Race Together Comes Apart

Well this brand disaster of a plan lasted all of a week.

According to a recently released internal memo, Starbucks baristas will no longer write “Race Together” on customers’ cups starting Sunday.

Starbucks spokesman Jim Olson says the campaign to create discussion on diversity and racial inequality will continue without the handwritten messages, which are phasing out as originally planned.

The memo from CEO Howard Schultz says the cups were always “just the catalyst” for a broader conversation and the company will still hold forum discussions, co-produce special sections in USA TODAY and put more stores in minority communities as part of the Race Together initiative.

The initiative has been criticized as opportunistic and inappropriate, coming in the wake of racially charged events such as protests over police killings of black males.

Olson says the change is not a reaction to that pushback.

Sure it's not.  And I'm really Boudica, Queen of the Celts.

Look, this was a horrible idea to begin with, because the only thing worse than people refusing to have a real conversation on race is people having a forced, non-serious conversation about it generated by a coffee company.  It's great that Starbucks wants to be a good corporate citizen, but it was putting all the pressure on its baristas to do the work with little or no guidance, particularly when you sell a product in places where your customer base is mostly white.

There are some real things Starbucks could do, and it looks like according to the statement they plan to at least start on doing them, but #RaceTogether was a road paved with good intentions with only one possible destination.

StupidiNews!

• The US National Counterterrorism Center estimates more than 3,400 Westerners have gone to Syria to join the fight for ISIS.
• Climate change, rising sea levels, and the aftermath of US nuclear testing is prompting the residents of Bikini atoll to ask for residence in the States.
• The US will not speak at today's UN human rights forum on Palestine to defend Israel, a move widely seen as part of President Obama's reassessment of relations between the two countries.
• Greek PM Alexis Tsipras is set to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the second time in five days as the fate of a $259 billion Greek bailout may be decided this week.
• Tesla Motors may have a new competitor in billionaire Richard Branson who hinted his company Virgin may be working on building electric cars rather than just racing them.

Last Call For Cruz, In (For A Brusin')

Sen. Ted Cruz officially opens the GOP 2016 clown car for business, and that business is wrecking America.

Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce Monday that he will run for president of the United States, accelerating his already rapid three-year rise from a tea party insurgent in Texas into a divisive political force in Washington.

Cruz will launch a presidential bid outright rather than form an exploratory committee, said senior advisers with direct knowledge of his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement had not been made yet. They say he is done exploring and is now ready to become the first Republican presidential candidate.

The senator is scheduled to speak Monday at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, where he is expected to declare his campaign for the presidency.

Over the course of the primary campaign, Cruz will aim to raise between $40 million and $50 million, according to advisers, and dominate with the same tea party voters who supported his underdog Senate campaign in 2012. But the key to victory, Cruz advisers believe, is to be the second choice of enough voters in the party's libertarian and social conservative wings to cobble together a coalition to defeat the chosen candidate of the Republican establishment.

In other words, he's jumping in now to try to bury Sen. Rand Paul early so he can come at Jeb Bush.  Will it work? Who knows?

But it'll be damn amusing to watch with Cruz's record, and I'm sure Republicans across the country want to be reminded of how Cruz shut down the same government as a Senator that he now apparently wants to lead as President.

This should be fun, especially with 19 other people possibly running.

Also, Monday's date is no accident: it's the 5th anniversary of the day the Affordable Care Act was signed into law by President Obama, and Cruz is still lying to everyone when he says the bill has somehow cost millions of American jobs and cost millions their health care.  Expect his announcement (and his campaign) to be full of blatant falsehoods, lies, and stupidity.

A Teachable Moment For State Legislatures

A fourth-grade class in New Hampshire went to the State Capitol in Concord to learn about the process of state government by proposing a bill.  Normally I'd say this was a great idea to see how laws are made, and how ordinary Americans can participate in the process.  But New Hampshire's House is overwhelmingly controlled by the GOP (something close to a 60-40% margin), and what these kids learned is a hard lesson on how politics at the state level work in the age of the Tea Party Maniac.

