A Gentleman’s view.

Jamie Dimon On Meet The Press: We Were ‘Dead Wrong’ To Dimiss Trading Concerns

NEW YORK — The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, which disclosed a $2 billion loss last week, said he was “dead wrong” when he dismissed concerns about the bank’s trading last month.

CEO Jamie Dimon said he did not know the extent of the problem when he said in April that the concerns were a “tempest in a teapot.” After the bank reported the trading loss, investors shaved almost 10 percent off the bank’s stock price.

“We made a terrible, egregious mistake,” Dimon said in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” `’There’s almost no excuse for it.”

The $2 billion loss came in the past six weeks. Dimon has said it came from trading in so-called credit derivatives and was designed to hedge against financial risk, not to make a profit for the bank.

Dimon said the bank is open to inquiries from regulators. He has also promised, in an email to the bank’s employees and in a conference call with stock analysts, to get to the bottom of what happened and learn from the mistake.

Dimon told NBC that he supported giving the government the authority to dismantle a failing big bank and wipe out shareholder equity. But he stressed that JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, is “very strong.”

Lawmakers and critics of the banking industry have seized on the $2 billion loss to say that banks still take too much risk more than three years after the financial crisis.

A piece of the financial regulation known as the Volcker rule would prevent banks from certain kinds of trading for their own profit. Dimon has said the trading involved in the $2 billion loss would not have fallen under the rule.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., told ABC’s “This Week” that he hopes the final version of the Volcker rule will prevent the type of trading that led to the massive loss at JPMorgan.

Dimon conceded to NBC that the bank “hurt ourselves and our credibility” and expects to “pay the price for that.” Asked what the price should be, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said that banks will lose their fight to weaken the rule.

“This was not a risk-reducing activity that they engaged in. This increased their risk,” Levin told NBC.

“So we’ve got to be very, very careful that the regulators here are not undermined by this huge effort to weaken the rule by putting in a huge loophole” that includes the trading involved in the JPMorgan loss, he said.

Addressing public anger toward Wall Street, Dimon said he wants a more equitable society and does not mind paying higher taxes. But he said attacking all of business is “very counterproductive.”

Trading Loss ‘Puts Egg On Our Face’

Dimon said JPMorgan Chase’s unexpected $2 billion loss on credit trades in May “puts egg on our face, and we deserve any criticism we get.”

In March 2011, Dimon expressed his fear over new regulations, warning that higher capital requirements would be “pretty much the nail in our coffin for big American banks,” according to the Financial Times.

Warning that limiting proprietary trading would also affect market making, Dimon was quoted by CNBC, “The United States has…the most liquid [capital markets in the world]. If you lose liquidity because you lose market making, you cost investors money.”

‘Little To Do With Financial Crisis’

“Proprietary trading had very little to do with the financial crisis,” Dimon told FOX Business Network Senior Correspondent Charlie Gasparino in January, adding that “you can’t even make markets for your clients” with the Volcker Rule.

Volcker ‘Doesn’t Understand’

“Paul Volcker by his own admission has said he doesn’t understand capital markets,” Dimon told FOX Business. “He has proven that to me.”

Volcker Rule Too Narrow

in February, Dimon asserted the Volcker Rule had been written too narrowly. “If you want to be trading, you have to have a lawyer and a psychiatrist sitting next to you determining what was your intent every time you did something,” he was quoted as saying in Businessweek.

‘They Think We Are Animals’: How America’s Police State Controls Black People By Nicholas Powers

Racism in America’s police force is linked to cops’ role as keepers of the status quo in an unequal society.

“Get out of the fucking car,” he yelled. I dashed to my apartment window, looked down and saw a cop aiming his gun at a car. Slowly, hands trembling above his head, a black man stepped out and kneeled on the road. Is he going to kill him? I wondered. If he so much as twitches the cop will blast his brains out.

As the afternoon mist thickened into rain, I saw the officer blinking droplets from his eyes. His face was a knot of rage and fear. Thankfully the young man being arrested didn’t twitch as he was handcuffed. After they left and my panic ebbed, I knew it wouldn’t be long until someone somewhere was blown into oblivion by the police.

It wasn’t a knee-jerk anti-authority reaction but a heavy feeling based on history. Months later I read of the NYPD killing 18-year-old Ramarley Graham and 68-year-old Vietnam veteran Kenneth Chamberlain. They join Duane Brown, Sean Bell, Timothy Stansbury, Patrick Dorismond, Michael Stewart and others on the growing roster of black men killed by the police.

