Author Archives: Mike

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America’s Continued Shame:

There is a com­mon thread that runs through­out all play­ers in the Republican par­ty which has at its core a con­cert­ed attempt to pre­tend that President Barack Obama is not pres­i­dent of the United States. Republicans have long attempt­ed to sow scorn and dis­dain on the intel­li­gent left, in an attempt to paint them as Elitists, out of touch and far removed from the American real­i­ty, “oth­er”. 

They have sought to devel­op a nar­ra­tive that is “aw shucks” argu­ing that a pres­i­dent should be a laid back per­son in the mold of say Ronald Reagan or George Bush the 43rd pres­i­dent. They sell the mer­its of a pres­i­dent who one would want to have a beer with. They have been suc­cess­ful in demo­niz­ing and label­ing Democratic can­di­dates like John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis as Massachuset lib­er­als, mak­ing the word lib­er­al a nasty stain and a neg­a­tive car­i­ca­ture. Of course two of the archi­tects of that dem­a­goguery Newt Gingrich and Bush’s brain, Karl Rove, are still a part of the polit­i­cal land­scape. Gingrich is involved in a fal­ter­ing polit­i­cal cam­paign against chief neme­sis Mitt Romney,while Rove heads up a pow­er­ful super pac that col­lects tens of mil­lions of dol­lars from wealthy donors like the Koch broth­ers and casi­no mogul Sheldon Alderson to fund right-wing can­di­dates in their quest to destroy Obama. Incredibly Gingrich is now whin­ing shame­ful­ly, his com­plaints? Negative cam­paign ads from Mitt Romney’s cam­paign and super pac. Spit in the sky it falls in your face.

The nar­ra­tive some­how places con­ven­tion­al wis­dom on its head, it con­vinces large parts of the coun­try par­tic­u­lar­ly the south­ern states that edu­cat­ed peo­ple are some­how un-American. By this rea­son­ing they have man­aged to con­vince large swaths of the pop­u­la­tion that peo­ple who play by the rules, gets an edu­ca­tion, raise a fam­i­ly, and live a decent dra­ma-free life, are some­how not American. Throw a black guy in there with a Muslim sound­ing name and the afore­men­tioned attrib­ut­es and this guy must be from Mars.

These are the same intel­lec­tu­al­ly chal­lenged folks who argue that (Global warm­ing is a hoax), This is the (drill baby drill) crowd which argues for unre­strained drilling for oil and nat­ur­al gas with­out a sin­gle thought for the envi­ron­ment. Anyone who dare men­tion the need for clean drink­ing water, clean air, and the need to pro­tect the eco sys­tem is cas­ti­gat­ed as the ene­my and an exam­ple of what is wrong with America.

There are those who pre­tend that what we are see­ing hap­pen­ing in this coun­try is just the com­mon nas­ti­ness of American pol­i­tics play­ing out. They are quick to point out that pres­i­dent Bush was treat­ed rather bad­ly by the left.

Really?

I just ref­ered to the for­mer leader of the free world as “pres­i­dent Bush”. When was the last time a repub­li­can ref­ered to our pres­i­dent as pres­i­dent Obama? The lunatic fringe of the repub­li­can par­ty has con­vinced some of the most intel­lec­tu­al­ly chal­lenged among their base that this pres­i­dent is not real­ly the president.

As we have seen from the moron­ic failed attempts of the birther move­ment led by ego­ma­ni­ac Donald Trump and oth­ers, to that woman in Florida who told Rick Santorum she does not refer to the Obama as pres­i­dent Obama, because he is not real­ly the pres­i­dent. She went on to tell him she won­ders why some­one does­n’t get him (ref­fer­ing to the pres­i­dent) out of there. To which the equal­ly moron­ic Santorum respond­ed “I am trying to get him out of there myself”.

The mind­set of the lunatic right imag­ines, if they are able to con­vince their equal­ly lunatic sup­port­ers that Barack Obama is not the pres­i­dent of the United States, some­how he will not be seen to be. Their strat­e­gy is tan­ta­mount to remov­ing the num­ber 44 from the Hindu-Arabic numer­al sys­tem and hope we will not notice we missed a number.

Throughout his­to­ry only 44 men has been so hon­ored to be called pres­i­dent of the United States, many has sought that office, many have failed , to date we have only had 44 men attain that lofty posi­tion, 43 white men, 1 black man. That his­tor­i­cal fact will nev­er be elim­i­nat­ed from the annals of history.

That there are peo­ple in this coun­try who pos­sess such bla­tant men­tal retar­da­tion to some­how want to sup­press the fact that a black man has attained what they said we could­n’t do is tes­ta­ment to our for­ti­tude. After 300 years of slav­ery, lynch­ing, rape, , jim crow ‚and every­thing that they could throw at us, the indomitable spirt of our peo­ple has shone through all the adver­si­ty to accom­plish what some can only dream about.

Sarah Palin Newt Gingrich

The dis­re­spect that has been shown to this pres­i­dent has been astound­ing, and has been noth­ing like we have seen before. MSNBC Martin Bashir com­ment­ed that repub­li­cans nev­er fail to refer to Sarah Palin as Governor , even though she was unable to com­plete a sin­gle term as gov­er­nor of Alaska, they also nev­er fail to refer to Gingrich as Speaker, even though he was ran out of con­gress on ethics vio­la­tion charges. Yet they are adamant in call­ing the pres­i­dent Barack Obama, a man who won by a large plu­ral­i­ty of the votes and the elec­toral col­lege to become the 44th pres­i­dent of the United States.

This nas­ti­ness is noth­ing new, we saw ele­ments of it in the race between Hillary Clinton and Obama in the pri­maries , we saw the signs , we saw the despi­ca­ble racial car­i­ca­tures, we heard the nean­derthal remarks, and they were com­ing from Democrats.

The more it seemed Barack Obama was going to be the nom­i­nee the nas­ti­er the attacks became. Thanks to the inter­ven­tion of Senator Dianne Feinstein of California after Obama secured the nom­i­na­tion it appeared that the hatch­et was buried between Clinton and Obama. I am still not con­vinced that either Hillary or Bill Clinton vot­ed for Obama.

What we saw hap­pen between Clinton and Obama was indeed small pota­toes when Sarah Palin was inject­ed into the con­ver­sa­tion. She came with a brand of nas­ti­ness that we have seen metas­ta­sized into what is now a despi­ca­ble scorched earth brand of pol­i­tics, that seem hell-bent on total destruc­tion of the oppo­nent and win at all cost. I per­son­al­ly thought that the inflam­ma­to­ry nature of the vit­ri­ol sur­prised even the man at the top of the then repub­li­can tick­et, John McCain.
Sarah Palin it appeared, did not receive the memo that black peo­ple were eman­ci­pat­ed, her entire demeanor and tone sug­gest­ed she felt this black man belonged on the plan­ta­tion, many argue it was her intel­lect or lack there­of which was at play here. Having seen and heard her dur­ing the cam­paign influ­enced me to lean toward the lat­ter argument.

Most Americans who love their coun­try and respect her insti­tu­tions includ­ing the pres­i­den­cy, find it offen­sive the way this pres­i­dent is char­ac­ter­ized and treat­ed in gen­er­al. If you ask the pres­i­dent he will most like­ly parse and brush it aside as insignif­i­cant, that is what is to be expect­ed from him he is not expect­ed to speak about it, Obama, in order to be elect­ed pres­i­dent of his own coun­try had to pre­tend he was not a black man, in essence he had to pre­tend for the con­sump­tion and ben­e­fit of the illit­er­ate to be water, colourless!!

Neither Jessie Jackson nor Al Sharpton adopt­ed this pos­ture , there is no evi­dence that either gen­tle­men were even capa­ble or desirous of adopt­ing that pos­ture, and as such we will nev­er talk about pres­i­dents Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton. This fact is not nec­es­sar­i­ly an indict­ment on Mister Obama , he sought to use a dif­fer­ent path-way to get to where he want­ed to get to, we may argue with the path tak­en but I seri­ous­ly doubt that any­one would argue with the results.

I think where mis­ter Obama may have been a lit­tle naïve’, to bor­row a term from his for­mer demo­c­ra­t­ic oppo­nent Hillary Clinton, is where I pre­sume he felt that after win­ning the pres­i­den­cy America would have been trans­formed into a post racial soci­ety. This naiveté’ may have emanat­ed from Mister Obama’s eth­nic­i­ty, being the off­spring of a white moth­er and a black father. The pres­i­dent is all to will­ing to point to his white fam­i­ly mem­bers, repub­li­cans are equal­ly as quick to say we don’t care. President Obama being from Hawaii prob­a­bly nev­er heard about the one drop of black blood rule which has long been part of jim crow laws and insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism in America.

The unfor­tu­nate truth about mis­ter Obama’s post racial soci­ety is that for the most part, it is a fig­ment of his imag­i­na­tion. As Dr Martin Luther King Jr. envi­sioned a coun­try where lit­tle black kids and lit­tle white kids played togeth­er over 40 years ago, we have seen the kids play­ing togeth­er but the racial hatred per­sists. We have to face the sad truths that we can­not leg­is­late moral­i­ty, we can­not leg­is­late human­i­ty, we can­not leg­is­late respect, we can­not leg­is­late Godliness. As the world wit­nessed those black stu­dents walk through a gaunt­let of hate­ful , jeer­ing peo­ple in lit­tle Rock Arkansas, despite the pres­ence of fed­er­al troops, we must come to grips with the real­i­ties that nei­ther fed­er­al troops nor fed­er­al leg­is­la­tion will change the repro­bate minds of those whom are pre­dis­posed to hate.

ap obama jan brewer nt 120126 wblog Exclusive Obama Says Encounter With Arizona Gov. Blown Out of Proportion

THIS WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN

ABOVE IS THE GOVERNOR OF ARIZONA JAN BREWER, WITH HER FINGER IN THE FACE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. THE PRESIDENT PLAYS IT DOWN AS WE HAVE COME TO EXPECT FROM HIM. HOWEVER THIS IS THE MOST DISRESPECTFUL CRASS, AND BORISH DISPLAY IMAGINABLE FROM SOMEONE WHO IS NOT FIT TO WIPE HIS SHOES. A DISPICABLE CLASSLESS MOMENT ONE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY , A STAIN ON THE STATE AND THE PEOPLE OF ARIZONA.

No oth­er pres­i­dent and his wife has been more cir­cum­spect and dig­ni­fied in the way they have com­port­ed them­selves whilst in the White House, than Barack and Michelle Obama. In fair­ness, President George Bush and his wife Laura were won­der­ful ambas­sadors in that regard. I per­son­al­ly liked pres­i­dent Bush and his wife Laura, even though I dis­agreed with most if not all of mis­ter Bush’s poli­cies, Laura Bush was a smil­ing lev­el-head­ed human being of impec­ca­ble char­ac­ter. Thank you Laura Bush for stand­ing up for Michelle Obama when the wolves were out to devour her.

There is a def­i­nite strat­e­gy to this dis­re­spect­ful demo­niz­ing of pres­i­dent Obama, not only is it geared toward an attempt­ed de-lig­itimiza­tion of this pres­i­dent but there is a more sin­is­ter mes­sage inher­ent in the strat­e­gy. One has to ask what prompt­ed that man to open fire at the White House with an AK47 rifle recent­ly? What is the rea­son for the rise in hate groups, includ­ing neo-nazis, skin­heads, and anti-gov­ern­ment mili­tias in the United States as report­ed by the FBI.

Let me be clear, the pal­pa­ble dis­re­spect is not only con­fined to pres­i­dent Obama, it may have been ampli­fied under his admin­is­tra­tion but it sure isn’t con­fined to him . There are a long line of self hat­ing  Uncle Tom Negroes who seem all of a sud­den to have crawled out of the wood-work to speak neg­a­tive dis­parag­ing things about the pres­i­dent, I don’t have to name them they know them­selves. These uncle toms were silent dur­ing the Bush years, too scared to open their mouths about any­thing for fear they would be sent to Gitmo. Now they are out in full force crit­i­ciz­ing this pres­i­dent. None is more painful to lis­ten to than Florida con­gress­man Allen West.

Here’s what he had to say recent­ly over the weekend.

“We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and my dear friend the chair­man of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain’t on the table.” He added, “Take your mes­sage of equal­i­ty of achieve­ment, take your mes­sage of eco­nom­ic depen­den­cy, take your mes­sage of enslav­ing the entre­pre­neur­ial will and spir­it of the American peo­ple some­where else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bot­tom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.“est said at a Lincoln Day Dinner for the Palm Beach County GOP,

Allen West.Florida congressman:

Then on Tuesday January 31st. Allen West attempt­ed to walk back his Uncle Tom moment of idio­cy, telling Soledad Obrien of CNN that what he was point­ing to, was that he was some­how in awe of a nation that allowed a poor boy from Atlanta Georgia to reach the heights he has reached.

Clearly Congressman Allen West is inca­pable of con­tain­ing his glee of becom­ing a Colonel in the United States Army and now a US con­gress­man, so he kicks the lad­der away that he climbed to the top on, so no one else could climb up as he has.

I won­der what con­gress­man Allen West would have done if he was born to a white moth­er and a black father who was a stu­dent from a dif­fer­ent con­ti­nent, then his par­ents divorced and he was made to move to live in anoth­er coun­try on anoth­er con­ti­nent , with his mom and a new hus­band , then brought back to live with his grand par­ents, strug­gling to define who he was, but ulti­mate­ly attend­ing Occidental col­lege in California, Columbia University, and Harvard Law school and be the Editor of the Harvard law Review. Then spend time work­ing to improve the lives of oth­ers in com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions, then becom­ing a State Senator, then a US Senator, and final­ly becom­ing the pres­i­dent of the United States of America . And did I men­tion receiv­ing a Nobel Peace Prize? All accom­plished in under 50 years.

If Allen West a con­gress­man, is will­ing to ban­ish the most pow­er­ful man on the plan­et, the most pow­er­ful man in the United States Senate the most pow­er­ful woman in the US House of Representative, an estab­lished con­gress­woman and DCC chair from America, what would he do to us ordi­nary nobodys had he accom­plished what Barack Obama has accomplished?

During slav­ery slave own­ers used divi­sive tac­tics to keep slaves in check, some were told they were dif­fer­ent than oth­ers, usu­al­ly those who worked in the big house were made to believe they had some kind of leg up over those in the fields. This strat­e­gy worked in ensur­ing that a free flow of infor­ma­tion was forth­com­ing to “Massa” in the big house . That tac­tic helped to keep slav­ery in place for over 300 years.

Today we see that divide and con­quer still works with many who share the same skin col­or with us, if noth­ing else. This is evi­dent in black folks whom are more than hap­py to dis­re­spect his own broth­er in order to please his mas­ters. The more things change the more they remain the same. It’s in every aspect of black America, Allen west is so over­joyed that white Floridians vot­ed him into office he can­not con­tain his glee, in his hur­ry to shuck , jive and please mas­sa, he dis­re­spect oth­ers and kicks the lad­der away, not will­ing to allow anoth­er poor per­son climb up .

Pathetic!!!

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Jamaica’s Élite Flawed Argument For JEEP:

A quick obser­va­tion of an expan­sive Article in the Sunday Gleaner of January 29th 2012 authored by vet­er­an Journalist Ian Boyne titled :JEEP: NO LAUGHING MATTER. (jamaica​glean​er​.com)

Ian Boyne has long car­ried the stig­ma of hav­ing sym­pa­thy for the Jamaica Labor Party, of course it is cer­tain­ly with­in Mr Boyne’s right to artic­u­late a point of view irre­spec­tive of the opin­ions of those who dis­agree with him. However read­ing the text and com­ing to grips with the tone of his rather lengthy the­sis, one won­ders if this piece was not an attempt by Boyne to get back to left of cen­ter or in sim­ple lan­guage an attempt to cur­ry favor with the rul­ing party.

Ian Boyne
In his Article Boyne said quote:The ILO’s par­tic­u­lar con­cern is that despite large stim­u­lus pack­ages, these mea­sures have not man­aged to roll back the 27-mil­lion increase in unem­ployed since the ini­tial impact of the cri­sis. Clearly, the pol­i­cy mea­sures have not been well tar­get­ed. Indeed, esti­mates for advanced economies regard­ing dif­fer­ent labour-mar­ket instru­ments show that both active and pas­sive labour-mar­ket poli­cies have proven very effec­tive in stim­u­lat­ing job cre­ation and sup­port­ing incomes.”
Where does this 27 mil­lion num­ber come from? Boyne despite his lengthy epis­tle failed to strike a coher­ent line that the aver­age read­er can attach him­self to, is this a world-wide num­ber? And if it is, how does the International labor Organization come up with this fig­ure, when there are actu­al­ly 10’s of mil­lions of peo­ple all over the world whom are unem­ployed, under­em­ployed and in some cas­es unem­ploy­able? That aside though, Boyne went on to talk about peo­ple who argue for a mar­ket dri­ven econ­o­my in dis­parag­ing terms using slangs like ” neolib­er­al” to describe the Jamaica Labor Party plat­form of a mar­ket dri­ven, mar­ket nec­es­sary, eco­nom­ic mod­el that must be at the cen­ter of growth and devel­ope­ment. Accusing a con­ser­v­a­tive par­ty like the JLP of hav­ing what he char­ac­ter­izes as neolib­er­al sug­gests that Boyne just acquired that ter­mi­nol­o­gy into his vocab­u­lary and is not yet sure what it mean, it is actu­al­ly an oxy­moron .

It does not take this entire bor­ing the­sis to say so very lit­tle . What are you doing talk­ing about neolib­er­al per­spec­tive in the same sen­tence with the JLP? The JLP has nev­er been a lib­er­al par­ty and still isn’t, what coun­try are you liv­ing in? And while we are on that sub­ject, the poli­cies Boyne are espous­ing and laud­ing, giv­ing cred­it to the PNP, was recent­ly revealed to be the brain-child of the JLP.

Austerity as we have seen in coun­tries like Greece Italy and oth­ers is exact­ly the wrong way to go . when­ev­er Government pulls back on expen­di­ture so does the econ­o­my , if the econ­o­my con­stricts there are less job cre­ation that is eco­nom­ics one-o- one. I am unaware of the ori­gins of these voodoo eco­nom­ic argu­ments , of course the mar­ket place is exact­ly the cor­rect cre­ator of jobs and not gov­ern­ment, how are gov­ern­ment jobs sus­tain­able if they are not backed by a sol­id and vibrant pri­vate sec­tor which is the real engine of income gen­er­a­tion? Market econ­o­my requires dis­ci­pline and ded­i­ca­tion ‚it will not hap­pen overnight, but when it does it does launch dis­ci­plined coun­tries like Malaysia, Indonesia and oth­ers to include Brazil into pros­per­i­ty. Many nations like China and oth­ers are now shift­ing away from the failed social­ist big gov­ern­ment poli­cies that have kept their pop­u­la­tions impov­er­ished for gen­er­a­tions. Yet his doc­tor­al the­sis seem to be sug­gest­ing that cheap gov­ern­ment hand­outs cam­ou­flaged as jobs, which by the way are going to be paid for with bor­rowed mon­ey, is some­how a net pos­i­tive for Jamaica. I am sor­ry but if that is the gen­er­al mind­set, and it might be, based on the results of the last elections,then God help Jamaica. I can­not believe any­one would quote bod­ies like the ILO as cred­i­ble orga­ni­za­tions on job cre­ation and sus­tain­able growth . Boyne’s arti­cle is about three decades late .

Boyne seem to believe that the eco­nom­ic boom that China and Brazil has expe­ri­enced was as a result of rigid Governmental con­trol and admin­is­tra­tion over their economies. The oppo­site is true, relin­quish­ing Government death-grip on eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty was exact­ly what large pop­u­la­tions like the afore­men­tioned two had to do to start see­ing eco­nom­ic growth and yes an explo­sion in employ­ment through globalization.

For the record ‚there is no evi­dence that these economies are flour­ish­ing because of gov­ern­ment, in fact there is fac­tu­al evi­dence that because com­pa­nies can do busi­ness with these coun­tries, tak­ing advan­tage of cheap­er labor and less bureau­cra­cy, their economies have been sig­nif­i­cant­ly helped.

The need to put idle hands to work can­not be over-empha­sized, it is rather impor­tant that we find work for our youths. People must have hope, young peo­ple grad­u­at­ing from schools must have some­thing to look for­ward to, I am in agree­ment with Boyne on that, but Boyne is wrong in believ­ing that the coun­try can afford to throw bor­rowed mon­ey away on work that bear no fruits and offers no pos­i­tive return. Boyne had this to say :

FDR cre­at­ed the Civil Works Administration (CWA) in November 1933 as the US head­ed into its fifth depres­sion win­ter. CWA did not offer tax breaks. Unemployed peo­ple were put to work. In a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle in the December issue of Harper’s mag­a­zine (‘More gov­ern­ment, please!’), Thomas Frank says CWA “did not wait for grand projects to be fleshed out: It sim­ply sent peo­ple into the nation’s pub­lic spaces to rake leaves, shov­el snow, fix roads, dig ditch­es and so on. The pro­gram­me’s admin­is­tra­tor, Roosevelt con­fi­dant Harry Hopkins, had famous­ly spent more than US$5 mil­lion in his first two hours as a fed­er­al offi­cial. At the CWA, he found jobs for four mil­lion peo­ple in two months.”