In the spirit of learning by doing, students drafted a bill to learn the process of how a bill becomes law. They proposed House Bill 373, an act establishing the Red Tail Hawk as the New Hampshire State Raptor. Even though it passed through the Environment and Agriculture committee with a majority vote, some representatives were far from receptive.

Rep. Warren Groen, a Republican from Rochester said, "It grasps them with its talons then uses its razor sharp beak to basically tear it apart limb by limb, and I guess the shame about making this a state bird is it would serve as a much better mascot for Planned Parenthood."

NH1 spoke with Groen over the phone on Thursday afternoon. Click here to listen to the interview with Groen.

That comment, considered offensive by many, was made while the fourth graders sat, watched and listened. The tough lesson didn't end there.

Rep. John Burt, a Republican from Goffstown said, "Bottom line, if we keep bringing more of these bills, and bills, and bills forward that really I think we shouldn't have in front of us, we'll be picking a state hot dog next."

In a 133-to-160 vote lawmakers killed the bill and perhaps the civic enthusiasm of some 9-and-10-year-olds.

You think?  By the way, New Hampshire's House has 400 members, it's one of the largest state Houses in the country by number of members.  Less than 75% of them even bothered to vote on the bill.   The bill died screaming, the kids found out they were going to be used as pawns to rail against abortion, and the best part was Rep. Burt telling these kids that they basically wasted the House's time with a stupid piece of legislation that had no chance.

What, did you think any story involving a GOP legislature in 2015 would have a happy ending?  You clearly haven't been paying attention.

Israeli Serious, You Guys

President Obama all but calls Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu a liar, which is actually true.

President Barack Obama is operating under the assumption that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not support the creation of a Palestinian state, despite the Israeli leader's post-election efforts to recast himself as amenable to a two-state solution.

"We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn't happen during his prime ministership, and so that's why we've got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don't see a chaotic situation in the region," the president said in an interview with The Huffington Post on Friday.

Though he pledged to keep working with the Israeli government on military and intelligence operations, Obama declined to say whether the United States would continue to block Palestinian efforts to secure statehood through the United Nations. In a phone conversation the two had on Thursday, he said he indicated to Netanyahu that "it is going to be hard to find a path where people are seriously believing that negotiations are possible."

In his first public comments on Tuesday's elections in Israel, Obama's deepest discomfort was saved for Netanyahu's Election Day warning about Arab Israeli voters going to the polls "in droves."

"We indicated that that kind of rhetoric was contrary to what is the best of Israel's traditions. That although Israel was founded based on the historic Jewish homeland and the need to have a Jewish homeland, Israeli democracy has been premised on everybody in the country being treated equally and fairly," said Obama. "And I think that that is what's best about Israeli democracy. If that is lost, then I think that not only does it give ammunition to folks who don't believe in a Jewish state, but it also I think starts to erode the meaning of democracy in the country."

I understand the relationship between Israel and the US is complex and messy at times, but nobody can seriously call this an equal partnership (because it's not, as much as the AIPAC hard liners want it to be.)  Israel is a client state of the US, taking military aid from us, and Israel needs the US far more than the US needs them.

Bibi knows this, hence the moderation of his comments.  But President Obama has clearly run out of patience with the man, and if possible the relation between our two countries is only going to get worse.  And a lot of that is on Bibi's head, if not all of it.

The entire transcript of Sam Stein's interview with President Obama is here.

Last Call For We Sold Our Country Cheaply

Here's a depressing statistic from Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza:

With reports of Jeb Bush telling donors not to give more than $1 million to his presidential campaign in waiting and Hillary Clinton aiming at a floor of $1 billion raised for her 2016 bid, the hand-wringing over the influence of money in politics has begun (again).

And, yes, lots and lots of money gets spent on elections -- money that, arguably, might be better spent elsewhere. But, it's also important to add a bit of context to the big numbers that get thrown around in terms of campaign spending. Republican pollsters Gene Ulm and Brian O'Bannon do just that in a blog post where they note that the estimated $7 billion spent on the entire two-year 2012 election pales in comparison to the amount of money gambled on the NCAA Tournament bracket from just Monday through Thursday of this past week. 

