workers in the United States, and the most skilled can make six figures (though that doesn’t go far in the hyper-expensive Bay Area housing market). Apple, based on its consultants’ report, expected to be indirectly responsible for nearly 18,000 jobs in Santa Clara County by now at an average pay of about $56,000 a year.

There are some advantages. If they work for one of the companies like Apple or Google that feature a subsidized, high-quality cafeteria, contractors can enjoy the food. They can tell their friends that they work at one of the world’s most admired companies, and enjoy predictable, regular hours. Once in a while, a contractor will be hired into a staff position.

“It’s not evil,” said Pradeep Chauhan, managing partner of OnContracting, a site to help people find tech contracting positions. “They have a job and they’re getting paid. But it’s not ideal. The problem with contracting is, you could walk in one day and they could say, ‘You don’t need to come in tomorrow.’ There is no obligation from the companies.”

And that is the ultimate contrast with the middle-skill, middle-wage jobs of earlier generations of titans — a sense of permanence, of sharing in the long-term success of the company.

“There were times I wasn’t happy with the place,” Mr. Harnden said of his Kodak years. “But it was a great company to work for and gave me a good living for a long time.”

Transmissions vs. Staplers

When an automaker needs a supplier of transmissions for its cars, it doesn’t just hold an auction and buy from the lowest bidder. It enters a long-term relationship with the supplier it believes will provide the best quality and price over time. The company’s very future is at stake — nobody wants to buy a car that can’t reliably shift into first gear.

But when that same automaker needs some staplers for the office supply cabinet, it is more likely to seek out the lowest price it can get, pretty much indifferent to the identity of the seller.

Labor exists on a similar continuum.

The right product engineer or marketing executive can mean the difference between success or failure, and companies tend to hire such people as full-time employees and as part of a long-term relationship — something like the transmission supplier. What has changed in the last generation is that companies today view more and more of the labor it takes to produce their goods and services as akin to staplers: something to be procured at the time and place needed for the lowest price possible.

There is plenty of logic behind the idea that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource the rest. By this logic, Apple executives should focus on building great phones and computers, not hiring and overseeing janitors. And companies shouldoutsource work when the need for staff is lumpy, such as for software companies that may need dozens of quality-assurance testers ahead of a major release but not once the product is out.

There’s no inherent reason that work done through a contractor should involve lower compensation than the same work done under direct employment. Sometimes it goes in the other direction; when a company hires a law firm, it is basically contracting out legal work, yet lawyers at a firm tend to be paid better than in-house counsel.

But as more companies have outsourced more functions over more time, a strong body of evidence is emerging that it’s not just about efficiency. It seems to be a way for big companies to reduce compensation costs.

Firms in the United States are legally required to offer the same health insurance options and 401(k) match to all employees — meaning if those programs are made extra generous to attract top engineers, a company that doesn’t outsource will have to pay them for everyone.

More broadly, there are a whole set of social pressures and worries about morale that encourage companies to be more generous with pay and benefits for employees who are on the same payroll.

“There was an overriding concern about equity,” said Mr. Cobb, the Wharton professor. “Firms would try to set pay so that the gap between the security guard or administrative assistant and senior V.P. wasn’t as great as you might expect, essentially by paying lower- and middle-skill workers more than they were probably worth on the market.”

Linda DiStefano applied for a secretarial job at Kodak during Easter week of her senior year in high school in 1968, and was hired to start immediately after her graduation for $87.50 a week, today’s equivalent of $32,000 a year. She put in four decades at the company, first as a secretary, then helped administer corporate travel and other projects.

“I helped put on the dinners for the board of directors, which in retrospect someone of my grade shouldn’t have been doing,” she said. “But I had a series of managers who trusted me.”

It bought her a house off Lake Avenue, a new car every few years and occasional long-distance trips to Motown reunion concerts. When her department was abolished in 2008, the travel bookings contracted out, she was making $20 an hour. The best job she could find was as a pharmacy technician at a grocery store for $8.50 an hour.

As you drive around Rochester, the role of Eastman Kodak in the city is evident everywhere, in the Kodak Tower that looms over the center of town, in the Eastman Theater on Main Street, and in the hulking buildings and empty parking lots of the manufacturing center known as Kodak Park.

In reading the company’s old annual reports, you get a sense that its executives thought of the jobs created and the wages paid as a source of pride and achievement. On the first page of most years’ annual reports was an accounting of how many employees the company had in the United States and worldwide, and the total pay and benefits they received.

Apple, with a spaceship-like campus about to open, looms large over Cupertino in its own way, accounting for something like 40 percent of the jobs in the city, and investing $70 million in local environmental and infrastructure upgrades. It is no middle-class enclave; the median home price is $1.9 million.

“We definitely feel a sense of pride to be the home of Apple,” said Savita Vaidhyanathan, the mayor of Cupertino. “But they consider themselves a global company, not necessarily a Cupertino company.” She said she has never met Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive. “We would have a hard time getting an audience with anybody beyond upper-middle management,” she said.

Ms. Ramos, the Apple janitor, lives down the road in San Jose. She pays $2,300 monthly for a two-bedroom apartment where she and her four children live. Before overtime and taxes, her $16.60 an hour works out to $34,520 a year. Her rent alone is $27,600 a year, leaving less than $600 a month once the rent is paid. Overtime, in addition to the wages from one of her teenage children who works part time at a grocery store, help make the math work, though always tenuously.

She works from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. On days when one of the other cleaners doesn’t show up, she may get a few extra hours, which is great for the overtime pay, but it means even less sleep before it is time to take her children to school.

