Truth

Fear of "The Other"

reagan-was-a-horrible-president:

None of this is about his birth certificate. David Remnick summed it up well in April 2011:

The cynicism of the purveyors of these fantasies is that they know very well what they are playing at, the prejudices they are fanning: that Obama is foreign, a fake, incapable of writing a book, incapable of intellectual achievement. Let’s say what is plainly true (and what the President himself is reluctant to say): these rumors, this industry of fantasy, are designed to arouse a fear of the Other, of an African-American man with a white American mother and a black Kenyan father. Obama, as a politician, is clearly not a radical; he is a center-left pragmatist. If anything, he believes deeply in his capacity to lead with subtle diplomacy and political maneuvering, with a highly realistic sense of the possible; in fact, to many he is maddeningly pragmatic.

The one radical thing about Barack Obama is his race, his name. Of course, there is nothing innately radical about being black or having Hussein as middle name; what is radical is that he has those attributes and is sitting in the Oval Office.

It Is Time For The 'Welfare Queen' Myth To Die

justinspoliticalcorner:

What is most obnoxious about the Welfare Queen myth is that it is traced directly back to Ronald Reagan, who was indulging in gleeful hyperbole to outrage his Republican base. It has probably done more than any other conservative talking point in living memory to encourage Americans to be cruel to their neediest neighbors, even when some of those Americans are receiving some form of government assistance themselves. Stupid Uncle Bonzo.

What Reagan actually said, according to Wikipedia: “During his 1976 presidential campaign, Reagan would tell the story of a woman from Chicago’s South Side arrested for welfare fraud: ”She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

The real life inspiration, according to Wikipedia: ”In 1976, the New York Times reported that a woman from Chicago, Linda Taylor, was charged with using four aliases and of cheating the government out of $8,000. She appeared again in the newspaper while the Illinois Attorney General continued investigating her case. The woman was ultimately found guilty of “welfare fraud and perjury” in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois.”

So one woman scammed the government out of a total of eight thousand dollars andgot caught and sentenced. From this one woman’s situation, Reagan creatively invented multiple imaginary dead fake veteran husbands (not true), a six-figure “annual salary” ($8,000 is four digits and not enough to live on for a year),  a dozen fake Social Security cards (not correct), 80 aliases (no) and 30 fake home addresses (also no) and so on…in short, he created the Welfare Queen stereotype by wildly exaggerating information about a real person who got caught doing something wrong and who was punished for her criminal act.

Right from the beginning, when Reagan first told the infamous Welfare Queen story, there wasn’t anyone who actually got away with welfare fraud in real life! One middle-aged woman inspired Reagan’s anecdote, and she got caught! She was punished! That fairy tale The Gipper told us has led to a lot of misery, most of it directed at the weakest members of our society: those who are the least capable of defending themselves. Are we a country of unkind assholes who lack compassion for our neighbors, now?
 

The same people who believe in the Welfare Queen myth also believe that people on government assistance are out blowing all that “free money” on iPhones, fancy shoes and lobster. In truth, the government provides pre-paid phones to low-income people who take part in welfare-to-work programs. When is the last time you spotted a payphone in the wild? (Was it in working order?) The government provides phones to people so they can apply for jobs. It is a bit difficult to hang out around the last surviving payphone in your area (again, if there is one) all day hoping an employer will call you. (What is more likely to happen if you hover around a payphone all day long is that the local police will assume you are selling drugs.) The government also provides phones because it needs these people to check in often and make sure that they are actually applying for work, because if they are not actively participating in job training or trying to find work, they lose the few benefits they qualify for.

Are you feeling the urge to gnash your teeth and shake your fist about so-called “Obamaphones” now? It’s such a crazy liberal idea, loaning poor people a phone to use! It was particularly smart of Obama to travel back in time to the mid-1980s to start a program that helped low-income people afford telephone service. Wait…what?

Except, again, as we have learned, Linda Taylor didn’t get away with anything. Ultimately she served years in jail and paid restitution. Crime did not pay. Gut social programs anyway! Better ten thousand starving children and babies than the chance that one woman get a penny more of “our” tax dollars than she is entitled to…even though over 91% of all government assistance recipients are the elderly, the disabled, children and the working poor (so much for the idea of an army of shiftless welfare recipients sitting at home on the couch, eating government cheese and food stamp-purchased bonbons all day).

This suggests that the Welfare Queen archetype and the distorted view of Black Americans on welfare is well-entrenched in the White American psyche. The majority of welfare recipients are non-urban and White. The majority of food stamp recipients have jobs or are children, so comparing paychecks to food stamps makes no sense.”

Let’s get this one thing straight: there are no Welfare Queens out there driving Cadillacs, having five kids specifically to get extra financial benefits from the government, getting free iPhones, and somehow getting rich off “your” money. NONE. There never were.

h/t: Addicting Info

(via occupy-my-blog)

Three-fifths of Milwaukee's black voters have vanished without a trace.

robot-heart-politics:

steviemcfly:

The voter purges have resulted in roughly 60% of black voters in that city no longer being registered. That’s 41% of the city’s total votes in 2008. Some perspective on it from reddit user BiscuitCrisps:

You know, back when I lived in a majority-black voter ward, I got purged from the voter rollsevery single year. And every year, I had to trudge back to the registrar of voters, and show them a driver’s license and two months of utility bills to prove that I still lived where I was registered. It’s why I didn’t vote from 1999-2001. I just got sick of re-proving my residence over and over.

My first reaction was: “Fucking incompetent bureaucratic machine”

Then, I moved to a majority-white voter ward … I registeredonce. I haven’t been purged once in the past seven years.

I used to say: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.

I’m now inclined to chalk the purging up to malice.

This whole thing is fucked.

If you can’t beat ‘em, purge ‘em.

(via jaison96)

I think it’s going to respectfully pick this president up and pat him on the head and say, son, son, son, Mr. President, you were never ready to be president, now go home and work for somebody and find out how the real world works.”

truth-has-a-liberal-bias:

stfuconservatives:

Not content only to be known as the person who criticized his disabled veteran opponent for bringing up her military background, Joe Walsh is also a flaming infantilizing racist.

What a total jackass.

(Source: stfuconservatives, via recall-all-republicans)

Race and the Presidential Race

latimes:

A debate is percolating over whether the Mitt Romney campaign has tried to stoke racial resentments, primarily through television ads attacking the Obama administration over welfare policy. Republican leaders deny it. President Obama and his aides have been largely silent on the issue.