Once the smoking guns cool and the body is buried, mainstream media repeat the same words, “accident” or “tragic.” But we, who are black or Latino or politicized, hear the slurs and threats shouted in the background. Progressive news show Democracy Now reported that when cops banged on Chamberlain’s door and he told them he was fine, one shouted, “I don’t give a fuck nigger!” In 2011, cops created a Facebook page to complain about working the West Indian Day Parade, on it they called the black partiers “animals” and “savages,” and one wrote, “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.” Repeatedly, journalists or lawyers smuggle out of the Blue Code of Silence evidence of police using racist, animal imagery to describe the very people they are supposed to serve.

Racism in America’s police force is linked to their role as keepers of the status quo in an unequal society. They enforce laws written by politicians on behalf of the wealthy — laws that end up trapping poor and working-class people in desperate lives. Racial and sexual minorities, legal and illegal immigrants are seen as threats to the social order. When we protest the law and “occupy” a space we are beaten and arrested. When we commit a crime to “get some” we are beaten and arrested. And when we do neither but simply live we’re busted to make a cop’s stop-and-frisk quota.

Language plays an essential role here. It starts with a defensive joke, a “perp” profile that becomes so blurred it encompasses nearly everyone on the street and a constant sense of danger. Each builds on the other until the change is complete and one day, they casually listen to NYPD Capt. James Coan give a racist hurrah speech to detectives executing warrants in Brooklyn. “They’re fucking animals,” he repeatedly said of black people from 2008 to 2010, “If you have to shoot, you shoot them in the head.”

A Shot in the Dark

“He was obliged to keep watch all night long with his guns at hand,” wrote slave trader Robert Durand in 1733. “The negroes were continuously ready to force open his hut to rob him…as they were only looking to avenge the kidnapping of their friends.” During the Atlantic slave trade, 12 million people were stolen from Africa and shipped to the Americas. Slave traders herded them from ship plank to the market, where once bought, they shuffled in chains to plantations. And with each jangling step, slaves were circled by men with guns and whips who did not see them as human beings but as dangerous dark animals.

If your job was to herd, whip and sell people like animals then you must see them as such or risk your sanity. From the auction block, jokes and imagery of Africans as savage heathens and apes, swept through cotton fields and upward into the halls of power. Racial ideology, the belief that a physical difference between humans determines their place in society, rose from the material practice of slavery. In his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson equated blacks to animals, writing that they don’t feel love or pain. “Their griefs are transient,” he wrote “Those numberless afflictions…are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.”

The continuous association of blacks to monkeys created a culture of violent policing of brown bodies. In his 1845 autobiography, abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote of an overseer named Mr. Gore who used his whip like a tongue as if to speak with leather. One day he lashed a slave named Demby who ran into a creek and refused to come out. Douglass writes, “Mr. Gore then…raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he stood.”

Slavery By Another Name

After the Civil War ended, African Americans had a brief season of freedom during Reconstruction. But the sight of their former slaves walking the streets terrified Southern whites. In the book and PBS documentary, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of African-Americans from the Civil War to World War II, reporter Douglass Blackmon explained how the Southern ruling class, which wanted the return of free labor, created the Vagrancy Laws. If blacks couldn’t be owned they could be jailed and forced to work. Historian Talithia LeFouria said it meant that, “Anything from spitting or drinking or being found drunk in public or loitering in public spaces could result in confinement.”

Before the war, images of blacks in newspapers were of lazy watermelon-chomping coons or blissful mammies or silent Uncle Toms. After the war they changed into lewd jezebels and fierce brutes. The shift came as slavery gave way to the convict-lease system. Racial ideology still pivoted on the concept of blacks as animals, once safely shackled, now free and dangerous.

Nearly 900,000 black people were arrested and channeled into the convict-lease system, where once incarcerated they were “sold” or “rented” to industries. In this era, police took over for slave catchers and prison guards for overseers as the reactionary force used to turn back history.

Stop and Frisk

“When I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and sexual prowess,” James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time (1963). If you read black writers of the past one truth becomes clear: an “unofficial” stop-and-frisk policy has always been in effect, though the entire nation.

It’s terrifying, humiliating to have a stranger’s hands pawing your limbs and their eyes peeling away your privacy, trying to find some illegal object on you. It takes a while for your body to feel like yours again. And decades after Baldwin wrote those lines, stop and frisk of blacks and Latinos has gone from unofficial racism to official policy. Nearly four million New Yorkers have been stopped and groped by the police between 2004 and 2011. Nine out 10 were innocent. And 87 percent were black or Latino.

