Paterson waits in the wings to become NY Governor

Destroyed by hubris and drowning in a tsunami of hypocrisy, the political career and power so craved by Eliot Spitzer slips away into the ether never to be seen again. Into the den of lions steps David Paterson, New York State’s Lieutenant Governor and the first African American and first blind man to hold that position.

On the eve of his inauguration as New York State’s 55^th Governor, David Paterson should consider the blueprint of his tri-state neighbor, M. Jodi Rell, Governor of Connecticut. Mrs. Rell was the longtime and longsuffering sidekick to the corrupt Republican megalomaniac, John Rowland, a three term governor. He went to prison having taken kickbacks from contractors doing business with the state.

Mrs. Rell moved quickly and decisively to distance herself from the former governor by endorsing an ethics package of reforms that banned campaign contributions from lobbyists and provided public financing for campaigns. Paterson, if he is smart, will do the same. Governor Spitzer championed limited ethics reform legislation. The crisis will allow Patterson to go much further.

Mrs. Rell established her integrity from the jump, and she gave excellent inaugural and state of the state addresses that branded her as an honest leader worthy of the people’s trust. Moreover, she extended her hand to the other party in a gesture of bipartisanship that won kudos from all. Her approval ratings are the highest on record for a Connecticut governor and she was re-elected in 2006 by a landslide majority.

Paterson, a former State Senator for two decades and Minority Leader of the New York State Senate, is no lightweight. A scion of a political family, his father, Basil Paterson, was a former New York Secretary of State and his son’s predecessor in the New York State Senate. He is well qualified to assume power. Nevertheless, it won’t stop his successor as Lt. Governor, Republican Joe Bruno and a host of others: Mike Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, and Andrew Cuomo from trying to knock over a blind man and take his throne.

The Republicans smell blood and are in a feeding frenzy as they consume the carcass of Eliot Spitzer like Sharks on chum. Once he is completely devoured, they’ll start in on Patterson. If Paterson doesn’t move decisively to assert his power and control, he’ll meet the same fate.

One way he could stake out some independence is by abandoning his support of Hillary Clinton. Surely he understands that if he wishes to seek re-election, he must do so with the unanimous support of African Americans. One way to reach blackfolks is by cutting the Empress of Triangulation loose in favor of the man who will be King.

As of this posting, word still hadn’t come from the Governor about a decision regarding resignation. Paterson should use my favorite Jamie Foxx line in “RAY.” Responding to his angry mistress who demanded that he leave his wife for her, Ray says, “You knew what it was before you got into it.” If Paterson still don’t get the answer he wants to hear, he should do as Ray did when a promoter tried to short him on his money: come across the table and whoop dat azz.

Man up. Issue a statement calling for him to resign and take what’s yours. He was man enough to leave the state in your hands to do his ho in peace, why can’t he leave for good, now?

Breaking: Gov. Spitzer expected to resign; African American to become NY Gov

 

 

 

 

New York Lt. Gov. David Paterson

 

Hat Tip: MSNBC

NEW YORK – New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer told senior members of his administration that he was involved in a prostitution ring.

The governor met with his senior aides earlier Monday afternoon after cancelling scheduled events for Monday. The governor may be linked to the prostitution ring through cell phone records, sources told WNBC.com.

Spitzer is expected to make an announcement Monday afternoon.

Spitzer, 48, is married and has three daughters.

Last week, federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed conspiracy charges against four people accusing them of running a prostitution ring that charged wealthy clients in Europe and the U.S. thousands of dollars for prostitutes.

The Web site of the Emperors Club VIP displays photographs of the prostitutes’ bodies, with their faces hidden, along with hourly rates depending on whether the prostitutes were rated with one diamond, the lowest ranking, or seven diamonds, the highest. The most highly ranked prostitutes cost $5,500 an hour, prosecutors said.

Spitzer has built his political legacy on rooting out corruption, including several headline-making battles with Wall Street while serving as attorney general. He stormed into the governor’s office in 2006 with a historic share of the vote, vowing to continue his no-nonsense approach to fixing one of the nation’s worst governments.

Time magazine had named him “Crusader of the Year” when he was attorney general and the tabloids proclaimed him “Eliot Ness.”

But his stint as governor has been marred by several problems, including an unpopular plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and a plot by his aides to smear Spitzer’s main Republican nemesis.

Spitzer had been expected to testify to the state Public Integrity Commission he had created to answer for his role in the scandal, in which his aides are accused of misusing state police to compile travel records to embarrass Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno.

ADDENDUM: The Governor made a statement a few moments ago in which he did not utter the magic words. “I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promised better.”

“I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself. I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.”

