Different Day, Same Shit.

"One of the things that I would do is take all black people back to the South and put them on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working. I'm going to put them all on the plantation. They need a good hard education on what it is to work."

I think Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson's gonna have a hard time convincing even his fellow House Negros that voluntarily giving one's self up to the "peculiar institution" as a way of building character is a good idea. I guess he never did watch Roots or better still, "Slavery by Another Name."

"Newt (Gingrich) said that he would have black children, minority children work as janitors at school. Working as a janitor would build character, more so than the handouts so many of them like."

"I know some people take it personally because a whole lot of folks don't like hearing the truth; they like to be in denial," he added. "Not all black people, but most black people know, and white people know, and black people say it more in private than they would in public, but for the last 50 years or so, generations and generations of black people have relied on the government or someone else to take care of them."

"Many black women have had babies out of wedlock and passed that on to their daughters that if they have babies out of wedlock, they'll get food stamps, free houses and your rent paid," Peterson said.

There are many ways to instill character and good work ethics in young kids, and making them work a mop and broom at school isn't exactly one of those ways to go about it.* You're not gonna instill a good work ethic in someone by forcing them to reenact the life and times of an ordinary black slave in 1840s Alabama. Resentment and a desire to kill whoever thought this was a good idea, oh yes. Very much so. Also note the stereotypical garbage Peterson spouts at the end. Reads just like an ordinary GOP script.

As I read the above, I began to think about Elizabeth Wright, a woman who shared many of the same traits Peterson's exhibiting, one glaring trait being the compulsion to chastise, upbraid and castigate other blacks within the presence of and for the approval of white America. It's one thing to speak about the problems plaguing the black community; it's another to speak on those problems just to get brownie points from your fellow white conservative friends, many who'd die laughing at the spectacle of one "nigger" whipping another.

...if they have babies out of wedlock, they'll get food stamps, free houses and your rent paid...

Why do conservatives tell themselves this? Being in poverty is not a picnic where you're suddenly showered with all sorts of freebies and an opportunity to live in a life of leisure that even the wealthy 0.1% would envy. Everything comes with a string attached: the food stamps are set at a paltry amount with restrictions on what you can and can't buy, the "free" house is in a shitty neighborhood and requires mandatory community service and surprise "inspections," and that "free" rent suddenly evaporates if you manage to make one cent over the state/federal poverty line. You're given enough to keep you in poverty but not enough to overcome it, in most cases. Poverty isn't luxurious -- it's stressful as hell. But try telling the average conservative making a comfortable $55k to $250k that.

Speaking of conservatives:

According to the report, Peterson himself grew up on an Alabama plantation where his family had once been enslaved, and where members of his family had later worked as share croppers.

It's all coming to focus. I have to wonder if Peterson's ancestors were overseers or trusties back then.

Perhaps the good Rev. should be a bit more honest with us and tell us what he really wants: to forfeit his own right to be considered and treated as a full-fledged human being and be returned to sub-human status, whence he'll be worked from sunup to sundown with the callousness and lack of dignity given to even most common livestock and whipped for his troubles if he reconsiders or steps out of line. He'll be lesser than livestock, but at least he'll be exactly where he wants to be.

*Most Japanese schools have their students pitch in with tidying up the classroom after instruction. As far as I know, the task is largely voluntary, although the collective spirit precludes all but a few from deliberately opting out. But this isn't Japan. 

Unfortunately, yours truly cannot be arsed to create a blog post about the boring hilarious antics of Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. So I'll point you to others who have done just that. Yay you.

Field Negro - CNN Laughfest.
Angry Black Lady Chronicles - Shit! I Have to Tidy Up the Place for Yet Another GOP Herp-Derpbate! – Now with Bonus Chirpstory!
Molly Ball @ The Atlantic - That Was Not the GOP Debate Rick Santorum Needed
The Political Carnival - Video- CNN Debate: GOP Candidates Attack Leniency With Contraceptives And ‘Legalizing Infanticide’

The voters in their infinite wisdom have just given a huge boost to perhaps the only GOP candidate who could shift the spotlight from President Obama to himself, alienate virtually all independent voters, lose more than 40 states and put the House majority in jeopardy.

We’d be looking at four more years of Obama’s economic policies, four more years of strained relations with allies, several new Supreme Court justices and an unprecedented power shift to the executive branch.