The duo write: "Significantly more money will be spent on tolerated, but illegal bracket gambling than spent on a legal, but not tolerated presidential election. Begging the question: Is there McCain-Feingold bracket reform in the future?"

What that means of course is that if you want to buy a national election, you only need a couple billion dollars.  That's pretty cheap compared to the trillions that compose our GDP.  You can effectively buy a country's politics for less than one-tenth of one percent of what America produces in a year.

We sell ourselves cheaply, do we not?

360 Degrees Of Separation

Slate's Eric Holthaus reminds us that America has passed a very real climate threshold this winter and that we need to stop talking about how climate change is off in the future, or discussing if it's a nebulous concept that may or may not exist.

The numbers say it's officially here now.

On Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that Earth’s global temperature for February was among the hottest ever measured. So far, 2015 is tracking above record-warm 2014—which, when combined with the newly resurgent El Niño, means we’re on pace for another hottest year in history.

In addition to the just-completed warmest winter on record globally (despite the brutal cold and record snow in the eastern U.S.), new data on Thursday from the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that this year’s peak Arctic sea ice reached its lowest ever maximum extent, thanks to “an unusual configuration of the jet stream” that greatly warmed the Pacific Ocean near Alaska.

But here’s the most upsetting news. It’s been exactly 30 years since the last time the world was briefly cooler than its 20th-century average. Every single month since February 1985 has been hotter than the long-term average—that’s 360 consecutive months.

More than just being a round number, the 30-year streak has deeper significance. In climatology, a continuous 30-year stretch of data is traditionally what’s used to define what’s “normal” for a given location. In a very real way, we can now say that for our given location—the planet Earth—global warming is now “normal.” Forget debating—our climate has officially changed.

So yes, the debate on climate change is now over. What happens now is how we choose to deal with it: do nothing if not make the situation even worse, or try to limit the damage.

Imagine another 30 years, 360 consecutive months, all warmer than the average of the planet over the last 100 years.  And then another.  California's drought is the new normal.  New England record snows are the new normal.  Florida hurricanes and Kansas F5 tornadoes and Arizona wildfires and Louisiana flooding?  All the new normal.

If you're 30 or younger, climate change has been the norm for your entire life. Storms of the Century ever couple of years has been what you have always known, from Hugo to Andrew to Katrina to Sandy. And the next 30 years?  Most likely much worse.

We're only just beginning to feel the effects.

America, In One Chart

The reason why we can't have a conversation on race is the fact that one side simply doesn't want to have that conversation, period.

Any questions?

Uninsure Them All And Let God Sort It Out

Jonathan Cohn goes through the House GOP budget proposal and finds the Republican plan to replace Obamacare is "repeal it and do nothing", which will take insurance away from tens of millions of Americans:

Worried about the number of Americans who still don’t have health insurance? If House Republican leaders get their way, the number will be much bigger -- maybe even twice as big. 

That may sound ridiculous. But health care analysts tell The Huffington Post that it’s a fair interpretation of the proposed 2016 budget that Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), the chairman of the House Budget Committee, released on Tuesday. 

Price's document includes two familiar ideas for transforming major government health care programs: repealing the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, and transforming Medicaid into a “block grant” program. It’s difficult to be terribly precise about the impact these changes would have, at least without some kind of formal economic modeling. But it's possible to do a rough calculation using estimates from independent experts and the Congressional Budget Office of previous proposals with similar elements, including the budgets that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) issued when he was in charge of the budget committee. 

Start with the likely impact of Obamacare repeal. The health care law -- beloved by some, hated by others -- makes Medicaid available to all low-income people in participating states, provides discounted private insurance to people buying on their own, and lets young adults stay on their parents’ plans. As a result, the number of people without health insurance today is down to 35 million, according to CBO. Over the next several years, that number is set to drop even further, to about 26 million. Without the law in place, by CBO’s reckoning, the ranks of the uninsured at this point would have been around 50 million -- and that number is projected to remain steady or increase slightly over the next decade. Taking the ACA off the books, as Price and his GOP allies hope to do, would likely boost the number of uninsured back up to that level or close to it.

So 15 million Americans would lose health insurance from repealing Obamacare.  Oh, but it get so much worse when you factor in the rest of the GOP plan to obliterate the nation's poorest.