Stop and frisk is a policy that legitimizes race-based control. The change came in 1993, at the end of the crack era, when Mayor Giulani was elected and paranoia of black and Latino youth hung in New York. Just four years earlier, the city convulsed when black teens were accused of and falsely confessed to raping a Central Park jogger.

In came Police Commissioner Bill Bratton with the “broken windows” theory. The premise of “broken windows” is that abandoned urban space invites worse crime, so a building with a broken window invites more vandalism, then squatters, then drug dealing, until it becomes a crack mansion. Broken window calls for ramped-up policing of smaller, quality-of-life crimes.

In reality, “broken windows” provides ideological justification for cracking down on low-level dealers and working-class people. CompStat managing used weekly reports to find the “hot spots,” which were inevitably black, Latino and poor. These areas flooded with police patrols. Drinking on the stoop, washing car windows at the intersection or smoking a joint got you busted.

An era of gentrification was upon the city. Neighborhoods that had been off limits were now open to investors. Rents went up. New stores came in. New people came in until the city is what it is today, large swaths serving as a playground for the transnational capitalist class.

So every day, in the city streets, blacks, latinos and the poor are fondled and pushed around by cops. It’s a “natural” site because the classic image of the black “brute” has been transformed into the ghetto thug.

In May 2012, New York City Council members met with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and questioned him on stop and frisk. They said their constituents felt “under siege.” He shot back, “What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence problems in these communities — people are upset about being stopped, yet what is the answer?”

Tricky Math

In 2010, secret recordings were smuggled out of the 81st Precinct in “Do or Die” Bed-Stuy by officer Adrian Schoolcraft. Printed in the Village Voice, the transcripts show bosses ordering street level cops to “pay the rent,” parlance for issuing tickets, summons and making arrests. Precinct bosses showed the inflated numbers to upper management as proof they were working hard. But when actual crimes were reported, officers were told to aggressively question the victims and downgrade them.

Putting “paper” on people and suppressing reports of real crime created statistics for politicians to trumpet how safe the city was on their watch. Under the veneer of First World professionalism, New York shares an ugly dynamic with Third World cities. If you are working class, poor, colored or foreign, you essentially have to pay the cops off. Except in our city, the money doesn’t go into their pockets but to the state in the form of a ticket.

People are being “mugged” by cops. And if you have a ticket you can’t pay, you get a warrant you can’t avoid and when caught, you’ll go to jail. The poorest people in the city are paying for their own oppression.

What’s Thug Got To Do With It?

His name was Ro’. I first sensed him in the panicked eyes of my neighbors. My block is a live wire of spoken and unspoken messages; I was told in their suspicious glances and fast walk-away that the new tall black man was trouble. When I got to my building, the DJ who lived downstairs was standing at the doorway with a small knife in his hand.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“You see that nigga over there,” he jutted his chin to the new guy. “His name is Ro’. Just came back from prison and he’s trying to hustle people, yelling that his bike was broken and they gotta pay to repair it.”

Every time I saw Ro’, he was more raggedy and hungry. My last memory, he jerkily walked along the street like a puppet with invisible strings yanking his limbs. One foot was bare; the other had a dangling slipper. And his eyes seemed to bob in a sea of chemicals. The men on the street shot him hard stares. He vanished afterward, maybe dead or in jail or rehab. I didn’t care which, I was just glad he was gone.

Walking home, I think of who else I want to vanish from the neighborhood. Maybe the bored men who curse my gay friends or the youth who shoot up the summer nights, sending everyone running for cover. And that’s the social contradiction. Black and Latino people are the most victimized by crime but are often brutalized or ignored by the very police who are supposed to protect us.

We live with a city government that is driven by a conservative vision that casts working-class minorities as “ghetto brutes.” On the other side, some activists on the left cast us as tomorrow’s revolutionary heroes or the mangled victims of capitalism. Between these ideologies is the ever-present reality of crime driven by desire to live the “good life” advertised around us without the resources to do so. Criminals defy the hypocrisy of society and try to “get some” but in a selfish, narcissistic way that destroys the neighborhoods they live in.

It leads to a corrosive division in black and Latino communities where we are afraid of each other and angry for being afraid. We lose faith in ourselves but crave it so much that we seize on spectacles of racist violence to experience once more an ephemeral unity. So when Trayvon Martin, a young black male, was shot dead in Florida by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, instantly we wore hoodies to love in him the innocence stripped and stolen and cursed and stopped and frisked from us every day.

