What we've been tweeting

From the news yesterday:

Some black clergy see no good presidential choice between a Mormon candidate and one who supports gay marriage, so they are telling their flocks to stay home on Election Day. That’s a worrisome message for the nation’s first African-American president, who can’t afford to lose any voters from his base in a tight race.

The pastors say their congregants are asking how a true Christian could back same-sex marriage, as President Barack Obama did in May. As for Republican Mitt Romney, the first Mormon nominee from a major party, congregants are questioning the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its former ban on men of African descent in the priesthood. The Mormon church lifted the ban in 1978, and the church has repeatedly condemned racism.

Tweet: Black evangelicals suddenly sour on NARAL AAA-rated black pol over gay marriage. mmm-K.

Don't want to get into the litmus test game and not to go all single issue but considering dude refused to vote for an abortion survivor law while he was a state senator in Illinois, we'd question your evangelical chops if you supported this guy.

Gotcha of the day

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Wasn't one of Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals making your opponent live up to its own standards? Live by racial and gender quotas, fail by racial and gender quotas.

Civil rights lawyers told The Daily Caller that President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign managers may have violated employment law by hiring an overwhelmingly white office staff for his campaign headquarters in Chicago.

That skewed workforce is starkly visible in an April photo released by Obama’s Chicago office, which shows roughly 100 of the office’s staff.

Only two of the people in the photo, far in the back, are clearly African-American, far below their 13 percent of the national population, and their 33-percent representation in Chicago.

“Were I the general counsel of an employer in Chicago with the workforce in the picture … I would be concerned,” said Charles Shanor, a law professor at Emory University and the former general counsel at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.

“The workforce is overwhelmingly made up of young white males [and is] a demographic profile that could raise red flags under both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act,” he told TheDC.

If asked by managers, “‘Do we run a risk of legal liability?’ I would say ‘Sure,’” if a company’s picture showed only two African-Americans in a staff of 100, said Northeastern University’s Roger Abrams, a left-of-center law professor and former dean of the Rutgers School of Law.

Let the record show we personally care not a lick just how absolutely white bread Obama's campaign staff is but for cryin' out loud, wouldn't a few more blacks or Hispanics pop up just by accident if we're talking statistical averages, here? That campaign staff is whiter than a dry erase board.

And people said the tea party lacked diversity. Cripes, Team O in Chicago makes a Charlie Daniels concert look like an EEO convention.


Oh, well. As we said, we don't care but we just wished some people would practice what they so smugly and condescendingly preach all the time.

Video clip of the day

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AlfonZo Rachel of ZONATION brings some much needed perspective to the whole Trayvon Martin travesty unfolding down in Arizona.

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3:15 : According to street law... according to God's law...

Eh, so which is it, pal? Never mind that neither of them are applicable to Florida's penal code. This chump is just trying to justify a, yes, lynch mob mentality.


3:48 : Zo makes an outstanding point regarding Afro-centrism (black separatism) and the Constitution. Wasn't the whole idea of the civil rights movement for blacks to gain equality in the eyes of the law? Wasn't the whole idea of the civil rights movement to be for constitutional equality for blacks and other minoritiess?


Yet, aforementioned chump is making the case for slavery by saying the (white mans') law doesn't apply to him (unless he is) thus invoking the "street law" or whatever which is just an invitation for lawlessness and rule of force vice rule of law, under which slavery would certainly be justifiable.

Yep, just another example of that new civility we've been hearing so much about.

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Video clip of the day

Reason.tv takes a look at the results of the Housing Act of 1947 and urban renewal's devastation of Manhattontown

"urban removal means Negro removal"

Upsetting the narrative

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Blacks in the big city North moving back to the South after 3 or 4 generations? Why, it just can't be!

The Rev. Floyd H. Flake, pastor of the 23,000-member Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral in Jamaica, Queens, said he was losing hundreds of congregants yearly to Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

“For decades, Queens has been the place where the African-American middle class went to buy their first home and raise a family,” Mr. Flake said. “But now, we are seeing a reversal of this as African-Americans feel this is no longer as easy to achieve and that the South is more benevolent than New York.”

Some blacks say they are leaving not only to find jobs, but also because they have soured on race relations.

Candace Wilkins, 27, of St. Albans, who remains unemployed despite having a business degree, plans to move to Charlotte, N.C.