It seems, gentlemen, it’s time to get off your . . . er . . . time to get off the bench and into the game. It is time to make the case for winning conservatism — a conservatism attractive to centrist voters that can be translated into a reform agenda. If conservatism becomes a movement of anti-media bashing and hyperbolic rhetoric, it will cease to be a force in American politics. And if it is led by an egomaniac whose personal advancement takes precedence over any principle, the GOP will be (correctly) mocked.

Uh-oh. Looks like someone's a bit worried about Newt Gingrich knocking the entire GOP presidential campaign off its axis. Not to worry -- Jennifer Rubin has plenty of company in that regard.

The GOP establishment is hoping and praying that Newt doesn't get another win in Florida, as it would completely flip the well-rehearsed script they're operating on: the one that involves Mitt Romney getting the nod. The last thing the GOP establishment wants is a candidate with copious amounts of personal and ethical baggage, a propensity for "going rogue" and the ability to go from hero to utter embarrassment in no time flat.

Romney and Santorum are sharpening their claws as I type. Others on the campaign trail and within the GOP are training their sights on Gingrich. It looks like Florida is shaping up to be a rather ugly battle to undo Gingrich before he manages another win. He's on the offensive and his attacks on Romney's time with Bain Capital Management could be the boost he needs in the Sunshine State.

I bet the GOP establishment is regretting the day it came up with the Tea Party concept right about now. That's what happens when you train an entire constituency to hunger for nothing but bloody red meat. Right about now, Mitt and Mr. C.U.M. are feeling a bit silly holding those tofu slices while Newton Leroy's throwing fresh meat to the crowds left and right.

Everyone's well aware of how, for decades, Republican leaders have attempted to cast black Americans as lazy, shiftless and entitled creatures and disparaged government assistance programs such as welfare and food stamps by painting a color-aroused portrait of flagrant and wanton abuse of one by the other -- the imaginary black single-mother Cadillac-driving welfare queen who regularly dines on filet mignon and champagne, courtesy of hardworking white American taxpayers, for example. And everyone's aware of how these stereotypes are just one of the many used in the hilariously disturbing dog fight that was the South Carolina primary, namely to draw out and win over the unreconstructed and easily color-aroused.

So you have the mistaken belief that blacks make up the majority of food stamp and welfare recipients, carefully crafted and refined by the GOP, expounded on by the likes of Newt Gingrich and consumed happily by color-aroused and embittered conservatives. You have Lawrence O'Donnell and Jane Walsh, who've called out Newton Leroy on this issue, and then you have Dana Loesch, who confuses the shit out of everyone in a crafty, yet flawed attempt to headgame everyone involved.

Let's start off with Newt Gingrich's comment about food stamps:

You want to be a country that creates food stamps, in which case frankly Obama’s is an enormous success. The most successful food stamp president in American history. Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?

On one hand, here's Newton Leroy blowing a dog whistle into the ears of the unreconstructed, who already believe that Pres. Obama, as a black figure and a Democrat, can't help but make it rain food stamps in the White House (which he had painted a gaudy black, purple and gold, just like in the clubs he and Michelle jump off at). On the other hand, people can simply point out that he was just talking about lazy Americans of all creeds and colors. In essence, this quote is so well-crafted that if anyone attempts to call out Gingrich on blowing the dog whistle here, there's plenty of room for false-flag conservatives to maneuver into position and attempt to call out the person calling Gingrich out on their own supposed racism.

Now someone had to call him out on that statement. Here's Joan Walsh doing just that:

Newt Gingrich doubled down on his clever new slur against President Obama as “the food stamp president.” He tried the line in a Friday speech to the Georgia Republican convention, and he used it again on “Meet the Press Sunday.” It’s a short hop from Gingrich’s slur to Ronald Reagan’s attacks on “strapping young bucks” buying “T-bone steaks” with food stamps. Blaming our first black president for the sharp rise in food-stamp reliance (which resulted from the economic crash that happened on the watch of our most recent white president) is just the latest version of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that Obama’s social policy amounts to “reparations” for black people.

Republicans have done well with their quest to stigmatize social welfare programs as handouts to the undeserving, and to pretend that most of the undeserving are black people.

Indeed they have. The response from Dana Loesch?

Walsh deduced that Gingrich couldn’t possibly be referencing any of this, no, it had to be because he’s being racist.

And what exactly is this "this" she's referring to?