A 60-cent-an-hour raise this year negotiated by her union, the SEIU United Service Workers West, helped. Kodak in its prime was not unionized, though in that era when organized labor was more powerful over all, managers deliberately kept wages high to try to prevent the company’s workers from forming one.

There is little chance for building connections at Apple. “Everyone is doing their own thing and has their own assignment, and we don’t see each other outside of work,” said Ms. Ramos in Spanish.

Ms. Evans, who was a Kodak janitor in the early 1980s before her rise to executive there and at other leading firms like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, recalls a different experience.

“One thing about Eastman Kodak is they believed in their people,” said Ms. Evans, now chief information officer at Mercer, the human resources consulting giant. “It was like a family. You always had someone willing to help open a door if you demonstrated that you were willing to commit to growing your skills and become an asset that was valuable for the company.”

The shift is profound. “I look at the big tech companies, and they practice a 21st-century form of welfare capitalism, with foosball tables and free sushi and all that,” Rick Wartzman, senior adviser at the Drucker Institute and author of “The End of Loyalty,” said. “But it’s for a relatively few folks. It’s great if you’re a software engineer. If you’re educated, you’re in command.”

But in the 21st-century economy, many millions of workers find themselves excluded from that select group. Rather than being treated as assets that companies seek to invest in, they have become costs to be minimized.

WHITE HOUSE FIRES CNN, NY TIMES, LA TIMES & POLITICO VIA BRIEFING EXCLUSION

WHITE HOUSE FIRES CNN, NY TIMES, LA TIMES & POLITICO VIA BRIEFING EXCLUSION:

MAINSTREAM MEDIA LIBERAL BIAS vs TRUMP.

TRUMP WILL ALWAYS PREVAIL BECAUSE HE'S A FEARLESS NY MEDIA GENIUS.


Sources: CNN, Alex Jones, Washington Post, NY Times


****** White House blocks CNN, New York Times from press briefing hours after Trump slams media


The White House on Friday barred news outlets — including CNN, the New York Times, Politico and the Los Angeles Times — from attending an off-camera press briefing held by spokesman Sean Spicer, igniting another controversy concerning the relationship between the Trump administration and the media.

The Wall Street Journal, which did participate in the briefing, said in a statement that it was unaware of the exclusions and "had we known at the time, we would not have participated, and we will not participate in such closed briefings in the future."

The Washington Post did not have a reporter present at the time of the gaggle.

CNN's Sara Murray went on air to describe what happened:

We lined up.

We were told there was a list ahead of time, which is sort of abnormal, but we put our name on a list. And then when we went to enter, I was blocked by a White House staffer, who said we were not on the list for this gaggle today.

Now, normally, if you were going to do something like this — an extended gaggle, off camera — you would have one person from each news outlet.

As you know, we have multiple people from CNN here every day. So, if you're going to do something beyond a pool, which is sort of the smallest group of reporters that then disseminates the information, you would have one person from every news outlet.

That is not what the White House was doing today. What the White House was doing was handpicking the outlets they wanted in for this briefing.

So Breitbart, the Washington Times, the One America News Network — news outlets that maybe the White House feels are more favorable were all allowed in, whereas I was blocked from entering, Politico was blocked from entering, the New York Times, the L.A. Times. All of these news outlets were blocked from going to a gaggle.

White House Correspondents' Association President Jeff Mason called in to CNN to say the organization is “still getting information about” the decision, adding:

They clearly wanted to have a gaggle that was not on camera and was not the full press corps today. We don't object to there being briefings like that that aren't always on camera, but we have encouraged them when they want to do something like that ... [to] still do it in the press room and do it in a place where all the reporters have a chance to ask questions.

So, we've made that clear, and we're going to continue to have discussions with them about that. And we're not happy about how this happened today.
The Post's Executive Editor Marty Baron issued the following statement:

“It’s appalling that the White House would exclude news outlets like the New York Times, CNN, Politico, the Los Angeles Times, and BuzzFeed from its publicly announced briefings. This is an undemocratic path that the administration is traveling. There is nothing to be gained from the White House restricting the public’s access to information.

We are currently evaluating what our response will be if this sort of thing happens again.”
White House deputy communications director Raj Shah insisted this was all much ado about nothing.

But New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet declared that “nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties.”

BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith, whose outlet also was excluded, added this: "While we strongly object to the White House's apparent attempt to punish news outlets whose coverage it does not like, we won't let these latest antics distract us from continuing to cover this administration fairly and aggressively."

Ben Wizner, director of the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union called the White House's move "yet another disturbing example of the Trump administration’s contempt for the vital role a free press plays in our democracy."

White House press secretary Sean Spicer himself had previously criticized the idea of limiting media access to the White House.

Two months ago, in a panel discussion, he said open access for the media is “what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship.”

recent days, the president has grown increasingly critical of what he calls the "fake news media. Hours before the limited-access gaggle, Trump devoted much of an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference to bashing the media.

“A few days ago, I called the fake news media the enemy of the people, and they are,” the president said. “They are the enemy of the people.”

Fox News anchor Bret Baier quickly discouraged gloating on the right, noting that his network's rivals showed solidarity when the Obama White House tried to freeze out Fox News eight years ago.

In 2009, the Obama administration attempted to exclude Fox News from a round of TV interviews with “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg. Jake Tapper (then of ABC, now of CNN) stood up for one of his network's “sister organizations” during a press briefing.

“Can you explain why it's appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one?” Tapper asked Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary at the time.

Rival networks refused to conduct interviews with Feinberg unless Fox News was granted one, too.

Fox Business Network told The Post that one of its reporters, Blake Burman, also was blocked from participating in the gaggle.