News Flash Mister Boyne, America did not bor­row that mon­ey it paid out to its peo­ple, sec­ond­ly America is one of a few coun­tries which can print mon­ey and to some degree hold infla­tion down because of its abil­i­ty to cre­ate goods and ser­vices for oth­ers to con­sume. Secondly monies spent by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was spent on main­tain­ing exist­ing infra­struc­ture and build­ing oth­ers. What JEEP pro­pos­es to do is to siphon off bor­rowed mon­ey des­ig­nat­ed for infra­struc­tur­al devel­ope­ment to unsus­tain­able crash-pro­gramme hand­outs by politicians.

Havent we been down this road before? Haven’t we seen these poli­cies before? Have they made Jamaica bet­ter? Yet in the next sen­tence Boyne turned right around and said this:

It is true that emer­gency pub­lic works pro­grammes are just that — emer­gency, unsus­tain­able work. But no one can accu­rate­ly esti­mate the ben­e­fits of find­ing work, for even a short peri­od, for some idle hands — for whom the Devil can find lots of work.

Clearly Boyne miss­es his own point, on the one hand he seem to under­stand the sim­ple con­cept, that crash-pro­gramme work is unsus­tain­able, and cost­ly , yet on the oth­er he espous­es it argu­ing the neg­a­tive, that no one can accu­rate­ly esti­mate the ben­e­fits of find­ing work for idle hand if only for a short time, whilst in the same breath mak­ing the case for what he him­self said, quote: (“no one can accu­rate­ly esti­mate”).

These are the same tired old argu­ments which have been used time and again by elit­ist lazy social­ists who want noth­ing but scraps to fall from the table of the rich to the floor so that the under­class may fight over them. They con­tin­ue to argue for the most labor inten­sive of employ­ment even as the indus­tri­al age has passed and we are in a com­plete­ly immersed in a dig­i­tal age. So Boyne and the pro­po­nents of crash pro­gramme argues for tem­po­rary de-bush­ing of gul­lies while the peo­ple who do the work floss with their iPhone’s. The pro­po­nents of crash pro­gramme work fail to come to terms with the stark facts in our coun­try. Jamaicans have more cell phones and oth­er tech-gis­mos than most peo­ple in indus­tri­al­ized devel­oped coun­tries, where do they get the mon­ey to pur­chase these devices, does any­one seri­ous­ly believe giv­ing bor­rowed mon­ey to polit­i­cal hacks will solve our prob­lems,? If they want to make a dif­fer­ence with bor­rowed mon­ey how about spend­ing it on skills train­ing? That way the coun­try may see some returns on it’s invest­ments. Jamaicans con­tin­ue to pre­tend that our coun­try is march­ing toward first world sta­tus when the reverse is true, we are try­ing to build a 21st cen­tu­ry coun­try on a 20th cen­tu­ry econ­o­my. The Soviets tried build­ing a 20th cen­tu­ry mil­i­tary on a 19th cen­tu­ry infra­struc­ture, his­to­ry is replete with instances like these . The def­i­n­i­tion of a fool is some­one who does the same thing and expects a dif­fer­ent result.

Sorry Ian Boyne you do make sense on occa­sion, this is not one of those occasions.

Those who sup­port (JEEP) are sim­ply try­ing to relieve their con­ciences of the guilt they feel at see­ing the poor­est of our peo­ple strug­gle to sur­vive, unable to pro­vide for their fam­i­lies through the dig­ni­ty of work. That is a tragedy, I’m just not sure if reliev­ing one’s con­science will be enough to com­pen­sate for the cries of the poor this time around.

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THEN THERE WERE 4:

Did you watch the Florida Republican debates? well too bad if you did­n’t because this was one of the best com­e­dy shows I have seen in a long time.

There are only four men left in the run­ning, and by the way they are all white, not that it’s cru­cial­ly impor­tant to you but con­sid­er­ing that the coun­try has become so diverse I would have thought that the Republican Party would field a bet­ter non-white can­di­date than Herman Caine, but that’s just my opin­ion , you may have a dif­fer­ent view.

CANDIDATES

(1) Ron Paul:

This live­ly old­er gen­tle­man seem like a lov­able grand­fa­ther who speaks in cir­cles, he is wit­ty, fun­ny and real­ly has a great plat­form that res­onates with well with younger more ide­al­is­tic vot­ers, his chal­lenge is, is the sup­port he has enough to con­vince the Republican estab­lish­ment to adopt parts of his plat­form into the repub­li­can gen­er­al elec­tion plat­form? Dr. Paul a med­ical Doctor and con­gress­man from Texas real­ly is a lib­er­tar­i­an, he favors small gov­ern­ment and argues stri­dent­ly for indi­vid­ual rights, repub­li­cans for the record favors states rights not indi­vid­ual rights. The largest hand­i­cap to Paul’s break­ing through the glass ceil­ing in his par­ty, is his belief that America’s mil­i­tary should not be used in for­eign inter­ven­tions, he wants all wars end­ed and all of Americas ser­vice mem­bers abroad brought home. This does not res­onate well with The neo-cons in the repub­li­can party.

(2) Rick Santorum:

Rick Santorum two-time United States Senator from Pennsylvania is an ultra con­ser­v­a­tive who believes strong­ly in the pro­tec­tion of the state of Israel,he argues for a super pow­er­ful mil­i­tary and stat­ed unabashed­ly that he would not cut a pen­ny from the pen­tagon’s bud­get, even has he argues vocif­er­ous­ly for cuts in sec­tors that impacts the lives of the most vul­ner­a­ble amongst us. Santorum a devout Catholic is bull­ish on Immigration , he seem to talk him­self into rages of anger as he address­es the caus­es he believe in, one won­ders if Santorum’s total­i­tar­i­an all or noth­ing views, are not his great­est imped­i­ment to being tak­en seri­ous­ly, and by the way even though he claims he is a devout chris­t­ian Santorum is a liar, he cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly claimed he did not say black peo­ple while address­ing the top­ic of food stamps in Iowa, when there is ample video evi­dence that he did just what he says he did not do, I can under­stand a thief, I can always pro­tect my valu­ables from a thief , I absolute­ly can­not stand a liar.

(3)Newt Gingrich:

Newt Gingrich for­mer Republican con­gress­man from Georgia and speak­er of the House of Representatives for four years of the Clinton Presidency, a man wide­ly believed to be a gringe, and a sour-puss. Republican estab­lish­ment oper­a­tives believe Gingrich if nom­i­nat­ed by the Republican Party would be a train wreck for Republicans come November. Many believe if Gingrich is nom­i­nat­ed , not only will President Obama be returned to the White House, but it would be a dis­as­ter for down tick­et can­di­dates on the bal­lot all the way down to munic­i­pal­i­ties. Gingrich through­out his polit­i­cal car­rear has been bedev­iled with accu­sa­tions of infi­deli­ty and has even been accused to have served his wife with divorce papers whilst she was in a hos­pi­tal recu­per­at­ing from an ill­ness. Gingrich has vehe­ment­ly denied these accu­sa­tions, Gingrich has been mar­ried three times. In fair­ness to Newt it is not out of the ordi­nary for some­one to be mar­ried mul­ti­ple times, the dis­con­nect is not with the amount of times he was mar­ried but with the rea­sons for the three Marriages. There are oth­er bag­gage in Gingrich’s back­ground includ­ing his threats to lock down the Federal Government over bud­get talks with the Clinton White House, many argue that it was a ego­ma­ni­a­cal tem­pera­men­tal out­burst from Gingrich because he was not invit­ed by then President Clinton to the front of Air Force One nei­ther on the way to, or back from Israel where they attend­ed the funer­al of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Gingrich had all but agreed that he was peev­ed at the President and as such decid­ed to pun­ish the whole coun­try because he was slight­ed. Gingrish was harsh­ly crit­i­cized bu many even in his own par­ty for being child­ish and petty.

(seat­tle sun​times​.com)

Gingrich is also accused of hypocrisy for per­se­cut­ing President Clinton for a sex­u­al dal­liance with White House Intern Monica Lewinsky while he was also cheat­ing on his wife. According to Marianne Gingrich Newt’s sec­ond wife when she brought up Gingrich’s hypocrisy to him, he report­ed­ly told her,” peo­ple should do as I says not as I do”. That air of supe­ri­or­i­ty has been a part of Gingrich’s per­sona to the point Santorum accused him of always being grandiose. In the end Gingrich was lit­er­al­ly ran out of the House of Representative by his own cau­cus over ethics vio­la­tions. His arch neme­sis Mitt Romney likes to remind every­one of the lat­ter on the cam­paign trail.

(4)Willard Mitt Romney

Then there is for­mer ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and ex Massachuset Governor Mitt Romney. Mister Romney did very well for him­self in the busi­ness world, as a result he has pegged his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign on his expe­ri­ence and suc­cess­es in busi­ness, he brags that as a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist he has cre­at­ed over a hun­dred Thousand Jobs. The prob­lem with Mitt’s strat­e­gy is that experts are com­ing out of the wood-work explain­ing that what Romney did at Bain Capital, as a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist had every­thing to do with gut­ting busi­ness­es, tak­ing all Bain could get then forc­ing the com­pa­ny into bankruptcy,and noth­ing to do with job creation.Texas Governor and for­mer repub­li­can can­di­date char­ac­ter­ized what Romney did as quote ” vul­ture cap­i­tal­ism“end quote. inter­est­ing­ly enough Romney does not talk about his record as gov­er­nor of Massachuset one of the nation’s most lib­er­al states​.One won­ders whether Governor Romney feels the nation will sim­ply ignore that he is run­ning as a con­ser­v­a­tive after being the Governor of one of America’s most lib­er­al states. President Obama has repeat­ed­ly said his Federally man­dat­ed health-care plan was craft­ed from Governor Romney’s health plan in Massachuset. Romney has vehe­ment­ly argued that he would not have imposed his plan on the entire coun­try, whether this will gain trac­tion in a gen­er­al elec­tion I don’t know, what I do know is that it makes it increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult for Romney to draw a sharp enough con­trast between him­self and pres­i­dent Obama in an elec­tion year when the coun­try is deeply polar­ized and the repub­li­can par­ty has been pushed far to the right by the tea par­ty. Romney’s repub­li­can rivals for the nom­i­na­tion are not mak­ing it any eas­i­er for him, Santorum in par­tic­u­lar , has made it the cor­ner­stone of his attack on Romney. Santorum feels that soon­er or lat­er Newt Gingrich will implode and he will be seen as the con­ser­v­a­tive alter­na­tive to Gingrich, hence he con­tin­ues to plug away at the con­nec­tion between pres­i­dent Obama’s health planned dubbed Obama-care and Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachuset dubbed Romney-care.

CONCLUSION

While the pres­i­dent was criss­cross­ing the coun­try talk­ing to work­ers about income inequal­i­ty, and high­light­ing the inher­rent injus­tice in the tax code which has Warren Buffett pay­ing a low­er tax rate than his sec­re­tary, repub­li­can mega mil­lion­aire Mitt Romney Newt Gingrich and the rest of the repub­li­cans were argu­ing about who had mil­lions invest­ed in Fannie May and Freddie Mac, or who would have a colony of Americans liv­ing on the moon by 2020 ‚nev­er mind we are broke and bor­row­ing mon­ey from the Chinese to pay our bills.

President Obama has posi­tioned him­self as a cham­pi­on and a fight­er for the 99%, whether his fresh­ly pop­ulist mes­sage will res­onate with a pub­lic weary from a slug­gish econ­o­my, lay-offs, and for­clousures is yet to be decided,there are many events  which may beat Obama in the fall of 2012 , Europe melt­ing down, Israel attack­ing Iran, a ter­ror attack on the home­land, a major blun­der on Obama’s part and a pletho­ra of oth­er events. If none of the afore­men­tioned hap­pen, President Obama will be guar­an­teed anoth­er term in the white house if this is the best the repub­li­can par­ty can do.

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Portia Deliberately Lied To The Country:

Information com­ing out of Jamaica yes­ter­day indi­cates that recent­ly elect­ed Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has backed away from her grand pro­nounce­ments that she would roll out 700 jobs as the first stage of her cam­paign pro­gramme (JEEP) Jamaica Emergency Employment Programme. We also learned that the much vaunt­ed JEEP was a stolen con­cept dredged up by the for­mer gov­ern­ment of the labor party.

There are two ironies here (1) If true that the labor par­ty came up with the pro­gramme , what did the PNP run on? (2) The JLP revealed the mon­ey from their pro­gramme would have come from the (IDB) Inter American Developement Bank, and not the JDIP The Jamaica Developement infra­struc­tur­al Programme. The JDIP of course is mon­ey bor­rowed from the Chinese Government specif­i­cal­ly for the coun­try’s infra­struc­tur­al developement.

The coun­try’s left lean­ing dai­ly Gleaner char­ac­ter­ized this sto­ry this way:

The high­ly antic­i­pat­ed Jamaica Emergency Employment Programme (JEEP) failed to get off the ground in St Ann yes­ter­day, with the Government all but admit­ting to mis­lead­ing the nation.

Story here:jamaica​glean​er​.com

Simpson Miller did tell the coun­try that 700 jobs would be cre­at­ed in 7 parish­es that amounts to an aver­age 100 jobs per parish as I have said before this will do very lit­tle to address the coun­try’s crip­pling unem­ploy­ment prob­lem but it is a step in the right direc­tion. I also stat­ed that I had no quar­rel with the jobs being cre­at­ed, my prob­lem is how are they fund­ed. Jamaica can­not bor­row mon­ey from over­seas lenders to de-bush gul­lies and clean drains, that mon­ey must come from tax­es or some oth­er source. If there is to be mas­sive job cre­ation by gov­ern­ment the source of fund­ing must be local, clean­ing drain and gul­lies does not return a prof­it, it is a finan­cial­ly neg­li­gi­ble endeav­our. Where are the funds to come from to repay lenders their mon­ey with inter­est? If there is no iden­ti­fi­able source of fund­ing with­in the coun­try in the first place .

I am aware that peo­ple need jobs, this is just not the way.

The real ques­tion is why did the Prime Minister think it nec­es­sary to lie to the pub­lic that the jobs to be rolled out were part of the emer­gency employ­ment pro­gramme when she knew it was a delib­er­ate false­hood? The Prime Minister must know it is beneath the office of Prime Minister. Immediately upon being elect­ed she has start­ed lying to the pub­lic, this is the sec­ond act of betray­al she has com­mit­ted in the cou­ple of weeks since she has been installed as Prime Minister. This comes after she appoint­ed a larg­er cab­i­net than for­mer Prime Minister Golding after stri­dent­ly crit­i­ciz­ing him for the size of the exec­u­tive dur­ing Golding’s tenure as Prime Minister. This Prime Minister has shown her­self to be either of two things, either she takes the peo­ple who vot­ed her into office for fools, as per the answer she gave when quizzed about the size of her cab­i­net. Or she is a patho­log­i­cal liar, you decide.

This Government would not have been my choice for the coun­try, it is how­ev­er the choice of the major­i­ty of elec­tors who vot­ed in the last elec­tions. as such we have to respect their deci­sion. Whether they vot­ed the way they did because they want­ed the feel good we are told is asso­ci­at­ed with the PNP or they were pissed at the Labor par­ty because of the Coke mat­ter is for the vot­ers to artic­u­late, the fact is we have to respect their choice.

Miller

Portia Simpson Miller giv­en a sec­ond chance could have decid­ed to choose a path of hon­esty, integri­ty, fidelity,and char­ac­ter, instead she has stead­fast­ly demon­strat­ed that a leop­ard can­not change its spots, she has demon­strat­ed a rank dis­dain for the integri­ty of the process. Her in your face con­temp­tu­ous appoint­ment of a cab­i­net larg­er than Golding’s and the answer she gave when quizzed is syn­ony­mous to her dis­re­spect­ful response when she was quizzed about Trafigura in which she stat­ed quote go ask the PNP, for the record Simpson Miller is the PNP.

Portia Simpson Miller has cho­sen to return to the ran­cid cor­rup­tion and crony­ism that char­ac­ter­ized the PNP’s 18 1⁄2 years in office ‚where cor­rup­tion was the norm, crime ran ram­pant, and it was any­thing goes. She under­stands ful­ly well the intel­lec­tu­al short­com­ings of a large por­tion of the elec­torate, and though not an intel­lec­tu­al heavy-weight her­self she has enough savvy, from being around the process long enough to under­stand how to worm her way into the hearts of the afore­men­tioned electorate.

HUMUNGOUS CABINET.….….….….….….….….….….….…… STRIKE ONE

DELIBERATELY LYING ABOUT JEEP.….….….….….….…STRIKE TWO

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Race To The Bottom:

What is it that makes so may repub­li­cans such racist repug­nant liars ? I am not say­ing that all peo­ple who vote for that par­ty are racists or indeed liars, but damn have you heard the things they say about President Obama? How do they feel that this path advances the his­to­ry or the integri­ty of America? The fact is this is exact­ly what they did to Dr. King in this coun­try, now every lying repub­li­can gets up on stage and invokes the name of Dr. the rev­erend Martin Luther King. In fact some of them vot­ed against a fed­er­al hol­i­day in hon­or of Dr. King.

It does seem to me that repub­li­cans are engaged in a race to the bot­tom, many Americans white and oth­ers read­i­ly agree and attest to the fact that slav­ery was an ugly blight on America, many read­i­ly agree that Jim Crowe was a shame­ful scar. People not stuck in the past who have the ben­e­fit of edu­ca­tion are ashamed of peo­ple like Bull O’Connor, George Wallace, and a pletho­ra of oth­er faces of the shame of America. I almost feel ashamed as a mem­ber of the human race for peo­ple like that woman in Florida who had this to say to Rick Santorum:

“I nev­er refer to Obama as ‘President Obama’ because legal­ly he is not,” the uniden­ti­fied woman told Santorum. “He con­stant­ly says that our Constitution is passé and he total­ly ignores it, as you know. He does what he darn well pleas­es. He is an avowed Muslim. And my ques­tion is, why isn’t some­thing being done to get him out of our gov­ern­ment? He has no legal right to be call­ing him­self President.”http://​www​.youtube​.com

Rick Santorum is irrel­e­vant and des­per­ate­ly look­ing for some trac­tion so when asked by Journalists why he did not cor­rect the woman he respond­ed thus.

“Why do you guys ask these ‘gotcha’ ques­tions, like it’s my job to go out and cor­rect every­body who says some­thing I don’t agree with?” Santorum said to reporters after the event. “I don’t think it’s my respon­si­bil­i­ty. Why don’t you go out and cor­rect her? It’s not my respon­si­bil­i­ty as a can­di­date to cor­rect every­body who makes a state­ment that I dis­agree with.”(abc​c​news​.com)

Here’s a fact for Santorum and that woman in Florida who claim the pres­i­dent is a mus­lim, Article 6 of the con­sti­tu­tion says that there shall be no reli­gious test for pub­lic office, and yes that includes the Presidency, and while we are at it , it is fun­da­men­tal­ly un-American for any­one to be dis­crim­i­nat­ed against because of their religion.

Prehistoric igno­rant relics of the past and their can­di­dates who take dead babies home and plays with the corpse, some sup­port priests who molest lit­tle boys and think it is ok as long as the Pope bless­es it. They must be stopped and the filthy ran­cid rhetoric they ped­dle shoved into their faces. They have the nerve to sug­gest that this pres­i­dent is divid­ing the coun­try with the pol­i­tics of envy, some nerve. When Barack Obama was elect­ed to the pres­i­den­cy he took with him a tor­rent of good will , as a result of the good will peo­ple felt towards Obama, they also gave the House and Senate to democ­rats. Not since Bill Clinton’s first term did democ­rats have such pow­er in Washington. if Barack Obama was a European style pres­i­dent as the talk­ing points of the repub­li­can par­ty sug­gest, would he not ram through his agen­da? For over a year Democrats con­trolled the House, Senate, and the Executive Branch, this pres­i­dent made repeat­ed over­tures to repub­li­cans to work with him to move the coun­ty for­ward. He did so to the extent that many in his own par­ty thought his lev­el of benev­o­lence and com­mit­ment to bi-par­ti­san­ship was anti­thet­i­cal to their objec­tives. Many in the pres­i­den­t’s base was mad as hell at him for what they con­strued to be weak­ness for his con­tin­ued over­tures to repub­li­cans. Time and again The pres­i­dent tried to work with house repub­li­cans only to have his over­tures rebuffed and his hand slapped away. I for one thought that his con­tin­ued attempts to work with repub­li­cans was weak­ness, and the pres­i­dent lost some of the belief I had in him. This I might add is the feel­ing of a lot of peo­ple I talk with.

