Thursday Open Thread

23 Feb 2012 Author: rikyrah

hat tips-The Obama Diary, 3CHICS:

The President and First Lady hosted a Blues Night at the White House.

President Obama sings Sweet Home Chicago!

The full concert will be shown on PBS on February 27th

Good Morning.

As you make it through your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

First Lady Michelle Obama hosts a student workshop called “At The Crossroads: A History Of The Blues In America” at the White House.

Tags: Open Thread

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Anonymous
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Anonymous
President Obama as an alien
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Published: February 22
They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,” while the less adventurous say that he’s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.
Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.
Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.
True, some of this is driven by cable television (a venue in which I acknowledge regularly participating). Attacks designed to gin up the conservative base are quickly recycled to gin up outrage within Obama’s own base. Moreover, Obama is not the first president caught up in the rank unpleasantness of this particularly unforgiving political moment. A quick Google search will unearth references to George W. Bush as a “Nazi,” and Bill Clinton’s Republican opponents went so far as to impeach him in a shameful episode of extreme partisanship.
…………………………
But there is something especially rancid about the never-ending efforts to turn Obama into a stranger, an alien, a Manchurian Candidate with a diabolical hidden agenda. Are we trying to undo all the good it did us with the rest of the world when we elected an African American with a middle name popular among Muslims?
In my experience, even Americans who voted against Obama were proud that our nation showed friend and foe alike that we are a special place. We know it’s wrong to judge people by their race or lineage, and we so value religious freedom and openness that we elected a Christian convert who is the son of a Muslim father and an agnostic mother to lead us at one of our most difficult moments.
Yet many in the anti-Obama camp just can’t stop themselves from playing on fears that electing a man who defies old stereotypes was a terrible mistake. Thus did the Rev. Franklin Graham assert Tuesday on MSNBC not only that Muslims regard Obama as “a son of Islam” (because his father was Muslim) but also that “under President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries.” Graham slightly softened his comments on CNN Wednesday, but it remains troubling that he chose to turn a legitimate concern about the persecution of Christians into a slander.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/on-the-president-as-alien/2012/02/22/gIQAces8TR_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
Anonymous
Buying From The Black Community
Maggie Anderson, author of Our Black Year, attempted to shop exclusively at black-owned businesses for a full year. It proved more challenging than expected:
We assumed, just like other little ethnic enclaves like Little Italy or Greek Town or Chinatown, that for predominantly black neighborhoods all the black businesses there would be owned by the local people. But easily over 90 percent of the businesses on the West Side [of Chicago]—and it’s the same way all over the country—are owned by people who are not black and do not live in that community. So it’s not a “buy local” thing, because these folks set up shop in the black community, sell their wares, make their money, hardly ever employ the local people there—and they put the steel bar over the door, pack up at 6:30, get in their car, drive to their suburb, and take that money with them. And that was the whole reason that these communities suffer the way they do: The everyday exit of the wealth in those neighborhoods directly leads to social crises there.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/
Anonymous
Four white wealthy men talk about contraception
By Steve Benen
Thu Feb 23, 2012 8:00 AM EST
About half-way through last night’s debate, moderator John King presented a question for the four candidates sent in from a viewer: “Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control, and if not, why?”
The question was not well received by the audience, which booed for quite a while. Opinions vary as to why, exactly, attendees responded so negatively, though I suspect it was because the audience saw this as an unnecessary area of discussion.
King, noticing the prevailing winds, immediately told the Republican presidential field, “Look, we’re not going to spend a ton of time on this.” The candidates had other ideas.
The ensuing discussion was one of the longest of the entire two-hour debate. Rick Santorum wanted to talk about “the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America” and “children being raised by children.” Ron Paul spent some time explaining his belief that “immorality creates the problem” of Americans wanting access to birth control. The discussion just wouldn’t end, moving from Title X to Arlen Specter to morning-after pills.
You could almost hear the smiles coming from Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. In the 21st century, four far-right white wealthy guys, all of whom think they should be president, spent 15 minutes in a nationally-televised debate talking about access to birth control.
The GOP candidates might as well have put a banner over their heads reading, “Independents, please don’t consider voting for us.”
But it was Mitt Romney’s response to the question that amazed me. “I don’t think we’ve seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we’ve seen under Barack Obama,” the former governor said.
Think about that one for a moment. The Obama administration is including contraception coverage as part of preventive health care for Americans — a decision a clear majority of the country heartily supports. The administration is exempting churches and other houses of worship, and has crafted a compromise so that religiously-affiliated employers will not have to pay for contraception coverage directly.
This is the biggest “attack” on religious freedom in the history of the United States? How is it, exactly, that a sane person could believe this?
Or more to the point, how is it that a Mormon, whose church faced actual attacks and discrimination, could see contraception access as a more serious assault on “religious tolerance”?
Romney added that Obama is “requiring the Catholic Church to provide for its employees and its various enterprises health care insurance that would include birth control, sterilization and the morning-after pill. Unbelievable.”