After his death, the racist Web site Storm Front posted two photos of Martin. One was blurry with him giving two middle fingers, looking mad thug. The other was clearly him smiling his new “gold grill” into the camera. The goal was to lower Martin’s credibility by making his face overlap with the “ghetto brute.”

It was quickly discovered that the first image was false. But as progressive critics pounced on the photos, we missed a vital point. Thugs don’t deserve to be shot either. In playing the politics of respectability, we relied on Martin’s cherubic youthful face to sell black innocence. He became for many, an icon of our own sabotaged lives. But the scarred, embittered men and women in the ‘hood are once again ineligible for public sympathy.

And I fell into this conservative ideology. I studiously look hipster to avoid hassle by the police. Sweaters, dark-rim glasses and a man-pouch are my camouflage. And it works. They never harass me. Since I teach literature, a thick book is often in my hands, which is useful for hailing taxis in Manhattan. Drivers assume I’m “safe” but I hear fear and disappointment in their voices when I say, “Take me to Bed-Stuy!”

My First Night In Jail

Last summer, an officer clamped cold handcuffs on me as I turned to him and said, “I’m glad I’m helping you make your quota tonight.” He roughly pushed me into the car, “Alright smart ass, for that you can sit in the back.”

I had been ticketed for drinking a beer in Tompkins Park. The bills came in the mail but I ignored it until it was forgotten. Now I cursed myself for being caught by 21st century vagrancy laws. While in the cell, new men came in and others were let out. Over the next 16 hours, I heard story after story of guys busted for drinking a beer or not having a ID on them or smoking a joint in the park. Some shouted for hours, some slept and some stared at the wall, projecting a personal movie of where they wanted to be instead.

I thought of Richard Pryor’s routine where he said, “Don’t go to the courts thinking you’ll find justice because guess what you’ll find – just us.”

It’s in Their Culture by Nicholas Farrell 

We are endlessly told that white people are racist and that white men are sexist. But in my experience people of a different color are much more racist and men of a different color much more sexist. It is just that we do not hear about this racism because no one is allowed to speak about it for fear of being branded…a racist.

Now from Britain comes the latest horrific example of nonwhite racism and sexism. And try as they might, the British media were unable this time to avoid telling us at least part of the truth.

Here it is: Nine British Muslims, eight of Pakistani and one of Afghani origin, gang-raped dozens of underage white girls in the northern England town of Rochdale between 2008 and 2010. One of the nine just happens to be a father of five and a religious-studies teacher in his local mosque.

There were 47 known victims, mostly aged 12-16 and living in local government children’s homes. But there were probably many more victims and many more rapists.

“If nine non-Muslim white men did the same thing to dozens of Muslim teenage girls, British Muslims would blow up the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.”

Last Tuesday in Liverpool those nine men were convicted and sentenced to a total of 77 years in prison. In separate recent trials, 56 men (50 of them Muslims) were convicted of similar crimes in other northern England towns.

In the coverage of this latest child-rape-industry trial, the British media avoided the fact that racism motivated the nine and that they are all Muslims. The police and social workers failed to investigate for the same reason. The nine are usually referred to as “Asian” or “Pakistani” and not “Muslim.” But at the root of their racism is their religion. Asian or Pakistani Christians or Hindus, for example, treat women of whatever age and color differently.

The Pakistani/Muslim attitude to women in general is very bad; the Pakistani/Muslim attitude to non-Muslim white women is even worse.

To such men, white women who go out without a male chaperone, dressed in miniskirts and high-heeled shoes, plastered in make-up, and who drink and take drugs, are sluts plain and simple. Infidel sluts.

In short: They are not merely asking to be raped. They do not just want to be raped. They deserve to be raped. That they are underage and in the care of the social services only reinforces this point of view.

All men, me included, have issues regarding how women dress and behave, don’t we? But most of us deal with them as best we can.

And most Muslims in non-Muslim countries, even of Pakistani origin, do not do what the Rochdale Nine did to all those non-Muslim, white, teenage girls. Nor are most Muslims in non-Muslim countries, even if of Pakistani origin, Islamic terrorists.

But let’s face it: Many, many Muslims do think that non-Muslim white women are sluts and the perfect symbols of Western decadence and that this is a core reason why they do not (how shall I put this?) approve of Western civilization and therefore why they would like it to be run along Islamic lines, just as the Islamic terrorists do, even if personally they do not actively support al-Qaeda, et al. Not in public, at least.