She said her decision was prompted by an altercation with the police.

In March 2010, witnesses say, Ms. Wilkins was thrown against a car by a white police officer after she tried to help a black neighbor who was being questioned. She was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, according to the Queens district attorney’s office.

Ms. Wilkins disputes the charges, which are pending, and has filed a complaint against the police. A police spokeswoman said the department was investigating her complaint.

“Life has gone full circle,” said Ms. Wilkins, whose grandmother was born amid the cotton fields of North Carolina and moved to Queens in the 1950s.

“My grandmother’s generation left the South and came to the North to escape segregation and racism,” she said. “Now, I am going back because New York has become like the old South in its racial attitudes.”

And this:

The movement marks an inversion of the so-called Great Migration, which lasted roughly from World War I to the 1970s and saw African-Americans moving to the industrializing North to escape prejudice and find work.

Spencer Crew, a history professor at George Mason University who was the curator of a prominent exhibit on the Great Migration at the Smithsonian Institution, said the current exodus from New York stemmed largely from tough economic times. New York is increasingly unaffordable, and blacks see more opportunities in the South.

The South now represents the potential for achievement for black New Yorkers in a way it had not before, Professor Crew said. At the same time, unionized civil service jobs that once drew thousands of blacks to the city are becoming more scarce.

“New York has lost some of its cachet for black people,” Professor Crew said. “During the Great Migration, blacks went north because you could find work if you were willing to hustle. But today, there is less of a struggle to survive in the South than in New York. Many blacks also have emotional and spiritual roots in the South. It is like returning home.”

But it's not just blacks, either, as people and businesses of all stripes are heading to the friendlier business climates of low tax and right-to-work states, many of which are in the South.

After all and aside from cultural implications, higher taxes and onerous regulations that raise the cost of living and constrict the labor market are in themselves a type of oppression as well.


* Pictured: The Atlanta skyline

Quickies

A round up of news items, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.


Thank you, Mr. President:

The Obama administration wants to shrink the government's role in the mortgage system — a proposal that would remake decades of federal policy aimed at getting Americans to buy homes and would probably make home loans more expensive across the board.

The Treasury Department rolled out a plan Friday to slowly dissolve Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored programs that bought up mortgages to encourage more lending and required bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis.

Exactly how far the government's role in mortgages would be reduced was left to Congress to decide, but all three options the administration presented would create a housing finance system that relies far more on private money.

What a wonderful opportunity to drive a stake through one of the players in the housing collapse. Seize the opportunity, Speaker Boehner!





Inevitable cultural evolution development:

Tattooing outgrows its renegade image to thrive in the mainstream

... or "You just aren't as cool as you once were".


Exit question: does this mean going "inkless" is the new radical chic?












Terrific... federally-funded (i.e. 'you'-funded) Keynesian gimmickry hits the Golden State.

More than 100,000 struggling homeowners could get help from a $2-billion program that California is launching, including about 25,000 borrowers who owe more than their properties are worth and could see their mortgages shrink.

The Keep Your Home California program, which uses federal funds reserved for the 2008 rescue of the financial system, has the potential to make a sizable dent in California's foreclosure crisis and help the general housing market. State officials hope to fend off foreclosure for about 95,000 borrowers and provide moving assistance to about 6,500 people who do lose their homes.

... band-aids and stop-gaps merely prolonging the crisis rather than unwinding it.




Huffington Post readers not real excited about that AOL buy-out.

Sell Out!, they cried.

ObamaCare RomneyCare waiver-mania update:

Even as Republicans and many states wage a bitter battle in Congress and the courts to block the mandatory insurance requirement in the national health care law, the provision appears to retain broad acceptance in Massachusetts.

Regulators’ flexibility may be part of the reason.

“We aren’t going to make someone pay just to make them pay,’’ said Celia Wcislo, a director of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East and a member of the Connector Authority, which oversees Massachusetts’ health care law and grants the exemptions.

"Flexibility".... we suppose that's one way of defining it. "Picking winners and losers" may be another and "patronage" yet another still as you may recall 1199SEIU were themselves the beneficiary of an ObamaCare waiver.
If you care to follow the links, ask yourself, "Are there two 1199 SEIUs?" Frankly, we're confused.



I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me Pt. II...