It is, in fact, literally “unbelievable,” since that’s not at all what the administration is doing.
It was painful enough to have so much of the debate focus on opposition to birth control, but Romney’s dishonesty managed to make a mind-numbing discussion even worse.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/23/10486012-four-white-wealthy-men-talk-about-contraception
RobM
Obama to address gas prices, pitch energy policy
“President Barack Obama is confronting Americans’ anxiety over rising
gasoline prices by drawing attention to his energy policies and taking
credit for rising oil and gas production, a greater mix of energy
sources and decreased consumption.”
This is very poor politics and poor policy. Worse it is hiding President Obama’s Bush II foreign policy moment; A big lie to explain a military action. Like Bush telling everyone to go shopping in the wake of economic contraction following the homicidal attack on the world Trade Center and I’ll take care of things-and we know how that turned out-President Obama has not explained that sanctions against Iran mean there will be less oil on the markets
The reason gasoline prices are going up are primarily a response to the embargo and sanction movement against Iran. Iranian oil is considered light but w/ a high sulfur content. Being light means it is sought after for the purpose of making gasoline. Given this substitutes are then sought driving up the prices of comparable light crudes rising the price of the refined products from them.
As opposed to explaining this and the “good” result that can come from the sanctions/embargo against Iran and the sacrifice needed he is engaging ducking the Foreign Policy issue and resorting to ignoring the reality politics and economics of the world oil markets. No good can come of this.
Anonymous
Mitt Romney’s tax proposal may not be narrative campaign wants
By Ezra Klein, Published: February 22
During a Wednesday phone call with reporters, Glenn Hubbard, a Columbia economist who is one of Mitt Romney’s top economic advisers, described the Romney campaign’s latest tax proposal in unusually evocative terms. “If you take the spending and tax pieces together, it’s a narrative of the policy agenda and life under a Romney presidency,” he said. And so it is. But if you really follow the numbers, and the policies they imply, it may not be the narrative the campaign wants.
The proposal’s basic features are a 20 percent cut in marginal tax rates (so the top rate would fall from 35 percent to 28 percent, the second-highest rate would fall from 33 percent to 26.4 percent and so on), a 30 percent cut in corporate taxes and a 13 percent cut in federal spending. But that’s just a string of numbers.
What’s important, as Hubbard correctly says, is the story the figures tell about a Romney administration. And that goes something like this: Under a Romney presidency, there would be a major redistribution — or perhaps it should be called a re-redistribution — from low-income people who depend on government programs such as Medicaid to higher-income folks who pay taxes.
As of now, we don’t know the most important fact about Romney’s tax plan: how much money it would raise. His campaign says those numbers are forthcoming. Outside groups will soon begin releasing estimates as well.
Hubbard says that Romney intends for the plan to be “revenue neutral,” which means that it wouldn’t increase the federal deficit. This is an important admission from the campaign: It says, in effect, that we shouldn’t cut tax revenue below where it is now. But it’s unlikely that independent estimates would find that the plan is revenue-neutral. The Romney campaign says part of the proposal’s cost would come from limiting or ending various deductions, particularly for the rich. But it also says that part of the cost would come from assuming that the plan would lead to faster economic growth — a speculative assumption that would be rejected under the rules Congress uses to evaluate tax proposals.
The Romney camp wants the plan to be “distributionally neutral,” which means that the tax burdens on various income groups wouldn’t change. We won’t know if that’s the case until we see independent estimates. But assuming the plan kept taxes on the top 1 percent of wage earners exactly where they are now, that would be $87,000 less than under President Obama’s plan, according to the Tax Policy Center. And so the deficit reduction that Obama envisions from raising taxes on the rich would have to come, under Romney, through spending cuts.
What we can say with some confidence is that if the Joint Committee on Taxation looked at Romney’s proposal, it would score it as lowering revenue. That would mean projected deficits would rise. And the corresponding spending cuts would have to be even larger than is currently the case, and much bigger than would be the case under Obama’s proposals. So under a Romney administration, at least part of the narrative is clear: Taxes would go down, and the need for spending cuts would greatly increase.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/mitt-romneys-tax-proposal-may-not-be-narrative-campaign-wants/2012/02/22/gIQAfNkIUR_story.html
Anonymous
Mitt the Heretic
By Jonathan Chait
In the ongoing (and never-ending) ideological redefinition of Mitt Romney, this moment looms especially large. In advance of tonight’s Republican debate, possibly the last one of the primary season, Romney is dropping new hints about his tax cut plan. Romney has been trapped between two irreconcilable needs. For the general election, he desperately needs to move left on taxes, to avoid the fish-in-a-barrel attacks on him as a wealthy financial manipulator who shelters his money overseas and wants to make the tax code even more advantageous for people like himself. Yet conservatives have been pushing him to move in the opposite direction and come out with an even more regressive tax plan.
The result is a careful attempt to fulfill both diametric goals through careful ambiguity. Romney calls for an across-the-board reduction in income tax rates, offset by unspecified reductions in tax deductions and spending cuts. Romney is saying that the top one percent will continue paying their current share. But liberal tax wonk Bob McIntyre notices that “share” does not mean the same thing as “level.” The income tax hits the richer much harder than do other taxes. You could reduce income taxes across the board, and the rich would be paying their same share of the income tax, but their share of the overall tax burden would decrease. And, when combined with the (still unspecified) spending cuts, the overall effect would probably be regressive. Of course, you can’t quantify it because Romney details only the money he plans to put into people’s pockets (lower tax rates) and none of the ways he plans to take money out.