The crimes committed by those nine Muslim sexist racists in Rochdale, a former mill town and once the pride of Britain’s textile industry, included multiple counts of rape and sex trafficking. The gang members, many of whom were taxi drivers, enticed the teenage girls to go out on the town with them by plying them with free alcohol and drugs. They would then pass the girls around to have sex with several men a day, several times a week, in taxis, flats, and kebab shops. One 13-year-old was forced to have sex with 20 men in one night.

In 2008, the police and the social workers had evidence of these terrible crimes. But they did little mainly because to do something would have meant criticizing the British Muslim community of Pakistani origin. Terrified of being accused of racism—an accusation that could easily have destroyed their careers and led to criminal charges against them as well as civil unrest—they turned a blind eye.

Even now, the metropolitan chattering classes and the multicultural freak-show crowd that control the media still insist that the Rochdale case has nothing to do with race.

Let’s not forget the sexism. This racism and sexism were rooted in the religion of the nine men, Islam. To do the same thing to Muslim girls, on the other hand, would have been for them unthinkable.

They all pleaded not guilty on the grounds that they had done nothing wrong in their eyes and were thus were brought to trial only because of their race and religion. One was banned from court after he called the judge “a racist bastard.”

At least Nazir Afzal, the Chief Crown Prosecutor in the northwest who eventually brought the case and who is of Pakistani origin and a Muslim, had the balls to say after the trial that “imported cultural baggage” had played a role, although he carefully avoided the word “religious.” Regardless of how you define it, that baggage involves among other things forced marriage, honor killings, and genital mutilation.

But still the metropolitan chatterers and the multicultural freaks refuse to concede defeat. They chant their tired old mantra: Sexual exploitation of teenage girls happens in every racial and ethnic group. Oh no, it doesn’t! Not on this scale against girls chosen precisely because they came from a different racial and religious group. And if nine non-Muslim white men did the same thing to dozens of Muslim teenage girls, British Muslims would blow up the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace. And that would only be the first course.

It is time that the left abandoned its multicultural diktat of turning a blind eye to such disgusting racism and sexism by nonwhite men simply because “it’s in their culture.” And it is time for the rest of us to look after vulnerable white non-Muslim teenage girls a little better than this.

S.E.C. Opens Investigation Into JPMorgan’s $2 Billion Loss

BY BEN PROTESS AND SUSANNE CRAIG

Regulators are investigating potential civil violations surrounding the $2 billion loss that JPMorgan Chase disclosed on Thursday, raising further questions about the trading activities at the nation’s biggest bank.

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently opened a preliminary investigation into JPMorgan’s accounting practices and public disclosures about the trades, according to people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is not public. Regulators learned about the activities in April, and formally opened an investigation in recent days, the people said.

The case, which is being run out of New York, will likely examine the bank’s past regulatory filings about the internal unit that placed the trades — as well as recent statements from the firm’s top executives.

In April, questions surfaced about the group, the so-called chief investment office, after reports emerged that a London-based trader was taking large bets that distorted the market. At the time, Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive, dismissed the concerns about the trading activities, calling them a “complete tempest in a teapot.”

On Thursday, JPMorgan revealed that the group had suffered significant losses, which could cost the firm $2 billion or more. A more humble Mr. Dimon on Thursday said “egregious mistakes” were made.

An important avenue for the S.E.C. investigation, the people said, is the firm’s accounting methods relating to the trades. Investigators could take a close look at a measure known as value-at-risk. The company disclosed earlier this year that it changed the way it calculates the metric, which may have masked some of the risk surrounding this trade. On a conference call Thursday, Mr. Dimon said the firm had reverted to the old way of calculation value-at-risk.

The people cautioned that the investigation is at an early stage. No one at JPMorgan has been accused of any wrongdoing. JPMorgan was not immediately available for comment. A spokesman for the S.E.C. declined to comment.

Another view:

Although JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon did not pin the “egregious and self-inflicted mistakes” that led to $2 billion in losses on any one person, warning signs about the big risks last month pointed to an easygoing trader named Bruno Michel Iksil, known playfully as “the London Whale.” Iksil, also called “the White Whale” and “Voldemort” by wary counterparts, is a “low-profile” French trader working for the company’s Chief Investment Office out of London, according to The Wall Street Journal. There, he prefers to wear black jeans without a tie, and has been making about $100 million a year working with credit-default swaps. But his huge gambles recently on corporate derivatives had hedge funds betting against him, with one Bank of America trader telling clients, “Fast money has smelt blood.” Now that the bank is bleeding everywhere, it’s largely on Iksil.