Before the night is over, New York State might have an African American Governor. Fox News is reporting that the Governor will submit his resignation to the New York State Assembly tonight.

 

MSNBC cancels Tucker Carlson

Word came today that Tucker Carlson’s show on MSNBC has been canceled. Hallelujah! Thank You, Jesus. No word or term adequately describes how much I loathe Tucker Carlson. He reminds me of the grade school classmates that I despised as a child. Their privilege and disdain of Negroes was some kind of a birthright that they wore proudly on angelic faces that showed me nothing but expressions of contempt.

I rarely call adults significantly older than me by their first names. Living in the south for more than 15 years has intensified that trait. I use Ms. or Mrs. or slap Mr. or Ms. in front of a first name. I can recall going home to the Midwest once and going to the grocery store my semi-retired grandma worked in as a demo-lady and came across some teenage boy calling her by her first name. It was like fingernails on a chalk-board. I almost lost it before grandma shooed him away. Mama confessed that she didn’t like children in the store calling her by her first name, but had resigned herself to that Midwestern habit.

I told grandma that I considered it HIGHLY disrespectful and hoped that she would say something. It was all I could do at the time to keep it together and not go off on the kid. Nothin’ makes me see red quicker than oblivious or deliberate disrespect. All of that brings me to Tucker Carlson, the subject of this post. He reminds me of that boy in the grocery store: disrespectful and oblivious.

Tucker Carlson is the kind of smug prick that causes sweet, Christian ladies like my grandma to bake up sumptuous batches of homemade cookies laced with rat poison and offer it to him with honeysuckled sweetness. Tucker ain’t got no home training and is contemptuous and disrespectful of any and everything black, or anything which could level the playing field. In short, he is addicted to white supremacist notions of superiority and is in desperate need of an intervention.

I know what you’re thinking, “Skeptical Brotha, that’s kinda strong isn’t it?” Sadly, no, Carlson is an unrepentant critic of Affirmative Action, Black politicians, Democrats, or anybody else more liberal than a movement conservative with an affinity for the confederacy.

Four years ago he asked Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton the following question about the University of Michigan case, “At the heart of one of these cases is a story of a woman named Jennifer Gratz. She applied to the University of Michigan. She had a 3.8 grade point average and she didn’t get in, partly because she was white. Now if your daughter was applying to college and she didn’t get in part because she was black, meaning her race counted against her, I think you would call that what it is, it’s racism. And I think you’d call it that. Why not call it that here?”

Where to begin? First, Tucker

 

Second, you should discard these antiquated and illogical fallicies about Affirmative Action. He wouldn’t know what was fair if it came up and bit him. It is supremely insulting that anybody could actually say with a straight face that stealing someone’s labor for two centuries and actively discriminating against them for another 75 years doesn’t merit some form of recompense. It’s completely absurd.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, before it was denatured and de-fanged with the addition of a stable of right-wing Handkerchief Heads, wrote, “Discriminatory actions by individuals and organizations are not only pervasive, occurring in every sector of society, but also cumulative with effects limited neither to the time nor the particular structural area in which they occur. This process of discrimination, therefore, extends across generations, across organizations, and across social structures in self-reinforcing cycles, passing the disadvantages incurred by one generation in one area to future generations in many related areas.”

“These interrelated components of the discriminatory process share one basic result: the persistent gaps seen in the status of women and minorities relative to that of white males. These unequal results themselves have real consequences.”

Tucker Carlson fails to recognize the context of America’s persistent inequality and fixates on the fiction of “reverse discrimination” to the exclusion of the routine “every day” racism which genuflects to white privilege and grants him two shows on two different networks to disseminate his ignorance to an unsuspecting public.

Lastly, Tucker has a rather odd fascination with the United Church of Christ-or rather Barack Obama’s church. It seems that Obama’s membership in a mainline protestant denomination is troubling to the Episcopalian Carlson. Senator Obama himself has said, “Commitment to God, black community, commitment to the black family, the black work ethic, self-discipline and self-respect. …Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement.” He added, “So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help.”

His attacks on Obama’s “separatist” faith and the black church are tinged with the acceptable racism of snarky disdain and contempt I felt from my white peers many moons ago. Coupled with the right-wing inspired Muslim smear and fear bomb, they are a potent cocktail too strong for the average member of the white working class and bedrock of the GOP coalition.

Thanks be to God that the preppy klansman no longer has two mainstream media perches from which to spew his racist condescension and religious bigotry. I know Grandma is just as pleased as I am. Perhaps now that MSNBC has finally given Tucker the boot, they can find a woman or person of color ” to diversify their all white-male line up.