President Obama deliv­er­ing the state of the Union Address/​Raleigh Telegraph photo:

One may not like the pol­i­tics of for­mer pres­i­dent George Bush, but he was decid­ed­ly focused on what he want­ed accom­plished , and democ­rats were not going to obstruct his agen­da. Americans like their pres­i­dent deci­sive , they attribute deci­sive­ness with strength, it may not nec­es­sar­i­ly be cor­rect but that is how we judge strength. In the end pres­i­dent Obama have been forced to use exec­u­tive orders to get any­thing done. This is exact­ly what the racist lunatic right want­ed from the begin­ning, they begun to label Obama as “oth­er” from the start, as they engaged on a cam­paign of obstruc­tion, prob­a­bly nev­er before seen in this coun­try. Many, prob­a­bly includ­ing the pres­i­dent would like to cov­er their eyes to the stark real­i­ties of the rea­son behind this assault.

RACE

What would com­pel chief Republican cur­mud­geon Mitch McConnell to say that his num­ber one pri­or­i­ty is to make the pres­i­dent a one term president?

What com­pels lunatic fringe nut wind-bag Rush Limbaugh to say he hopes the pres­i­dent fail?

I could go on and on detail­ing the rancid,vile and vit­ri­olic lan­guage that is a sta­ple of lit­er­al­ly all repub­li­cans when­ev­er they dis­agree with the pres­i­dent, but you get the pic­ture. These are peo­ple who claim to love their coun­try, they wrap them­selves in the flag and berate oth­ers with faux accu­sa­tions of not lov­ing America, yet they say they want the pres­i­dent to fail, these peo­ple are trai­tors , they are quite will­ing to see their coun­try destroyed because there is a black guy at the helm of the Executive branch of Government. There are oth­er cur­mud­geons , it is instruc­tive that the only black mem­ber of the supreme court, asso­ciate jus­tice Clarence Thomas does not see fit to attend a joint sit­ting of con­gress for the state of the nation address from the pres­i­dent of the United States.

Bush appointee Samuel Alito has aligned him­self square­ly on the side of the neo-cons on that body , a body where all Americans once felt they had a chance to get final and impar­tial jus­tice. This group now con­sist of Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. To his cred­it Chief Justice Roberts irre­spec­tive of his pol­i­tics have cho­sen not to play those games. One would have thought that Someone like Mitch McConnell’s job would have been to serve the peo­ple of the state of Kentucky and the nation and not to set­tle pri­vate hatred or to indulge in spite­ful tit for tat ini­ti­at­ed by the right-wing fringe.

I can under­stand Tim Thomas goalie of the NHL’s Boston Bruins, or NASCAR’S Greg Biffle and Tony Stewart crass­ness in not turn­ing up to the white House to be con­grat­u­lat­ed by President Obama. This is to be expect­ed from those two sports, any­one sur­prised by that is divorced from real­i­ty in America. The tra­di­tion of sports stars get­ting invit­ed to the White House to be con­grat­u­lat­ed by the sit­ting pres­i­dent is a time-hon­ored tra­di­tion, mem­bers of sports teams are usu­al­ly thrilled to get invit­ed to the white House to be con­grat­u­lat­ed by the pres­i­dent, irre­spec­tive of their pol­i­tics. It’s respect for the pres­i­den­cy, its respect for the pres­i­dent. Opting out demon­strates a gut­ter coarse­ness that is rem­i­nis­cent of what would have been expect­ed of the peri­od between slav­ery and the 1960’s.

What I can­not under­stand is the dis­re­spect and lack of civil­i­ty of the likes of Colorado Republican rep­re­sen­ta­tive Doug Lamborn who did not show up for the state of the Nation address by pres­i­dent Obama. As I point to these repub­li­can hacks who will inevitably be mere igno­ble foot­notes in his­to­ry, I must piv­ot and use this oppur­tu­ni­ty to segue and pay my respects to Arizona Democratic con­gress-woman Gabrielle Gifford, a tru­ly patri­ot­ic America who turned up to lis­ten to the coun­try’s chief exec­u­tive tell the coun­try about the state of affairs and where he intends to take the country.

See more here: (abc​news​.com)

The brave and indomitable Gabrielle Gifford.

Congress-woman Gifford was crit­i­cal­ly wound­ed when an assailant shot her as she attend a meet and greet in her district.Several peo­ple were killed and injured in that assault and even though crit­i­cal­ly wound­ed from a bul­let to her head Mrs Gifford fought her way back and valiant­ly showed that she would not be defeat­ed by ter­ror. A true American hero if ever there was one.

SUCCESS AFTER SUCCESS

Pompous self-aggran­diz­ing Newt Gingrich and flip-flop­ping liar Mitt Romney trot from state telling repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers that when the pres­i­dent talks about fair­ness in the income tax struc­ture in this coun­try he is actu­al­ly engag­ing in class war­fare. This is irony of the worst kind, because repub­li­cans are the par­ty that is locked in a strug­gle with the White House over not rais­ing tax­es on aver­age mid­dle class and work­ing Americans,but refus­es even to approach the table to dis­cuss repeal­ing Bush-era tax cuts for mil­lion­aires and bil­lion­aires. If ever there was class war­fare in this coun­try this is it, the arro­gance of repub­li­cans and those who pay to put them in pow­er to take care of their inter­ests and the insult­ing notion that if we con­tin­ue to make the super rich even more rich we will all be bet­ter from the crumbs that fall off their tables. The fact is it has been tried since Nixon to Reagan to Bush and still we have not seen where that works, the truth is the reverse is true the poor gets poor­er and the rich gets rich­er. Experts declare there are over two tril­lion dol­lars in the hands of rich busi­ness peo­ple, yet we do not see them rush­ing to hire, so that peo­ple’s lives can be bet­ter in this coun­try. con­verse­ly when we put mon­ey into the hands of aver­age peo­ple they go out and spend that mon­ey , it cre­ates jobs, brings more mon­ey into the trea­sury, and invari­ably finds its way back to the top as it always does. That’s the way to empow­er peo­ple not to make them beg­gars wait­ing for crumbs from the tables of the rich.

While the repub­li­can machine was gear­ing up to dis­re­spect where they should dis­agree if war­rant­ed, the pres­i­dent of the United States was issu­ing orders to US Navy seal team 6 to go res­cue two Americans held for ran­som in Somalia by pirates. Navy seal team 6 is report­ed­ly the same élite team of seals who elim­i­nat­ed Osama Bin Laden. We give the Seals the great­est respect they deserve and as pres­i­dent Obama says his detrac­tors should learn from these heroes on how to work togeth­er to build America. Republican can­di­dates run­ning for pres­i­dent and the sur­ro­gates who appear on cable tele­vi­sion par­rot­ing the lies they adopt as talk­ing points does­n’t even have the integri­ty to give cred­it where cred­it is due, do they think that all Americans are total­ly stupid/​Do they not know that despite a strug­gling econ­o­my peo­ple are cog­nizant of the fact that Osama Bin Laden is dead: most of Al Qaeda’s top oper­a­tives are dead: Libya is lib­er­at­ed with­out one American life lost: three mil­lion jobs cre­at­ed and the econ­o­my pulled back from the brink of the precipice: General motors and Chrysler saved from bank­rupt­cy and returned to prof­itabil­i­ty after just 3 years , con­trary to what Mitt Romney Vulture Capitalist said should be done: Romney said they should be allowed to go into bank­rupt­cy. Never mind the total destruc­tion that would have been wrought on state economies. The list of accom­plish­ments of this pres­i­dent is aston­ish­ing­ly incred­i­ble con­sid­er­ing that he is work­ing with a racial­ly obstruc­tion­ist congress.

WHERE IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY GOING?

It’s impos­si­ble to see what the strat­e­gy is for the repub­li­can par­ty going forward,they have repeat­ed­ly dis­re­spect­ed black peo­ple and as a con­se­quence they have lit­er­al­ly giv­en up on win­ning any sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the black vote. To his cred­it Former President Bush our 44th President made over­tures to the African-American com­mu­ni­ty as well as the Hispanic com­mu­ni­ty, this was not fol­lowed upon or encour­aged by his par­ty after he demit­ted office. With the excep­tion of a few uncle tom self hat­ing blacks there real­ly is no black sup­port for repub­li­can can­di­dates that would make much of a dif­fer­ence. Newt Gingrich famous­ly stat­ed that Spanish is the lan­guage of the ghet­to, he is now try­ing to woo lati­no vot­ers in the state of Florida, he should find it an uphill bat­tle with Puerto Ricans liv­ing in that state, but it will prob­a­bly be a wash tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the Cuban-American pop­u­la­tion in Florida that gner­al­ly align itself with Republicans. Recent indi­ca­tions how­ev­er indi­cate that there are sig­nif­i­cant shifts in the lati­no vote in Florida as there is a size­able influx of more demo­c­ra­t­ic lean­ing Puerto Ricans and oth­er lati­no immi­grants from oth­er coun­tries. see sto­ry here: (huff​in​g​ton​post​.com)

Mitt Romney has stat­ed stri­dent­ly he would veto the dream act if he is elect­ed pres­i­dent. The dream act if passed would have allowed chil­dren of immi­grants who entered the coun­try ille­gal­ly with them as babies to go to school and become assim­i­lat­ed into American soci­ety. Despite the fact that these chil­dren could not seri­ous­ly be pun­ished by any­one with an iota of brain-cell in their cra­ni­um, repub­li­cans call it amnesty and has stead­fast­ly refused to sup­port this piece of com­mon sense leg­is­la­tion. As com­mon sense as this bit of leg­is­la­tion is, there is an even big­ger issue which will deve­l­ope into a seri­ous and unten­able prob­lem as time pro­gress­es. Children who are not able to go school to get the edu­ca­tion they need,so that they may live out their God giv­en tal­ents will be angry. they will be angry because the only coun­try they have ever known has dis­tinct­ly said to them we do not want you here , we do not want you in our schools, and we do not care about you. these will be some very angry peo­ple who will invari­ably feel that their lives have been severe­ly ham­pered, America will have a prob­lem with these peo­ple and bet­ter be pre­pared for the con­se­quences. Dogma and ide­ol­o­gy can­not be that impor­tant that it elim­i­nates intel­li­gent dis­course, or lim­its com­mon sense deci­sions. If America has learned any­thing it should be that America got great because of it’s immi­grant com­mu­ni­ty, it’s diver­si­ty, and it’s con­stant stream of fresh ener­getic crop of hard work­ing immi­grants enter­ing it’s shores, not despite it. President Obama made that absoloute­ly clear in his recent state of the union speech. As a River becomes a rag­ing infer­no from the mul­tutide of trib­u­taries and streams that dumps into it, so does America con­tin­ue to grow from the con­stant infu­sion of tal­ent , intel­lect, and ener­gy. Given a chance repub­li­cans would build a wall around America close her ports to all but white peo­ple and take America back to the dark ages of slav­ery. they ought to be ashamed of themselves. 

Where are the Colin Powel’s and the Chuck Hagels , where is even John Mc Cain who told that woman “no maam, no maam he is a decent fam­i­ly man, cit­i­zen we just have dis­agree­ments ?(youtube​.com)

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Stolen Jeep?

Yesterday I told you the truth about (JEEP) the crash pro­gramme acronym the Government of Jamaica rode to pow­er on December 29th of 2011.

Today we learn there is a prob­lem with the design of JEEP, in that the Labor Party now say the blue print for the pro­gramme was theirs.

According to Samuda, the Ministry of Finance had ini­ti­at­ed a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), fol­low­ing upon which a mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing was signed on December 5 last year by the Ministry of Transport and Works, National Works Agency (NWA) and the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) to imple­ment a com­pre­hen­sive road main­te­nance pro­gramme on the north­ern coastal high­way from Negril to Port Antonio.“Participating in the sign­ing were the then min­is­ter of trans­port and works, Shahine Robinson; the act­ing head of NSWMA, Colonel Allan Douglas; and Earl Patterson, [act­ing] CEO of the NWA,” Samuda said..jamaicaob​serv​er​.com.

It this sto­ry is true and from all indi­ca­tions it is, then the Jamaican peo­ple just got duped. I am not sure what the impact this pro­gramme will have on the coun­try’s unem­ploy­ment, what I do know is that the longer this pro­gramme lasts the worse off the coun­try will be. There are indi­ca­tions the Government wants this hand­out pro­gramme to run for two years , it is imper­a­tive that the gov­ern­ment lay out with speci­fici­ty what the cost will be before one gul­ly is bushed or one drain cleaned. It is impor­tant that the peo­ple are aware of how much in the hole they will be for this with noth­ing tan­gi­ble to show for it.

The clean­ing of drains,or the removal of growth from gul­lies should be either addressed with resources in the sol­id waste bud­get, or should be done with a set-asides, which deals specif­i­cal­ly with those func­tions. Those func­tions are impor­tant for secu­ri­ty rea­sons, as well as pro­tec­tion of the envi­ron­ment. However as impor­tant as they are those func­tions can­not be paid for with bor­rowed money.

How will this Government square what is a trans­par­ent act of pork bar­rel give-away with lend­ing insti­tu­tions which will stri­dent­ly demand cuts in the pub­lic sec­tor in order that the coun­try may qual­i­fy for loans? I warned that this par­ty was not a changed par­ty, I warned they had no new ideas, what they were obsessed with was attain­ing pow­er. If this is the best this par­ty has to offer the coun­try then Jamaica is in for a seri­ous time going for­ward. The tragedy in all of this many as can be seen from the blog posts feel that this is a net pos­i­tive for the coun­try, of course most of our peo­ple are inher­ent­ly inca­pable of mak­ing informed deci­sions with­out the dis­tor­tion of polit­i­cal taint.

Countries that want to be sol­vent must oper­ate like well run busi­ness­es and homes, most busi­ness­es and fam­i­lies are not allowed to car­ry deficits. If the electricity,water cable, or phone is not paid for it gets turned off. The same rules should apply to gov­ern­ment, I am not advo­cat­ing turn­ing out the lights , but gov­ern­ments should live with­in their means. If one con­tin­ue to throw mon­ey into projects which yield no returns on those invest­ments it’s just a mat­ter of time before he runs out of mon­ey. This is as sim­plis­tic as it gets, do not throw bor­rowed mon­ey away doing what ought to have been done with nor­mal resources from reg­u­lar taxation.

The PNP clear­ly had no plan to run on with the excep­tion of the Emergency Employment Programme. The ques­tion is ‚if as the Labor par­ty stat­ed it was their plan all along and that the fund­ing for it would have come from the (IDB) bor­rowed mon­ey , but not mon­ey siphoned from Infrastructural devel­ope­ment, why did the for­mer Government not acti­vate the plan? Whether this fias­co was dreamed up by the JLP,or the PNP is imma­te­r­i­al it does not mat­ter. Whether it was dreamed up to get votes,ease the unem­ploy­ment prob­lem, or as we have seen thus far, pay­ment to be doled out by politi­cians to par­ty hacks, it will be one more nail in the cof­fin of our coun­try that will sell us down the destruc­tive path of servi­tude to the resur­gent Chinese.

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JEEP = CRASH PROGRAMME:

Jamaica’s new­ly elect­ed Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller told that coun­try she is ready to launch cer­tain aspects of the Jamaica Emergency employ­ment Programme (JEEP) .Miller rode to vic­to­ry on the promise she would be using this pro­gramme much vaunt­ed by her par­ty, to pro­duce jobs for unem­ployed peo­ple in the coun­try. Simpson Miller address­ing mem­bers of the exec­u­tive coun­cil of her par­ty told them that she would like­ly launch cer­tain aspects of the pro­gramme on Wednesday of this week.

Simpson Miller Azan: MP’s to select JEEP employ­ees. Jamaicagleaner​.com

Miller went on to say that the roll out would like­ly see 700 hun­dred jobs cre­at­ed over sev­en parish­es that’s 100 jobs per parish.

What is the cri­te­ria that will be the qual­i­fi­er for secur­ing those jobs?

What kinds of jobs will they be?

Will the jobs, irre­spec­tive of kind or qual­i­ty, be doled out to par­ty hacks?

One hun­dred jobs per parish will not ease the chron­ic unem­ploy­ment in the coun­try, it is how­ev­er a step in the right direc­tion. The source of my wor­ries is not with how many jobs will be cre­at­ed, or who will get those jobs, impor­tant though those two con­sid­er­a­tions are.

HERE’S THE PROBLEM:

In January, the Government held talks with China regard­ing re-direct­ing mon­ey from funds loaned for the Jamaica Development Infrastructure Programme towards JEEP .

This is astound­ing in my esti­ma­tion, it is arguable a bad pol­i­cy that Jamaica have been pur­su­ing when it decid­ed to bor­row mon­ey from China as part of its devel­ope­ment goals, the fact is China is awash with cash and as part of any loan guar­an­tee demands that coun­tries bor­row­ing its mon­ey actu­al­ly use some chi­nese work­ers on projects in order to put Chinese work­ers to work. This is sound pol­i­cy for China , it lends mon­ey, col­lects inter­est on its mon­ey, and puts its work­ers to work, it is a win , win for China. There is real­ly not a lot of choice in this regard as unpalat­able as it is for Jamaica as it is for oth­er coun­tries like the United States. The Chinese have the cash and we need money.

AS BAD AS IT IS THOUGH

: As bad as bor­row­ing mon­ey from the Chinese and employ­ing their nation­als is, it is par­tic­u­lar­ly alarm­ing to me that now these funds will be mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed from doing tan­gi­ble infra­struc­tur­al work that will be part of the cat­a­lyst that must pro­pel Jamaica into the first world. Let me say this, this is clear and unequiv­o­cal crash pro­gramme dis­guised as some­thing else, it will be dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly giv­en to PNP sup­port­ers as pay­ment for their vote, and to buy vote for future elec­tions, this is vin­tage PNP strat­e­gy, this JEEP pro­gramme is dif­fer­ent in that we will have used the Chinese’ mon­ey we will have noth­ing to show for it , no roads no bridges, and we will be slaves to them for this money.

The coun­try’s Transport and works Minister Richard Azan revealed that Members of Parliament will play what he called an inte­gral part in select­ing employ­ees of (JEEP). Are you kid­ding me? I have been warn­ing long before the elec­tions of 2011 that Miller has no under­stand­ing of how a mar­ket econ­o­my works , she under­stands very lit­tle about what is required to pre­pare the coun­try for the 21st cen­tu­ry , as such it would be impos­si­ble for her to come up with ideas or strate­gies which would pro­pel the coun­try into the 21st cen­tu­ry. Miller under­stands the pol­i­tics of the 70’s, patron­age pol­i­tics, gar­ri­son pol­i­tics, nepo­tism, (her fam­i­ly mem­bers in her cab­i­net) she can­not help her­self that is who she is, the only prob­lem is that her time has come and gone. I stat­ed in no uncer­tain terms that this much hyped JEEP would be noth­ing more than a return of crash pro­gramme, as an Elementary school stu­dent in the 70’s, I was a wit­ness to his­to­ry, I saw the Armies of PNP sup­port­ers sit­ting on walls, rid­ing around on motor­cy­cles, and lean­ing on brooms, wait­ing for their cheques for doing noth­ing . Manley bank­rupt­ed the coun­try with this mon­ey give-away to PNP sup­port­ers .Miller is here to fin­ish the destruction.

CRASH PROGRAMME WORK CAN NEVER BE THE SOLUTION TO OUR COUNTRY’S DILEMA, IT IS PAYMENT FOR VOTES PLAIN AND SIMPLE.

As I point­ed out on many occa­sions in these blogs this is what Portia Simpson Miller was up to, it was what she cam­paigned on , it is pol­i­tics at its most base, most crass and most parochial. It wa designed to pay for votes, it is not a seri­ous attempt at job cre­ation, it is a bud­get bust­ing give-away. Money in JDIP will even­tu­al­ly run out, after all it is not an infi­nite source, bor­row­ing to build and repair infra­struc­ture is some­thing we can live with. Infrastructure built and main­tained is an asset, Politicians dol­ing out bor­rowed mon­ey to par­ty hacks as pay­ment for vot­ing for them is the most despi­ca­ble act the Miller Government could vis­it on the Jamaican peo­ple. Those who vot­ed for this gov­ern­ment are not fools, many peo­ple are hun­gry or with­out jobs. To some­one with­out a job or food on the tables it is rather appeal­ing when some­one promis­es the prospect of a job. This approach how­ev­er is an affront and a slap in the face of Jamaicans. On the face of it there seem to be legit­i­ma­cy how­ev­er when looked at in a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive there is a les­son all of us must have learned from the mis­takes of the past . Those who for­get the mis­takes they made are bound to repeat them.

Portia Simpson Miller have had 4 years after her par­ty lost to the labor par­ty to avail her­self to the real­i­ties of the 21st cen­tu­ry, crash pro­gramme hand­outs and “shar­ing man­goes with the rest of the world” can­not be the path for­ward for Jamaica. We live in the age of infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies , math and sci­ence must be in the fore­front of what we teach in our schools and uni­ver­si­ties. If our young peo­ple are going to com­pete in the world polit­i­cal lead­ers must under­stand that our peo­ple must be edu­cat­ed and pre­pared for the jobs in com­put­er engi­neer­ing, research,and writ­ing soft­ware programmes.