Fox News chief White House correspondent John Roberts said on air that his network will join others in protesting the exclusion of certain outlets.

HILLARY CLINTON'S FICTITIOUS BLACK VOTER FIREWALL (CHARLES BLOW'S COLUMN)

@hillaryclinton

~ HILLARY CLINTON'S FICTITIOUS BLACK VOTER FIREWALL (CHARLES BLOW'S COLUMN):

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S 2016 "BLACK VOTER FIREWALL" IS A POLITICAL MYTH.

2016 BLACK VOTERS ARE NOT ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT HILLARY'S CAMPAIGN.


Respected BLACK Journalist Charles Blow recently authored an article in the NY Times about how 2016 BLACK voters have created a "Firewall" around Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign to insulate her politically.

I beg to differ with Mr Blow in that no such "BLACK voter firewall" exist for Hillary as it once did for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

In fact due to the legislative actions of Bill Clinton & Barack Obama against the BLACK American community, many BLACK voters today no longer trust Hillary and are strongly considering supporting a GOP presidential candidate in Nov 2016.

Thus Charles Blow's "BLACK voter firewall" relative to Hillary Clinton's 2nd bid for U.S. President is actually just a Political Myth.




*** Hillary Clinton Stumbles

In October, when Hillary Clinton made a spectacle of the congressional Benghazi committee during a marathon interrogation that seemed designed to make a spectacle of her, she emerged stronger than ever. Her polls numbers surged.

That performance had come on the heels of a strong debate performance the week before in the first Democratic presidential debate.

She had bolstered the image she wanted to project: strong, smart, capable and battle-tested.

But now, on the verge of Monday night’s Democratic town hall in Iowa — the last time the candidates will face off before the caucuses in that state — and with Bernie Sanders’s poll numbers climbing not only in Iowa, but also in New Hampshire, the Clinton campaign seems increasingly desperate and reckless.

I noticed the turn in the last debate as Clinton seemed to me to go too far in her attacks on Sanders, while simultaneously painting herself into a box that will be very hard to escape.

She wrapped herself in President Obama’s legacy so tightly that she could hardly breathe, and then built an image of herself as a practical politician who could build on Obama’s accomplishments by taking small steps and negotiating tough deals.

But practicality and incrementalism, as reasonable as that strategy and persona may be, are simply no match for what animates the Sanders campaign — a kind of kinetic, even if sometimes overblown, idealism. His is a passionate exposition of liberalism — and yes, democratic socialism — in its most positive light.

But, let me be clear and unequivocal: I find his earnest philosophic positions to be clear and often laudable, but also somewhat quixotic.

I think that he is promising far more than even he knows he can deliver, and the electability question is still a real one, even though polls now show him matching up well against possible Republican opponents.

For instance, Sanders’s plan for universal health care is an admirable ambition of any true liberal, but as presented seems to me unworkable, and the prospect of getting it passed through this Congress or any Congress that vaguely resembles it is nil.

Congress has voted to repeal Obamacare, which is far shy of Sanders’s proposal, more than 60 times. Suggesting that it would pass something even more expansive is mere fantasy.

When Sanders is pressed on how he will accomplish his ambitious goals, he often responds with the nebulous answer that it will require a “political revolution,” which seems to mean energizing and engaging an unprecedented number of new voters who would not only ensure his election but flip control of the Senate and possibly the House.

Interesting, but also unlikely. Go talk to all the Blue Dog Democrats who lost their seats in the wake of Obamacare passage. Go talk to all the voters who are being disenfranchised by new voter suppression laws.

Go talk to all the poor people who live in states where conservative voters ensure Republican leadership, and therefore prevent Medicaid from being expanded in their states.

There are political realities that exist in America that can be changed sometimes, and often are, but that are not often subject to sea changes.

Furthermore, Sanders likes to tout that he doesn’t have a “super PAC” and doesn’t want one.

That is a principled position. But the Republican candidate will have the support of many super PACs, awash in hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money, and the Republican nominee himself might even be a billionaire.

They are going to beat Sanders like he is a nail with the “socialist” label and his proposal on new taxation. Middle of the spectrum Middle America is likely to be very susceptible to this negative messaging.

But instead of Clinton finding a way to express that her plans are more tangible than Sanders’s, and her chances in the general election are stronger than his, she and her campaign have made some incredulous inferences about Sanders’s honor.

The swipes at him as being soft on the gun industry as some way of cozying up to it, or of being anti-Obama because he wanted Obama to be stronger in pursuing a liberal agenda, or that he wants to scrap Obamacare, simply do not connect.

Sanders may be a dreamer, but he’s not dishonorable. Trying to sully him in this way only sullies her.

There are a tremendous number of echoes starting to be heard between the way Clinton ran against Obama, and the way she is running against Sanders.

Clinton has what political insiders call the “firewall”: Overwhelming support among black and Hispanic voters in Southern and some Western states. But a win by Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire could supply a boost of momentum that could greatly erode the Clinton firewall.

If Clinton can’t find a positive, energetic message to project, and soon, she is going to be swept away by Sanders.

Some part of Sanders’s proposals and even his vision for this country may indeed be a fairy tale.

But in the 2008 race, Bill Clinton criticized Obama and his position on the Iraq war as a “fairy tale.”

Well fairy tales sometimes come true, particularly when Hillary Clinton stumbles.


Sources: NY Times, Youtube

ZERO TOLERANCE: Public Schools Are Eliminating Disciplinary Policies Which Target BLACK & LATINO Students

#ZEROTOLERANCE

Public Schools across the nation are eliminating Racist "ZERO TOLERANCE" Disciplinary Policies which primarily target BLACK & LATINO Students anyway.