Unemployment is soaring at nine percent.
The CBO predicted that the US economy will be unsustainable by 2037 on its current path.
The IMF declared two weeks ago that the age of America will end in a decade.
One in six Americans now receive government help. USA Today says more Americans are receiving federal aid than ever. Investors’ Insight says more Americans than ever before are on the government dole.
Lastly, according to our own government statistics, more white Americans receive federal aid than black Americans, shattering the stereotype that led Walsh to immediately think “black people” when she heard the words “food stamps.”

Problem is, if you ask anyone walking down the street what they would immediately think when they hear "food stamps," it would be a mental picture of a plump black woman with Kool-Aid hair, weave and fingernail extensions and a bad attitude giving the cashier lip while swiping her EBT card at the card reader.

The above images are NOT what most people think when they hear about "food stamps." They have no idea that more white Americans are on the dole than black Americans. Many a black blogger knows this -- to stave off attacks by the color-aroused, they had to look up this information for themselves. Politicians and mainstream media outlets, for one reason or another, have not made that knowledge widespread to America in general.

Loesch, on the other hand, says it's not about the dog whistles, because as far as she and other conservatives are concerned, there are none. Instead, you're a "racist" for even assuming that Gingrich could have insinuated that he was making a sly swipe against black people, you racist liberal progressive Democrat scum, you.

Loesch isn't above dishing out backhanded complements. In fact, she pats Lawrence O'Donnell on the back for stating the obvious:

It’s good to see a progressive finally stop believing that food stamps are patented to black Americans. If only Walsh and The Nation thought the same. Perhaps Lawrence O’Donnell has been reading Big Journalism. It’s OK, Lawrence, we won’t tell!

So, Loesch accuses O'Donnell, Walsh and others of being "presumptuous" about the GOP linking food stamps to blacks, as though they themselves believed in the stereotype that the GOP has spent decades crafting and refining. Marvelous. She's calling out people who are calling out Gingrich for being a racist prick...for being racist pricks. That is some rather slick shit there.

If most people aren't careful, they'll read what she's written and start nodding their heads in agreement, because it seems like something that's sensible -- just a bunch of liberals who are making something out of nothing, right. It takes a while to see through the bullshit.

By the way:

The Regressives have to say everything is a 'dog whistle'... how else could they continue to peddle the absurd notion that they care or are even remotely competent.

Democrats are the party of ... Jim Crow, the KKK, destruction of the black family, death of millions of unborn, class envy, hatred of their countrymen and country.

It always starts with a bit of truth. After Reconstruction, the Democrat party was the home of self-proclaimed "Dixiecrats" who indulged in the worst excesses of Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan and segregationist policies. By the 1960s, the Democrat party was slowly becoming less about Jim Crow and more about the liberal policies that we all know and love (well, most of us do).

And then came the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Southern Strategy, created in large part by Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips.

By the 1980s, the Democrat party was no longer what it used to represent and neither was the GOP. The conservative party threw its doors open to every unreconstructed bigot and Dixiecrat who loathed the day Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, along with their constituents. It's no accident that the southeast is about as blue as a Air Force serviceman's dress uniform red as the back of a stereotypical Southerner's neck.

Black Americans knew that the chessboard was being flipped around, and they switched sides accordingly. And it still burns the GOP's collective ass that blacks weren't stupid enough to remain at the GOP table as the old Dixiecrats came stomping in. So no, the Democrats are not the party of "Jim Crow, the KKK, destruction of the black family, death of millions of unborn, class envy, hatred of their countrymen and country." But the Republicans have shown that they fit those characteristics to a tee. Projection, wasn't it?

And yes, this Dana Loesch is the same Dana Loesch who claimed she would have copped a squat and a piss on dead terrorists, despite the desecration of enemy bodies being verboten under the Geneva Convention. And her blog is apparently a part of the Breitbart collective. Take that as you will.

You have to wonder if whenever Rick Santorum goes home, he breaks out the makeup kit hidden way in the back of the sock drawer, runs off to the bathroom and spends the next hour or so making himself "feel pretty." Then he breaks out the iPod, throws on a scarf, cranks up the tunes and starts dancing to Lady GaGa.

I bet he wasn't expecting to "feel pretty" in the middle of an autographing/photo op.

And I didn't like how those two proto-goons were pushing and shoving the old, balding guy out of the hall. Those guys looked like they could have "1488" inked on them somewhere.


Mittens isn't doing so well, either, although he isn't getting glitter thrown at him. Still, having to watch a joke candidate walk away with 40% of the caucus vote has to be painful.