If the monies to be used for JEEP was not bor­rowed mon­ey I would still have prob­lem with the return of this pro­gramme to Jamaica . It is an affront and an insult to the intel­li­gence of all Jamaicans, and is noth­ing more than a cheap insult­ing abuse of the Jamaican peo­ple by cor­rupt manip­u­la­tive politi­cians who take the Jamaican peo­ple for absolute fools.

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South Carolina To Chuckie:

Gingrich won South Carolina, eas­i­ly beat­ing out Mitt Romney, the fast talk­ing Former Governor and Venture cap­i­tal­ist who pegged his cam­paign on his expe­ri­ence in the pri­vate sec­tor and what he char­ac­ter­ized as his abil­i­ty to cre­ate jobs. Much of the claims of job cre­ation made by Romney has come under scruti­ny, not by Democrats but by Romney’s Republican rivals for the nom­i­na­tion. Romney, who (if the pun­dits were to be believed) was already the pre­sump­tive nom­i­nee, now have a wake up call and was as ear­ly as Friday January 20th the day before the elec­tion seek­ing to low­er expec­ta­tions as to how he would do in South Carolina.

Romney (we were told) lit­er­al­ly had the nom­i­na­tion sewn up; after all as far as the pun­dits were con­cerned, he had tons of mon­ey, has been run­ning for pres­i­dent for years and was next in line of suc­ces­sion to be the nom­i­nee based on the Republican method of pick­ing the next guy in line to be their nom­i­nee. Now Romney may very well end up being the nom­i­nee Republicans choose to go up against President Barack Obama, but at least for one pri­ma­ry the pun­dits have been shamed into (mea cul­pa) “oops”.

Now that the pun­dits have been shamed twice, we real­ize that they do not know what will hap­pen par­tic­u­lar­ly as it relates to Gingrich. Juan Williams and Conservative icon Charles Krauthammer have been two of the pun­dits who have lit­er­al­ly said that Gingrich’s cam­paign is dead, over, yet he has risen from the dead to win South Carolina, and win it deci­sive­ly. Many, includ­ing those in the media who make a liv­ing from cri­tiquing their own pro­fes­sion (like Howard Kurtz) have exco­ri­at­ed CNN’s John King for ask­ing Newt Gingrich about his alleged infi­deli­ties at the top of the South Carolina debates.

As I have point­ed out in recent blogs, those who ques­tion John King’s deci­sion are indeed brain-dead and are will­ing to shoot the mes­sen­ger instead of address­ing the mes­sage. If King is to be crit­i­cized for any­thing it would be for fail­ing to push back , and push­ing back force­ful­ly at Gingrich for his clear and appar­ent hypocrisy for feign­ing out­rage at being asked about his ser­i­al phi­lan­der­ing when he was at the fore­front of the attack on President Clinton while he was doing exact­ly the very same thing, and indeed stat­ing to his sec­ond wife when she chal­lenged him on his hypocrisy, stat­ing quote,“peo­ple should fol­low what I say not what I do”.

The tragedy of this is that it is an age-old tact used by repub­li­can politi­cians from Nixon to Reagan, from George Bush to Gingrich to Romney they have all used the strat­e­gy of attack­ing the press to par­ry atten­tion from the issue at hand, this strat­e­gy has been per­fect­ed by Karl Rove an admir­er and pro­po­nent of Orwellian strat­a­gem Wikipedia) “(Eric Blair and can­di­date for President Newt Gingrich. South Carolinians love to boast that they pick Presidents, in fact they have giv­en wins to all repub­li­can nom­i­nees for President since Ronald Reagan. If that pat­tern holds true we would have to assume that Gingrich will be the next pres­i­dent, if that premise is cor­rect we will have to accept the fact that South Carolinian repub­li­can vot­ers who call them­selves evan­gel­i­cal Christians are will­ing to over­look the sins of a ser­i­al adul­ter­er, who was rep­ri­mand­ed and forced out of lead­er­ship in Congress because of ethics violations.

If vot­ers in South Carolina are will­ing to over­look these trans­gres­sions then it is real­ly inter­est­ing to see where the pres­i­den­cy is going and what peo­ple want their pres­i­dent to rep­re­sent. The real ques­tion to my mind is, are South Carolinians real­ly sold on Newt Gingrich’s brand of race bait­ing , media demo­niz­ing pol­i­tics, or are they des­per­ate search­ing for an anti-Romney?

The week of January 15th to 21st was one the Romney cam­paign would cer­tain­ly want to have back; their can­di­date waf­fled on whether he would release his tax returns, and when pressed waf­fled on how much of it he would release. On this alone he was booed dur­ing the debates in South Carolina. That was not all-there is the ques­tion of his sug­ges­tion that he pays about a 15% tax rate, one that is low­er than what the aver­age American pays. Then there is the issue of Romney hav­ing off-shore accounts in the Cayman Islands, and his gaffe to reporters that the well over three hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars he earned as speak­ing fees last year was quote “not a lot”. This would indi­cate that at least to some peo­ple Romney is a pho­ny and a man who is much clos­er to the 1% than the rest of us who make up the 99%.

inter­est­ing­ly, after the loss in South Carolina Mitt Romney has told the media Sunday morn­ing that he plans to release two years of tax returns. This shows that Romney real­izes this issue is going nowhere, and may have con­tributed to the drub­bing he took in South Carolina, the irony though is that Romney’s cam­paign still does not get it they feel they can skirt around the issue and peo­ple will forget.

What is Romney afraid of in his tax returns that caus­es him to be so queezy regard­ing releas­ing them in num­bers? When asked by John King if he would emu­late his father and release mul­ti­ple years of tax returns Romney stut­tered in a ram­bling exchange that drew boos from the crowd. Someone asked me why are the pun­dits not talk­ing about the fact that Gingrich was forced out of Congress, and Romney isn’t run­ning on his record as Governor of Massachuset? I told her sim­ply that this is a dog fight between repub­li­cans who real­ly are try­ing hard not to bloody each oth­er too much.

Democrats for their part refus­es, or are inca­pable of speak­ing direct­ly and con­nect­ing with the American peo­ple in the way they like to be spo­ken to in sim­ple direct terms. They speak in terms that do not con­nect with the aver­age vot­er cir­cling the issues rather than call­ing a spade a spade.This makes them seem elit­ist. They refuse to use the word “lie“if some­one tells a lie, respond­ing instead by say­ing the per­son­’s state­ment bears no rela­tion­ship with the truth”, what the hell is the prob­lem with say­ing some­one is lying if that per­son is lied? The short­est dis­tance between two points is a straight line, use that straight line to con­trast the dif­fer­ence between the record of this pres­i­dent with that of Romney who is run­ning away from his record as Governor of Massachuset, the same way their par­ty is run­ning away from for­eign pol­i­cy their tra­di­tion­al suit.

Democrats do not con­nect with vot­ers also because of the issues they embrace. America is still a coun­try that is evolv­ing as it relates to social issues, we are dif­fer­ent from Europe on many social issues, some say we are behind, I would not be that pre­sump­tu­ous to say that. Maybe Europe are to far ahead on some of those issues , peo­ple deter­mine the way they chose to live their lives. I for one though not a sup­port­er of repub­li­can poli­cies, believe mar­riage is sacro­sanct and should be reserved for a man and a woman , that does not mean that gay peo­ple should not have all the rights and priv­i­leges that every­one else enjoys. Lets just not say their union is a mar­riage, call it some­thing else.

Republicans are also more dis­ci­plined on mes­sage, they may be wrong , the sto­ry they tell may be lies but they all repeat the same refrain loy­al­ly. Democrats can­not even sup­port their own pres­i­dent, they seek out nuanced posi­tions often times try­ing to pro­tect their own cow­ard­ly back-sides. This President has not got­ten the lev­el of sup­port he needs from con­gres­sion­al democ­rats or from demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nors whom have ben­e­fit­ted from his poli­cies. They are stay­ing low watch­ing eco­nom­ic trends rather than robust­ly get­ting out there and defend­ing this pres­i­den­t’s record. Some in the con­gres­sion­al black cau­cus were seen in Jamaica at the swear­ing-in event of the PNP gov­ern­ment that just came to pow­er in that coun­try, when they should be here sup­port­ing their own pres­i­dent in the uphill strug­gle he faces.

This goes for the con­gres­sion­al black cau­cus and the new crop of black media-types,never in my life have I seen such an abun­dance of black repub­li­cans on tele­vi­sion I won­der how much the repub­li­can par­ty is pay­ing these sell­outs to dis­re­spect our first African-American pres­i­dent.(see black repub­li­can­ism in America)

Romney can­not run on his record as Governor of the lib­er­al state of Massachuset because pres­i­dent Obama has tied his health care plan in that state to the mod­el he designed for the coun­try, Romney gam­bles that his record as a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist is more ten­able that his stint as Governor. The down side to this strat­e­gy is that Romney will have to embell­ish his record as a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist ‚he paints him­self as a job cre­ator when that dis­ci­pline has very lit­tle to do with job cre­ation. This is a strat­e­gy that is bound to fall as flat as Hillary Clinton’s asser­tion to duck­ing bul­lets in the Balkans may have con­tributed to her demise in the Democratic cam­paign of 2008 against then can­di­date Obama.

Republican can­di­dates vying for their par­ty’s nom­i­na­tion has char­ac­ter­ized this as the most impor­tant elec­tion ever. Never mind that this coun­try tore itself apart in a civ­il war and that the very state that first seced­ed from the union , a trea­so­nous move in my esti­ma­tion, still flies the very sym­bol of that trea­son, the con­fed­er­ate flag over its cap­i­tal rotun­da. Romney says this elec­tion is for the heart and soul of this coun­try.www.theblaze.com/…/rom­ney-post-sc-pri­ma­ry-speech-this-…Cached

How much money is Mitt Romney worth?

Romney Gingrich

Gingrich the king of grandios­i­ty as per Rick Santorum (now lost in the shuf­fle) not to be out­done, makes the same argu­ment but with much more dra­mat­ic effect, he would not be sat­is­fied in assail­ing the pres­i­dent as a fail­ure as the oth­ers have done,he has to show he is head and shoul­ders above them using of course.…. you guessed it grandios­i­ty! He refers to the pres­i­dent as a Saul Alinsky rad­i­cal who wants to rad­i­cal­ly trans­form America.

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er and writer. He is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be the founder of mod­ern com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing, and has been com­pared to Thomas Paine as being “one of the great American lead­ers of the nonso­cial­ist left.”[4] He is often not­ed for his book Rules for Radicals.

In the course of near­ly four decades of polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing, Alinsky received much crit­i­cism, but also gained praise from many pub­lic fig­ures. His orga­niz­ing skills were focused on improv­ing the liv­ing con­di­tions of poor com­mu­ni­ties across North America. In the 1950s, he began turn­ing his atten­tion to improv­ing con­di­tions of the African-American ghet­tos, begin­ning with Chicago’s and lat­er trav­el­ing to oth­er ghet­tos in California, Michigan, New York City, and a dozen oth­er “trou­ble spots”.

Saul David Alinsky

His ideas were lat­er adapt­ed by some U.S. col­lege stu­dents and oth­er young orga­niz­ers in the late 1960s and formed part of their strate­gies for orga­niz­ing on cam­pus and beyond.[5] Time mag­a­zine once wrote that “American democ­ra­cy is being altered by Alinsky’s ideas,” and con­ser­v­a­tive author William F. Buckley said he was “very close to being an orga­ni­za­tion­al genius.”[4]Wikipedia

When Gingrich seeks to dem­a­gogue pres­i­dent Obama he is mak­ing a con­nec­tion between two Americans whom have made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to their com­mu­ni­ties , some­thing Gingrich and Republicans could well learn from. Gingrich seeks con­verse­ly to turn Alinskys con­tri­bu­tion on its head labelling them as neg­a­tives because they were most­ly aimed at improv­ing the lot of the dis­pos­sessed in Chicago in the 60’s , and attach­ing them to pres­i­dent Obama sole­ly on the basis of geog­ra­phy. When Gingrich calls the pres­i­dent a Saul Alinksy rad­i­cal he hopes that peo­ple will attach the word rad­i­cal with an east­ern European sound­ing name and with­out doing the research assign a neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tion, mark you Gingrich nev­er miss­es a oppur­tu­ni­ty to call the pres­i­dent a dan­ger­ous Saul Alinsky rad­i­cal. He how­ev­er nev­er tells you who Saul David Alinsky was and he hopes you will nev­er both­er to find out for yourselves.

Gingrich well under­stands the impact cer­tain words have on the men­tal psy­che of peo­ple , after all he har­vest­ed a litany of words which he has used to label Democrats in a demean­ing way which have stuck in some cas­es leav­ing vot­ers turned off from any­one thus labelled. The term “rad­i­cal” is not accidental,it is one of the code words they are using. Gingrich can­not run on ethics or accom­plish­ments, so he is pre­pared to run on Reagan and even Bill Clinton’s record, when that gets swat­ted away by Romney, Gingrich resorts to the ran­cid pol­i­tics of racial hatred and fear. It worked in South Carolina the epic-cen­ter of racial intol­er­ance.

Barack Obama has prob­a­bly weath­ered more to become pres­i­dent of these United States than any oth­er per­son in his­to­ry, he was labelled a rad­i­cal, inex­pe­ri­enced, not ready,naïve, and that was from democ­rats. We were told by wild-eyed Republicans that Obama was the equiv­a­lent to of Manchurian can­di­date, well we found out how much of a Manchurian can­di­date Obama turned out to be.

Ended the Iraq war:

Saw the end of Osama Bin Laden:

Saw to the sal­va­tion of the American economy:

Saved the American auto industry:

Oversaw the cre­ation of over two mil­lion jobs after los­ing three mil­lion before he could enact one pol­i­cy decision:

Appointed rea­son­able less activist judges to the supreme court:

And many more but I will pro­vide you with a link of some peo­ple of whom I am a fan, they are far more com­pe­tent and capa­ble of artic­u­lat­ing this pres­i­den­t’s achieve­ments than I ever could.3CHICSPOLITICO

President of the United States of America Barack Hussein Obama

During the gen­er­al elec­tions of 2008 repub­li­cans sought to scare Americans with Jeremiah Wright , they paint­ed Barack Obama as a wild-eyed lib­er­al who could not be trust­ed , who if elect­ed would destroy America, they made the argu­ment that Obama sat in a church as the pas­tor berat­ed and damned America, for the first time a can­di­date for pres­i­dent was being held account­able for the actions of anoth­er per­son, this prompt­ed Obama to craft and deliv­er a speech that will go down in the annals of his­to­ry as one of the most sig­nif­i­cant and soul impact­ful speech in the his­to­ry of this coun­try. (God said he would turn what one’s ene­mies has craft­ed for evil to the ben­e­fit of those who trust him). In fair­ness democ­rats stood on the side­lines, and skirt­ed the issue rather than stand for some­thing and be count­ed , this includes even some in his cab­i­net as we speak. Many of those who vot­ed as pub­lic offi­cials not to have a day des­ig­nat­ed in hon­or of Dr. King are now some of the first to invoke his name when they try to appeal for support.

None of those who exco­ri­at­ed Jeremiah Wright both­ered to men­tion that this man is a patri­ot who served his coun­try in the US Marine corps, then lat­er the US Navy, after which he accom­plished a laud­able string of aca­d­e­m­ic accomplishments .

In 1967 Wright enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a bach­e­lor’s degree in 1968 and a master’s degree in English in 1969. He also earned a mas­ter’s degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School.[11] Wright holds a Doctor of Ministry degree (1990) from the United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, where he stud­ied under Samuel DeWitt Proctor, a men­tor to Martin Luther King, Jr.[16]Wikipedia.

Jeremiah Wright served his country in war when most of the those who criticised and demonized him cowardly hid behind deferments and other acts of cowardice in order to avoid going to war. That includes Gingrich and Romney , who now wants America to believe they are bulwarks of conservatism, these jokers all of them with the exception of Perry and Paul who served ‚talk a good game about Military action , flexing their muscle and threatening military action if they are elected president. They are quite willing to have someone else do the killing and risk getting killed, as long as they are not the ones doing any of the lifting. 

As this pri­ma­ry sea­son con­tin­ues the strate­gies will dif­fer from state to state, Gingrich has shown that his strat­e­gy will be to dem­a­gogue minori­ties and the press,and say what he thinks res­i­dents of each state wants him to say. He will also mage grand promis­es, as Santorum labeled him grandiose, Gingrich will con­tin­ue to appeal to the most base instincts of the far­thest right of the repub­li­can par­ty. Romney seem­ing shell-shocked at his loss in South Carolina will con­tin­ue to try to ignore Gingrich, attack­ing the pres­i­dent with his froth­ing mouth full of lies and mis-state­ments. As Romney spends more and more money,Gingrich will con­tin­ue to present him­self as the attack dog red state repub­li­cans who hate Obama are look­ing for. The prob­lem with that strat­e­gy is the fur­ther to the right Gingrich forces Romney as he posi­tions him­self, is the far­ther they move away from rea­son­able vot­ers in the middle.

Can any­one say sec­ond term mis­ter president?

.

by

Race Baiting, Blame The Media, Typical Republican Strategy Lies And More Lies:

In the week that Republican Candidate Newt Gingrich is expe­ri­enc­ing his sec­ond life in this cam­paign, and prob­a­bly lucky for him just before the South Carolina debates, his sec­ond wife Marianne told ABC news that Gingrich want­ed her to have an open mar­riage, a pro­pos­al she was not par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of. Gingrich has been mar­ried three times, he has been accused of infi­deli­ty and even have been said to have served one of his wives with divorce papers whilst she was sick in hospital.

Newt Gingrich:

It is rather inter­est­ing, the hypocrisy of Republicans and in par­tic­u­lar those in South Carolina who cheered rau­cous­ly when Gingrich launched into a sanc­ti­mo­nious attempt at faux out­rage at CNN’s John King who had the audac­i­ty to open the debates by ask­ing Gingrich about what his wife said about him. http://​Youtube​.com

John King, USA

King’s por­trait cour­tesy of face​book​.com

Newt Gingrich was at the tip of the spear seek­ing to sear President Clinton for hav­ing a sex­u­al dal­liance with a White House Intern dur­ing his time in office. It is rather hyp­o­crit­i­cal of Gingrich and the oth­er mem­bers of that Congress who made a humon­gous deal about what President Clinton did, almost plung­ing the coun­try into a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis, yet the same peo­ple are quite will­ing to look away and make lame excus­es for what Gingrich is accused to have done to his pre­vi­ous wives, and the alle­ga­tions made against him about infi­deli­ty. There is no short­age of lying hyp­ocrites parad­ing as chris­t­ian evan­gel­i­cals who are on tele­vi­sion argu­ing that Gingrich’s ser­i­al infi­deli­ty as they are alleged, are sub­ject to God’s grace and for­give­ness, as of course they are. It is no won­der that these same peo­ple who speak about being chris­tians, and espouse the foun­da­tion­al prin­ci­ples of for­give­ness and grace did not have any for­give­ness for President Clinton. These same peo­ple who talk about being chris­tians and extol the sanc­ti­ty of life, will defend an embryo, they will defend a sperm but they will not defend a black or col­ored baby. What Christ are they talk­ing about, What God do they wor­ship? Every elec­tion cycle the media con­tin­ue the talk­ing points of these peo­ple by call­ing them evan­gel­i­cal chris­t­ian, is it any won­der that peo­ple are turned away from chris­tian­i­ty and reli­gion on a whole, when these are the faces of christianity.

Newt Gingrich was aware of the kind of peo­ple in that room in South Carolina, he was pre­pared for John King ask­ing him that ques­tion, he had that answer irre­spec­tive of the time King asked him about alle­ga­tions of his infi­deli­ty. Gingrich was equal­ly aware of the kind of audi­ence when he lam­bast­ed Juan Williams for dar­ing to ask him about con­tin­u­al­ly sug­gest­ing that poor minor­i­ty kids should be jan­i­tors. He was equal­ly aware when he allowed the woman at the cam­paign stop to com­pli­ment him for quote putting Juan Williams in his place..youtube​.com.

As despi­ca­ble as Gingrich’s racial pos­tur­ing is, the oth­er jok­ers com­pet­ing for the Republican nom­i­na­tion are just as excit­ed to release what seem to be pent-up racial ani­mos­i­ty toward black peo­ple and pres­i­dent Obama in par­tic­u­lar. Mitt Romney the media ele­vat­ed front-run­ner would not be out done in his attempt to show his con­ser­vatism. Seeking to impress the crowd Romney tells debate crowd hun­gry for blood he would stuff attacks down pres­i­dent Obama’s throat. In the all out attempt to dis­re­spect this pres­i­dent Gingrich told one man who said he want­ed Gingrich to bloody President Obama’s nose to which Gingrich stat­ed ‘I do not intend to bloody Barack Obama’s nose I intend to knock him out”.

