Jack & Jill Politics

Let us be honest. African American politicians aren't necessarily interested interested in what is in the best interests of African Americans. They are more interested in maintaining the status quo. Even if African American's are suffering.


I suspect that Fox paid the CBC institute the requisite fee.



The question isn't Why did the CBC Institute partner with Fox. The question is why African American voters need to send incumbents packing every eight years or so. Most of these African American congresspeople are from gerrymandered districts where black folks are boxed into one big ole district. Thus preventing African Americans from affecting elections in neighboring districts. Thus once an African American makes it to congress, they are set for life and then they just bequeath their seat to their children who in turn get a seat for life.



There is no inducement for current CBC members to be responsive to the desires of their constituents when that desire runs counter to their own personal ambition.



Unless y'all have a plan to unseat African American incumbents next year. They really don't care what we think. So what are we going to do about THAT? Anybody want to start a "Kick Out Black Incumbent" PAC? Show of hands.

whataboutourdaughters.org

It's been a day, and I STILL can't get over being called a 'Liberal Activist


Like that's an insult.



I want to know, when LIBERAL became a derisive term for BLACK FOLK?



I have to know...I missed the memo.



It was meant as an insult. As a dismissal.



They need to stop clowning and stop selling out.

Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Champions Fox News?


By



Greg Fuller



In the view of many, mine included , the Black Community consist of people with diverse viewpoints and interest , but it is also true that many in the Black community understand that we still have an common interest in maintaining , and expanding to those still left out of ,the political and economic gains of the past 40 years . Moreover, the Black Community common interest still has as goals: solidifying our position in new arenas we now find ourselves, and breaking down the barriers to arenas we are still excluded from. The CBC was founded in recognition of and to further these goals.



If one analyzes the struggle for Blacks to attain parity in this society, there is no doubt that, since 1964 and to this very day, the GOP has opposed those goals in action if not in principle. Moreover, it is a matter of fact and beyond dispute, that Fox News Network is one of the GOP’s most pronounced and effective tools in actively opposing the goals many in the Black Community are unified on. That said, the CBC needs to explain itself: Why is the CBC cooperating with Fox News on any level?



In General, Fox News is a bastion of political operatives who champion views and agendas that are an anathema to the interest of the majority of Black people in particular and the middleclass in general .



At the highest levels of American politics, powerful interests function within a framework of having no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interest. One of the few exceptions to this rule has been in the area of racial politics. Since at least 1964 when Barry Goldwater opposed civil rights as part of his presidential campaign , the GOP has employed racial politics without reservation or regret . To further the larger economic interesting of the Republican Party, racial politics has been used as a central organizing strategy ; it is employed by preying on America’s racial division to keep a sizable segment of the White population voting and supporting the GOP. Now that racial politics in its unvarnished form is considered unacceptable, and bad for business by the large commercial interest who are political contributors, Gay marriage and abortion are now used more prominently than racial politics, but racial politics is still very much with us as it has for all of this Nation’s history. That history being to exhaustive to recount here, I’ll limit my examples to just a few anecdotes that I vividly recall:



During the 1968 Presidential Campaign, Richard Nixon co-opted George Wallace’s law and order politics (anti-civil rights) and labeled it his southern strategy. Nixon used lingering White resentment over the passages of voting rights and civil rights laws to bring voters with those resentments into the GOP .The Southern Strategy has been a touchstone of GOP politics ever since, giving rise to the present day Red State , Blue State dichotomy . Some will I’m sure, try to hoodwink their present day followers’ into thinking Red and Blue is about things other than race, but that would be revisionist history by any factual standard.



Since Nixon, the southern strategy playbook has included ,to cite just a few examples :



Roland Reagan’s 1980 Philadelphia Mississippi(the site of KKK murders of Civil Rights Workers ) “ State’s Rights Speech “, George Bush Senior’s operative Lee Atwater’s (Carl Rove’s patron saint ) use of the Willie Horton ad’s to inject race into the 1988 Presidential Campaign , in 1990 Senator Jessie Helms used ads that suggested that Blacks where displacing Whites from jobs they should have gotten but did not due to Affirmative Action . Affirmative Action is typically mischaracterized and used by the GOP as a proxy for race as are Welfare Recipients despite facts that refute the racial stereotypes of Welfare Queens and etc.



Since Y2K, it is notable that the George W. Bush administration attacked Affirmative Action as one of its first initiatives. Moreover, Bush’s Department of Justice now operates under the philosophy that pursuing religious discrimination is a higher priority than racial injustice. And let us not forget Other Bush family favors, like Jeb Bush’s secretive removal of Blacks from Florida’s voter rolls and similar vote suppression efforts by the GOP in Ohio and elsewhere.



For a long time the GOP has sought out EICBs (everything is cool Blacks), for appointed and elected positions. EICBs typically represent the extreme minority of Blacks who feel our quest for full inclusion in American society has been achieved, and that race is now a hindrance no greater than having red hair or big feet. Apparently, hiring even EICBs no longer meets GOP needs : Breathtaking in its raw arrogance and potential for malevolence, we now find out that in the George W Bush administration , Blacks have been routinely ruled out as hires for the position of attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division .



And , should the “keepers of the flame” at the CBC think the lack of Black attorney hires in Civil Rights is an anomaly, and that the GOP age of racial politics is over - they should think about the GOP’s treatment of their former member Harold Ford during his Senatorial bid , when the “Call me Harold “ ad was used to exploit any anti-miscegenation campaign contributors or voters in the Tennessee electorate . As Harold is one the Blacks that the GOP crowd supposedly likes , his sense of betrayal must be especially acute ?