For Democrats, Ashley Bell was the kind of comer that a party builds a future on: A young African American lawyer, he served as president of the College Democrats of America, advised presidential candidate John Edwards and spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.

But after his party's midterm beat-down in November, Bell, a commissioner in northern Georgia's Hall County, jumped ship. He joined the Republicans.

Bell, 30, said he had serious issues with the healthcare law and believed that conservative "blue dog" Democrats in Congress who shared his values had been bullied into voting for it.

Bell's defection is one of dozens by state and local Democratic officials in the Deep South in recent months that underscore Republicans' continued consolidation of power in the region — a process that started with presidential politics but increasingly affects government down to the level of dogcatcher.

Some 40 years after the New Left started driving working class whites, So-Cons and Catholics from the ranks of the Democratic Party it's happening again but with, hopefully, another demographic.




ESPN March Madness Bracketology update here.

Local flavor: Head coach Steve Fisher's steady, methodical approach to building a "program" is bearing fruit. The San Diego St. Aztecs are ranked #6 in the nation and are currently slotted as a #2 seed in the Southeast region playing their opening round game(s) (a hopeful paranthetical if there ever was one) in 5-hour-desert-dash-away Tucson.

Huge game later on today at Las Vegas taking on the Runnin' Rebels.

Oprah Winfrey on the "new civility": "Shut up!" , she explained.





Stuck inside of Coshocton with the East Village blues again...

“Whenever I see that kind of story, where everybody agrees, I know there’s something wrong,”

Atheist, left-wing, jazz fan, award-winning journalist, chronicler of the civil rights movement and pro-life. Take a wild-ass guess as to which of the aforementioned is Nate Hentoff's unforgiveable sin?



And finally, B-Daddy tackles the thorny issue of a new city hall here in America's Finest City.

No really... they're here to help.

One of the great statist economic policy follies is that of this concept of the “living wage”, which is manifested by the incessant push from minority and civil rights activists to raise the minimum wage, or as we around here at BwD headquarters like to call it, “the great jobs killer”.

Forcing businesses, mostly small businesses, to raise their minimum wage will result in one of two things: that increase in the cost of doing business will be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices for goods and services and/or the employer will cut back on the hours of or lay off the employees at the bottom end of his wage scale.

Higher prices and higher unemployment… now who can't get with that program?

Of course, these self-styled activists because of their noble-minded efforts wind up shafting the very people they are most trying to help. Check out the graph below tracking the corresponding rise in the minimum wage alongside the rising black teen and overall teen unemployment rates.



For all you back-patters out there we leave you with this little gem from our boy, B-Daddy.

Ever notice how Democrat favored policies have a racist outcome, even if Dems aren't racist? Welfare trapped minorities into a life of dependency. Racial quotas breed resentment of minorities. Public school monopolies primarily put inner city minorities at a disadvantage. Abortion impacts blacks disproportionately more than whites.

Add the push for increases to the minimum wage to this list of unintended consequences.

Because it’s feeling good about yourself and your efforts that trumps actual results.


P.S. B-Daddy is thinking about going to a Coffee Party get together at Lestat's Coffee House in North Park in a friendly gesture/effort to find some common ground with those folks. Let him know whether or not you think that is a good idea. After some initial reservations, we figure, screw it - why not? We do believe conservatives have some common ground over what they call "corporatism" and we call economic fascism and what we both refer to as crony capitalism.

P.P.S. Lestat's... are they serious?

Could they possibly find a more obvious venue for disaffected Hopenchange beta-male types. At least no one's going to get lost trying to find the place.

P.P.P.S. Sorry, can't let this go. Leslie, Sarah, Dawn, were we to do anything similar could I suggest KnB Wine Cellars in Del Cerro or Hoffer's in La Mesa.

Discussing things as important as the future of the nation should not be accompanied by anything less than a wide variety of fine adult libations.

School Daze

Perhaps it was our heteronormative suburban upbringing that prevents us from grasping what it is that all these college students here in California are in a uproar over budget cuts to the UC and CS system. After all, our political awakening was Prop. 13 and the threat of being shuttled off to summer school if that ballot measure was defeated. Lobbying out on the school yard on behalf of Howard Jarvis (and of course, our home-owning parents) became a passion.