This part gets my blood boil­ing because whether hypo­thet­i­cal­ly or lit­er­al­ly , nei­ther of these two are capa­ble of doing what they pro­fess to do to this black man so let’s get that out in the open, so both these jok­ers can stop with the non­sense. This elec­tion will be a knock down dragged out dirty one, President Obama will have to wage a cam­paign that exceeds the scope of the one he waged to win the pres­i­den­cy, if you thought Republicans were des­per­ate in 2007 , they will be even more so in 2012 , they will use all the dirty tricks, lies, dis­tor­tions and fab­ri­ca­tions at their dis­pos­al, not only will he have to deal with whomev­er wins the repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion , he will have to deal with the incred­i­bly wealthy, pow­er­ful peo­ple who want him gone so they can return to the days of no reg­u­la­tion and cor­po­rate wel­fare. They are capa­ble and all too will­ing to put tens of mil­lions of dol­lars into super pacs in an attempt to destroy this pres­i­dent and his record.

Two of the most pow­er­ful of the donors against Obama are the bil­lion­aire Koch Brothers who are some of the filthy rich who are bank rolling Tea Party cam­paign against work­ing peo­ple in this coun­try.It’s time that ordi­nary peo­ple push back against these mega rich peo­ple who are dis­dain­ful of ordi­nary work­ing peo­ple who con­sume their prod­ucts in our homes dai­ly with­out even real­iz­ing it.

SOME OF THE COMPANIES OWNED BY THE KOCH BROTHERS

Angel soft toi­let paper : Brawny paper tow­els : Dixie plates, bowls, nap­kins and cups :mar­di gras napkins:Quilted noth­ern toi­let paper: soft and gen­tle toi­let paper:Sparkle and van­i­ty fair napkins:Georgia pacif­ic paper products:Georgia pacif­ic lum­ber and build­ing prod­ucts: Stainmaster carpet:Lycra.

We have to take a stand, lets take advan­tage of the pow­er of our mon­ey, they are tak­ing advan­tage of the pow­er of their mon­ey, let us start with these prod­ucts and as we do our research let us hurt them where it mat­ters most , in their pock­et books, let’s tell them where to go with their products.

by

Crime Trending Upward ^

MURDERS IN JANUARY SPIKE BY 140 PERCENT:

jamaica​glean​er​.com

Read sto­ry at link pro­vid­ed above

The Jamaica dai­ly glean­er blared this head­line today Wednesday January 18th 2012. 

This sto­ry was post­ed to that medi­um’s web­site at 1:29 pm Jan. 18. 2012, At about the same time this sto­ry was being post­ed , I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a cou­ple of my fel­low Jamaicans, one of whom raised the issue of the huge spike in homi­cides since the begin­ning of the year.I was shocked to learn from my friend that the com­mon theme on the streets in Jamaica is now that the “crim­i­nals are in pow­er so it’s any­thing goes” I have writ­ten exten­sive­ly and expan­sive­ly on the sub­ject of crime in Jamaica but I was stunned to hear that this is actu­al­ly the mind­set on the streets. My friend told me that his sis­ter tells him that things have sud­den­ly turned around for the worse to what they were before the raid on Tivoli, and gun­men are return­ing to the streets unafraid.

For the first 7 days 30 peo­ple were slaugh­tered, I will speak briefly on the com­ments of the com­mis­sion­er but first, “whether or not some or all of those killed believed in the rule of law or not , the mil­lion dol­lar ques­tion is real­ly were there strin­gent mea­sures in place that seri­ous­ly deal with mur­ders would­nt at least some of them be alive”?

If the answer is at best.….….….. maybe, aren’t the Jamaican peo­ple then vot­ing against their best inter­est at least on the issue of crime.

I thought it was inter­est­ing that Jamaicans would sac­ri­fice their safe­ty on the altar of being able to “eat a food”  

Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington

Commissioner of Police Ellington argues that his Department has man­aged to cut the spike from a 140% spike to 17% over the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od last year. I guess he means for the sec­ond week the num­bers have lev­elled off to a 17% over­all spike over the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od last year. Ellington attrib­ut­es this less fright­en­ing num­ber of 17% over a two-week spread as against 140% over a one week peri­od, the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od last year, to increased oper­a­tions and cur­fews by his depart­ment. If the log­ic of the com­mis­sion­er is to be believed the JCF would need a force of approx­i­mate­ly four times its present size to keep the cur­fews intact round the clock in order to return Jamaica to a place where mur­ders are at a min­i­mum. That would not include domes­tic mur­ders which Police rarely have con­trol over, and if that was the case Jamaica would be a place under per­pet­u­al mar­tial law.

What was instruc­tive in the com­mis­sion­er’s assess­ment was that the same method of polic­ing that was being employed when I served in the eight­ies to ear­ly nineties is the same method of polic­ing that is in place today. I thought that we would have grad­u­at­ed from the method­ol­o­gy of cur­fews and large oper­a­tions ‚which real­ly say to peo­ple “they don’t know what they are look­ing for” , to a more tar­get­ed intel­li­gence based, low col­lat­er­al pin-point approach.

But even if the coun­try had a bet­ter sys­tem of Policing at its dis­pos­al, even if we had a bet­ter sys­tem of jus­tice which puts crim­i­nals away , in jail where they belong, how do we han­dle a mind­set in which arguably a plu­ral­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion sup­ports crim­i­nal­i­ty as a way of life , (or at best sup­ports an under­hand­ed unlaw­ful hus­tle) as a means of putting food on their table? Many will argue that there is no such plu­ral­i­ty as only about 48% of the elec­torate vot­ed in the past elec­tion! that num­ber though fac­tu­al­ly cor­rect con­ceals the fact that the major­i­ty of the elec­torate resort­ed to apa­thy and did not both­er to par­tic­i­pate. But a no vote for some­thing is a default vote for the oppo­si­tion, each and every vot­er ought to know what’s at stake comes elec­tion time. Every elec­tor must know what he or she is vot­ing for or against, and as such not par­tic­i­pat­ing in their democ­ra­cy removes them from seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion as citizens.

As I have stat­ed in these blogs on many pre­vi­ous occa­sions, crime will con­tin­ue to increase in Jamaica under this Administration, it will fright­en investors away, and it will crip­ple the econ­o­my which depends pri­mar­i­ly on Tourism, and sec­on­dar­i­ly on remit­tance (hand­outs )from Jamaicans liv­ing abroad. Both means of for­eign exchange inflow has already slowed down due large­ly to eco­nom­ic con­di­tions in The United States and Europe , which sees less tourists vis­it­ing the coun­try and less dis­pos­able income avail­able to Jamaican immi­grants liv­ing in oth­er countries.

by

The Raw Facts About The Republican Party’s Race Problem:

Tony Perkins President of the Family research Council and the entire length and breath of the Republican food chain has per­fect­ed the argu­ment of , ” DEFEATING BARACK OBAMA AND RESTORING AMERICA TO IT’S FOUNDING PRINCIPLES” Let’s talk about the cod­ed lan­guage being used in the elec­tion cam­paign, even as we cel­e­brate the life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Newt Gingrich

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As a blog­ger and a news hound, I watch Television,(well most­ly lis­ten) as I am always busy, I vis­it web­sites, lis­ten to radio, and read blogs, all with a view of get­ting a feel for the essence of real­ly what’s hap­pen­ing in the world, and as much as pos­si­ble be able to free myself from the shack­les of the pack­aged prod­uct that pass­es for news the major media hous­es feeds us, under the assump­tion that we are unable to fig­ure things out for ourselves.

Cris Matthews host of MSNBC Hardball speak­ing to the issue of racial code words on Andrea Mitchell Reports on Tuesday January 17th , Matthews said suc­cinct­ly “it’s not some­thing you can sen­si­tize some­one to, either you see it or you choose not to see it because you don’t want to” Matthews point­ed to a cou­ple of instance where it was done in pre­vi­ous elec­tion cycles and even though it was there , some argue that oth­ers who men­tioned it were mak­ing much ado about noth­ing. So the ques­tion to you my read­ers is this , Is there a cod­ed lan­guage that is being used by white can­di­dates when they speak to cer­tain sec­tions of the vot­ing pub­lic, usu­al­ly all white audi­ences like the Lilly white audi­ence in Myrtle Beach South Carolina?

Well let’s take a look, There is a com­mon thread that runs through all in the repub­li­can par­ty when they refer to President Obama They call him ‘Barack Obama” Now as Cris Matthews said, one can choose to ignore this and pre­tend that it is nor­mal or one could see it for what it real­ly is a means of de-legit­imis­ing the pres­i­den­cy of This pres­i­dent . This has caught on with even some in the media who have delved, some of them unwit­ting­ly, into the Barack Obama new speak, with­out real­iz­ing that is exact­ly what those who are still fight­ing the civ­il war wants. This is part of a cam­paign aimed at de-legit­imiz­ing the president.

CODE SPEAK .

(1)Barack Obama:

(2)Food stamp President:

(3)The issue of the President’s birth certificate: 

(4) Election is for the soul of America:

(5) European social­ist:

Opponents of this pres­i­dent speak about get­ting rid of Barack Obama and restor­ing America to it’s val­ues, what val­ues are they talk­ing about ? Are they refer­ring to the val­ues on dis­play in that crowd in South Carolina on Monday night? that shame­ful dis­play shows once and for all a State that still couch­es it’s racial hatred in codes and rau­cous applause when Newt Gingrich stat­ed that in New York a jan­i­tor could be fired and many kids hired to fill their space , he stat­ed it would put mon­ey in their pock­ets. Of course this nean­derthal makes no ref­er­ence to how these stu­dents would han­dle work­ing and going to school, or maybe he does­n’t feel that poor minor­i­ty chil­dren should go to school,maybe Gingrich is actu­al­ly try­ing to cre­ate a per­ma­nent class of jan­ti­tors . Wasn’t that the rea­son blacks were exe­cut­ed if they were caught read­ing or learn­ing to read dur­ing slav­ery?

What is instruc­tive about Republican crowds is that they want a gay sol­dier to die because he did not have any insur­ance, they want pris­on­ers on death row to be fried. The demeanor of the crowd in South Carolina was par­tic­u­lar­ly telling when Juan Williams asked Gingrich whether he was­n’t seek­ing to belit­tle peo­ple, ref­er­enc­ing the issue of Gingrich’s pro­posed pol­i­cy of mak­ing minor­i­ty kids jan­i­tors, he said first of all “Juan” then wait­ed for applause from the igno­rant racist crowd, before he pro­ceed­ed into his dia­tribe about Barack Obama being the food stamp pres­i­dent. He used William’s name the way they used the name Barack Hussein Obama in a con­text that is intend­ed to demean, telling their white sup­port­ers he is not one of us , he is “oth­er”. That first part of the sen­tence ” first of all Juan”,( code speak) then wait­ing for the applause from the crowd that says to him, “we get it , you put him in his place”

On the day that the nation cel­e­brat­ed the life and work of the great­est icon for social jus­tice in many life­times Martin Luther King Jr. Republican can­di­date for pres­i­dent Newt Gingrich sought to demean and belit­tle black peo­ple by being open­ly hos­tile and dis­mis­sive of a black Journalist in the State of South Carolina. Despite this trag­ic affront and the con­tin­u­a­tion of it there are still blacks in this coun­try who feel that they should be defend­ers of these repug­nant vile crea­tures that parade as human beings who con­tin­ue to spread this tox­ic brand of hatred. Republican strate­gist Ron Christie a black Republican who worked in for­mer vice pres­i­den­t’s Dick Cheney’s office char­ac­ter­ized Gingrich’s vile behav­ior as quote “a clum­sy attempt to explain some­thing that is true”

Republican strate­gist and for­mer Cheney deputy assis­tant Ron Christie:See blog titled black repub­li­can­ism about how we feel about the Ron Christie’s of this world. 

Republican can­di­dates for pres­i­dent are not restrained this cycle in using overt racism in their quest for polit­i­cal pow­er, they want to get rid of this Democratic pres­i­dent, how­ev­er they want to get rid of the black pres­i­dent much more. They have been pre­pared from the inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Obama to use what­ev­er tac­tics they see fit to remove Obama from office. This is not all they are using, it is just one tool in their tool kit of dirty tricks, to include, fraud­u­lent argu­ments of vot­er fraud in order to enact leg­is­la­tion in sev­er­al states that makes it dif­fi­cult for minori­ties to vote . Santorum nailed Mitt Romney on the ques­tion of why peo­ple who have paid their debt to soci­ety should not being allowed to vote, Romney stat­ed he does­n’t believe that peo­ple who com­mit vio­lent crimes should be allowed to vote, this got Romney thun­der­ous applause from the Lilly white St Carolina crowd. Never mind that as Governor of Massachusetts Romney did noth­ing to stop peo­ple on parole from voting.

It is instruc­tive that as we cel­e­brat­ed the birth­day of Dr. King the Confederate flag still flies over the cap­i­tal rotun­da in South Carolina, and as the Confederate flag flies over the rotun­da, A crowd of racist seces­sion­ists booed a black jour­nal­ist as he sim­ply sought to do his job. 

Rather instruc­tive about where the soul of this repub­li­can par­ty real­ly is, as if there was ever any doubt.

UPDATE

A woman con­grat­u­lat­ed Newt Gingrich at a cam­paign stop in St. Carolina today,here’s what she said “Speaker Gingrich I would like to con­grat­u­late you for putting mis­ter Juan Williams in his place last night“the crowd erupt­ed into thun­der­ous applause while Gingrich basked in the glow and adu­la­tion from the crowd, after the applause died down Gingrich nod­ded his head and told the woman smil­ing­ly “thank you, thank you.

Never once did he repu­di­ate the lan­guage, nev­er once did he repu­di­ate the notion , nev­er once did he say it was nev­er his inten­tion to put Williams in his place. Perry, Santorum, Paul, and Romney stood on that stage in South Carolina as Newt Gingrich dem­a­gogue black peo­ple, and dis­missed a black Journalist to sus­tained and rau­cous laugh­ter and applause, not one of them stopped Gingrich or object­ed to his vile and dis­re­spect­ful brand of pos­tur­ing, as such the nom­i­nee of this par­ty should be held respon­si­ble for Gingrich’s actions.

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Reality Versus Rhetoric:

The new gov­ern­ment of Jamaica missed a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty after its vic­to­ry at the polls on December 29th 2011, to show the coun­try that it had reformed and that it now under­stands the glob­al eco­nom­ic con­di­tions fac­ing coun­tries that were tra­di­tion­al eco­nom­ic pow­er­hous­es like the United States and France, much less small depen­dent coun­tries like Jamaica.Portia could not resist the urge to reward the par­ty faith­ful, so she opt­ed to cre­ate a cab­i­net that was larg­er than the cab­i­net of her pre­de­ces­sor Bruce Golding , which she stri­dent­ly crit­i­cized as too large and exces­sive. What is it that makes her feel that it is quite ok for her to do the very thing she so vehe­ment­ly, and stri­dent­ly crit­i­cized when the shoe was on the oth­er foot one would ask? Well those who under­stand Jamaican pol­i­tics will tell you her par­ty is the par­ty which arro­gant­ly believes that they alone should gov­ern the coun­try, and as such has labeled our coun­try PNP coun­try. On that phi­los­o­phy they are much like the American Republican Party which demands that Democrats irre­spec­tive of their man­date giv­en them by the elec­torate, must acqui­esce to their every demand on pol­i­cy. To them elec­tions have no con­se­quence, such is the men­tal­i­ty of the Peoples National Party.

Swiss finan­cial ser­vices com­pa­ny UBS has recent­ly warned investors to stay away from Jamaica for now because of the change of Government and utter­ances made by the leadership,and as it relates to its rela­tion­ship with the International Monetary fund. The warn­ing cement­ed what is a well-known fact that this par­ty that has now formed the gov­ern­ment has always been hos­tile to for­eign invest­ments and that it refus­es to hon­or inter­na­tion­al oblig­a­tions entered into by its pre­de­ces­sors. In a syn­op­sis UBS said, “The debt tar­gets “will require sig­nif­i­cant and sus­tained fis­cal effort through tough tax increas­es, expen­di­ture con­trol, includ­ing unpop­u­lar cuts in pub­lic employ­ment, as well as divest­ing loss-mak­ing state companies,” .

It will be inter­est­ing to see how this state­ment and the agree­ment in place with the International Monetary Fund squares with the much vaunt­ed JEEP which Miller and her par­ty rode to vic­to­ry at the polls. The eco­nom­ic real­i­ties fac­ing the coun­try is the same as for most coun­tries in Europe and oth­er parts of the world , these real­i­ties require that gov­ern­ments take seri­ous hard looks at their economies and make tough nesc­ssary adjust­ments in order to main­tain some degree of sol­ven­cy. As unpalat­able as these deci­sions are they are nesces­sary and must be insti­tut­ed. Jamaica is a devel­op­ing coun­try still in the pro­cess­ing of estab­lish­ing a work­able tax­a­tion sys­tem, to date the coun­try still has a tax sys­tem that large­ly pres­sures Government work­ers with the bulk of small busi­ness peo­ple pay­ing no tax­es, or at worst cheats the sys­tem blind. My point of dis­agree­ment with UBS is with it’s con­clu­sion that tax increas­es must be part of the solu­tion. Tax increas­es will not solve the prob­lem what we need is a widen­ing of the tax net to bring into com­pli­ance all those who aren’t pay­ing their fair share. Taxing those who are already pay­ing at a higer rate will actu­al­ly con­strict the tax base and result in less tax­es collected.

Other coun­tries like Italy, Greece and Spain are also hav­ing seri­ous eco­nom­ic trou­bles which require some aus­ter­i­ty. Renowned Economist, New York Times Columnist and Princeton Professor Paul Krugman feels that gov­ern­ment have a role to play in inject­ing cap­i­tal into these trou­bled economies rather than adopt­ing belt-tight­en­ing mea­sures that even­tu­al­ly shrinks economies and in his view makes the prob­lem worse.

Bruce Golding Simpson Miller

As was to be expect­ed the Government of Portia Simpson Miller did not learn any­thing beyond a craven and rapa­cious desire for pow­er. Once again the Intellectual Elites and oth­er parts of civ­il soci­ety to include the cler­gy, bar asso­ci­a­tion, media and oth­er groups are gid­dy with excite­ment at the ascen­sion of Miller to the Prime Minister’s perch for a sec­ond time in less than five years. Many are ecsta­t­ic that she has once again tak­en the reins of pow­er, assail­ing any­one who dare sug­gest she is unqual­i­fied for the job, their most read­i­ly avail­able label for dis­senters are sex­ist, and elit­ist. The truth is, Jamaica may very well not be the most sophis­ti­cat­ed coun­try to gov­ern, but irre­spec­tive of the lack of sophis­ti­ca­tion in a coun­try that size, she still is func­tion­al­ly inca­pable of mak­ing the best deci­sions that would give the coun­try max­i­mum chance in any giv­en sit­u­a­tion. Those who wor­ship at the altar of “SisterP” as she is called, have a legit­i­mate argu­ment to make when they cel­e­brate her for climb­ing from the bot­tom of the work­ing class, to the high­est elect­ed office in the land, that is no easy feat in Jamaica, a coun­try still steeped in post colo­nial caste demar­ca­tions. Noble though those argu­ments are they are not qual­i­fi­ca­tions for astute lead­er­ship at that level.

Our coun­try can ill afford to waste anoth­er 18 1⁄2 years while the rest of the world march­es sted­fast­ly into first world sta­tus while we con­tin­ue with failed poli­cies of social exper­i­men­ta­tion. Miller though hav­ing won 42 seats to the LaborParty’s 21 must be very care­ful not to inter­pret her man­date as carte blanche to dis­re­spect the very peo­ple who put her in pow­er, as she clear­ly did with that in your face extra large exec­u­tive. She would be well advised that only forty eight per­cent of the elec­torate even both­ered to turn up at the polls , so the peo­ple who both­ered were those who were solid­ly in her cor­ner to begin with. Voter apa­thy this cycle stemmed large­ly from their dis­af­fec­tion with the actions of Golding who did sig­nif­i­cant harm to the par­ty of Bustamante .

See the achieve­ments of the Jamaica Labor Party at link pro­vid­ed below.

http://​www​.jamaical​abour​par​ty​.com/​b​a​se/

Sir Alexander Bustamante Edward Seaga

In order to take advan­tage of any sit­u­a­tion one must first under­stand that sit­u­a­tion, she hasn’t always demon­strat­ed that she under­stands the issues. After a tumul­tuous two terms in pow­er begin­ning in 1972 and cul­mi­nat­ing in 1980 Michael Manley was uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly kicked out of office, for what every­one but the cultist that sup­port that par­ty will tell you was gross in mis­un­der­stand­ing of world affairs. Manley after his lop­sided 51 to 9 seat defeat refused to con­test the snap elec­tions the Labor par­ty of Edward Seaga called toward the end of 1983. This unprece­dent­ed move gave the labor par­ty con­trol of all seats in the Parliament, Seaga was forced to appoint 8 Independent Senators to form an oppo­si­tion of sorts because of the pos­ture of the enti­tled PNP led by Michael Manley, whose response was to label the gov­ern­ment “ bogus”

Norman Manley Michael Manley

Manley for the most part between 1983 and 1989 trav­elled and did speak­ing engage­ments in the United States and Britain. He returned to con­test the Elections of 1989 and was prompt­ly returned to Office after soft­en­ing his social­ist rhetoric. Manley’s win in 1989 was the begin­ning of an unprece­dent­ed 18 1⁄2 year unbro­ken hold on pow­er that saw him step­ping away and hand­ing the reins to his deputy Percival James Patterson because of ill-health.