Romney’s plan essentially endorses the goals of the pro-rich right — supply-side enthusiast James Pethokoukis enthuses about Romney’s plan here — while trying to leave enough ambiguity to avoid getting pinned down against Obama. Indeed, Romney follows a similar strategy as the one employed by George W. Bush, who, while running in 2000, cloaked his regressive tax plan in all kinds of misleading language about helping the poor.

The more important development, which has received shockingly little attention, is that Romney once again let the sane man inside him, the one he keeps hidden from sight, briefly slip out in public. Responding to an audience question, Romney said that spending cuts would stymie economic growth:

If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy,” he said in part of his response. “So you have to, at the same time, create pro-growth tax policies.”

Most economists would consider this is a pretty banal statement. In an economy with mass unemployment and zero interest rates, reductions in spending reduce growth. But Republicans have come to regard this position, which is accepted by the entire macroeconomic forecasting field, as utter heresy. The whole Republican indictment of Obama is centered around the claim that he has spent too much, that this spending is responsible for a variety of ills, including unnecessarily slow growth, and that cutting spending immediately would not hurt but help economic growth. This has become perhaps the party’s single most fervent idea during the Obama era.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/02/mitt-the-heretic.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nymag%2Fintel+%28Daily+Intelligencer+-+New+York+Magazine%29
Anonymous
Posted at 01:45 PM ET, 02/22/2012
Mitt Romney, scourge of the one percent
By Greg Sargent
When Mitt Romney unveiled his new tax plan cutting taxes across the board by 20 percent in Arizona today, he pledged that he would “make sure the top one percent keeps paying the current share they’re paying or more.”
This illustrates how much the landscape has shifted in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the broader public’s rising preoccupation with inquality. After all, only last month, Romney attacked Obama as divisive for using the 99-versus-one-percent language, which he termed as “entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”
That aside, his rhetoric raises a question: What does his new plan actually mean for the wealthy?
I just got off the phone with Bob McIntyre, the president of the liberal-leaning-but-nonpartisan Citizens for Tax Justice. He says the upshot for the rich is a huge tax cut that’s paid for by cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Total taxes cut in the plan: $10 trillion over 10 years, by his calculation.
The central feature of Romney’s new plan is an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut — on top of continuing the Bush tax cuts, by McIntyre’s reading. For the top earners, that means the tax rate drops to 28 percent. The plan also cuts the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, repeals the estate tax, and maintains the current tax rate of 15 percent on income from capital gains.
Bottom line?
“The wealthy will pay far less in taxes than they do now, including a wealthy person named Mitt Romney,” McIntyre says.
McIntyre notes that the plan does allow for the closing of some loopholes enjoyed by the wealthy, but said we need more detail to see whether they will constitute anything meaningful.
The plan appears to be paid for by unspecified cuts to Social Security and Medicare. On the latter program, Romney’s plan envisions a “a premium support system that gives each senior the freedom to choose among competing private plans and traditional fee-for-service Medicare.” That appears to be a reference to the Ryan-Wyden Medicare plan.
So how does this all square with Romney’s claim above about the one percent? McIntyre says the key is that Romney said the one percent’s “share” would not drop. He didn’t say the amount the one percent pays wouldn’t drop.
“If you reduce the whole thing by 20 percent then they can go down by 20 percent and still pay the same share,” McIntyre explains. So there you have it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/mitt-romney-scourge-of-the-one-percent/2012/02/22/gIQATficTR_blog.html
Anonymous
Bob McDonnell for Veep!
By Charles P. Pierce at 3:59PM
The governor of Virginia really, really wants to be somebody’s vice-president. Very likely, that would be a presidential candidate who would like to get more than three votes from women in the general election. Bob McDonnell also has spent his life as a jumbo bag of nuts on the issue of women’s place in this society, and particularly what they do with their ladyparts when he’s not watching and Jesus is on vacation. So here comes that delightful bill out of the Virginia House of Delegates (motto: Patrick Henry’s Picture Just Fell Off The Wall) by which any woman in the Commonwealth who wants to exercise her constitutional right to choose has to get a big old probe stuck up inside her first.
Arroooogah! Arroooogah! Dive. Dive!
So, suddenly, vice-presidential timber Bob starts to have second thoughts about the Dildos Mandating Dildos Act Of 2012. Bob’s “backing off” his committment to organized medievalism. Good for you, Bob. By way of explanation, The Washington Post reports this little nugget without any concern that some of its readers may keel over laughing:
Many of the bill’s supporters were apparently unaware of how invasive the procedure could be, one of the officials added.
One of the bill’s original co-sponsors was a woman named Kathy Byron. You telling me she didn’t know what exactly was being mandated here? You telling me she couldn’t have enlightened her colleagues before they passed this idiocy and made Virginia look like a laughing stock in front of the whole world? This, I tell you, I do not necessarily believe.