Anyway, a couple of education-related items:

It is all but impossible to fire even the worst teachers if they’re members of United Teachers Los Angeles and work in the L.A. Unified School District. The union that spends millions on radio and TV ads telling you that more funding is needed “for our students” has forced the cash-strapped district to spend $3.5 million over the last 10 years “trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance.” Of those, “only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.

Read the rest here from Joel Engel which includes an interesting take on the LAUSD and Black History month.



And maybe we should re-think this whole school funding thing. At the very least, could the taxpayers spring for some white-out?



H/T: Instapundit.

Video of the day

“We’ve got a black man kickin’ it in the White House but where’s the man in the black household?”

Greetings, Racists!

Self-hating blacks. That’s the only reasonable explanation for the video below.

(we were warned that it was only going to be up on YouTube for a limited time so if embed no workie, click on over to PajamasTV and watch it, here.



In all seriousness, how much strength of conviction would a black person such as, Buddy Sosthand (the suited one in the video), have to possess to be an openly conservative black person?

When a few people in our dinner party crowd found out we were conservatives, it was a mild shock to their system (“You’re hip, charming, smart, funny and a real lady-killer… how can you be a conservative?”) so we can only imagine what it would be like to stand up to an entire culture and mindset of racial grievances and victimhood let alone be openly critical of the this country's first black President.

P.S. Yes, that is the young man and his lady friend of ACORN video fame.

Go tell it on the mountain.

In national politics, black and Latino voters are, on average, more liberal than white voters.

But in Los Angeles, not so. The Los Angeles Times poll of 1,500 registered voters in the city, released this week, shows 40% of white voters describing themselves as liberal, 36% moderate and only 22% conservative.

White L.A. voters are also more likely to call themselves liberal than are either black or Latino voters. In the Times poll, 27% of black voters and 29% of Latino voters identified themselves as liberal, while 28% of black voters and a third of Latinos described themselves as conservative.

We fully realize that this is just a sampling from a single geographic area, albeit, a heavily urban one but it would suggest the folly of many of our country-clubbing friends in the G.O.P. to abandon social conservatism as a way to attract minority voters.

And here are some highlights from a poll taken by the Wilson Research Stategies:

* 76 percent of African American adults believe that securing America’s economic recovery should be the top priority, even if it means delaying action in climate change.
* 56 percent of African American adults think our federal and state policy makers fail to adequately take into account economic and quality of life concerns when considering new anti-global warming laws.
* When asked if the federal action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could increase unemployment, 38 percent of survey respondents said they felt African Americans would proportionately lose more jobs while 49 percent felt that federal action to reduce greenhouse gas emission would hit all races equally.
* Only 15 percent of survey respondents said they would be willing to pay one dollar more for gasoline due to greenhouse gas legislation. The numbers dropped to 5, 3, and 4 percent if gas prices increased by two, three or four dollars a gallon.
* Only 11 percent of survey respondents said they would be willing to pay one hundred dollars more a year for electricity in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The numbers dropped to 6, 4 and 1 percent when respondents were asked if they would be willing to pay an extra two hundred, three hundred, or six hundred dollars a year for electricity.

Of those polled, 3% identified themselves as “strong republicans” and 67% as “strong democrats".


So, what’s the deal? How is it that the G.O.P. cannot peel-off more of these votes as the numbers suggest more commonality between the two entities than the conventional wisdom holds? Are Republicans just that incompetent that they cannot tailor their message to this country’s two largest minority groups? Or, is there a decades-old political/cultural association stigma of which they have yet to overcome?

We used to run around with a guy, “Jimmy” that would chide us: “What is it with you white people and camping and the great outdoors?”

Us: “Dunno. Just a chance to get away from the normality of everyday civilization, stretch the legs and take in some beautiful sites.

Jimmy: “Whatever. You’ll never see any of my people out there.”

Lo and behold, not too much longer after this conversation, after summitting Mt. Whitney with a good friend and Pops, we were on the descent towards Whitney Portal when we passed a group of people heading up, one of whom was a black male in his 20s.

Oh boy, we thought. Can’t wait to get back to Jimmy and inform him of this “sighting”. The following Monday at work, we rolled up on Jimmy and told him what we had observed the previous week.

Jimmy looked at us sideways and said: “Dude may have been black but he ain’t no brother”