Roseanne Barr to Obama: Bow to the White Woman

Roseanne Barr wrote a post today on Huffington Post entitled “Bow to the Woman” I have decoded her meaning below.

Barack Obama: Bow to the white woman, and take the vice presidency. Heal our bruised white feminist egos. You’ve come too far too fast and you know it. This was supposed to be our turn. You will run in eight years with our vocal support as we surreptitiously undermine you behind the scenes and destroy any possibility of your election. You must pass through our feminist sieve first though: bow to the white woman.

Otherwise it will be about your voting record and you do not want to live through that punishment, especially if you are innocent. Premier Hillary represents the soul of the Democratic Party: the white women who support her, Latinas, Latinos, 5 percent of the black voters, white blue collar worker, male and female, as just proven in Ohio, and the fake azz white Baby Boomers…quit bitching and moaning and whining now! Be a punk and take vice, bow to the white woman who is the last vestige of the neoliberal white power structure which represents the military industrial complex. You can’t win without the votes of the people who support Clinton. You do not have the white working class vote; you do not have the white majority on your side even with white independents. The states you win are not swing states or even Democratic states. You are a spoiler and your campaign is alienating Clinton’s white vote. Many of Clinton’s white feminist backers are turned off due to the truthfulness of the attacks your supporters Gary Hart and Samantha Power has let loose on your opponent.

You can’t fight back dirtier than she can — it will bury your message of hope and change. It obscures the message of the people in this party!

The white feminist message is: Hoes before Bros. The white women who hold up this party and are its majority want equal rights for the Machiavellian she-devil that claims to care about those of us who work for a living. Equality and no less. Attacking the female candidate as the power obsessed monster that she is will not work for you. Your strident leftist advisors are off the mark. White people are centrist, especially during a war.

Join and ultimately lose!!!! It will take both of you to win this campaign: the one who was wrong on the war and the one who was right: however, the people want to be ruled by a white above all else! If you take this nomination from her she will see to it that the party factions itself to death and you lose to another old white man, Fuhrer McCain. Then she’ll run again, serve two terms, and by then Chelsea will be old enough to run for office and continue the dynasty.

Be stupid, Barack, show us how cooperation works, let’s live the fake white liberal dream of Dr. King…blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, male and female left and right holding hands on the way to another two centuries of white imperialist domination of the earth. Stop the massive movement for “Change we can believe in” and be a damn fool by taking the vice presidency.

Gary Hart slams Billary

Skeptical Brotha’s Mea Culpa: I am sorry y’all, I’ve been absent for several days and I just needed a mental health break. I am working on a piece that I hope y’all will enjoy and in the meantime, this commentary from former Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart sums up my thoughts on the national security credentials of Billary Clinton.

Hat Tip: Huffington Post

“It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party’s nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.

By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party’s nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.”

…If Mrs. Clinton loses the nomination, her failure will be traced to the date she voted to empower George W. Bush to invade Iraq…For her now to claim that Senator Obama is not qualified to answer the crisis phone is the height of irony if not chutzpah, and calls into question whether her primary loyalty is to the Democratic party and the nation or to her own ambition.”

The Death of Hope

 

 photo by Barbara Kinney, Flickr

Today is my favorite Uncle Jim’s birthday.  He would have been 59.  The memories of him are always strongest at this time of the year because just as this time was his sunrise it was also his sunset. He died of pancreatic cancer just two days short of his 52^ndbirthday. He fought valiantly until the end refusing to succumb to the reality of his terminal prognosis. A proud Vietnam veteran who fought nearly two decades for the Service-connected benefits he deserved, they were belatedly awarded a few months before his death.   

Uncle Jim spent wildly in the months before his death having been denied for so long and in a vain effort to stave off death.  Emaciated and wan, losing more than 150 pounds, Uncle Jim refused to allow me and Mama visit him.  I was an emotional wreck and cried bitterly for weeks after he told me of his pancreatic cancer.  He sent for grandma and she flew to California and stayed with family during his hospitalization.  I dreaded the day when the call came because my mother was in denial. She persisted in the delusion that there would be enough time to plan a trip to see him. Every time I think of holding her as she wailed inconsolably, I am reduced to tears.   

I suspect that Hillary Clinton is going through much the same thing emotionally because her denial has manifested itself in her every move and deed since losing all of the contests after Super Tuesday.  Her behavior is characterized by wild spending, emotional outbursts and delusional talk of going all the way to the convention. One columnist wrote tellingly of observing her going through the five stages of grief and she clearly hasn’t accepted that the end is near, her appearance on Saturday Night Live notwithstanding.   