ARTICLE: "Seeing the Toll, Schools Revise Zero Tolerance"

Faced with mounting evidence that get-tough policies in schools are leading to arrest records, low academic achievement and high dropout rates that especially affect minority students, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.

Perhaps nowhere has the shift been more pronounced than in Broward County’s public schools. Two years ago, the school district achieved an ignominious Florida record: More students were arrested on school campuses here than in any other state district, the vast majority for misdemeanors like possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti.

The Florida district, the sixth largest in the nation, was far from an outlier. In the past two decades, schools around the country have seen suspensions, expulsions and arrests for minor nonviolent offenses climb together with the number of police officers stationed at schools. The policy, called zero tolerance, first grew out of the war on drugs in the 1990s and became more aggressive in the wake of school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado.

But in November, Broward veered in a different direction, joining other large school districts, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Denver, in backing away from the get-tough approach.

Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior.

These alternative efforts are increasingly supported, sometimes even led, by state juvenile justice directors, judges and police officers.

In Broward, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, the school district entered into a wide-ranging agreement last month with local law enforcement, the juvenile justice department and civil rights groups like the N.A.A.C.P. to overhaul its disciplinary policies and de-emphasize punishment.

Some states, prodded by parents and student groups, are similarly moving to change the laws; in 2009, Florida amended its laws to allow school administrators greater discretion in disciplining students.

“A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward County Schools superintendent, who took the job in late 2011. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”

Nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic, according to federal data.

“What you see is the beginning of a national trend here,” said Michael Thompson, the director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center. “Everybody recognizes right now that if we want to really find ways to close the achievement gap, we are really going to need to look at the huge number of kids being removed from school campuses who are not receiving any classroom time.”

Pressure to change has come from the Obama administration, too. Beginning in 2009, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education aggressively began to encourage schools to think twice before arresting and pushing children out of school. In some cases, as in Meridian, Miss., the federal government has sued to force change in schools.

Some view the shift as politically driven and worry that the pendulum may swing too far in the other direction. Ken Trump, a school security consultant, said that while existing policies are at times misused by school staffs and officers, the policies mostly work well, offering schools the right amount of discretion.

“It’s a political movement by civil rights organizations that have targeted school police,” Mr. Trump said. “If you politicize this on either side, it’s not going to help on the front lines.”

Supporters, though, emphasize the flexibility in these new policies and stress that they do not apply to students who commit felonies or pose a danger.

“We are not taking these tools out of the toolbox,” said Russell Skiba, a school psychology professor at Indiana University who promotes disciplinary changes. “We are saying these should be tools of last resort.”

In Broward County, the shift has shown immediate results, although it is too early to predict overall success. School-based arrests have dropped by 41 percent, and suspensions, which in 2011 added up to 87,000 out of 258,000 students, are down 66 percent from the same period in 2012, school data shows.

Under the new agreement, students caught for the first time committing any of 11 nonviolent misdemeanors are no longer arrested and sent to court. Rather, they attend counseling and perform community service.

Nor do students face suspension for minor infractions. Instead, they also attend a program called Promise for three days or more. Repeat offenders get several chances to change their behavior before more punitive measures kick in.

One recent afternoon, an 18-year-old senior sat in the cafeteria at the Pine Ridge Alternative Center, where students are sent in lieu of a suspension, and spoke with a family therapy graduate student on a counseling team. The girl had been caught with a small amount of marijuana in her car on her high school campus, a misdemeanor that would have led to a suspension or arrest in the past. It was the first time she had gotten in trouble at school.

“I was freaking out,” she said. Her first fear was that she would be barred from prom. Here, though, she saw the larger picture and came to view the incident as “her second chance.”

She learned about bullying and drugs and alcohol. “It was a slap in the face,” she said. “I don’t even want to smoke anymore.”

Other students here learn to manage their anger, if that is their issue. Parents are involved in the process. And counselors have helped identify problems at home including abusive situations, something that administrators said underscores how invaluable the counseling component has been for the Promise program, said Belinda Hope, the principal at Pine Ridge.

Mr. Runcie and others said the more punitive measures tended to make a bad situation worse. Suspended and expelled children would be home alone or on the street, falling behind academically. Those arrested could be stigmatized by criminal records.

“The data showed an increase in the harshness of the disciplinary practices in schools — what was once a trip to the principal’s office is now a trip to the jail cell,” said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group involved in the effort.

Juvenile judges were among the first to express alarm over the jump in the number of students appearing in court on misdemeanors, an increase they said is tied to the proliferation of school police officers.

“We started to see the officers as a disciplinary tool,” said Judge Elijah H. Williams of Broward County Circuit Court, a juvenile judge who said he was “no flaming liberal” but saw the need for change.

“Somebody writes graffiti in a stall, O.K., you’re under Arrest.

A person gets caught with a Marijuana cigarette, you’re under Arrest.”


Sources: NY Times, Youtube

NYPD WILL HIRE PEOPLE OF ALL RACES & NATIONALITIES, EXCEPT BLACK MEN

#NYPDRacism

NYPD WILL HIRE PEOPLE OF ALL RACES & NATIONALITIES, EXCEPT BLACK MEN.

ARTICLE: "More Diversity In City’s Police Dept., But Blacks Lag"

It is among Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly’s prouder legacies:

A majority of the police officers in New York City are now members of minorities, and have been since roughly 2006.

But as the Police Department has attracted an increasingly kaleidoscopic range of nationalities to its ranks in recent years — officers hail from Albania to Yemen — department statistics reveal a decline in new recruits among Black New Yorkers.