And Obamacare repeal is only the first way in which Price’s health care agenda would increase the number of uninsured. Turning Medicaid into a block grant, as the House budget seeks to do, would mean ending the program’s current guarantee: that, as more people fall into the program’s eligibility guidelines, the federal government will provide more money. Under a block grant scheme, by contrast, the federal government would start giving states fixed sums of money with which to administer the program. Given the funding levels Price’s budget appears to set, the money almost certainly wouldn’t keep up with demand for the program. 

In reality, these block grants are huge budget cuts by another name. States would find it impossible to maintain the Medicaid rolls at those funding levels, and start removing people from the program as a result. How many? Price’s budget doesn’t provide the same level of detail that Ryan’s early budgets did. But the proposals appear to be very similar. And an estimate of Ryan’s 2012 scheme, put together by researchers from the Urban Institute and published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, suggested that by 2022, turning Medicaid into a block grant would reduce the number of people receiving insurance through the program by between 14.3 million and 20.5 million. 

Again, this would be on top of the people who would lose insurance thanks to repeal of Obamacare. Add the numbers together and, come 2022, something like 60 or 70 million people who would have gotten insurance through either Medicaid or Obamacare would no longer have it. Few of these people would be able find insurance through other means. The result could be close to twice as many uninsured Americans as the estimated 35 million who lack insurance today -- or possibly even more. (And it’d certainly be more than twice as many as the 26 million who, according to the CBO, would remain uninsured in 2022 under the status quo.)

60 or 70 million people without insurance by 2022.  That's one in 4 Americans, or more.  It would come close to breaking our federal health care system completely, and yet Republicans are not only okay with this, but are making this the goal of the budget.

But hey, tens of millions of people who can't afford health coverage aren't a problem for very long, now are they?

This is what will happen if the GOP wins in 2016.  Keep that in mind.

Legal Eagles Flying High

So, what do the geniuses at Townhall.com have for us this week, Zandar?  I'm glad you asked, as we have the legal stylings of one Frank Turek, author, man of faith, and law-arguer person.

The Supreme Court is about to decide if the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution requires the states to redefine marriage to include same sex relationships. There are several reasons why the answer is no. 

The most decisive of these reasons is the fact that when the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, homosexual behavior was a felony in every state in the union. So if the 14th Amendment was intended to require same-sex marriage, then every state in the union intended to throw the new couple into prison as soon as the marriage was consummated!

States had miscegenation laws then too.  Are you done ye...oh.

Some may say, “Who cares what they believed in 1868 about homosexuality? We’ve evolved since then.” 

That’s addressed by the second reason: laws and words have specific scopes and meanings. They don’t have unlimited flexibility as liberal justices tend to think. Neither the intent nor the text of the Constitution requires the states to redefine marriage. If the people of the United States have “evolved” on the issue, then the Constitution provides them with a very clear and fair way for the document to intelligently “evolve”—they need to convince a supermajority of federal and state legislatures to amend the Constitution. That’s the very reason our Constitution has an amendment process!

That's odd.  Is he saying that laws (passed by the legislative), court orders (the judicial) and executive orders (executive branch) are all null and void because they're not in the Constitution?  Because you know what?  Those branches have weighed in numerous times on the text and intent of the Constitution with respect to marriage.  The Supreme Court is about to do it again.  Pay attention. Now go aw...ugh.

If we fail to use the amendment process and permit judges to substitute their own definitions and judgments for what the people actually meant when they passed the law in the first place, then we no longer govern ourselves. Why vote or use the political process if unelected justices strike down our laws and impose their own as they go? In fact, why have a Constitution at all? If it’s “evolving” or “living,” then it’s not really a collective agreement of the people—it’s a pretext that allows judges to invent rights and impose any moral (or immoral) position they want against the will of the people. 

Imagine if the people were to pass an amendment guaranteeing a right to same-sex marriage. Would you consider the Supreme Court to be legitimate if it imposed its own position and overturned the amendment? No, the people decide what the laws are, not the Court.