  • That 18 ½ year PNP run saw crime esca­lat­ing to a stag­ger­ing pro­por­tions, each year seem­ing worse than the one before record­ing an aver­age 1600 mur­ders annu­al­ly. This does not mean that Manley did not have an impres­sive pro­gres­sive agen­da of accomplishments.
  • The low­er­ing of the min­i­mum vot­ing age to 18 years.
  • The intro­duc­tion of equal pay for women.[3]
  • The intro­duc­tion of mater­ni­ty leave.[3]
  • The out­law­ing of the stig­ma of ille­git­i­ma­cy.[3]
  • The abo­li­tion of Masters and Servants Act.[3]
  • A Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act which pro­vid­ed work­ers and their trade unions with enhanced rights.[3]
  • The estab­lish­ment of the National Housing Trust, which pro­vid­ed “the means for most employed peo­ple to own their own homes,” and great­ly stim­u­lat­ed hous­ing con­struc­tion, with more than 40,000 hous­es built between 1974 and 1980.[3]
  • The intro­duc­tion of free edu­ca­tion at pri­ma­ry, sec­ondary, and ter­tiary lev­els.[4]
  • The intro­duc­tion of sub­sidised meals, trans­porta­tion and uni­forms for school­child­ren from dis­ad­van­taged back­grounds.[4]
  • The intro­duc­tion of spe­cial employ­ment pro­grammes.[5]
  • The intro­duc­tion of pro­grammes designed to com­bat illit­er­a­cy.[5]
  • Increases in pen­sions and poor relief.[6]
  • The intro­duc­tion of a work­er’s par­tic­i­pa­tion pro­gramme.[7]
  • The pas­sage of a new men­tal health law.[8]
  • The intro­duc­tion of the fam­i­ly court.[8]
  • An increase in youth train­ing.[8]
  • A reform of local gov­ern­ment tax­a­tion.[8]
  • An upgrad­ing of hos­pi­tals.[9]
  • The intro­duc­tion of free health care for all Jamaicans.[9]
  • The estab­lish­ment of health clin­ics and a para­med­ical sys­tem in rur­al areas.[9]
  • The estab­lish­ment of var­i­ous clin­ics to facil­i­tate access to med­ical drugs.[9]
  • A sig­nif­i­cant increase in spend­ing on edu­ca­tion.[9]
  • An increase in the num­ber of doc­tors and den­tists in the coun­try.[9]
  • An expan­sion of day care cen­tres.[9]
  • The intro­duc­tion of Project Lend Lease, an agri­cul­tur­al pro­gramme designed to pro­vide rur­al labour­ers and small hold­ers with more land through ten­an­cy.[7]
  • The intro­duc­tion of a National Youth Service Programme for high school grad­u­ates to teach in schools, voca­tion­al train­ing, and the lit­er­a­cy pro­gramme.[7]
  • The intro­duc­tion of com­pre­hen­sive rent and price con­trols.[7]
  • The intro­duc­tion of sub­si­dies on basic food items (1973).[7]
  • The intro­duc­tion of pro­tec­tion for work­ers against unfair dis­missal.[7]
  • List tak­en from Wikipedia

These are difficult times , excesses, waste, and pay for play can no longer be the order of the day, politicians cannot fatten themselves at the expense of taxpayers while further condemning generations yet unborn to a life of poverty. I urge this Administration to empower the Office of Contractor General in the interest of the Jamaica people. I will not hold my breath however for this administration to do anything but fatten itself and it’s friends as it has always done with a spirt of entitlement. 

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TOURISM AND CRIME:

Two sto­ries emerged out of Jamaica in the Daily Gleaner of Wednesday 11th 2012 that ought to scare Jamaicans wher­ev­er they are domiciled.

(1MoBay firms suf­fer as cruise ship arrivals drop.Jamaicagleaner​.com.

(2)Gangs still a prob­lem – Ellington.radio@​gleanerjm.​com

At the risk of sound­ing like an alarmist, I point out these two events as I believe they are inex­orably linked. I am also sor­ry to say I point­ed this out before but…. I have. Last year Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington stout­ly declared he had charged his com­man­ders to come up with com­pre­hen­sive plans to dis­man­tle the gangs oper­at­ing with­in their com­mands.

See blog: July 21, 2011 By: mike6470 Filed in: General News

On the occa­sion Commissioner Owen Ellington made the call to his com­man­ders I gave my unso­licit­ed opin­ion, that call would do noth­ing to alle­vi­ate the Criminal Gang prob­lem with­in the coun­try. Almost a year lat­er we have seen a change of Government and unfor­tu­nate­ly the Commissioner of Police is stat­ing as I expect­ed, Gangs are still a prob­lem” I point­ed out in blog posts (in green) above that there were a pletho­ra of rea­sons why this was a fish­ing expe­di­tion by the Commissioner, not least of which is the fact that most of his com­man­ders have no train­ing in deal­ing with gangs, and on that basis alone the call to action was bound to fail.

Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington

But more than any short­com­ings that may be in the secu­ri­ty forces, are sig­nif­i­cant fail­ures of lead­er­ship, will, or desire to do any­thing about that prob­lem. Before Christopher Coke was extra­dit­ed to the United States, the Labor par­ty Government of Bruce Golding showed that despite the argu­ments he advanced in sup­port of his deci­sion to inter­vene, he was pre­pared to put the country’s cred­i­bil­i­ty on the line in order to pro­tect an accused drug dealer/​gun run­ner. Then Prime Minister Golding stat­ed that he was sim­ply pro­tect­ing the rights of a Jamaican cit­i­zen. That argu­ment would have been a noble argu­ment had his and oth­er Administrations not sat back and observe oth­er Jamaicans of less noto­ri­ety being shipped off to the United States to face tri­al. Anyone privy to my views will attest to the fact that I do not speak for peo­ple extra­dit­ed, nei­ther do I hold water for them, I mere­ly point­ed to Golding’s inter­fer­ence into a mat­ter that ought to have been left where it belonged, in the courts. To my mind and that of a lot of oth­er peo­ple, his actions amount­ed to unmit­i­gat­ed crim­i­nal support.

The oth­er party,the People’s National Party which was just returned to pow­er on December 29th of 2011 was in oppo­si­tion then , they made a point of rid­ing that issue until it cul­mi­nat­ed into Coke being extra­dit­ed to the United States, on the face of it one could rea­son­ably argue that was a good thing for Jamaica, well not so fast. There were explic­it un-intend­ed con­se­quences as a result of what was a bla­tant act of polit­i­cal pos­tur­ing by Portia Simpson Miller and her par­ty. Seventy three peo­ple were killed in Tivoli Gardens, and crime went down 40% up to the end of the labor party’s term.

The most egre­gious act the PNP did was to deny the secu­ri­ty forces addi­tion­al time to fight crim­i­nal ter­ror­ists hell-bent on the destruc­tion of the Jamaican state. The very per­son now in charge of the secu­ri­ty appa­ra­tus Peter Buntin stat­ed that they would not vote to give the police and Army addi­tion­al time to go after ter­ror­ists because they may abuse cit­i­zens rights, Really?  

Peter Buntin National Security Minister

IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THE WORLD UNDERSTAND THAT THE PEOPLE’S NATIONAL PARTY NOW THE GOVERNMENT IN JAMAICA REFUSED TO VOTE TO GIVE THE COUNTRY’S SECURITY FORCES ADDITIONAL TIME TO CHASE DOWN TERRORISTS AND EXTERMINATE THEM,WHILST THEY WERE IN OPPOSITION ON THE PRETEX THAT THE SECURITY FORCE (MAY) ABUSE CITIZENS RIGHTS.

Portia Lucretia Simpson Miller, PM.

For a long time when the ques­tion of tourism in the Caribbean came up Jamaica came to mind, and in par­tic­u­lar Montego Bay. Successive Administrations of both par­ties did lit­tle to improve the prod­uct, so though quaint Montego Bay was, it was just a mat­ter of time before it lost its appeal and charm, that time is here. As a young offi­cer I spent, many hours on that strip from Walter Fletcher beach to Sam Sharpe square chas­ing down pros­ti­tutes, male and female and arrest­ing drug deal­ers. There nev­er was a com­pre­hen­sive plan to erad­i­cate small offences, and I’m still uncon­vinced that the polit­i­cal direc­torate or the police hier­ar­chy under­stood the need to devel­op a per­ma­nent strat­e­gy. The end result is that Montego Bay was allowed to decay, today the sec­ond city is a lit­er­al eye-sore with many a cruise ship pas­sen­gers con­fid­ing in me that they do not get off the ship when it docks in that city. The envi­rons of Montego Bay is lit­tered with shan­ty towns and gangs run wild. It can­not be a good thing when the pri­ma­ry tourism attrac­tion is almost ringed by shan­ty towns where police and sol­diers are engaged in gun bat­tles some­times for hours on end.

Jamaica’s num­ber one for­eign exchange earn­er is tourism, it would occur to any sane plan­ner that secu­ri­ty would nec­es­sar­i­ly be on the front burn­er of any gov­ern­ment, well as we have seen the Labor Party of Bruce Golding was quite pre­pared to go to bat for a known crim­i­nal and this new Government pop­u­lat­ed with the same peo­ple who were involved in a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of scan­dals, inept, will be unable to do any­thing about crime. The present Government is too heav­i­ly invest­ed in allow­ing too many Jamaicans a free hand at illic­it activ­i­ty as a pay­back for putting them back in office. They are and will be, phys­i­cal­ly and ide­o­log­i­cal­ly restrained from tak­ing actions against Jamaican gangs. As a man said to me after the PNP vic­to­ry at the polls, “no more police lock­ing down dance” in ref­er­ence to the pol­i­cy the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment had adopt­ed to curb­ing some of the crim­i­nal­i­ty by enforc­ing the Town and com­mu­ni­ty act that gov­erns night noises.

The present lead­er­ship of the coun­try have no con­cept of how to effec­tive­ly tack­le crime, in fact they real­ly do not care, the mind­set of their sup­port­ers is rather instruc­tive, and (“Now wi can eat a food”) Clearly there is a gen­er­al feel­ing with­in our coun­try when­ev­er the PNP is in Government that crim­i­nals have carte blanche To do what they please, in fact over one 10 year peri­od dur­ing the last PNP admin­is­tra­tion not a sin­gle detec­tive was trained by the Jamaica Constabulary Force, not one, this in addi­tion to the fact that the Force was woe­ful­ly short of qual­i­ty detec­tives to begin with. The con­se­quence of that was clear to see, crime esca­lat­ed to unprece­dent­ed lev­els, and crim­i­nals hav­ing no fear, actu­al­ly chal­lenged the author­i­ty of the state through force of arms.

Tivoli Gardens have been lit­er­al­ly out-of-bounds for the secu­ri­ty forces for many years until Christopher (Dudus) Coke was rout­ed after the United States insist­ed he be arrest­ed and extra­dit­ed to them to stand tri­al on drug and weapons charges, charges he was all too hap­py to plea guilty to. Those charges he plead guilty to were report­ed­ly small pota­toes com­pared to what he is actu­al­ly guilty of. A com­plic­it media, Criminal rights lob­by and many in civ­il soci­ety for years were fooled into believ­ing the lie that peo­ple liv­ing in Tivoli were some­how being set upon by the Police. The truth is crim­i­nals in that redoubt have for years cap­i­tal­ized on that sym­pa­thy by devel­op­ing a sophis­ti­cat­ed strat­e­gy that was on full dis­play when the secu­ri­ty forces final­ly were forced to enter that enclave. For years police were fired on by crim­i­nal thugs liv­ing in that state that was allowed to oper­ate with­in the Jamaican state. As a young police offi­cer I took fire in front of the Denham Town Police Station with my col­leagues when we went from The Mobile Reserve to shore up the staff of that sta­tion after mer­ce­nar­ies of Tivoli gar­dens attacked the sta­tion with gun­fire. Our truck was lit­er­al­ly destroyed because the then com­mand­ing Officer of west­ern Kingston was pet­ri­fied of respond­ing to the attack, so he told us to stay inside and not respond. As a result win­dows were shot out as we lay hunched down obey­ing orders not to return fire. The Police had capit­u­lat­ed out of fear for the hell they would catch in the media and oth­er sec­tors, for doing what we were sworn to do, uphold the law.

These and oth­er acts of cow­ardice on the part of the police did noth­ing for morale with­in the depart­ment, many peo­ple left , many decid­ed to col­lect their salaries and do noth­ing , and unfor­tu­nate­ly many decid­ed to join in the crim­i­nal­i­ty. But most impor­tant­ly this choke hold Tivoli had on the nation was not lost on the crim­i­nal boss­es oper­at­ing there, it also wasn’t lost on crim­i­nals oper­at­ing in oth­er places in the coun­try who swift­ly rec­og­nized that they could com­mit any crim­i­nal act go to Tivoli Gardens, and no one would dare enter to get them. This allowed the hier­ar­chy of the Tivoli Empire to devel­op a loy­al fol­low­ing of mer­ce­nar­ies, fund­ed and financed with the pro­ceeds of drug mon­ey from the United States, and oth­er coun­tries as well as a mas­sive extor­tion rack­et that ran from Kingston to as far as Manchester. This enabled them to pur­chase more guns and ammu­ni­tion that broad­ened the empire. The most unfor­tu­nate part of this nation­al tragedy is that tax-pay­ers were forced to pay for this crim­i­nal enter­prise as the Presidential clique oper­at­ing out of Tivoli Gardens by Coke, was award­ed one gov­ern­ment con­tract after another.

Street thugs also under­stood that the police were fight­ing this bat­tle with their hands tied behind their backs and they tact­ful­ly and tac­ti­cal­ly cap­i­tal­ized on this. They art­ful­ly trot­ted out mourn­ers who pro­fess to wit­ness every case of shoot­ing by police detail­ing with speci­fici­ty, ever aspect of what hap­pened in each case, irre­spec­tive of the time of day the shoot­ing occurred. The media being tac­it cheer­lead­ers in all of this, are more than hap­py to offer micro­phones to the fake mourn­ers to spew their lies. Police faced dan­gers oth­er than the tra­di­tion­al and obvi­ous, this includes impris­on­ment when they are attacked by heav­i­ly armed thugs.

Militia men devel­oped mil­i­tary type tac­tics when they trade gun­fire with police, one effec­tive tac­tic was to remove the weapons of fall­en com­rades, leav­ing the police hav­ing to answer time and time again to the ques­tion, “where is the weapon that this dead man was firing”

This was, and still is, a pub­lic rela­tions night­mare for an inept police force, that large­ly has a hier­ar­chy that is more con­cerned with pleas­ing and lick­ing the boots of their polit­i­cal boss­es, than actu­al­ly uphold­ing the laws. The Police licks the boots of the politi­cians, the Politicians licks the boots of drug/​gun run­ning punks, what pow­er does the police have over the Dons? Of course those who sup­port crim­i­nals as a way of life, and those in the media spare no expense in pub­li­ciz­ing the sup­posed trans­gres­sions the evil police force vis­its on the poor inno­cent peo­ple of Tivoli gar­dens (sic. Of course this did not pre­clude the Police hier­ar­chy from devel­op­ing a strat­e­gy that would have pre­vent­ed Tivoli as it was from becom­ing that can­cer it became, using sim­ple tech­nolo­gies like audio and video devices would have exposed some of that non­sense for what it was. Of course this would actu­al­ly require the hier­ar­chy of the Police force to actu­al­ly be capa­ble of think­ing. This includ­ed those who left the Military and were forced onto Police Officers as com­mis­sion­ers of Police.

I urge my fel­low Jamaicans to observe these two events in a par­al­lel prism, the slow­ing down of tourism in Montego Bay and the con­tin­ued gang prob­lem with­in the coun­try. They are relat­ed, inter­con­nect­ed and will have a dev­as­tat­ing effect on the econ­o­my going for­ward in the face of an impo­tent, inept, and in some cas­es unwit­ting­ly com­plic­it Administration.

by

Is This The Best Republicans Have To Offer ?

The Republican pri­maries are on in earnest, the only woman who entered the pri­maries exit­ed after a dis­mal show­ing in the Iowa cau­cus­es, Iowa of course is the state in which she was born. I always won­dered about Michelle Bachman and her iron-lady approach but I’ll come back to her lat­er .It seem that after all of the can­di­dates have had their brief romance with repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers the field is down to Romney , Santorum, Paul, and to a less­er extent Gingrich , the lat­ter is now wag­ing a kamikaze cam­paign against Romney for his neg­a­tive ads against Gingrich in Iowa, which lit­er­al­ly knocked him out of con­tention for the Republican nom­i­na­tion . Gingrich pret­ty much knows he can­not win the nom­i­na­tion but seem quite will­ing to go down in flames , tak­ing Willard Mitt Romney with him.

I pre­dict­ed the implo­sion of Herman Caine long before he actu­al­ly implod­ed and point­ed to the rea­sons he would implode, the truth of the mat­ter is that repub­li­cans can­not stom­ach pow­er­ful black peo­ple, yes „ yes I know , what are you talk­ing about? the last repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion had pow­er­ful black peo­ple , remem­ber Powell and Rice? Yes I remem­ber Powell and Rice very well , Powell was shut out of Bush’s inner cir­cle and lit­er­al­ly lost the President’s ear for the greater part of his tenure as Secretary of state. Dick Cheney won that tus­sle, Powell lost most of the lus­ter and shine he had as the sole mem­ber of Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion who could gar­ner any respect in the world when he told the United Nationsthat Iraq had weapons of mass destruc­tion, and that the Iraqi’s were oper­at­ing mobile labs which they moved from place to place to avoid detec­tion . Powell’s grave brief­ing came replete with maps and graphs detail­ing how the Iraqis were deceiv­ing the world while at the same time were in pos­ses­sion of weapons that could result in a mush­room cloud. Wooooo I shud­der just think­ing about it , well we all know those were fig­ments of the imag­i­na­tion of the hawks in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion who want­ed war at all cost and would not be stopped in their drum­beat and march to war with the peo­ple of Iraq. lat­er as that lie unrav­elled the nar­ra­tive became one of Régime change. Those out­right lies and dis­tor­tions has cost America count­less bil­lions in trea­sure, thou­sands of ser­vice men and women killed and maimed and noth­ing to show for it, make no men­tion of the hun­dreds of thou­sands of Iraqis who were killed for no oth­er rea­son oth­er than they were liv­ing in their own coun­try. The nar­ra­tive is now that the Iraqi peo­ple were lib­er­at­ed and are bet­ter now that Saddam Hussein their pres­i­dent who was hanged, is gone. Never mind that the Iraqi peo­ple nev­er asked for help in remov­ing their sup­posed despot­ic leader.Dick Cheney in his book lam­pooned both Powell and Rice with a kind of dis­re­spect that one would expect to hear lev­eled at a Democrat, in his book Dick Cheney for­got all about Ronald Reagan’s 11th com­mand­ment , “nev­er speak ill of anoth­er repub­li­can” oth­er so-called black repub­li­cans have been treat­ed hard­ly any bet­ter Michael Steele was boot­ed as head of the Republican National com­mit­tee imme­di­ate­ly his par­ty won back the House from democ­rats in 2010.

Powell

But I am not here to talk about black repub­li­cans and their fol­lies today, what I real­ly want to talk about are the repub­li­can can­di­dates. I must say that even though I am repulsed by Republicans, and I have no stom­ach for Democrats , I do admire Ron Paul for his lib­er­tar­i­an phi­los­o­phy. I too believe in small gov­ern­ment, and less or no mil­i­tary inter­ven­tions in for­eign lands,I am not sure of some of the peo­ple who sup­port Doctor Paul who seem to believe in seg­re­ga­tion, in fair­ness Dr. Paul stood up at the debate sat­ur­day night January 7th and declared Dr. King and Rosa Parks to be his heroes for stand­ing up to seg­re­ga­tion, none of the oth­er jok­ers stand­ing on the stage offered a sin­gle word in sup­port of Paul’s full-throat­ed dec­la­ra­tion of love for Dr. King, and Rosa Parks. Whether Dr. Paul’s state­ments reflect­ed an epiphany or reflect­ed a depar­ture from views he orig­i­nal­ly held is imma­te­r­i­al in my view. The fact that he had the con­vic­tion of char­ac­ter to make that state­ment in that forum I thought was a coura­geous act.