The decline comes despite aggressive recruitment efforts in places like central Harlem and the Bronx, where the department regularly assigns friendly recruitment officers to visit.

In 2003, 18 percent of the Police Academy’s 2,108 graduates were Black.

Of the 1,247 recruits who started the academy this summer and will graduate on Friday, Black make up about 10 percent, according to the department.

By contrast, the percentage of Hispanic recruits has remained around 25 percent from 2003 till now, and the percentage of white non-Hispanic recruits has actually risen in recent years, to 57 percent from 52 percent in 2003.

Police Department statistics reveal a decline in new recruits among Black New Yorkers, despite aggressive, brochure-strewn recruitment efforts in places like central Harlem and the Bronx.

There are many possible explanations for the decline, including demographic shifts in the city’s Black population, a rise in the number of new immigrant applicants and possibly the highly publicized reduction of officers’ starting salary midway through the decade. (It was since raised to a base pay of about $42,000.)

The Police Department’s aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics may have played a role as well.

As the percentage of Black recruits to the Police Academy zigzagged downward over the last decade, the number of recorded street stops, mostly in minority neighborhoods, rose higher, sowing distrust of the police.

“I think most people are past saying ‘Oh, don’t be a cop,’ ” said Orayne Williams, 22, a senior at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who is from Flatbush, Brooklyn. “But it still does exist.

People from the community have that mind-set.”

Standing nearby, his friend Parris Bailey cut in.

“I like the stop-and-frisk idea; they need to be able to do their job,” said Ms. Bailey, 21, who lives with her parents in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and counts “Law and Order” among her favorite shows.

But she said she never considered being a police officer.

“Defense attorney,” she said.

Mr. Williams said he was preparing for the Law School Admissions Test, not the police exam.

Police departments often struggle to diversify their ranks, and the New York Police Department has made strides over the last decade.

It is roughly 30 percent Hispanic at the patrol level; it has more than doubled the number of Asian police officers since 2003;

and it is slowly moving toward being majority minority across all ranks.

(About 52 percent of the 34,000-member force was White at the start of 2013;

16 percent was Black.)

By contrast, at the Port Authority Police Department, Blacks make up a small part of each academy class.

Out of 217 graduates in 2012, 13 were Black.

That is up from just four in 2008, the last year of new recruits.

Recruiters for the New York Police Department, who are officers themselves, pitch the job mostly for its benefits:
compensation of over $90,000 after five and one-half years, the option to retire after 22 years with half pay and health care.

The recruiting slogan is:

“Be Proud.”

At the start of the Bloomberg administration, attitudes toward the police in minority neighborhoods softened in anticipation of a shift from the law-and-order approach of Rudolph W. Giuliani and a string of police shootings of Black men.

Under Mr. Kelly, the department pushed to increase diversity while requiring two years of college credit or military service to enter the academy.

Yet critics charge that police behavior in minority neighborhoods over the last decade has hindered efforts to attract Black officers, alienating many young men and sowing broader resentment.

“We had this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde recruitment strategy that played out in the community,” said State Senator Eric Adams, a retired police officer.

“I had a conversation with Commissioner Kelly around this,” he added.

“He had to acknowledge that the Police Department is not doing well at recruiting Black men.”

John J. McCarthy, the department’s chief spokesman, pointed to statistics showing the overall diversity of the department and that, since 2010, the percentage of Blacks taking the Police Department exam had remained relatively constant, fluctuating between 17 and 20 percent of all test takers.

Those who pass may not become officers for a variety of reasons, including residency requirements and background checks.

(There is also now a two-and-a-half-year wait between the time an applicant takes the test and enters the academy, possibly dissuading some.)

“Although the N.Y.P.D. is smaller than it was over a decade ago, the agency is more diverse than ever before,” Mr. McCarthy said. “In fact, the N.Y.P.D. is the most diverse police department anywhere in the world.”

The incoming police commissioner, William J. Bratton, had to deal with similar apparent distrust in Los Angeles.

Under his leadership, the department convened focus groups with African-American residents to learn of their concerns before trying aggressive recruiting.

Some said they actively discouraged their children from joining the force.

“One group that was particularly adamant against young Black men joining were mothers who saw their sons, and in some cases their grandsons, jacked around over the years,” said John W. Mack, a former head of the Los Angeles Urban League and then president of that city’s police commission during Mr. Bratton’s tenure there.

“And why would you want your sons to join a police force who was doing that?”

The situation can be frustrating for Black officers in New York.

“This is a great job,” said Detective Yuseff Hamm, the president of the Guardians, a Black fraternal organization that dates from 1942.

“This is a great career.

This is an absolute benefit to the citizens of New York.

But a lot of people don’t look at it that way in the community.”

Detective Hamm said the biggest challenge was attracting new Black recruits who do not already have family members in law enforcement.

Stop-and-frisk, he said, is just one of many concerns. “It comes up in them saying, ‘Is that what I would have to do?’ ” he said.

More often, he said, the department’s educational requirements pose problems.

“It’s necessary, but a hindrance at the same time,” he said.

Census data shows that the number of Blacks who could be eligible to be hired by the Police Department — 21- to 35-year-olds with at least two years of college living in the city or surrounding eligible counties — has increased since 2000.

At the same time, said Susan Weber-Stoeger, a demographer at Queens College, the number represents a smaller percentage of all New Yorkers who fit that criteria.

Outside John Jay College, Mitchell, 21, a Black senior from Canarsie, Brooklyn, said he was in the process of joining the force in 2014.

(He declined to give his last name for fear of violating department rules.)

“All the cops there on Utica Avenue, the white cops, look scared,” he said of a thoroughfare that cuts through some minority areas. “What are you scared of?