As to the first, the entire point of the judicial branch and in fact the express purpose of the Supreme Court is to determine if a law is constitutional or not.  As to the second, if the Constitution said that, it would be pretty hard to find it unconstitutional. Please go read an 8th grade civics text and quit bot...argh.

Third, the 14th Amendment was intended to prevent states from discriminating against newly freed slaves. At that time blacks and women didn’t even have the right to vote, yet no court ever thought it could use the “equal protection” clause to change state voting laws. So why do some district courts think they can use it now to change state marriage laws? Are we to believe that “equal protection” does not guarantee a woman’s right to vote but does guarantee a woman’s right to marry another woman? 

Since the people “evolved” on voting rights, they convinced supermajorities in Congress and of the state legislatures voted to add the 15th and 19th Amendments in 1870 and 1920 respectively. The courts knew they shouldn’t act as legislatures to grant rights not addressed by the Constitution. Neither should this Supreme Court.

There's this thing called "legal precedent" that allows the Supreme Court to determine if a law is unconstitutional or not.  In fact, that's exactly what these district courts did, including citing the legal reasoning of sitting Supreme Court justices. Again, express purpose of the courts is to do just that, with the US Supreme Court having the final say.

Please re-read that thing you're waving about and...what is it NOW?!?

Fourth, despite all the talk about equal rights, everyone already has equal marriage rights. Every person has the same equal right to marry someone of the opposite sex. That law treats all people equally, but not every behavior they may desire equally. If people with homosexual desires do not have equal rights, then people with desires to marry their relatives or more than one person don’t have equal rights. The “born that way” justification doesn’t work either because that same justification could make any desired arrangement “marriage,” which means the logic behind it is absurd. The Court needs to acknowledge the fact that natural marriage, same sex-marriage, incestuous marriage, and polygamous marriage are all different behaviors with different outcomes, so the law rightfully treats those behaviors differently while giving every citizen the equal right to participate in marriage whatever its legal definition is.

Once again, Loving v Virginia. Actually read the decision, man.  Also, see the entire dismantling of "separate but equal".  You're expressly creating a class of people that doesn't have the same rights.  The "slippery slope" to polygamy and bestiality is nonsense because nobody's arguing for that. Now for the love of...SERIOUSLY ARE YOU STILL HERE?

Finally, the states make marriage law, not the feds. The U.S. Constitution says nothing about marriage. While the Supreme Court did overturn Virginia’s ban on inter-racial marriage, it did so because Virginia discriminated on the basis of race, which is precisely what the 14th Amendment was intended to prevent. There is no rational reason to discriminate on the basis of race because race is irrelevant to marriage. However, gender is essential to it. Even the 2013 Windsor decision, which partially struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, recognized that marriage is a state, not a federal issue. Since there is no 14th Amendment issue here, the Court must leave marriage to the states.

Except that the 14th Amendment actually reads the following:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

If you say that same-sex marriage is illegal, you're violating that part of the Constitution.  It's not hard, man.  That's the clause of the 14th they are talking about and it doesn't even mention race. And even if you ignore the 14th Amendment, there's the argument that the 5th Amendment's Due Process clause also provides such protections.

Now shoo and...I dislike you now.

Legal reasons such as these are all the Court is constitutionally permitted to consider. Polls and policy considerations are for the people or their legislatures, not the courts. Ryan T. Anderson writes in his recent column titled Memo to Supreme Court: Nothing in the Constitution Requires States to Redefine Marriage: “The overarching question before the Supreme Court is not whether an exclusively male–female marriage policy is the best, but only whether it is allowed by the U.S. Constitution. The question is not whether government-recognized same-sex marriage is good or bad policy, but only whether it is required by the U.S. Constitution.” 

Does the U.S. Constitution require same-sex marriage? No, the U.S. Constitution requires the Court to leave this issue to the states. If you believe otherwise, then amend the Constitution.