But you will note that Bob only has committed to not signing the POS today. If he chooses not to sign it, it may mark him lousy with the Republican base. (Oh, boy! A brokered VP nomination! TV gold!) If he signs it, most women of both parties will spit at the mention of his name. Seriously, now, what’s a brother to do? One thing is for certain — even if McDonnell bails on the bill, it will turn up again, and probably in a whole bunch of states. Hell, “personhood” got flogged in Mississippi and is now more of a legislative presence than it ever was. These people do not stop. This is a national problem, not a state-by-state thing. It demands a national response.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/bob-mcconnell-birth-control-6814208#ixzz1nDO9vT2F
Anonymous
I watched the first episode of MHP and was just exasperated with the GOP guy (can’t/don’t want to remember his name) with his talking points-’class warfare’ ‘divisive’ ‘the party that ended slavery’. I really wish someone would ask these people why is it they have to go back over 100 years to proclaim something good that they’ve done? In the words of Janet Jackson what have you done for me lately?
RobM
The vampire squid of America was not the only one setting up fraudulent mortgage bonds.
Ex-Bond Highflier Is Warned by SEC
RobM
This link shows why the mortgage settlement, which we still haven’t seen, is fraudulent. The supreme court of MA is deciding whether or not a foreclosure is legally valid if all the documentation is not there was processing. it does not address, in the cases sited, whether or not the people foreclosed on are in arrears on their mortgage. the settlement argues that pursuing foreclosures w/o proper documentation is legal. The fraud often occurs because w/ the separationMassachusetts Home Seizures Threatened in Loan Case: Mortgages of the two documents you can being paying your mortgage to the servicer but the payments are note being recorded properly and then the owner of the home must sue to show they have paid.
“A ruling in favor of Eaton would show how a $25 billion settlement
reached this month with state and federal officials still leaves banks
exposed to liabilities tied to home repossessions. It also underscores
the challenge of resolving a foreclosure process that Federal Reserve
Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a study last month is plaguing the
housing recovery.
At issue in Eaton v. Federal National Mortgage Association, also known as Fannie Mae, are two documents borrowers sign to get a home loan. The first is the mortgage establishing the right to seize a property. The second is the promissory note that creates an obligation to pay the debt. While the servicer had the mortgage when it foreclosed, it didn’t have the note. One without the other is known as a naked mortgage.
Foreclosure Challenges
Home-loan financiers such as government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac typically separate the two documents when bundling home loans into securities to sell to investors. Almost $6 trillion in mortgage-backed bonds have been issued in the last three years.”
Massachusetts Home Seizures Threatened in Loan Case: Mortgages
lamh35
Speaking of Florida, just saw this story on TPM about Marco Rubio spending time as a Mormon during his boyhood years.
Even though I think it would be a mistake for Rubio to tie himself to the Romney ticket, with this type of information trickling in, it’s beginning to make me wonder if Rubio and his people ain’t just stupid enough to actually be on the ticket in 2012.
Like I said, I think it’s would be a mistake, but meh, I don’t care one way or the other, I think in some ways I’m one of the few people who don’t believe that Rubio on the ticket does much in terms of helping Romney or GOP draw in Latino votes and I get that info from my Latino friends who’ve said that just cause Rubio is Latino doesn’t really guarantee Latino support they’ve all said that Puerto Rican or different than Cubans, and Cubans are different than Mexicans and Mexicans are different than Dominincans and so on and so on.
Anyway, here the TPM link about Rubio once being a Mormon youth:
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/marco-rubio-spent-youth-as-mormon
lamh35
Conspiracy! Rivals Accuse Romney And Paul Of Collusion
The warm friendship between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney is starting to annoy their rivals, who are openly accusing the two candidates of forming a Survivor-style alliance.
Ron Paul has mostly refrained from tough attacks on Romney, who has some kind words in turn for Paul. The libertarian-leaning Congressman has instead used his debate performances and advertising dollars to go after the rest of the field. Thursday’s debate was no different as Paul lashed Santorum as a “fake” conservative, an attack he’s deployed in a TV spot in Michigan this week as well. Earlier in the race, he took a similar tack with Newt Gingrich. Neither campaign is pleased…
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called the relationship between Paul and Romney “bizarre” the same morning and offered some idle thoughts as to what either side was getting out of the deal.
“The thing that went unspoken but everybody knows, and that is that Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have formed an alliance,” Scarborough said. “It is such an obvious alliance that Mitt Romney would do well to just come out and admit it. I don’t know what he’s promised Ron Paul. I don’t know if Ron Paul is hoping that his son gets in the administration. But let’s just be really honest here — for all the people for Ron Paul to form an alliance with in the Republican Party, to pick out Mitt Romney is really bizarre.”
lamh35
Worst. Surrogates. Ever.
By Steve Benen