Despite his reputation as bearish in the past — “sometimes criticizing colleagues as too optimistic on markets,” the Journal reported — the Whale turned way bullish lately, trading so hard that he may have single-handedly moved the index. The Whale’s “big bets illuminate the risk inherent in hedge fund-style trading,” said Senator Jeff Merkley last month, pointing to potential violations of the planned Volcker rule. At the time, Dimon insisted that chatter about the trading was a “tempest in a teapot,” and that the deals were safe and by the book. “The CIO balances our risks,” said CFO Doug Braunstein. “They hedge against downside risk, that’s the nature of protecting that balance sheet.” With his bets all over the news and his bosses well aware, the Whale was anything but a rogue trader.

Iksil reportedly stopped making trades in early April, but when the second-quarter losses were announced yesterday, all eyes went back to the Whale, who started at JPMorgan in 2005, according to the U.K. Financial Services Authority, and commutes to work from Paris. His personal Bloomberg profile noted that he is a “champion of ‘kick it’” and “walking over water,” but also “humble.” He also supposedly likes to work from home on Fridays. With all the news about him swirling today, he might do well to stay inside.

20 Historical Facts That Republicans Distort Or Just Get Plain Wrong

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

We all know at least one person that doesn’t know much about history. And we all know that there have been people who have tried to distort history. The Republican Party, however, does both. Over these last two years, Republicans have a made a real effort to distort history as much as possible, to the point where they are now seeking to rewrite school textbooks. The Republican Party has bent over backwards to present their own twisted version of history and it’s starting to look like that one requirement to be a Republican is to be ignorant of historical facts and events. Below is a list of the many historical facts that Republicans have either distorted or have just gotten plain wrong along with corrections of their errors.

1. Did Paul Revere Ride To Warn The British?) Sarah Palin made the dubious claim that Paul Revere actually warned the British instead of the American colonists. Her supporters even made attempts to edit the Paul Revere Wikipedia entry to make her claims sound correct. If she had taken the time to read Longfellow’s poem, Paul Revere’s Ride, she would not have made this error, as the great majority of school children know that Revere made his midnight ride to warn Americans, not the enemy.

2. Was The Shot Heard ‘Round The World Fired In New Hampshire?) Did you know that Lexington and Concord are located in New Hampshire? I didn’t. And the people in New Hampshire and Massachusetts didn’t either. When Michele Bachmann exclaimed to a New Hampshire crowd that “the shot heard ’round the world” occurred in their state, I’m sure that Massachusetts let out a roar of laughter. The sad but hilarious thing is that most American children know that the first shot of the American Revolution occurred in the state of Massachusetts.

3. Was John Quincy Adams A Founding Father?) Michele Bachmann must have failed American History in school. Because she has absolutely no knowledge of early American history. She once claimed that John Quincy Adams is a Founding Father of America when in fact, JQA was just a child when the Revolution began. He was born in 1767 and was just 14 when the war ended. And like Palin’s supporters, Bachmann fans proceeded to edit the Wikipedia page of John Quincy Adams in an attempt to make her claim viable.

4. Did The Founding Fathers End Slavery?) Michelle Bachmann isn’t through yet. During a speaking event she once claimed that the Founding Fathers were the ones who ended slavery. That’s a surprise to me since George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe all owned slaves. In fact, 12 of the first 16 American Presidents owned slaves. But Bachmann’s attempt to paint the Founding Fathers as saints is also a denial of past Republican Party history since early Republicans rose to prominence by fighting against slavery and the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, ended slavery altogether.

5. Was America Founded As A Christian State?) Ever heard of David Barton? He’s the guy that Glenn Beck goes to when he wants to distort history. David Barton claims that the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Christian state. Many Republicans have since picked up on this claim and have been shamelessly using it to court the Christian right-wing, and as a reason to end the separation of church and state that has been part of this country since its founding. His claim can be trounced with one question. If the Founding Fathers wanted America to be a Christian state why did they not say so in the Constitution? Instead, the Founders placed this in the document.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
~First Amendment, Bill of Rights of the Constitution

In other words, there is to be absolutely NO state religion.