Paul

Of course Ron Paul’s com­ments came while the newest dar­ling of repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers Rick Sontorumhas deter­mined that he would get noticed that he would dis­re­spect African-Americans as much as pos­si­ble if that is what it takes to get noticed by the nut jobs on the right. Santorum clear­ly said in rela­tion to wel­fare at a lily-white event in Iowa “I don’t to make black peo­ple’s lives bet­ter by giv­ing them oth­er peo­ple’s mon­ey , I wan­na give them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to go out and make their own mon­ey”. Never mind that 84% of wel­fare recip­i­ents in the state of Iowa are white, and Santorum was­n’t even asked about black peo­ple.http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​v​=​y​Y​S​P​q​s​V​R​M​t​g​&​f​e​a​t​u​r​e​=​p​l​a​y​e​r​_​d​e​t​a​i​l​p​age

Thumbnail Sontorum

Quite the oppo­site to Ron Paul’s brav­ery , Santorumlied out­right about being caught between two sen­tences, two thoughts, two words,he said quote I have watched the tape and I am quite sure I nev­er said black ‚no one in the room heard me say black peo­ple ‚end quote. As a for­mer detec­tive I tell my wife all the time that the best way to get real truth­ful infor­ma­tion from crim­i­nals is to let the perp speak with as lit­tle inter­rup­tion as pos­si­ble from the inter­view­er, crim­i­nals will tell on them­selves giv­en a chance. Even if we allow lying Santorum to con­vince us that he was caught between thoughts , why would black be in his thoughts at the time the issue of wel­fare come up? The truth is that is their nar­ra­tive, they found out dur­ing the Clinton years and Newt Gingrich’s con­tract on America that the bulk of wel­fare recip­i­ents were actu­al­ly white mid­dle age women, despite this hate mon­gers like Santorum and oth­ers con­tin­ue to wage this cam­paign of false­hood and lies.I have watched and list­ed to the tape over and over and over numer­ous times and the only thing I came away with is how could Santorum come away from watch­ing this tape and claim that he did not say black peo­ple. He revealed him­self to be noth­ing more than a despi­ca­ble racist liar. Maybe vot­ers should take a clos­er look at this freak fringe can­di­date who wants to wage war on oth­er coun­tries, take away a wom­ans right to choose , dis­crim­i­nate against gays and les­bians, and give away cor­po­rate wel­fare to the filthy rich and large cor­po­ra­tions. This guy is not only dan­ger­ous but freakish.

Most of us have respect admi­ra­tion and love for women , we cheer when women accom­plish feats that were once thought to be only achiev­able by men, we love them , they are our wives, girl­friends, sis­ters, mothers,aunts , teach­ers and our nurs­es, we love them because they com­fort us, we have grown accus­tomed to her lov­ing ten­der care , but we also make the grave mis­take in believ­ing that they would take that car­ing ten­der touch to lead­er­ship posi­tions in pol­i­tics or busi­ness. Many have felt the hands of a female boss­es and have no such mis­con­cep­tion. Michelle Bachman it appeared, felt that she should launch a cam­paign of dis­re­spect against President Obama from day one of the pres­i­den­t’s term, her approach was to refer to the pres­i­dent as Barack Obama no men­tion of the title “President“Even the most ardent haters of for­mer pres­i­dent Bush acknowl­edged him as pres­i­dent. This approach by Bachman served as a tem­plate for the rest of repub­li­can whack jobs when refer­ring to the pres­i­dent not to refer to him as President Obama, but as sim­ply Barack Obama. Make no mis­take that dis­re­spect­ful approach is anoth­er in the series of acts aimed at de legit­imiz­ing the pres­i­dent which fol­lowed the failed brither débâ­cle which revealed pro­po­nents as igno­rant racist neanderthals.

It is com­mon now even for mem­bers of the media, except when they are report­ing the news to sum­mar­i­ly refer to the pres­i­dent as sim­ply Barack Obama, the com­man­der-in-chief of the most pow­er­ful nation pos­si­bly in the his­to­ry of this plan­et, gets no respect. yet any small town may­or is duly ref­ered to as may­or fol­lowed by his or her name, even an alleged racist sher­iff from Arizona is giv­en mas­sive air­time and addressed by his title even though he is under fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tions for all kinds of breech of con­duct vio­la­tions as it relates to detainees and how they are appre­hend­ed and incarcerated.

Bachman

Willard Romney the can­di­date that says any­thing what each crowd or inter­view­er wants to hear said recent­ly , “We have been fight­ing over the last three years to make sure that this pres­i­dent does not get to enact his agen­da”. This is in line with Mitch McConnell’s state­ment that his pri­ma­ry func­tion is to ensure that pres­i­dent Obama is a one term pres­i­dent, the grand poo­ba of repub­li­can , wind-bag Rush Limbaugh said at the onset of pres­i­dent Obama’s term he hopes the pres­i­dent fails, nev­er mind that if the pres­i­dent fails the coun­try fails, how does repub­li­cans who pre­tend to have a monop­oly on patri­o­tism explain these dia­met­ri­cal­ly oppos­ing posi­tions. The real prob­lem with the com­ments of snake oil sales­man Mit Romney is that he stat­ed cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly that he and oth­ers have been fight­ing to ensure that the pres­i­den­t’s agen­da does not get enact­ed, refer­ring to John Huntsman being in China car­ry­ing out the agen­da of the Obama admin­is­tra­tion. I have just one ques­tion regard­ing this state­ment , was­n’t the pres­i­dent elect­ed to exact­ly enact the agen­da he put for­ward to the American peo­ple? If the answer is yes, whose inter­est does Mit Romney rep­re­sent if he does not want the agen­da of the vast major­i­ty of the American peo­ple who elect­ed Barack Obama enacted?

With The first pri­ma­ry of the sea­son com­ing up Tuesday January 10th in the Granite State of New Hampshire and South Carolina fast approach­ing it seem there is hard­ly any com­pe­ti­tion left for Willard Mitt Romney. Romney has been run­ning for President for the last 6 years, he has lots of mon­ey , and his super pacs are spend­ing mil­lions more with­out Romney hav­ing to declare where the mon­ey is com­ing from. In all fair­ness democ­rats pres­i­dent Obama also have super pacs that rais­es and spend mon­ey on his behalf.

Romney

Mitt Romney has been able to assail pres­i­dent Obama’s record with­out any push­back from the lily liv­er­ied demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty that has stead­fast­ly refused to stand with this President. The media for its part has been com­plic­it in let­ting Romney get away with not tak­ing ques­tions from the press, and not ask­ing ques­tions of him that are mean­ing­ful on the rare occa­sions they have a chance to ques­tion him. He has been allowed to con­tin­ue to recite the same tired old attack lines against the pres­i­dent , cliché after cliché with­out being forced to defend the myr­i­ad flip-flops he has done on lit­er­al­ly every issue, one moment he is on record for a wom­an’s right to choose the next he is pro-choice, one moment he is for civ­il unions, the next moment he is not. For this guy it sim­ply is a mat­ter of where he is and to whom he speaks. He is like liq­uid , he takes the shape of what­ev­er con­tain­er he is poured into. Is that what America wants in her President?

It will be inter­est­ing to see what the win­ner of this car­ni­val will run on as the econ­o­my is rebounds, because as sure as night fol­lows day they dare not open their mouths about for­eign pol­i­cy with this pres­i­dent. I am just not sure hatred of Barack Obama and obstruc­tion­ist tac­tics will be enough to win for Republicans.

by

How Real Are You ?

Is every­one around us fake and pho­ny? Putting up a front? Lying to themselves
and oth­ers? Is every­one real­ly rude,self- cen­tered, depressed, and just
down­right angry indi­vid­u­als? Even more impor­tant­ly… Am I?!!!??? For as long
as I could remem­ber these were the type of peo­ple I’d see and just emulated.
Thinking its ok to have an atti­tude, roll my eyes, and be sar­cas­tic because
some­one said “the wrong thing to me”, or some­thing I did­n’t want to hear (but
maybe need­ed to hear). I would think peo­ple who were “hap­py” all the time were
lying to them­selves or thought they were bet­ter than me ( since of course at the
time I thought no one was bet­ter than me)! I would say to myself, when are they
going to snap? When are they going to go off because I can’t wait to see it. I
always was excit­ed to see the dra­ma it excit­ed me, I was like a drug addict
look­ing for my next fix. Well did I ever get a rude awak­en­ing when these people
nev­er went off, nev­er got angry, nev­er gave an atti­tude. As I got old­er I
under­stood more and more the world does not and will nev­er revolve around me (
nor does the sun or moon!) Its called grow up and mature. Pray more complain
less is what I learned, which is those “hap­py” peo­ple are tru­ly hap­py and have
plen­ty of joy. It may be more work to be nicer to peo­ple and not give an
atti­tude, but it feels bet­ter because who real­ly wants to be rude.… I DON’T!

By: Astarr Mahogany.

by

Disingenous Hypocrites!

Portia Lucretia Simpson Miller did not con­cede the General Elections of 2007 to Bruce Golding even when it was clear that she had lost. As a mat­ter of fact Golding was obvi­ous­ly still smart­ing from that slight as he brought the mat­ter to the fore at a JLP ral­ly pri­or to the December 29th elec­tion. Miller for her part retort­ed that she had treat­ed Bruce Goling cor­dial­ly dur­ing his tenure as Prime Minister. Never mind that Golding nev­er accused her of inci­vil­i­ty toward him dur­ing his tenure as PM, he specif­i­cal­ly spoke to what he saw as a depar­ture from estab­lished pro­to­cols. Conversely Miller launched a vul­gar broad­side of a tirade in which she vowed not to con­cede any­thing, and pledged to be the worst night­mare of the new­ly elect­ed Government of Bruce Golding.

She did not leave it there, she start­ed with an imme­di­ate cam­paign to dele­git­imize the new Government by hav­ing the rapa­cious pha­lanx of tri­al lawyers asso­ci­at­ed with that par­ty file motions in the courts chal­leng­ing the legit­i­ma­cy of some mem­bers of the Labor Party who held dual cit­i­zen­ship to sit in Parliament. Jamaica’s con­sti­tu­tion express­ly pre­vents any­one with dual cit­i­zen­ship from sit­ting in the nation’s par­lia­ment. The JLP with their share of lawyers must have know that this would be a poten­tial prob­lem that would not stand, and if they did not know this, prob­a­bly were not ready to take the reins of gov­ern­ment despite being in the wilder­ness of oppo­si­tion for an unprece­dent­ed 18 1⁄2 years. As a result of the PNP’s chal­lenge a few mem­bers of the new admin­is­tra­tion were in fact decer­ti­fied by the courts and found inel­i­gi­ble to sit in par­lia­ment. Each par­lia­men­tar­i­an decer­ti­fied was returned to par­lia­ment in by-elec­tions . Interestingly the PNP also had mem­bers who were in con­tra­ven­tion of that sec­tion of the constitution.

CABINET

As soon as Golding announced his 18 per­son cab­i­net Portia launched a broad­side against the Prime Minister, lam­bast­ing him as being extra­vant in hav­ing an 18 per­son cab­i­net when the coun­try was strug­gling. The Irony of that piece of hypocrisy was that the coun­try had just hand­ed lead­er­ship to the Labor Party , after the PNP’s 18 1⁄2 year run. Being that as it may, one would imag­ine that Queen Portia fresh from her coro­na­tion would be remind­ed that she had crit­i­cized Golding for hav­ing a too large cabinet.

So what did Portia Simpson Miller do? A day after her coro­na­tion, she went ahead and named a 19 per­son cabinet.

A 19 PERSON CABINET?

Golding

(Jamaica glean­er photo)

How does this new Government explain this or is it even true? Well see for yourselves.

Cabinet min­is­ters

1. Dr Peter Phillips
2. Peter Bunting
3. Roger Clarke
4. Ronnie Thwaites
5. Lisa Hanna
6. Robert Pickersgill
7. Fenton Ferguson
8. Anthony Hylton
9. Derrick Kellier
10. Noël Arscott
11. Dr Omar Davies
12. Wykeham McNeill
13. Phillip Paulwell,
14. Dr. Morais Guy
15. Horace Dalley
16. Natalie Neita Headley
17. Senator A.J Nicholson,
18. Senator Mark Golding
19. Senator Sandrea Falconer

State min­is­ters

1. Luther Buchanan
2. Arnaldo Brown
3. Sharon Folkes Abrahams
4. Ian Hayles
5. Colin Fagan
6. Richard Azan
7. Damion Crawford
8. Julian Robinson

Yup it is true, this is the new and improved People’s National Party, this is the par­ty that has just been returned to pow­er, shame­less, uncon­scionable, and off to the races, there will be no out­cry because this par­ty can­not do any wrong for the mass of the peo­ple, the élite that sup­ports them, or those who ben­e­fits finan­cial­ly. the PNP elites have the gift of gab they will some­how try to pull the wool over the eyes of inde­pen­dents and labor par­ty sup­port­ers who will most cer­tain­ly have a prob­lem with this hypocrisy.

Republicans now in the pri­ma­ry stage of select­ing a can­di­date to run against President Obama, are hop­ing that the American econ­o­my will con­tin­ue to be lethar­gic come next November’s elec­tion, they have noth­ing else to run on but a stag­nant econ­o­my. They are bet­ting against their coun­try so they can defeat one man because of his race. After all they can­not speak about for­eign pol­i­cy which was their strong suit, for decades they were able to paint Democrats as weak on for­eign pol­i­cy, when the truth is their for­eign pol­i­cy was one of unnec­es­sary saber rat­tling, bel­li­cose lan­guage when address­ing those they did not like and wag­ing wars over­seas that were total­ly unnec­es­sary, and inad­vis­able, and which end­ed up lit­er­al­ly destroy­ing the American economy.

Republicans can­not talk about for­eign pol­i­cy because Obama got Bin Laden, and brought the troops home from Iraq, he saw the demise of Khadafy and arguably restored America’s cred­i­bil­i­ty abroad to the extent that is pos­si­ble, depend­ing where one is refer­ring to. The lat­est Jobs num­ber showed 200,000 new jobs cre­at­ed last month and true to form the GOP can­di­dates will give the pres­i­dent no cred­it for the con­tin­ued good show­ing on the eco­nom­ic front, Santorum stu­pid­ly claimed the good job num­bers sug­gest that investors are tak­ing the hir­ing plunge because they believe the Republicans will take the white house. Snake oil sales­man Willard Romney said the econ­o­my is doing bet­ter despite the poli­cies of pres­i­dent Obama. I thought the com­ments of the oth­ers were incon­se­quen­tial as they will not be the nomine for that party.

President Obama has lit­er­al­ly pulled the American econ­o­my from the brink of dis­as­ter and has presided over steady growth which saw 3 mil­lion new jobs cre­at­ed in the pri­vate sec­tor, yet his reelec­tion is far from assured. As is the sit­u­a­tion in Jamaica where the labor par­ty returned the econ­o­my from sus­tained neg­a­tive growth despite a hor­ri­ble world reces­sion to three quar­ters of pos­i­tive growth but was uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly kicked out of office, Obama runs the risk of being a one term pres­i­dent because of myopic vot­ers with short term memory.

Portia’s log­ic.

Miller response to ques­tions as to how she explained the size of her cab­i­net when she crit­i­cized Mister Golding’s cab­i­net size said this, quote” “I have added some young per­sons so that they can begin to under­study the seniors. What I am try­ing to do now is suc­ces­sion planning.
“I am deal­ing with suc­ces­sion plan­ning. And, if you check my size and the num­ber of peo­ple that won elec­tions for the People’s National Party, it is quite dif­fer­ent from Mr Golding’s”

This bit of sim­ple mind­ed non­sense would be com­i­cal if it was­n’t so insult­ing. One would have to con­clude that there is a cor­re­la­tion between the amount of seats won by a par­ty and the amount of min­is­ters , junior min­is­ters, and min­is­ters with­out port­fo­lios nescessary.The PNP won 42 seats in the House of Representatives to the Jamaica Labor Party’s (JLP) 21 seats.
In 2007, Golding’s JLP won 32 seats to the People’s National Party’s 28 in the then 60-seat House.
Miller either believe that there is a con­nec­tion between the two or seri­ous­ly have a seri­ous dis­dain for the intel­lect of those who can actu­al­ly think for themselves.

There has always been an attempt on the part of the cultists who sup­port that gut­ter par­ty to try to link peo­ple who do not ascribe to their depen­den­cy syn­drome as some­how anti-Jamaican or anti-poor peo­ple. That nar­ra­tive has served the PNP well since it’s incep­tion, they have mas­tered the art of fake car­ing, fool­ing the une­d­u­cat­ed mass­es into believ­ing that they have their inter­est at heart . By using scarce taxpayer’s funds they have for decades worked at the craft of buy­ing loy­al­ty through free­bies and patron­age. Today what they have is a fren­zied mas­sive horde of cultist fol­low­ers who real­ly beleive they are mes­si­ahs. Never mind that there is noth­ing that that par­ty can point to out­side of hand­outs, that would rea­son­able make the argu­ment for the fren­zied almost drug crazed like sup­port they receive.

The truth is most of us come from real­ly poor back­grounds, we are ambi­tious peo­ple who once just want­ed to work, acquire an edu­ca­tion, have chil­dren, and give them a bet­ter life than we had. After the socialist/​communist rhetoric of the 70’s which stip­u­lat­ed that those who did­n’t like their non­sen­si­cal poli­cies should hop onto one of the five flights a day to Miami the psy­che of our nation changed for the worse. Not only did those peo­ple leave , so did their cap­i­tal, so did investors, but worst of all most of the skilled and edu­cat­ed proffe­sion­als took flight. Many peo­ple sim­ply walked away from their beau­ti­ful, homes in fear for their lives, those homes were prompt­ly cap­tured by PNP goons and. Such was the indoc­tri­na­tion of the poor­er mass­es that those who worked hard and accom­plished, were evil cap­i­tal­ists who should share what they have with those who sat on their rear ends and did noth­ing. The Jamaica of today is a direct result of that hog­wash redis­tri­b­u­tion­ist garbage.

The archi­tect of that débâ­cle Michael Manley returned to Jamaica at the end of the 1980’s with his tail, between his legs, armed with mea cul­pa, and was prompt­ly returned to office by the cultists. Ironically the cam­paign song the PNP used against Edward Seaga through­out the 70’s was a song by George Nooks called” my father born ya” Manley left for green­er pas­tures dur­ing the admin­is­tra­tion of Edward Seaga, and returned only to once again seek pow­er, after he attained the pow­er by once again being returned to office, he left due to fail­ing health this time to England where he lived until he passed away. Seaga, lam­bast­ed, berat­ed, ridiculed , and scorned as an out­sider who was­n’t born in Jamaica, have not left dur­ing all the loss­es he took a the hands of the cultists, and still resides in Jamaica.

Seaga 

The suc­cess­ful class war­fare that the peo­ple’s nation­al par­ty has engaged in over the years has dri­ven away tremen­dous­ly tal­ent­ed peo­ple from Jamaica’s shores, cre­at­ed a nation of depen­dent peo­ple and has set our coun­try back so far small­er coun­tries like Barbados are very close to first world sta­tus with no indi­ca­tions if our peo­ple will ever see a first world unless they emi­grate. Once again all of the old cor­rupt orange clad gang­sters are back at the tiller, hav­ing anoth­er go around for their friends and asso­ciates ben­e­fit at the expense of the illit­er­ate masses.

Manley


 

by

Return Of The Welfare State!

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Thursday the 29th of December was my birth­day. I told my wife I did not need a birth­day present, I am a sim­ple man who real­ly requires very lit­tle to make me hap­py. So as usu­al I went to work as I always did, some­thing I absolute­ly love to do, par­tic­u­lar­ly work­ing for myself at my very own busi­ness. I was blown away that my 18-year-old son a fresh­man in col­lege who just recent­ly start­ed work­ing in retail part time told me excit­ed­ly on the phone “dad don’t eat any­thing today I’m tak­ing you to din­ner for your birth­day and you can eat what you want”. I felt that some­how a part of my life had come full cir­cle. I could hard­ly con­tain my emo­tions. What I real­ly antic­i­pat­ed how­ev­er was that the Jamaican peo­ple would con­tin­ue on the path of account­abil­i­ty. Downward trend­ing crime and ter­ror, a revived agri-sec­tor, three con­tin­u­ous quar­ters of pos­i­tive growth,a buoy­ant tourism indus­try and opti­mism on the part of poten­tial investors. Secure in the knowl­edge that Jamaica is a coun­try on its way to first world sta­tus by way of a mar­ket econ­o­my . Instead of an ide­o­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven cult-run, banana repub­lic oper­at­ing on failed poli­cies of 40 years ago. After 5.pm I start­ed lis­ten­ing to the radio on pow­er 106 on the inter­net, it was a dif­fi­cult task try­ing to deci­pher what was going on amidst the fake accents of the many experts all vying for air­time on that medi­um. I did how­ev­er gath­er that the People’s National Party was lead­ing in the raw vote, even as a child this was the norm dur­ing nation­al elec­tions, the PNP would run away with the raw vote , which is the direct total of elec­tors who cast their vote. the raw vote in Jamaica how­ev­er has nev­er been clean, when one fac­tors in vot­er intimidation,ballot box stuff­ing, the steal­ing of bal­lot box­es, dead vot­ers on the vot­ers list, elec­tors vot­ing a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of times,and a pletho­ra of oth­er anti demo­c­ra­t­ic acts. Both Parties have been guilty of these prac­tices, so to a large extent the raw vote was nev­er a reli­able barom­e­ter for mea­sur­ing how elec­tions would turn out,they gen­er­al­ly result­ed in show­ing up the dis­par­i­ty with the amount of votes com­ing out of gar­ri­son con­stituen­cies against the amount of elec­tors liv­ing in those com­mu­ni­ties. However it would be naiveté’ of me to believe that if the raw vote total kept going up for the PNP that it would not seri­ous­ly impact the elec­tions in their favor, which is exact­ly what hap­pened. So at 8.pm I logged off the inter­net closed my busi­ness place and walked out know­ing that Jamaica had made the deci­sion to return to a wel­fare state. I walked away feel­ing angry, I felt that the Jamaica Labor Party should cease con­test­ing elec­tions in Jamaica, let the coun­try be sole­ly the charge of the PNP and let them live in the squalor they vote for time and again. At that moment I wished that all labor par­ty sup­port­ers should have a way of leav­ing the morass , and all who vot­ed for Portia Simpson Miller should be forced to live with the con­se­quences of their actions and cer­tain­ly not allowed to leave.