When compared against his Republican rivals, Mitt Romney enjoys far more support from his party’s establishment, giving him a small army of GOP surrogates he can dispatch to get his message out to the public.
Of course, this only works when the campaign’s surrogates (a) aren’t embarrassing, and (b) actually agree with Romney’s message.
Take Rep. Joe Heck (R) in Nevada, for example. The Republican congressman is a top Romney backer in the Silver State and a campaign surrogate, but he doesn’t mind talking publicly about how wrong Romney is on housing policy…
Randy Pullen, a former Arizona Republican Party chairman and a top campaign backer in the state, offered this assessment of the race yesterday: “Santorum connects with people. Unfortunately, my guy has a hard time doing that”…
Rep. Fred Upton (R), a top Romney backer in Michigan, said this week that Romney was wrong about the auto-industry rescue. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), one of the campaign’s most prominent surrogates, contradicted Romney on the release of tax returns. Sen. John McCain (R), a very high-profile supporter, told a national television audience Romney’s position on Taliban negotiations isn’t his position…
Then there’s Romney’s other group of surrogates: the ones he doesn’t want to talk to anymore. Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu was a top campaign surrogate until his recent scandal, and Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) was a leading surrogate before he was caught up in his own ethics controversies…
lamh35
Going on offense on the auto bailout
Here’s the clearest glimpse yet of how the Obama campaign will use his rescue of the auto industry to go on offense against the eventual GOP candidate in swing states that were hit hard by the economy.
The Obama campaign is going up with this new ad in Michigan in advance of the GOP primary, accusing the GOP candidates of turning their backs on the auto industry and describing Obama’s auto bailout as an American manufacturing success story…
Anonymous
AFTERNOON OPEN THREAD IS UP!!
RobM