The Black cops you see there, they’re relaxed.”


Sources: NYPD, NY Times

North Carolina No Longer Ranked 2012 Swing State; Now Listed As Toss-Up State (NY Times Analysis)

Explaining The Times’s Battleground State Ratings

Six months before Election Day, nine states that President Obama carried four years ago are now firmly up for grabs in the latest New York Times ranking of key battleground states, while Mitt Romney holds an early advantage in two other states the president won in 2008.

As the general election race intensifies, Mr. Obama begins with a slim edge in several critical states and has a variety of paths to winning re-election, according to the Times analysis of electoral votes.

But there are considerable opportunities for Mr. Romney, whose candidacy is in a position of strength in enough states where a victory could deny the president a second term.

The Times ratings, which will be reviewed periodically throughout the campaign, find nine states are locked in the tossup category: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

In the quest to win the necessary 270 electoral votes, the president has 185 solidly on the Democratic side and Mr. Romney has 158 in safe Republican territory.

The analysis finds 115 electoral votes in the tossup category, with 32 leaning Democratic and 48 leaning Republican.

The Times rankings are based on interviews with Republican and Democratic strategists and the economic climate, political volatility, polling and electoral history in each state.

Here is a brief rationale for the current collection of toss-up states:

Colorado:

The president’s victory here in 2008 was among his favorites, after the state had voted Republican in eight of the nine prior presidential races. A wariness of big government is testing Mr. Obama this time, but Mr. Romney faces his own challenge appealing to independents and women, whose support was critical to Democratic wins in races for the Senate and governor in 2010.

Florida:

A wave of home foreclosures and a sour economy has complicated Mr. Obama’s path to a repeat victory here.

A growing number of conservative retirees offer Mr. Romney hope, but the outcome could hinge on whether he can win over Hispanic voters, particularly younger Cuban Americans in southern Florida and Puerto Ricans in central Florida.

Iowa:

The state that paved Mr. Obama’s path to the presidency could complicate his re-election, despite an economy that is more robust than many other states. Mr. Romney faces a challenge of exciting evangelical voters who did not support him earlier this year at the Iowa caucuses. In a close race, these six electoral votes are critical to both sides.

New Hampshire:

The president is leading in some early polls, but the state is too volatile to make any predictions at this point.

Mr. Romney has been seen as a favorite son, having been governor in the state next door, Massachusetts.

The Republican gains in 2010 have created a backlash among some Democrats in a state that will be a backdrop for the presidential campaign.

Nevada:

The Romney campaign has a ready-made laboratory to argue that the policies of the Obama administration have not worked, particularly in a state with the nation’s highest rates of home foreclosure and unemployment.

But the president is traveling to the state again and again, hoping his appeal to Hispanic and lower-income voters will deliver the state again.

Ohio:

It is hard to picture Mr. Romney winning the White House without Ohio.

An improving economy could help Mr. Obama, particularly with a revival in the auto industry, but the state’s conservative leanings still pose a significant challenge.

It will likely break late, with neither candidate winning the early enthusiasm race.

Pennsylvania:

Republicans have lost the last five presidential elections here, but it is not an automatic lock for Mr. Obama. Democrats have an edge in voter registration, but new voting laws concern party leaders.

This state could eventually lean Democratic as the campaign moves along, but the president has yet to prove that the key independent voters will be on his side.

Virginia:

The population shifts in Northern Virginia are changing the state’s political demographics. The president carried the state by seven percentage points in 2008, but that margin belies the true fight underway in the state this time.

This is one of the states Mr. Romney needs to put back in the Republican column if he is to be elected.

Wisconsin:

The political climate here is volatile, given the June recall election of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican.

A flood of outside money – pro-union and antiunion – has created a charged dynamic.

The president has an early edge over Mr. Romney, but the environment is too uncertain to safely move the state into the Democratic-leaning column.

The Times rankings also include four states that lean Democratic, including Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico and Maine, which allows its electoral votes to be divided and Mr. Romney is fighting for at least one.

In this group, Michigan and New Mexico are the most competitive and could become true tossups as the race progresses.

In an interview last year, Mr. Romney declined to commit to competing aggressively in his native Michigan, saying he would make his determination on the state of the race rather than family sentiment.

This state is worth watching closely.

The Times rankings also include four states that are leaning Republican, including Arizona, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina.

(One electoral vote in Nebraska, which also allows its allocation to be divided, is also included in this category, after Mr. Obama won it in 2008.)

In this group, North Carolina is the most competitive and could become a toss-up as the campaign develops.

Four years ago, Mr. Obama narrowly carried the state and is aggressively targeting it again.

Arizona is another state to watch, with the president’s re-election team sizing it up over the summer to see if it is worth making a full investment in the fall.


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Sources: AP, ABC News, AlJazeera English, CBS News, CNN, McClatchy Newspapers, NY Times, Youtube, Google Maps

Obama's "Kill List" Great Foreign Policy Move For Re-election; Long Term? Not So Much

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Obama's ‘secret kill list' shows president is final word on terrorist killing missions

When it comes to the "secret kill list"--a regularly updated chart showing the world's most wanted terrorists--President Obama is the "final moral calculation" in the kill or capture debate, according to the third in a series of New York Times articles assessing his record.

And despite his liberal background, Obama has taken an aggressive approach to counterterrorism.

The Times said it interviewed three dozen current and former advisers to Obama for the article, who described his "evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda":

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands.

When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda—even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was "an easy one."

Part of Obama's "evolution" on terror apparently began early in his term, when a drone strike resulted in civilian casualties:

Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. "The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, 'I want to know how this happened,'" a top White House adviser recounted.

