Newt Gingrich Really, Really, Really Doesn't Want To Be Virginia's Senator So Stop Asking 

 Jason Linkins

Newt Gingrich does not want to run for Senate in Virginia. And I mean he really, really doesn't want to. And so he'd really like the people who are trying to get him to run for Senate in Virginia to pack it in and stop talking about it -- so much so that the lawyers are now involved. Per The Washington Post's Aaron Blake:

A lawyer for Newt Gingrich is asking supporters attempting to draft the former speaker into the 2014 Virginia Senate race to "cease and desist" from using his likeness in its efforts. The lawyer also says Gingrich (R) will not run for Senate next year or at any point in the future.

At issue here is a days-old "Draft Newt" political action committee launched by a former Gingrich staffer named Andrew Hemingway, who formerly served the 2012 presidential aspirant as his New Hampshire state director and digital fundraising director. As The Hill reported last week, Hemingway said in a statement, "We want a credible challenger to Mark Warner, and no one could do what Newt could do to fight -- and win ... U.S. Senator Newt Gingrich would be an immediate game-changer, giving conservatives another voice that would take the fight to the Obama administration." According to reports, the PAC had obtained over 10,000 signatures in support.
Of course, Gingrich has "left the door open" to another run at the White House. Actually, it would be more fair to say that in the past two decades, he's failed to even install a door between himself and "runs at the White House." It's just that last year he finally decided to go through with it, ending up defeated and in debt. Now, he's making the easiest money of his long career as a seat-filler who occasionally speaks on CNN's Crossfire, and in all likelihood, he is bound by a contract to not run for office while he's pocketing Jeff Zucker's funbucks.
So Gingrich's lawyer, Stefan C. Passantino, would like all of these "Draft Newt" shenanigans to end with all deliberate haste, telling the group: "Accordingly, we hereby demand that you cease and desist from the unauthorized use of Speaker Gingrich's name or likeness and that you further cease and desist from any activity implying or insinuating that your group is in any way authorized by, or affiliated with, Speaker Gingrich or his organizations."
Right now, the GOP lacks what would ordinarily be considered a "credible challenger" to Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.). Polls conducted in July by Public Policy Polling had Warner up double digits on the skylark potential candidates that could get in the race, including Virginia Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Former Virginia Sen. George Allen has said he will not run in 2014.
Gingrich isn't the only name that's been floated as a possible candidate. Back in August, GOP officials were said to be "grumbling" over Liz Cheney's decision to seek a primary battle against the sure-to-be-reelected Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, instead of staying closer to home and taking on Warner. I don't know what the Commonwealth of Virginia did to deserve having Liz Cheney and Newt Gingrich wished upon it, but surely being stuck with either Cuccinelli or Terry McAuliffe as the governor next year will fully absolve the Old Dominion of its sins.

GOP launches race war to boost the 1 percent 

 

From Newt's epithets to the gutting of food stamps, Republicans try to unite white people to serve a hideous agenda 

 By Brittney Cooper

Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/Tami Chappell/AP/Ed Reinke)

The recent vote of House Republicans to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program reflects a deep-seated and insidious racial resentment toward Americans of color. This racial resentment rears its ugly head within the provisions for the bill that demand that non-employed participants in the program get a job, job training or do community service activities. Though the bill in its current form will most likely die in the Senate, the fact that Republicans would even pass it should concern us.
Conservatives continue to lead under the aegis of a deliberate and willful ignorance about the long-term existence of a group known as the working poor, people who work long hours in low-wage paying menial labor jobs, and therefore cannot make ends meet. Moreover, there is a refusal to accept that the economic downturn in 2008 created conditions of long-term unemployment, such that people simply cannot go out and “get a job” just because they will it to be so.
I often wonder if government officials actually talk to real human beings about these policies, because if they did, they would find many people with a deep desire to work, but a struggle to find well-paying jobs. Some of those people would gladly take jobs that pay far less, but are frequently told that their education and years of work experience make them over-qualified.
This is not a race-based problem. The American middle class itself is shrinking dramatically each year in relation to a poor economy, an insistence on austerity measures from the right, and a capitulation to these measures on the left. However, the complete irrationality and utter severity of the legislation, and the total lack of empathy and identification that inform contemporary Republican social advocacy is tied to a narrative about lazy black people and thieving “illegal” brown people.
In 1976, Ronald Reagan invented the term “welfare queen,” to characterize the actions of exactly one person in Chicago who had bilked the welfare system out of a staggering amount of money. Buttressed by an underlying white racial resentment of the liberal pieces of legislation that emerged during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations – laws that had attempted to change conditions, but could not change hearts and minds around racial inequality issues — white conservatives latched on to a narrative about lazy African-Americans stealing from taxpayers and living lavish lives financed by the welfare state.