There are a number of actual Supreme Court justices and decisions that greatly disagree with you. I'm guessing you're going to meet five of these justices, maybe even six, in June.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama called Israeli PM Netanyahu to congratulate him on winning elections in Israel on Tuesday, but also to voice concerns about commitment to a two-state solution.
• A New York judge will not release documents pertaining to the death of Eric Garner, whose death sparked national protests after being choked to death by police officers on camera.
• Records show that the Clinton Foundation's health program stopped disclosing the names of donors in 2010, an apparent violation of a promise made by Hillary Clinton while Secretary of State.
• The investigation of the death of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is leading to Chechnya, where the chief suspect is part of an elite police unit loyal to Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.
• Net neutrality rules have prompted cable pay networks HBO and Showtime to seek deals with broadband companies for exemptions from data caps for streaming video.

Last Call For Paved With Bad Intentions

I wonder what my douchebag of a Congressman, Thomas Massie, is up to.

Just introduced the #DRIVE Act of 2015 - (Developing Roadway Infrastructure for a Vibrant Economy). Info -> http://t.co/GIjEhF8tZ1
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) March 19, 2015

Wait, die-hard Glibertarian Thomas Massie sponsoring an infrastructure bill?  What's the catch?

Today, Congressman Thomas Massie introduced the DRIVE (Developing Roadway Infrastructure for a Vibrant Economy) Act of 2015 with Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Congressman Justin Amash (R-MI), Congressman Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), and Congressman Ken Buck (R-CO) as original co-sponsors. The DRIVE Act (H.R. 1461) would help keep the Highway Trust Fund solvent and improve our national infrastructure, without raising the gas tax, by refocusing the Highway Trust Fund on its original and proper role of building and maintaining federal highways and bridges. 

OK.  So again, what's the catch?

“Currently, gas tax revenue is diverted from the federal Highway Trust Fund for bike paths, sidewalks, mass transit, and other local projects," said Congressman Massie. "But due to inflation and fuel efficiency improvements of today's vehicles, there is no longer enough money in the Highway Trust Fund to maintain our nation's critical highways and bridges while also funding local projects that have no federal nexus. By eliminating diversion of gas tax revenues, the DRIVE Act ensures that the Highway Trust Fund can fulfill its namesake duty – to fund highways, without an increase in the gas tax rate.”

Oh I get it.  Let's cut to the end.

Annually, over $9 billion of the Highway Trust Fund goes to the Mass Transit Account, which provides funds for local public transportation projects, including subways, light rail, buses, and streetcars. Additional authorizations exist for sidewalks and bike paths to be funded from the Highway Trust Fund. The DRIVE Act repeals these authorizations and reduces Highway Trust Fund obligations by approximately $10 billion annually.

Ding ding ding!  So we're going to fix the Highway Trust Fund by cutting $10 billion a year from mass transit projects, like, say, Cincinnati's streetcar.

Oh well played, Mr. Massie.  Your bill has no chance in hell, but thanks for the heads up on what the GOP "fix" for the Highway Trust Fund is.

New Black City

I know I give the notion of "black respectability politics" (the theory that African-Americans have largely brought the problems of socioeconomic disaster upon themselves by accepting government programs and not simply choosing to be wealthy, productive members of society by reaching out to white America more often) a wide berth, and battle the nonsense surrounding this from both the left and right.

But Wall Street Journal pundit and author Jason Riley really does need his own category of impressively wrong on this, as he breaks down recent events involving race in Oklahoma and Missouri.

We don’t have to use our imagination because we can look at black history, which shows the rate at which blacks were entering the skilled professions during periods when labor-market discrimination was open, rampant and legal. Between 1940 and 1970, the percentage of black white-collar workers in the U.S. quadrupled. “There was a substantial black middle-class already in existence by the end of the 1960s,” write Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in their book “America in Black and White.” “In the years since, it has continued to grow, but not at a more rapid pace than in the preceding three decades, despite a common impression to the contrary.”

History shows that faster black progress was occurring at a time when whites were still lynching blacks, not merely singing about it. Liberals want blacks to ignore the lessons of this pre-Civil Rights era, which threaten the current relevance of groups like the NAACP and call into question the Democratic Party’s belief that there is a federal solution to every black problem. 

Moreover, this history reveals that what we see today in black America is not lack of progress due to white racism but retrogression due in large part to post-Civil Rights era social pathology and misguided government interventions. The problem isn’t the attitudes and behaviors of the boys on the bus so much as those of the boys in the ’hood. 