6. Did Benjamin Franklin Reject Evolution?) We continue with the lack of knowledge of the Founding Fathers among the right-wing. Many Republicans have been making the claim that Benjamin Franklin rejected evolution. There are two problems with this claim. First, the theory of evolution wasn’t around until Charles Darwin published the theory in 1859, nearly 70 years AFTER Franklin died in 1790. And secondly, Franklin was a man of science above all else. It is unlikely that he would have rejected a scientific theory in favor of creationism. Franklin in fact, rejected the dogma and divinity of Christianity.

7. Was The American Revolution Fought To End Slavery?) Yet another claim that David Barton makes in an attempt to present the founding generation as perfect, is that the American Revolution was waged to end slavery. Once again, Barton makes a claim that is completely false. The American Revolution was fought to win American independence from Great Britain. And as I recall, the slaves were certainly not freed before, during, or after the war. They remained as slaves and would be slaves until the Civil War.

8. Was The Civil War Fought Over State’s Rights?) Republicans claim that it was all about state’s rights and not about slavery. The truth is, state’s rights only played a small role. The South feared that President Lincoln would end slavery, so they took preemptive measures by seceding from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter without any provocation. Slavery was, without a doubt, the main cause of the war between the states. Without slavery, white plantation owners would have to pick their own cotton, or, pay people to do it for them. They also believed Africans to be inferior and would not tolerate their freedom. We should all keep that in mind as the South/Republican home base continues to make claims that they aren’t racist.

9. Do States Have The Right To Secede?) After President Obama took office, many Republican legislators and governors, particularly in the South, began threatening secession. They say secession is a right but is it really? The answer is absolutely not. Not only did the Civil War settle this dispute, James Madison and Andrew Jackson (both Southerners) also rejected this claim. Nowhere in the Constitution will you find the right to secede. The Constitution was created by the people “in order to form a more perfect union” and by seceding, a state breaks up the nation, thus breaking a legally binding contract. And Andrew Jackson once threatened to march an army to South Carolina after that state threatened to secede. In fact, Jackson felt that secession was treason. The Supreme Court has also weighed in on this issue. In Texas v White, the court held that the Constitution did not permit states to secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such ordinances, were “absolutely null”.

10. Was D-Day All About Health Care?) Republicans have been very vocal about the Affordable Care Act and Rick Santorum is no exception. He has made the claim that Americans stormed the beaches at Normandy on D-Day because they opposed Obamacare. He said, “Almost 60,000 average Americans had the courage to go out and charge those beaches on Normandy, to drop out of airplanes who knows where, and take on the battle for freedom … Those Americans risked everything so they could make [their own] decision on their health care plan.”

This is absurd. The men that stormed the Omaha and Utah beaches were fighting to liberate Europe from Nazi rule. They weren’t thinking about health care 67 years into the future. They were thinking of their families and whether they’d ever see them again. Santorum also fails to realize that military personnel and their dependents have government-run health care. And the soldiers aren’t complaining about it either. And as a matter of fact, many World War II veterans and their families also have Medicare which is also run by the federal government. That blows Santorum’s claim out of the water.

11. Did Ronald Reagan Only Lower Taxes?) Worshiping Ronald Reagan means you also have to believe that Reagan never raised taxes during his Presidency, but this constant right-wing claim is false. While he did cut taxes in 1981 and again in 1988, Reagan actually raised taxes every year from 1981 to 1987 including The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 which, at the time, had been the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history, the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, a higher gasoline levy, a higher payroll tax, and a 1986 tax reform deal that included the largest corporate tax increase in American history.

12. Was Joseph McCarthy A Hero?) Another idol of the Republican Party is Joseph McCarthy. Republicans are now rewriting school books to present McCarthy as a hero who did no wrong. In reality, where the rest of us live, Joseph McCarthy was nothing more than a witch hunter who accused innocent Americans of being communists. He had no real evidence that people were communists and he should have recognized that people have the right to be part of any political party they choose. He violated the Constitution and ignored the values of freedom that we hold dear.
Just like Republicans today.

13. Was Martin Luther King Jr. A Republican?) Republicans claim that Martin Luther King was a Republican. So they can explain this part of a speech by King, right? In one speech, he stated that “something is wrong with capitalism” and claimed, “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” So, by claiming King as one of their own, I’m assuming Republicans are also adopting his philosophy.

14. Who Signed The Smoot-Hawley Act?) Many Republicans still have anti–New Deal views. Michele Bachmann blamed FDR for turning a recession into a depression by passing the “Hoot-Smalley Tariff”. Except that FDR didn’t pass it. Hoover did, three years before FDR took the oath of office. Oh, and it’s Smoot-Hawley, NOT “Hoot-Smalley”.