After thinking about Harold’s experience , his CBC colleagues should view the clips at : “Fox Attacks Black America” http://foxattacks.com/2007/03/fox_attacks_black..., they will find that the clips are threads from the same GOP shroud of racial politics as the “Call me Harold “ ad .



So again I repeat : Why is the CBC cooperating with Fox News on any level ? Is it that they think Fox News is no longer an appendage of the GOP ? Or do they think an agreement with FOX reduces Fox’s ability to cut, paste and frame the content or distort it for later use ? Additionally ,why would any credible Democratic Candidate for President risk such distortion, given Fox’s record of extreme bias.



I have long thought that ,in general ,Democrats demonstrate strategic idiocy by appearing on the Fox News Channel. Needless to say, that makes any CBC and Fox News cooperation highly suspect both strategically and as a matter of principle .



Comments and feedback are welcomed .



Greg





************************************************************************



Twenty-six members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) have signed letters to Sen. Barack Obama

By Alexander Bolton

May 23, 2007



Twenty-six members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) have signed letters to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) urging them to reconsider their decisions to skip a debate cosponsored by the CBC Institute and Fox News.



Last month, under pressure from liberal activists, Obama, Clinton and Edwards, the front-runners in the Democratic presidential primary, announced that they would skip the debate scheduled for September because they consider Fox biased against Democrats.



Obama in particular has had a rocky relationship with Fox. His campaign froze out the conservative-leaning news network for a few weeks after it erroneously reported that Obama had received schooling at a radical madrassa — a Muslim school — during his youth in Indonesia.



Members of the Black Caucus say that by skipping the Fox debate, Obama and other candidates risk missing a chance to share their views on issues important to minority voters that are often given short shrift at other debates.

“Reconsider,” said CBC Institute Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), summing up the letter to Democratic presidential candidates. “Basically, it would be in your best interests to talk to the communities we represent.”



Black Caucus leaders sent the letter to the entire field of Democratic presidential candidates, but the primary targets were Obama, Clinton and Edwards.



The caucus has 43 members from 22 states, who together represent about 40 million Americans, an official with the group said. Seventeen members of the Black Caucus represent districts that are less than 50 percent African-American, said caucus Chairwoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), who argued that the issues at the debate will also be of interest to other minority constituencies, such as Hispanics.



“It’s not just a black thing,” Kilpatrick said.



Thompson said presidential debates often ignore issues that are important to minority voters.



“Nobody is talking about the disproportionate statistics that we have in this country as it relates to minority population,” Thompson said. “You can look at healthcare, you can look at education, you can look at employment, you can look at housing, you can look at lending. All those [statistics] show a very bad picture for many constituents we represent.



“So we think Democratic and Republican candidates alike should have an opportunity to say what they plan to [do to] level the playing field,” he added.



By framing their decision to skip the debate as a missed opportunity to communicate to an important Democratic constituency, caucus leaders are ratcheting up the political pressure on the Democratic front-runners.



Thompson said that the CBC Institute, not Fox, would set the debate format and select the questions to be asked. He said Fox merely will broadcast the event.



So far, liberal opinion leaders have praised the Democrats’ decision to snub Fox.



Left-leaning columnist E.J. Dionne wrote last month that Democrats were well within their rights.



“Tell me again: Why do Democrats have an obligation to participate in debates on Fox?” Dionne wrote. “I am an avid reader of conservative magazines such as National Review and the Weekly Standard. But if these two publications teamed up to sponsor a Democratic debate, would anyone accuse Edwards, Obama and Clinton of ‘blacklisting’ if the candidates said, ‘no thanks’?”



The pressure may be particularly acute for Obama, who is a member of the Black Caucus. Obama has irked fellow CBC members by failing to respond to a request made early last year that he host a fundraiser for the Black Caucus’s political action committee (PAC). Clinton received a similar invitation and quickly followed through by headlining a CBC PAC fundraiser in March of 2006.



If Obama were to change his mind and attend the debate, it would put pressure on Edwards and Clinton to follow suit. Otherwise, it might look as though they were snubbing African-American voters, an important bloc of the Democratic electorate. For instance, in South Carolina, which will hold the country’s second presidential primary, black voters are expected to make up nearly half of Democratic voters.



The 26 Black Caucus members who signed the letter wrote that they strongly support the debate sponsored by the CBC Institute and Fox. The signatories emphasized that the Black Caucus is separate and distinct from the CBC Institute, but their very action also illustrated the close affinity between the two groups. Four caucus members sit on the institute’s board: Thompson, Kilpatrick, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.).



Thompson and Kilpatrick noted that when the CBC Institute asked cable news networks to air presidential debates it hosted in 2003, only Fox responded. They said the debates drew impressive ratings.



Thompson said loyalty is a factor in the CBC Institute’s decision to stick with Fox. In total, the institute plans to host four presidential debates, two for Democratic candidates and two for Republican candidates. Fox and CNN will split the broadcasting evenly.



“Given the importance that African-Americans and others hear from you on your position on critical issues that affect their lives and the country, we urge your participation,” a Democratic source who described the letter’s conclusion said.



But the debate is not without controversy in the black political community.



“I think what we have are candidates who understand that Fox is a propaganda outlet and not an appropriate place for political discourse to be treated as news,” said James Rucker, the executive director of ColorOfChange.org, who applauded Obama, Clinton and Edwards for skipping the debate. ColorOfChange.org describes itself as an online community of 90,000 Americans dedicated to amplifying the voice of Black America.









Signatures







Greg Fuller