In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a "near certainty" that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.

"The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets," the Times said, "and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration's 'false choice between our safety and our ideals.'"

And Obama's success limiting civilian deaths in drone strikes is, in part, due to "a disputed method for counting civilian casualties" embraced by Obama. According to the Times, the White House considers "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

Obama's personal involvement in counterterrorism operations can be seen in his study of the "baseball card"-like "kill list." For example, in January 2010--four months before he ordered the operation that killed Osama bin Laden--President Obama questioned the ages of some of the al-Qaeda suspects on it.

"How old are these people?" Obama asked during his regular Tuesday briefing with intelligence officials--dubbed the "Terror Tuesday" meeting--in the White House Situation Room. "If they are starting to use children, we are moving into a whole different phase."

The White House has also struggled with the so-called "Whac-A-Mole" approach to counterterrorism--an al-Qaida leader killed in, say, a drone strike is simply replaced with another.

"One guy gets knocked off, and the guy's driver, who's No. 21, becomes 20?" William M. Daley, Obama's chief of staff in 2011, told the Times. "At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?"


Joe Scarborough On Obama 'Kill List': 'I Wonder How This Is Going To Look Ten Years From Now'

Joe Scarborough expressed discomfort on Tuesday with President Obama's newly revealed "kill list" of alleged Al Qaeda suspects.

The New York Times ran a lengthy story about Obama's intimate involvement in personally deciding which people should go on the list of targets for drone strikes. The opening scene of the story showed Obama choosing whether or not to target two teenagers, "including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years."

On Tuesday's "Morning Joe," Scarborough said that the story made him "flinch." He wondered whether it was right for the president to be so personally implicated in such choices. "Something to me is just not right about taking that into the Oval Office," he said.

The other panelists all seemed to be fine with Obama's participation, saying that it showed a willingness to confront the realities of his decisions.

Scarborough still seemed uneasy:

I just wonder, ten years from now, what we're going to be saying about a president lining up pictures of teenagers in the Oval Office and picking.

I'm not talking the morality of doing it or not doing it, I'm just talking about whether it should be kept away from the president, away from the White House.

And you stack that on top of us launching drone attacks in countries where we haven't even declared war? There are going to be some searing critiques a decade from now about our overreach.

"There could be critiques of a president who was disconnected as well and did not choose to look and did not choose think about every angle, including the moral choice," Brzezinski said. "Don't you think?"

"No," Scarborough replied. "I don't. I think there are a lot of people that are going to spin for Barack Obama ... I think you're going to have a lot of liberal hand-wringing."


Sources: AP, ABC News, AOL, Huffington Post, NY Times, The Daily Beast, Yahoo, White House

Cory Booker's "Nauseated" Remarks Repudiated By Obama's Re-election Team; Remember Campbell Brown & Velma Hart

"Booker, whose career is just beginning, doesn’t have the luxury that Obama does to bite the hand that feeds him. Christie is a popular governor and business-types love his cost-cutting approach. Booker can’t afford to be seen denouncing one of the most important businesses in his state."
Chris Stirewalt







Perino: White House trashing ‘friends’ Cory Booker and Campbell Brown

Former Bush spokesperson Dana Perino says that President Barack Obama’s White House has been dismissing advice from their “friends” like Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who called an Obama ad “nauseating,” and Campbell Brown, who wrote that that the president was “condescending” toward women.

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Booker had said that the Obama campaign should stop criticizing presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for job losses caused by Bain Capital, a firm that he founded. The Newark mayor later released a YouTube video walking back his remarks.

“Cory Booker is a friend of the White House,” Perino told Fox News host Gretchen Carlson on Monday. “In some ways, your friends give you the best advice. They could have taken that yesterday as some friendly advice. A brush-back pitch to let them know that what he is hearing across the country—what Cory Booker is hearing is that this isn’t working.”

Carlson pointed out that “there are a lot of Democrats that don’t agree with the tactic that this administration is using because all it does is promote class warfare.”

Fox News host Clayton Morris asked Perino if it was “going to be a problem for the administration” that former CNN host Campbell Brown, the wife of a Romney adviser, had written a New York Times op-ed accusing the president of “condescending” to women.

“Yesterday, the White House gets these two broadsides and instead of saying, ‘That’s good advice. Let us take some time to think about that and come back out and have a strong commencement address that President Obama is going to give today.’ Instead they basically trashed two of their friends,” Perino explained. “It looks like they have nothing else to go on.”


Former CNN Anchor Campbell Brown Slams Barack Obama: 'Stop Condescending to Women'

It appears the White House's dishonest, media-assisted plan to concoct a Republican "War on Women" has failed and failed miserably.

Take for example former CNN anchor Campbell Brown who in Sunday's New York Times published an op-ed surprisingly titled "Obama: Stop Condescending to Women":

WHEN I listen to President Obama speak to and about women, he sometimes sounds too paternalistic for my taste. In numerous appearances over the years — most recently at the Barnard graduation — he has made reference to how women are smarter than men. It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress. As I listen, I am always bracing for the old go-to cliché: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”

Some women are smarter than men and some aren’t. But to suggest to women that they deserve dominance instead of equality is at best a cheap applause line.

My bigger concern is that in courting women, Mr. Obama’s campaign so far has seemed maddeningly off point. His message to the Barnard graduates was that they should fight for a “seat at the table” — the head seat, he made sure to add. He conceded that it’s a tough economy, but he told the grads, “I am convinced you are tougher” and “things will get better — they always do.”