Portia Lucretia  Simpson Miller and parts of the con­stituen­cy she has rep­re­sent­ed for decades.

Since Universal adult suf­frage Jamaicans have gone to the polls 16 times, of those 16 times the People’s National Party have won 9 con­tests to the 7 of the Jamaica Labor par­ty. Previous to the dubi­ous­ly his­toric sin­gle term for the JLP, the People’s National Party held office for a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly his­toric con­tin­u­ous 181⁄2 years, Pundits, com­men­ta­tors, media types and plain PNP sup­port­ers arro­gant­ly pro­claim Jamaica to be PNP coun­try. Some have argued that the JLP is sim­ply a filler for the coun­try when they are a lit­tle tired of PNP gov­er­nance. The results of the last elec­tion seem to cement that notion and as one ecsta­t­ic crash pro­gram enthu­si­ast crowed online quote “the whole coun­try now orange”, refer­ring to the tell-tale orange col­or of the PNP. To these die-hard it mat­ters not that this is emblem­at­ic of how Jamaicans vote when they do not get their way , in 1980 Manley was only able to hold onto 9 seats out of a total 60 and came close to los­ing his, many argue to this day that Michael Manley actu­al­ly lost his seat but was allowed to keep it to min­i­mize the shame . In the 90’s Edward Seaga saw his for­tunes erased and he was deliv­ered a crush­ing defeat , man­ag­ing to hold onto a measly 8 seats out of 60. This pat­tern of vot­ing either points to an elec­torate that throws hissy fits, or one that has vio­lent mood swings.. I would haz­ard that the for­mer is clos­er to the truth. Jamaicans vote their own self­ish inter­ests. Their inter­ests are usu­al­ly as base as their bel­lies, If Jamaica was PNP coun­try as some pro­claim how could Edward Seaga have won 51 seats in 1980? The truth is there was no flour, sug­ar, rice , salt fish or any of the things we like on the shelves in Jamaica’s stores, that was the deter­mi­nant in those elections.

Whatever the rea­sons for the dis­ap­pear­ance of those items from store shelves is for the prog­nos­ti­ca­tors and pun­dits to argue. Hungry peo­ple grav­i­tate to where they feel they will get fed, peo­ple want­ed their sta­ples back , they vot­ed for Seaga and they got their sta­ples back. The PNP has always being the par­ty that promis­es every­thing, Government jobs in abun­dance, of course to an unso­phis­ti­cat­ed elec­torate this is music to their ears, of course they are going to grav­i­tate to that par­ty. The fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between the par­ties is rather sim­ple, one par­ty offers promis­es , plat­i­tudes, and hand­outs, it appeals to the base needs of the most vul­ner­a­ble to win elec­tions , after which it mis­us­es scarce resources to pay off hacks and loy­al­ists, oth­ers are placed on the pub­lic pay­rolls where they con­tin­ue to bleed the state with­out any returns on the resources hand­ed out to them . In some cas­es many nev­er did a min­ute’s work yet they have col­lect­ed salaries for years .

Victory: PNP supporters celebrate on election nightThe oth­er par­ty has the cor­rect for­mu­la, it under­stands that pros­per­i­ty can­not come through hand­outs, or polit­i­cal patron­age, but will only be accom­plished through low crime , invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, edu­ca­tion and a mar­ket dri­ven strat­e­gy, this usu­al­ly means that the pub­lic pay­roll is purged of dead wood. There has got to be belt-tight­en­ing and in some cas­es aus­ter­i­ty is nec­es­sary. This is gen­er­al­ly seen as arro­gant, cold-heart­ed and cru­el, so back to the par­ty of hand outs they go wel­come to Jamaica. Business does not like uncer­tain­ty, it does­n’t like bel­li­cose rhetoric, hence there is no one beat­ing down Jamaica’s doors beg­ging to invest there. The rea­son for this is that there is no con­ti­nu­ity nei­ther par­ty wants to con­tin­ue a pro­gram that will poten­tial­ly bring cred­it to the oth­er, in the end the coun­try suffers

The PNP will form the next Government in short order, once again they will have access to all that they craved, demand­ed, and some­how believe to be their birth-right, the reigns of pow­er and access to the pub­lic cof­fers. They will be forced to bal­ance the demands of lend­ing insti­tu­tions that the work­force be slashed, against those who vot­ed for their JEEP-full of jobs. It will be inter­est­ing to see how this will be accom­plished , my guess is that there will be seri­ous fall­out in this bal­anc­ing act , cul­mi­nat­ing into a with­hold­ing of funds from lend­ing agen­cies and a return to a demo­niz­ing of cap­i­tal­ists and their insti­tu­tions, upon which there will be hell to pay from those who sold their votes on the promise of crash pro­gram jobs in the JEEP. There are two class­es of PNP sup­port­ers, the sac­ri­fi­cial lambs who con­sis­tent­ly fall vic­tim to the promis­es that are made to them and the elit­ists who actu­al­ly becomes filthy rich from lucra­tive con­tracts, and pay­offs. It will con­tin­ue this way until the elec­torate real­izes there are no free lunch­es, sac­ri­fices will have to be made, some­times those who sac­ri­fice will not ben­e­fit from those sac­ri­fices, but their chil­dren and the coun­try will be bet­ter for it.

The Labor par­ty has made tremen­dous mis­cal­cu­la­tions and mis­takes, none more pro­found than the Manat Phillips and Phelps mat­ter involv­ing Christopher (Dudus) Coke. This has left an indeli­ble scar on the JLP, a good friend of mine swears that the defeat of the JLP is direct­ly because they have not moved to make the Opposition a par­ty to how monies in (JDIP) The Jamaica infra­struc­tur­al devel­op­ment pro­gram are spent. Really ? I was real­ly unaware of that lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion of the elec­torate, sure­ly this is news to me , it may very well be true but I am more inclined to go with my instincts and my gut feel­ings , they sim­ply do not under­stand the chal­lenges of a weak world econ­o­my and the con­se­quences to small depen­dent economies like Jamaica’s.

Those in the media ‚let me be spe­cif­ic the Editorial board of the Gleaner, the coun­try’s old­est news paper has now tak­en it onto them­selves to be in charge of the post-elec­tion exhuma­tion and post-mortem, of course they are very hap­py to dole out advice to young Andrew Holness about why he lost and what he should do to ensure that he will be rel­e­vant going for­ward. The gall and temer­i­ty of these arro­gant Pharisees is shock­ing, nev­er mind that Andrew Holness is the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of suc­cess, at age 39 Holness is accom­plished aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, has a stel­lar record as edu­ca­tion min­is­ter and has demon­stra­bly shown that he is capa­ble of lead­ing and achiev­ing suc­cess. Their arro­gance has no bounds when they pre­sume to sug­gest to the JLP that the youth arm G2K is some­how respon­si­ble for the par­ty’s defeat. At the core of this pre­sump­tu­ous­ness is the argu­ment that because G2K revealed to the world the crass uncul­tured war­mon­ger­ing propen­si­ty of Portia Simpson Miller they some­how dis­re­spect­ed the Jamaican Queen (sic).

Whatever mate­r­i­al G2K put into the pub­lic domain is fair game, as long as the mate­r­i­al was not doc­tored , changed or oth­er­wise adjust­ed to mis­rep­re­sent the facts, Portia must account for her crass behav­ior in pub­lic, She can­not hide behind gen­der as her sur­ro­gates, and fel­low cultists expect . Man or woman we are respon­si­ble we for our actions. Portia has ben­e­fit­ed immense­ly from the largess of Jamaica’s tax pay­ers, she is a car­rear politi­cian who has always been on the gov­ern­men­t’s cheese in one role or anoth­er, she ought to know how to con­duct her­self at least in pub­lic. No one will be ter­ri­fied of her cult fol­low­ing when we talk about her boor­ish behav­ior, that is what her advis­ers at the Gleaner’s Editorial board need to talk to her about. I don’t need to be told of her dis­gust­ing­ly embar­rass­ing behav­ior which I wit­nessed in the late 80’s when her thugs were not allowed to steal bal­lot box­es from the White Hall Elementary school. She rolled on the ground in the mid­dle of the streets , of course claim­ing that her sup­port­ers were being harassed, nev­er mind that her con­stituen­cy is nowhere near Whitehall avenue in Saint Andrew North.

So to the PNP consultants/​gay lob­by at the edi­to­r­i­al board of the Gleaner mind your busi­ness, you have done a tremen­dous job of elect­ing a no idea washed up throw­back to Jamaica House and placed a homo­sex­u­al agen­da on the front burn­er, your job is done, leave the labor par­ty to do what it must. Labor did not lose because of G2K, it lost because there are not enough vot­ers who under­stand the com­plex issues of the 21’st cen­tu­ry, they under­stand the needs of “eat­ing a food and run­ning wid it”.

Former Barbados prime Minister Tom Adams(now deceased) put it best when he said he would not want to be prime min­is­ter of Jamaica because of the high rate of illit­er­a­cy , he was right when he said it in the 80’s ‚though Tom is gone his words are as true now as they were then.

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The JLPNP On Crime!

Below are two excerpts from the man­i­festos of the Jamaica Labor par­ty and the People’s National Party of Jamaica as usu­al we choose to show you the evi­dence tell you what we think , but we also under­stand that you are much smarter and much more capa­ble of assess­ing the infor­ma­tion, and inform­ing your­selves. This infor­ma­tion mas made pos­si­ble by the Jamaica Observer​.com.

THE JLP ON CRIME

IN putting for­ward its plan to con­tin­ue its dri­ve to reduce crime, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) not­ed that high crime has cre­at­ed a soci­ety bogged down by fear to the point of being under pro­duc­tive and less patri­ot­ic. It also point­ed to crime cre­at­ing an atmos­phere that has put off for­eign vis­i­tors and investors. Claiming cred­it for a 36 per cent reduc­tion in major crimes since 2007, the JLP said it had already begun improv­ing the effec­tive­ness of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) by improv­ing its mobil­i­ty; enhanc­ing the phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture and strength­en­ing its human resource capac­i­ty and effec­tive­ness. It also said it had been enhanc­ing the Ministry of National Security’s pro­gramme for social inter­ven­tion, crime pre­ven­tion and com­mu­ni­ty safe­ty since it took office. The JLP admin­is­tra­tion has iden­ti­fied 10 ini­tia­tives on which it intends to focus in its next term, should it be returned to office at the polls. Efforts will be focused on deep­en­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of com­mu­ni­ty polic­ing includ­ing increas­ing police work­ing part­ner­ships with res­i­dents, the pri­vate sec­tor, schools, tourism and farm­ers. There will also be greater police involve­ment in diver­sion and man­age­ment of youth at risk of offend­ing, youth deemed uncon­trol­lable, youth oper­at­ing at the low­er lev­els of gangs or who have com­mit­ted low-lev­el offences, the man­i­festo sets out. Another pil­lar of the JLP’s anti-crime plan will be the estab­lish­ment of what it calls “resourced mul­ti-agency response organ­i­sa­tion­al net­works, focused on crime pre­ven­tion and com­mu­ni­ty safe­ty and capa­ble of sup­port­ing social inter­ven­tion and oth­er crime pre­ven­tion ini­tia­tives, pri­mar­i­ly at the parish lev­el”. The JLP says it will work to increase cit­i­zens’ trust in the police even as it con­tin­ues its trans­for­ma­tion of the cul­ture of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) through the cul­ture change com­mit­tees and work­shops set up ear­li­er this year. Additionally, the par­ty says it intends to over­see a merg­er of the Private Security Regulations Authority (PSRA) and the Firearms Licensing Authority (FLA), a rec­om­men­da­tion of the Public Sector Transformation Programme. The Police Services Commission (PSC) and the Police Civilian Oversight Authority (PCOA) are also to be merged, cre­at­ing a new Police Authority. “This new arrange­ment will also see the com­mis­sion­er of police (while main­tain­ing ‘oper­a­tional respon­si­bil­i­ty’) being held to account for the exer­cise of his func­tions and those ser­vices the police force pro­vides to the pub­lic,” the JLP man­i­festo out­lines. This new enti­ty will enjoy the con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tion afford­ed to the present Police Services Commission. The author­i­ty will also be respon­si­ble for mon­i­tor­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of poli­cies relat­ing to the man­age­ment of the police force and the man­age­ment and use of finan­cial and oth­er resources. It will, in addi­tion, mon­i­tor and assess the per­for­mance of the police and their effec­tive­ness. In terms of bor­der secu­ri­ty, a sec­ond-term JLP admin­is­tra­tion would expand the Passport, Immigration and Citizenship Agency (PICA) Border Management System and strength­en the agen­cy’s inves­tiga­tive capac­i­ty to end cor­rup­tion in the cit­i­zen­ship appli­ca­tion process. The JLP is also promis­ing to strength­en the Department of Correctional Services (DCS); reg­u­lar­is­ing the trans­fer of respon­si­bil­i­ty of remand from the JCF to the DCS in lock-ups. The mobil­i­ty of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) is to be strength­ened by the pro­cure­ment of troop car­ri­ers, patrol vehi­cles, admin­is­tra­tive vehi­cles and util­i­ty-type vehi­cles of which an esti­mat­ed 200 are need­ed. The Maritime Awareness and Response Capabilities of the JDF will also be boosted.

The PNP on Crime

THE Opposition People’s National Party (PNP), if giv­en the man­date to gov­ern the coun­try come Thursday, has said it will pur­sue a three-pronged approach to nation­al secu­ri­ty in order to effec­tive­ly address the scourge of vio­lent crime​.It cit­ed in its man­i­festo, pre­sent­ed two weeks ago, that for many years Jamaicans have lived under the threat of vio­lence and crim­i­nal­i­ty on a scale that has neg­a­tive­ly impact­ed the nation­al psy­che and stymied eco­nom­ic growth and invest­ment. The par­ty said it intends to try to fix that by focussing on three areas: mak­ing insti­tu­tion­al improve­ments, tar­get­ing organ­ised crime, and fos­ter­ing greater trust of law enforce­ment among the pop­u­lace. Specifically, a future PNP Government, the par­ty says, will strength­en the human and insti­tu­tion­al capac­i­ty of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) with the inten­tion of ensur­ing it main­tains high pro­fes­sion­al stan­dards. The Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) is also to be a major focal point for a PNP admin­is­tra­tion which has said it is already push­ing for the estab­lish­ment of a Police Management Authority (PMA). This new body is intend­ed to be a statu­to­ry author­i­ty with juris­dic­tion over the con­sti­tu­tion, man­age­ment, admin­is­tra­tion and reg­u­la­tion of the police force. The PNP not­ed that set­ting up this new agency will require the repeal of the Jamaica Constabulary Force Act, the Special Constables Act and the District Constables Act. Other leg­isla­tive mea­sures will need to be under­tak­en in order to trans­fer the func­tions of the Police Services Commission and the Police Civilian Oversight Authority to the PMA. This move is part of plans the Opposition says it has to fur­ther mod­ernise the police force. This mod­erni­sa­tion will entail tar­get­ing organ­ised crime which, accord­ing to its man­i­festo, is some­thing the PNP said it has a proven track record of fight­ing. The par­ty point­ed to what it said were “some high­ly pub­li­cised inter­dic­tions and inter­ven­tions, with­out any exter­nal prompt­ing”. “In recog­nis­ing the typ­i­cal transna­tion­al char­ac­ter of organ­ised crime, the pre­vi­ous PNP Government embarked on a delib­er­ate pol­i­cy of co-oper­a­tion between local law enforce­ment bod­ies and inter­na­tion­al enforce­ment part­ners, to ensure the extra­di­tion of crim­i­nal ‘dons’ to coun­tries with evi­den­tial­ly stronger juris­dic­tion­al claims against them,” the man­i­festo reads. “This has always been done with­out any com­pro­mise to our sov­er­eign­ty; and in prac­ti­cal acknowl­edge­ment of the enor­mous resources avail­able to transna­tion­al crim­i­nals; but, with an unre­lent­ing resolve to secure their con­vic­tion by all avail­able legal and con­sti­tu­tion­al means.” In putting forth its plans to deal with crime, the PNP said it intends to reduce dis­trust between cit­i­zens and law enforce­ment, which, it not­ed, “goes hand in hand with the ‘informer fi dead’ sub­cul­ture”, and makes effec­tive polic­ing very dif­fi­cult. The PNP, if it forms the new Government, has said it will seek to change this sub­cul­ture “by chang­ing the approach of the lead­er­ship of the police to one which embraces ser­vice, account­abil­i­ty and a de-cen­tral­i­sa­tion of author­i­ty,” reads the doc­u­ment. As such, the par­ty says, the JCF will be repo­si­tioned as a civil­ian law enforce­ment organ­i­sa­tion. Special units capa­ble of deal­ing with sit­u­a­tions of extreme vio­lence are to be set up to oper­ate in tan­dem with the JDF. A new PNP admin­is­tra­tion has also com­mit­ted to over­see­ing the devel­op­ment of a ter­tiary-lev­el Forensic Science Programme to pro­vide train­ing for a pro­fes­sion­al cadre of foren­sic sci­en­tists and crime scene inves­ti­ga­tors. This, it said, will help law enforce­ment to keep pace with the chal­lenges of increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed crim­i­nals. The PNP, in recog­ni­tion of the rate of recidi­vism in Jamaican pris­ons, said it will focus on reha­bil­i­ta­tion, re-social­i­sa­tion and re-train­ing of inmates. Additionally, it said it intend­ed to help equip them with con­flict-res­o­lu­tion skills, as well as focus on the improve­ment of con­di­tions in cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ties.Read more at jamaicaob​serv​er​.com

It’s inter­est­ing to see that both polit­i­cal par­ties now have a strat­e­gy to fight crime, dur­ing my 10 year tenure in the JCF I sw first hand the dis-ser­vice being done to the coun­try because of a sus­tained lack of com­mit­ment to crime erad­i­ca­tion, and the sup­pres­sion of vio­lent behav­iour. As a result we have seen at least two gen­er­a­tions emerge who see vio­lence and crim­i­nal behav­ior as a viable and accept­able way of life, the coun­try also stand to lose anoth­er gen­er­a­tion of tod­dlers to crime, vio­lence, and car­nal­i­ty, a gen­er­a­tion with no val­ues or morals.It’s inter­est­ing to see that come elec­tion time the Jamaica Labor Party through the National Security min­is­ter is now telling the Police that he will be look­ing out for their inter­est . Where was the Minister when the Government of Bruce Golding dis­re­spect­ed pub­lic sec­tor work­ers by refus­ing to have the appro­pri­ate high lev­el nego­tia­tors who can actu­al­ly make deci­sions for the Government meet with work­ers. This despite the fact pub­lic sec­tor work­ers had con­tracts that were binding.

The oth­er par­ty, the PNP in my view is a trea­so­nous par­ty to Jamaica , when the state­ment above is looked at there is noth­ing in there for law enforce­ment offi­cers, what it offers is to fur­ther erode their author­i­ty to do their jobs , cre­ate anoth­er over­sight agency to fur­ther com­pli­cate mat­ters , does noth­ing to reduce or even address crime, cre­ate ani­mos­i­ty ( see INDECOM) fur­ther bur­den tax­pay­ers, and increase crime. This how­ev­er is noth­ing new for them , this trea­so­nous, anti-lawen­force­ment excuse for a par­ty refused to vote in sup­port of our police and mil­i­tary the time they need­ed to do their jobs by extend­ing the lim­it­ed state of emer­gency (SOE) .

Let me be clear in no oth­er coun­try in the world (not a rouge state) would this be tol­er­at­ed , irre­spec­tive of their pol­i­tics, Government and oppo­si­tions alike under­stand the need for the rule of law to be para­mount, after all if the rule of law is usurped and anar­chy takes its place what will oppo­si­tion par­ties look­ing to gain state pow­er pre­side over. The People’s National Party has been a blight and a scourge on the Jamaican Nation and will con­tin­ue to be for as long as there are more low infor­ma­tion peo­ple look­ing for handouts.

I have lots more to say about these two state­ments put out about crime by both par­ties time how­ev­er does not allow me that lux­u­ry today, elec­tion day. Go out and vote and vote for our coun­try’s future.