Black elites are eager to blame bad black outcomes on bigotry and quick to denounce or mock anyone who offers an alternative explanation. But we should be thankful that black leaders of yore didn’t pretend that racism must be vanquished from America before blacks could be held primarily responsible for their socioeconomic circumstances. “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too,” Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in St. Louis. “We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.” 

I mentioned that King quote, which comes from a 1961 profile of him in Harper’s Magazine, in a column for this newspaper several years ago. Some readers accused me of fabricating it. In the era of Al Sharpton, apparently it is hard for people to believe that leading civil-rights leaders used to speak so frankly about black self-help and personal responsibility. Which may be all you need to know about the quality of those black leaders today—and the commentators who carry water for them.

Yes, that's his argument: because in the struggles of Jim Crow-era America, black people were more involved in trying to better themselves, we were better off then.  In fact, the Civil Rights era was a huge mistake because it made us soft and reliant on the government.

We were better off fighting for rights than securing legislation to actually have those rights.  That seems odd until you recall that Riley's overarching theme is that any government action to try to resolve racism is always detrimental.

And Riley's argument about the black middle class would have actually meant something if that didn't include a faltering middle class since 1970 for all Americans, not just African-Americans.  Real wages for all workers -- men, women, black, Asian, Latino and everyone else -- have been stagnant in this country since (you guessed it) 1970 or so and for the poorest Americans they have gotten worse.

From WWII to 1972 or so, the time period Riley highlights, black workers were still well behind their white counterparts in wages earned.  When the 70's and 80's came around it was the people on the bottom that got burned, and that happened again in the Great Recession in 2008.

Riley's theory only makes sense if you're somehow blaming the Civil Rights era for the decline of the entire economy for all Americans.

Which he is.  Nice how that works, eh?

Not Fitting The Narrative

Apparently the whole CLINTON E-MAIL SCANDAL isn't something that the "liberal media" has been screaming about enough, because the latest CNN poll finds Hillary Clinton handily beating all GOP challengers by double digits in a 2016 matchup.

Hillary Clinton continues to be a dominant force heading into the 2016 presidential election, according to a new CNN/ORC poll. The former secretary of state maintains a broad lead over the field of potential Democratic challengers she could face in a nomination contest and sizable advantages over the leading contenders from the Republican side in general election match-ups. 

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tops the possible field for the Republican Party's nomination race, followed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former neurosurgeon Ben Carson all in a tight cluster. 

But none of the top candidates in this field gets within 10 points of Hillary Clinton in a series of hypothetical general election matchups. 

Rand Paul comes closest, with 43% saying they'd be more likely to back him while 54% choose Clinton. 

The two candidates who currently top the GOP field, Bush and Walker, match up equally against Clinton, with each carrying 40% to her 55%. Huckabee gets 41% to Clinton's 55% and Carson has 40% to Clinton's 56%.

Checking out the complete poll info,  Clinton is the only candidate with above 50% favorability rating (53% to 44%) while Jeb Bush is underwater by 16 points (31-47%) and Chris Christie is the least liked candidate in either party at minus 19 (25-44%).

I'm not super thrilled about a Hillary Clinton presidency, but I promise I'd vote for her in a heartbeat against any of these GOP clowns.  Seems many Americans agree with me.

StupidiNews!

• Tunisian PM Habib Essid says the country's military has identified two of the five suspects in yesterday's deadly raid on tourists at a museum in the capital of Tunis, killing 19.
• The "Angry Birds" brand may have finally flown the coop as mobile gaming giant Roxio reported a 73% drop in profits in 2014 due to sluggish sales of the franchise.
• The Obama administration is considering delaying pulling out from Afghanistan due to Islamic State activity and US bases at Kandahar and Jalalabad may remain open through 2015 rather than closing.
• Greek PM Alexis Tsipras is heading to an EU summit in Brussels with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other EU leaders to try again to resolve the Greek bailout crisis.
• Congressional Republicans continue to attack the FCC's open internet rules, with Oregon GOP Rep. Greg Walden proposing legislation that would cut the FCC's budget in response.