Brown then shared some employment statistics that belie media assertions Obama's policies are helping women, in particular college graduates under 30:

According to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, about 53.6 percent of men and women under the age of 25 who hold bachelor’s degrees were jobless or underemployed last year, the most in at least 11 years. According to the Pew Research Center, if we broaden the age group to 18- to 29-year-olds, an estimated 37 percent are unemployed or out of the work force, the highest share in more than three decades.

Brown then surprisingly took a shot at Obama's "silly and embarrassing" new ad targeting women:

The women I know who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, “The Life of Julia,” a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.

And she wasn't done:

It’s obvious why the president is doing a full-court press for the vote of college-educated women in particular. The Republican primaries probably did turn some women away. [...]

But Mitt Romney will never be confused with Rick Santorum on these issues, and many women understand that. (I should disclose here that my husband is an adviser to Mr. Romney; I have no involvement with any campaign, and have been an independent journalist throughout my career.) The struggling women in my life all laughed when I asked them if contraception or abortion rights would be a major factor in their decision about this election. For them, and for most other women, the economy overwhelms everything else.

Another recent Pew Research Center survey found that voters, when thinking about whom to vote for in the fall, are most concerned about the economy (86 percent) and jobs (84 percent). Near the bottom of the list were some of the hot-button social issues.

Exactly. And although Brown chose not to bring the media into her criticisms, their focus on the fictitious War On Women was shameful due precisely to the public's priorities which are not on social issues at the moment.

The President wanted to shift attention away from a struggling economy, and his dutiful fans in the press did their part.

Brown concluded:

[T]he promise of [Obama's] campaign four years ago has given way to something else — a failure to connect with tens of millions of Americans, many of them women, who feel economic opportunity is gone and are losing hope. In an effort to win them back, Mr. Obama is trying too hard. He’s employing a tone that can come across as grating and even condescending. He really ought to drop it. Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills.

Indeed, and this is likely why a new CBS News/New York Times poll found women now favoring Romney over Obama.

This entire stunt by the White House that began in January appears to have failed miserably, and if the media hadn't gone along with it, we wouldn't have wasted almost five months talking about things America doesn't care about at the moment.



Three ways of looking at Cory Booker

Newark Mayor Cory Booker spent Sunday afternoon attempting to clarify comments he made on Meet The Press, in which he called the Obama campaign's attack on Bain Capital (and private equity) “nauseating."

In an almost four-minute follow up video for his social media followers, Booker explained that Romney's business record was fair game, and that he was simply frustrated by negative campaigning.

Here is that Version:



The Obama campaign, however, sent out a different video on Sunday night. On Twitter, Obama campaign press secretary Ben La Bolt tweeted out a 35-second version of the video, which was very likely cut by the Obama campaign (because, when I clicked on La Bolt's link, it had just 8 views).

Here is that video:



What gets lost in the edit is the nuance of Booker's argument. Watching the 35-second video, you would believe that Booker was flip-flopping from his comments on Meet The Press and going on an all-out assault on Romney. In the four-minute video, Booker stands by his comments -- including "nauseating" -- and explains that while he does think Romney's record is fair game, he remains "furstrated" by the Obama campaign's negative attacks.

In other words, the 35-second video is a reverse from the original argument. The four-minute video is an extenstion of the original argument.

Asked for his response to the ad, RNC spokesman Tim Miller, who has been attacking the ad on Twitter, emailed:

It's clear this video was orchestrated by the Obama campaign, and as long as he is President any defense of the free market/private sector by members of his party must be silenced and apologized for.

Of note, that same YouTube account also has a 17-second version of Booker's video, which as of 9 p.m. Sunday has exactly one view:




Political jabs are 'Nauseating,' Mayor says

Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, New Jersey, a Democrat, said Sunday that some of the current politicking makes him sick - including criticism of Mitt Romney from his own party.

Booker, whose national standing is on the rise, distanced himself from attacks on Romney's record at the private equity firm Bain Capital, which he said make him "uncomfortable."

"I'm not going to sit here and indict private equity. To me we're getting to a ridiculous point in America," Booker said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "If you look at the totality of Bain Capital's record, they've done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses, and this, to me, I'm very uncomfortable with."

Booker compared Romney's background to his own as mayor and called for the attacks from both parties to cease. The two-term mayor has supported significant budget cuts in his city that he said were necessary to correct its fiscal order.

"This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides. It's nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough, stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright," Booker said. "This stuff has got to stop because what it does is, it undermines to me what this country should be focused on."

Romney's history in the private sector and a Republican-backed proposal for an ad linking President Barack Obama to his controversial former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., have occupied much of the campaign chatter of late.

Team Obama has condemned Romney and his partners for profiting while some of the companies with which he was involved laid off workers or filed for bankruptcy. Romney's campaign has defended his record as an example of capitalism and accused the Obama re-election campaign of waging class warfare.

Ultimately, Booker, an Obama supporter, said the 2012 election is about "two men with fundamentally different ideals."

"The sexy stuff of campaigns that the media plays over and over again that we wasted time talking about is this negative stuff," Booker said. "The reality is – and I listen to Obama. I have Obama surrogate notes here, they're talking about the positive issues."

After an onslaught of attention following his Sunday show appearance, Booker took to YouTube Sunday afternoon to reiterate his support of the president and elaborate on his frustrations with current state of political campaigns.

Booker said Obama "more than deserves re-election," but that he hopes the general election will focus on the "issues that count."

"I am indeed upset. I am indeed frustrated," Booker said. "But I believe the American public, working together can more and more denounce this type of campaigning and more and more focus on the issues that count."


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Sources: AP, Booker Rising, CNN, Fox News, Gawker, MSNBC, NBC, Newsbusters, NY Post, NY Times, Raw Story, Youtube, Google Maps