As I write this, Bill Clinton is speaking at Texas A&M University.  Looking pale, flaccid, and spent, he resembles a ghost.  Bill, with his snow white mane has become a Dickensian apparition, a ghost of the nostalgic 20^th century past.  He’s haunting the voters of Texas and admonishing them not to emulate the stingy and parsimonious Ebenezer Scrooge and to set things right and restore his House to the imperial throne of power.   Can’t you just see Hillary riding on the Big Dog’s soldiers like tiny Tim, politically crippled and pathetic?   

The woman around whom the right-wing created an empire of hate now barely mentions her. On Tuesday, she will have no choice but to accept reality.  CNN is reporting that Rhode Island, her stronghold state in the string of primaries to be held on March 4 has closed up nicely for Obama.  Her once huge lead in the polls has evaporated.   Both Texas and Ohio have seesawed and now we’re looking at a dead heat. The death rattles of her campaign are clearly being heard nationwide and this cruel political marathon of sadistic endurance draws to a close.   

This is also a moment for me to eat a heaping helping of crow and to acknowledge how wrong I was to assert that Obama’s campaign was a black middle class fantasy and a delusion of epic proportions.   The general election is still an open question but the white power structure sho’ ain’t scared of Barack Obama, the Safe Negro.  They have their claws in him just as they would any white contender in a similar position. The handwriting is on the wall and they’ve done everything accept throw Hillary under the bus.  A cautious brotha wouldn’t hazard a guess tonight with the conflicting polls out yesterday and today, but I smell death in the air, and fear in their eyes and it is not just because of the death anniversary of my Uncle Jim. 

ADDENDUM 

Originally entitled, “The End is Near,” this post had to be renamed.   The Inevitable One has been resurrected from political death to suck the life out of hope once again.  The Corporate Vampire that passed NAFTA and GATT sent forth his female proxy to smear the Hopeful One with a lie about a secret NAFTA deal with the right-wing Canadian government.  It was what Michelle Obama calls,  “a fear bomb” and it worked quite well on the gullible white working class of Ohio.  The “kitchen sink”strategy is effective.  They’ve certainly left no stone unthrown.

Playing the victim while contending for power from a position of privilege really suits her.   Paulo Freire has written, “Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former [one] seems to them like oppression….Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights.”

Now that the press has been made a party to Hillary’s false oppression and been humiliated by her victories as a result of becoming her foil to pander to a gullible public, they will follow their assigned roles as gatekeepers of power and haze Obama with even more gusto. Obama musn’t be allowed to ascend to power without the proper chastening.

In Texas, the natural affinity of the Latino community for Hillary was not effectively challenged despite the massive advertising edge by Obama.  He failed to make significant inroads into the Latino community and carried less than a third of Latino voters.  Familiarity trumps newness in this context.    While not completely deflated by this win, it is abundantly clear, as others have asserted, that this fight will go all the way to Denver.  

Race	Status	Candidate	Votes	Vote %	Del*	Precincts
Texas Primary Updated 1 minute ago County: Table | Map Exit Poll		Clinton	1,335,978	51%	16	88% reporting
		Obama	1,238,260	47%	10

Race	Status	Candidate	State Del.*	%	Del*	Precincts
Texas Caucus Updated 18 minutes ago		Obama	13,589	56%	0	22% reporting
		Clinton	10,874	44%	0
		Uncommitted	21	0%	0

Race	Status	Candidate	Votes	Vote %	Del*	Precincts
Ohio Updated 4 minutes ago County: Table | Map Exit Poll		Clinton	1,102,050	55%	62	91% reporting
		Obama	859,845	43%	46

Some Clermont polling places temporarily ran out of Democratic ballots, Sandusky sites are staying open until 9 p.m., and Barack Obama’s campaign has sued for time extensions in Franklin and Cuyahoga counties, claiming ballot shortages.

Race	Status	Candidate	Votes	Vote %	Del*	Precincts
Vermont Updated 1 minute ago County: Table | Map Exit Poll		Obama	73,454	60%	8	82% reporting
		Clinton	46,546	38%	4

Race	Status	Candidate	Votes	Vote %	Del*	Precincts
Rhode Island Updated 5 minutes ago County: Table | Map Exit Poll		Clinton	91,053	58%	5	88% reporting
		Obama	62,921	40%	1
		Uncommitted	821	1%	0

DENNIS KUCINICH ALSO FACES A PRIMARY CHALLENGE FROM THREE SERIOUS CANDIDATES

JOE CIMPERMAN	18341
BARBARA ANNE FERRIS	3531
DENNIS J. KUCINICH	29101
THOMAS E. O’GRADY	2911
ROSEMARY A. PALMER	2059