More painful is the reason why Newt was able to run away with those votes like that. He found the open secret of winning the SC primary - beat up on minorities and the poor in coded language. And the crowd ate it up with bare hands. He couldn't have done any better if he had broke out a 55-gallon drum BBQ grill and started whipping up some spare ribs and pork BBQ for the audience. He knew his audience and the audience loved him.

And it's gonna make Florida all the more painful for Newt. As much as I liken the panhandle areas north of Orlando as South Alabama/Georgia, I don't think the dog whistles are gonna be heard as well in those parts. And given how Romney and Santorum are determined not to let a repeat of SC happen again, I say it's gonna be a knockdown dragout battle between all three.

And no one's gonna give a good shit about Ron Paul. It's practically over for him, but he just don't know it yet.

This is what I don't get about people who support Newton Leroy Gingrich. They tout his "family values" even though the man is miles away from ideal when it comes to genuine family values:

Kip Carter, his former campaign treasurer, was walking Newt's daughters back from a football game one day and cut across a driveway where he saw a car. "As I got to the car, I saw Newt in the passenger seat and one of the guys' wives with her head in his lap going up and down. Newt kind of turned and gave me this little-boy smile. Fortunately, Jackie Sue and Kathy were a lot younger and shorter then."

This is a man who walked out on his first wife while she was suffering from cancer and walked out on his second wife when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, after asking if he could have an "open marriage" so he could nail his soon-to-be third wife. You can't put "family values" and "Newt Gingrich" in the same sentence without laughing your head off at the inherent contradictions. Yet he still finds support from the "family values" crowd:

One senses him trying. "I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows," Deace says. David, after all, committed adultery with the ravishing Bathsheba, then had her husband killed, among other transgressions. The Bible makes room for complicated, morally compromised heroes. Now Christian conservatives, desperate for an alternative to Mitt Romney, are learning to do so as well.

"Under normal circumstances, Gingrich would have some real problems with the social-conservative community," says Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council. "But these aren’t normal circumstances."

You could say the same thing about Mark Sanford. Or Anthony Weiner. Or Elliot Spitzer. Hell, let's throw Herman Cain in there while we're at it. "Extraordinary" men beset by their own lusts and transgressions. And yet Sanford, Weiner and Spitzer had their political careers garroted and left in the street to bleed out. Even the coveted (R) next to Sanford's name couldn't save him. And Herm? Take a look through the archives to see what happened to that guy.

"Family values." The concept involves one man and one woman, married to one another, with kids, with no adultery, no out-of-wedlock sex and no homosexuality in sight. Yet it's represented by a man whose had three wives, cheated on at least two of them and exhibited all the moral failings that would have these people falling on their fainting couches if it were any other person.

I'm starting to think that "family values" means something entirely different from the above and I haven't gotten the memo on what that is exactly. New code word for "status quo?" A rallying cry for those who only want to see sickeningly perfect and blindingly white nuclear families? A way for religious and conservative groups to game themselves into backing Newt without throwing up? Perhaps the fine folks in South Carolina could tell me after they've finished celebrating Newt's win. I'm really dying to know.

You know what's funny? There's already a sterling example of "family values" available, and it's already in the White House. Yep, Barack and Michelle Obama. Too bad they already have two strikes against them, as far as the "family values" crowd is concerned - being Democrats and being that other thing that seems to set off so many people...socialist? No, that's not it...Kenyan? Close, but not quite...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has surged to the largest national lead held by any candidate so far in the race for the Republican Presidential Nomination.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary Voters finds Gingrich on top with 38% of the vote. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is a distant second at 17%. No other candidate reaches double-digits.

Looks like Newton Leroy Gingrich is the newest GOP Flavor of the Moment™, and that flavor's a big hit with the "Anyone but a Mormon" crowd, especially the evangelicals around the country.

Newsmax/InsiderAdvantage polls of Iowa and New Hampshire voters conducted Nov. 28 showed Gingrich in the lead in Iowa with 28 percent, followed by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, at 13 percent and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in third place at 12 percent. In New Hampshire, Romney leads Gingrich 31 to 27 percent.

An InsiderAdvantage poll conducted in South Carolina for the Augusta Chronicle showed Gingrich besting Romney by 23 points, 38 to 15 percent.

“This has gone from being an anyone but Romney race to a Gingrich versus someone race,” InsiderAdvantage head Matt Towery tells Newsmax.