Courts to Hasten Efforts to Prevent Foreclosures
The New York plan includes an unusual agreement by four banks to send representatives to court who can approve loan modifications.
Mortgage settlement conferences have often been paralyzed by repeated
requests for information and the absence of anyone with authority.
“It is an important step forward” because it increases the involvement
of judges with the power to punish defiant or disorganized lenders, said
Geoff Walsh, an expert on foreclosure policy at the National Consumer
Law Center in Boston.
The new program is to start in Queens this spring and then expand around
the city and to nearby suburbs, court officials said. The officials
said that under the program, judges would take over the running of some
settlement conferences from court attorneys, who lack the power to
impose punishments. State law
requires that bank representatives “be fully authorized to dispose of
the case,” but enforcement of that requirement has been sporadic.
The officials said the plan would include court supervision of the
collection of required documents to try to avoid delays and would seek
to shorten the time some foreclosure cases linger in the courts to
several months from up to two years.”
Just really amazing the state are going after the financial institutions. When the final document on the settlement comes out it will be interesting to read what it speels out is covered by the amnesty given.

Entries (RSS)
Comments (RSS)

Who We Are

Cheryl Contee aka "Jill Tubman", Baratunde Thurston aka "Jack Turner", rikyrah, Leutisha Stills aka "The Christian Progressive Liberal", B-Serious, Casey Gane-McCalla, Jonathan Pitts-Wiley aka "Marcus Toussaint," Fredric Mitchell, Keith Owens, Anson Asaka, Barbara Moore, Deborah Small, Lisa Coffman, Michael Patton

Special Contributors: Rashad Robinson, Marvin Randolph, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, James Rucker, Rinku Sen, Adam Luna

Technical Contributor: Brandon Sheats

Jack & Jill Politics