That narrative has persisted well into the 21st century when Newt Gingrich derisively referred to Barack Obama as the “Food Stamp President” in the 2012 elections. Uninterrogated and misplaced racial resentment has been the most effective strategy for making white people support draconian social policies in the name of “taking the country back.” This is true, even though in sheer numbers, white people are the largest group of recipients of the SNAP program.
Fiscal conservative politicians (including some Democrats like Bill Clinton) have presided over a massive and systematic redistribution of wealth into the 1 percent since the 1980s. For African-Americans this means that we lost over half of our collective (and meager) net wealth, in just the last five years, due to predatory lending and the the machinations of big business. But it is easier to hate and regulate welfare recipients.
Since everyone knows that welfare queens finance their lives of luxury through the receipt of food stamps, which amounts on average to about $135 in groceries each month, cutting the food stamp program, a move that will take nearly 4 million people off the rolls in the next 10 years, is not merely a pragmatic measure or a “necessary evil,” but rather a deeply symbolic act that points to recalcitrant and entrenched racist attitudes on the right. It turns out, then, that African-Americans are not the only group of voters whose political behavior is motivated – at least, in part — by racial identity.
The Republican Party often capitalizes on these attitudes about poor African-Americans in moments of economic downturn, as a way to rally white working- and middle-class American voters. This is very similar to the strategy used by the Southern Planter class in the 1850s to curtail alliances between working-class white people and enslaved African-Americans.
Rather than create a more equitable system by freeing the enslaved and paying everyone fair wages, the plantocracy deployed a narrative about white racial superiority that caused poverty-stricken white people to disavow their own class interests in service of racial unity. In fact, as David Roediger outlines in his now classic work “The Wages of Whiteness,” this is one of the key processes that led to white people in the U.S. becoming a unified racial group, beyond the ethnic identities (Polish, German, Irish, etc.) that had previously characterized them. Without benefit of this historical context, the consistency with which contemporary white conservatives vote against their own economic interests, in order to remain beholden to fiscal and social conservatism would appear downright peculiar.
Beyond the academic implications of these choices, I am concerned about real people who need access to these services. There are members of my own family who need public assistance, because they live in economically depressed areas where job opportunities are few. There are college students and graduate students whom I teach, who are supporting themselves through school, and use food stamps so they can eat each month. And there are countless children, who come from poor homes in rural and urban areas throughout this country, who need the security that comes from being able to eat three square meals a day, so that they can be healthy and perform well in school.
A final note of caution: In a world with no food security, there will be increased violence. This is related to a contemporary crisis that we are seeing among youth. When we scratch our heads wondering why we have seen a surge of bullying in schools and bullying deaths in response, perhaps we should admit that we are a nation of bullies. Our children are merely modeling the logic of a nation that ties its own sense of status, identity and power to its ability to unrelentingly pick on the “least of these.” In this American dystopia, the disproportionately black and brown least of these will be left with no other choice but to fight back or (destroy themselves and others as they) die trying.
Brittney Cooper is a contributing writer at Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @professorcrunk.

Cenk Uygur on Conservatives' Reaction to President Obama's Syria Speech

Cenk Uygur on Conservatives' Reaction to President Obama's Syria Speech

By Heather      



The Young Turks and Cenk Uygur put together a nice mashup of the right wing and Fox pundits' reaction to President Obama's speech on Syria this Tuesday and as Cenk noted, they're really pissed off that they're not going to get their bombing any time soon.
After getting criticism from all sides who did not necessarily agree on whether the United States ought to use air strikes in Syria or not, now that President Obama has given his speech saying he wants to give diplomacy a chance first, the right is all in agreement that it's a reason to attack him, call him weak and claim that his presidency is doomed. It seems the only way these wingers believe we can show we're not weak is by lobbing a few bombs on some more people's heads in the Middle East, because that's what tough guys do, don't ya' know.
Like Uygur, I'm so sick of these Republicans and the fact that the only thing consistent about their policies is that if President Blackenstein (as Bill Maher calls him) is for something, they're going to be against it, even if they were for it a year, or week, or even a day before.
Our government would function a whole lot better if we had some people running it who actually cared about what was good for their constituents who are not part of the one percent instead of governing by sabotage to make a Democratic president look bad, consequences be damned, with this goon squad on Fox cheerleading for them all the way.




Cenk Uygur on Conservatives' Reaction to President Obama's Syria Speech http://t.co/8gvuQShvJz