Any rational human being would have to wonder what do Republican voters see in a thrice-married adulterer who literally walked out on his first wife as she was knee-deep in a battle against cancer. Especially a guy who was known for "indiscretions" that would have a Democrat burned at the stake:

Kip Carter, his former campaign treasurer, was walking Newt's daughters back from a football game one day and cut across a driveway where he saw a car. "As I got to the car, I saw Newt in the passenger seat and one of the guys' wives with her head in his lap going up and down. Newt kind of turned and gave me this little-boy smile. Fortunately, Jackie Sue and Kathy were a lot younger and shorter then."

Perhaps Republicans are more forgiving when its one of their own (or when it's politically expedient):

One senses him trying. "I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows," Deace says. David, after all, committed adultery with the ravishing Bathsheba, then had her husband killed, among other transgressions. The Bible makes room for complicated, morally compromised heroes. Now Christian conservatives, desperate for an alternative to Mitt Romney, are learning to do so as well.

Unless they're Democrats. That's when Heaven starts getting orders faxed from RNC headquarters for fire and brimstone to be showered upon those scoundrels.

Another reason for this spent gaseous body's sudden resurgence is his knack for tapping into the pleasure centers of the average wingnut. He can walk and talk the way the 27 percenters and Teabaggers like to see and hear. Take the following, for example:

“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.

“They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal,” he added.

I know people who were raised in those really poor neighborhoods, and yet they had strong work ethics instilled in them from the get-go thanks to seeing mom and pop (or in many cases, just mom) scraping up a few nickels here and a few dimes there in an attempt to fulfill their duties as the breadwinners of the family.

I also know people who were raised in homes where the mother didn't have to do anything, nor actually aspired to anything more than what the state and feds gave her in welfare and food stamps, plus whatever the man in her life threw in now and again, where the constant everyday refrain was that you couldn't get ahead in life or get the cars, clothes and riches unless you were out on the streets "grindin'" and "hustlin'" everyd.....damnit. My inner Freeper's out of the closet again. Pardon me a moment while I stuff him back in...

This is Leroy's forte, delivering coded speech and rhetoric to the perpetually color aroused and hate afflicted "Real" Americans throughout the country, preying on their drive to see that uppity Negro Barack Obama driven out of the White House and put in his place, preferably in chains somewhere, in order to secure himself a political legacy, along with insane amounts of money and influence. A presidency and political legacy, built on the backs of minorities and poors, and fueled by the hateful and the willfully stupid.

So will Leroy ever get his hands on the nomination? I doubt it. Although the Teabaggers and "Real" Americans are down for pulling hard and long for an anti-Romney candidate, the GOP Establishment would rather have a known quantity who sticks to the script, rather than have a Tea Party-endorsed loose cannon who happens to have more brains than any of the previous contenders. I wouldn't assume he would not win the nomination, although chances are he'll prove to be as disposable as Cain, Bachmann, Perry and Santorum were.

I noticed a billboard along the side of the road today, as I was slowly clawing my way through rush-hour traffic. And it wasn't like any other billboard. Just three panels featuring three people who seem like everyday stock photograph models normal Americans, aside from three words along the bottom of each panel: "I'm a Mormon."

Yep. A campaign to normalize the image of Mormon folks, so they won't continue to be seen by the evangelical and Methodist crowds as a bunch of freaky little devils-incarnate. If one wasn't careful, one would assume this could be in response to indirectly normalize the image of the GOP Establishment's preferred candidate, the magic underwear-doning Willard "Mittens" Romney. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints says this campaign's timing with the GOP presidential nomination campaigns and Romney's own bid for the nomination are merely coincidental. Sure.

The reticence of the protestant-based religions in the southeast and other regions to accept Romney, along with other unfortunate events, led to Newt Gingrich becoming the newest Flavor of the Moment™, getting a spectacular bump in the polls. If this (indirect) attempt to make Romney palatable to the GOP's flyover supporters doesn't pan out, the Establishment may be forced to either a)accept Gingrich and mold him for their own purposes, or b)find a way to conveniently spike his nomination push, most likely by using the same ticking time bombs that blew Herman Cain's campaign to smithereens. Wonderful, glorious smithereens. "Ginger White?" Seriously? If The Onion doesn't get it's shit together, it'll be out of business by the end of next year.

Crawling along in traffic, I wonder if anyone who actually had a mind to take a look at that billboard would put two and two together and ponder why the Mormon image suddenly needed a jump-start? Probably not. Most people would rather follow America's Next Top Model or listen to empty-headed pundits expel calorie-free opinions in attempt to feel self-important.