Last Call For Just Blame Obama

Former Rep. Allen West has gotten the taste of that sweet Wingnut Gravy Train and he's never going to let it go.  He's found his niche as the Black Guy Who Hates Obama and he'll ride that for as long as he can, Ben Carson be damned.

On Sunday, Fox News host Charles Payne asserted to West that many people believed that Obama was the “central reason” why the racial divide seemed to be worsening.

“For President Obama, when you look at it from his perspective as a progressive socialist community organizer, he believes race relations are fine because of the impact they are having on social justice,” West explained. “So when you have this divide among us because that is the goal of collectivism, which is what the president believes in, then everything is fine for him.”

“When you have somebody like Al Sharpton visiting the White House and providing him counsel 82 times, and standing and putting pressure on Sony, and other individuals,” he continued, “and this angst that has happened, and this mob atmosphere that is going on, this is really what the president would like to have. This vomiting of dissension. But that is not what the inner-city needs right now.”

Payne opined that the country seemed to be more racially divided because the president had taken opportunity “at every turn” during his administration to blame racism for America’s problems.

“They created that atmosphere back early in 2009,” West agreed. “Eric Holder said we were a nation of cowards when it came to race. And you look at the fact that we have elected and re-elected the first black president, but yet he still believes that is not enough. We have [black people as serving as] the national security advisor, the [secretary of] Department of Homeland Security.”

“I don’t know what else you need to have.”

How about not being shot for being black, asshole? 

Gotta hand it to West, being a black person making white racists feel better about their racism has been very profitable throughout American history.  It takes a certain hardness of spirit to do that, probably the kind of thing he picked up in Iraq before getting kicked out of the Army for torturing Iraqi civilians.  Please note this didn't stop him from winning a term in Congress, because as I've said before, we're a nation that largely approves of torturing brown people.

But yes, blaming President Obama for "race relations" in this country is exactly what millions of racists want to hear from a black guy on FOX News.  West will be set for a long time.

A Metric Crapton Of Stupid

It's bad enough that we have yet another missing Asian airliner to worry about now (and CNN is having a grand old time with it) but FOX News still takes the cake for stupidity when it comes to disaster porn.

Fox News host Anna Kooiman speculated on Sunday that an AirAsia flight could have gone missing because international pilots were trained using the metric system.

During breaking coverage of missing Flight QZ8501, Kooiman asked former FAA spokesperson Scott Brenner if the “real reason” the plane had disappeared was because of the “different way other countries train their pilots.”

“Even when we think about temperature, it’s Fahrenheit or Celsius,” she pointed out. “It’s kilometers or miles. You know, everything about their training could be similar, but different.”

IT WAS THE METRIC SYSTEM. (lightning, scary organ music)

Brenner, however, said that the major difference between international pilots and U.S. pilots was the reliance on automatic pilot.

“And a lot of that… is because a lot of crashes are due to pilot error,” he explained. “So, if you try and eliminate any potential risk, you try and eliminate the pilot’s ability to make incorrect inputs into the aircraft.”

“It’s not just a difference in the way that we measure things?” Kooiman replied. “Is it not as safe in that part of the world? Because our viewers may be thinking, ‘International travel, is it safe? Is it not safe?’”

Yes, because the world uses imperial system measurements.  OH WAIT, NO IT DOESNT.



It's literally the US, Myanmar, and Liberia.  That's it.  EVERY OTHER COUNTRY USES METRIC.

If there's an example of the intersection of American exceptionalism and rampant ignorance of the world, it's the fact that in 2014 we still use miles, Fahrenheit and gallons unlike the other 7 billion people on this planet and it's because we absolutely refuse to change that the rest of the world has to pay good money to convert to do business with us.

I honestly believe FOX would drum up a shooting war just to prevent us from switching over.

Sunday Long Read: Title, Tag, And Taken

Your Sunday long read is the latest financial sector scam to exploit the poor with low credit and destroy families and neighborhoods through usury: title loans.

For many borrowers, title loans, also sometimes known as motor-vehicle equity lines of credit or title pawns, are having ruinous financial consequences, causing owners to lose their vehicles and plunging them further into debt.

A review by The New York Times of more than three dozen loan agreements found that after factoring in various fees, the effective interest rates ranged from nearly 80 percent to over 500 percent. While some loans come with terms of 30 days, many borrowers, unable to pay the full loan and interest payments, say that they are forced to renew the loans at the end of each month, incurring a new round of fees.

Customers of TitleMax, for example, typically renewed their loans eight times, a former president of the company disclosed in a 2009 deposition.

And because many lenders make the loan based on an assessment of a used car’s resale value, not on a borrower’s ability to repay that money, many people find that they are struggling to keep up almost as soon as they drive off with the cash.

As a result, roughly one in every six title-loan borrowers will have the car repossessed, according to an analysis of 561 title loans by the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit in Durham, N.C.

Subprime loans wiped out minority home ownership.  The median black household net worth has dropped to under $4,000, and most of that is in the last thing black households own: a car.  Now those are being repossessed because banks will no longer do business in minority communities.

It's targeted elimination.