15. Did 9/11 Happen On George Bush’s Watch?) How many times have we heard a Republican or right-wing talking head on Fox say that no terrorist attacks happened when George W. Bush was President? In July, Fox News host Eric Bolling said “we were certainly safe between 2000 and 2008 — I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.” Other Republicans such as Rudy Guiliani and Dana Perino also “misremember” that period of time. I seem to recall sitting in a 20th Century History course at my high school on September 11, 2001 when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City. And as I also recall, George W. Bush was President at the time.

16. What Did The Founding Fathers Think About Corporations?) Corporations are people according to Republicans. They even believe the Founding Fathers loved corporations. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The truth is that the Founding generations distrusted corporations with a passion. That’s why corporations were regulated rather harshly compared to the pampering Republicans give them today. Corporations were limited to an existence of 20-30 years and could only deal in one commodity, could not hold stock in other companies, and their property holdings were limited to what they needed to accomplish their business goals. And perhaps the most important facet of all this is that most states in the early days of the nation had laws on the books that made any political contribution by corporations a criminal offense. If the Founding Fathers were still alive and reinstated these regulations, Republicans would be accusing George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the rest of the founders of being evil, un-American socialists.

17. What Is The Constitutionality Of Federally Mandated Health Care?) Is federally mandated health care unconstitutional? According to Republicans it is. But that’s not what the Founding Fathers thought. Congress passed and John Adams signed, a mandatory health care insurance law back in 1791. The mandate required sailors to pay a tax and in the event they needed care, they could get medical care from the government. If it was unconstitutional as Republicans claim, why didn’t Thomas Jefferson or James Madison repeal it? The fact is, they didn’t, and I’d say James Madison knew more about the Constitution than any Republican does, considering he’s the primary author of that sacred document.

18. Is Social Security A ‘Ponzi Scheme’?) When Rick Perry called Social Security a “ponzi scheme” in the first GOP Debate, he not only made a political mistake of epic proportions, he was also dead wrong. Social Security was created to keep senior citizens out of poverty and it has done a wonderful job of doing just that. When people put money into a ponzi scheme, they don’t get it back. Social Security, however, gives the money back plus more to every person who puts money into the system. It’s far from being a ponzi scheme. The real ponzi scheme is the private health insurance business which takes money from you and then drops you when you need medical care.

19. Did The Founding Fathers Support A Strong Federal Government Or A Weak One?) This is an easy one. Republicans are dead wrong when they claim that the Founding Fathers wanted a weak federal government. And that is simple to prove. Before we had the Constitution, America was a loose alliance of states under the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government was weak. So weak in fact that it didn’t have the power to levy taxes, could not regulate commerce, and relied on the states to provide money for defense. The states had all the power and the federal government had virtually none. This was a chaotic system that threatened to tear apart the new nation. So the Founders wrote the Constitution which created a strong central government capable of levying taxes, regulating commerce, printing money, and forming a military. Most importantly, under the Constitution, the federal government was given the power to provide for the general welfare and the states were given far less power. Republicans will often cite the Tenth Amendment as proof of state supremacy but they’re wrong about that too. After the Constitution was ratified, some wanted to add an amendment limiting the federal government to powers “expressly” delegated, which would have denied implied powers. However, the word “expressly” ultimately did not appear in the Tenth Amendment as ratified, and therefore the Tenth Amendment did not reject the powers implied by the Necessary and Proper Clause. In other words, the federal government has the power to make laws about things that are not found in the Constitution such as health care.

20. Were The Founding Fathers A Group Of Right Wingers?) Republicans have been crisscrossing the country trying to convince Americans that the Founding Fathers were conservatives. But were they really? The answer to this question is absolutely not. If the Founding Fathers were conservatives they would never have revolted against England. One can hardly call breaking away from the most powerful nation on Earth at the time a conservative act. Plus, the Founding Fathers supported a strong federal government, believed in civil rights, supported separation of church and state, despised corporations, and believed the government had the power to provide health care and levy taxes. This is why the Supreme Court throughout American history has rarely ruled laws unconstitutional using the Tenth Amendment.

Republicans and Americans in general need to get a firm grasp of history. The Republicans understand that the lack of education is the key to controlling the electorate. All they need to do is distort and re-write history in their favor to win the votes of the ignorant. We must learn our past history so that we do not go down the backwards road that Republicans are leading us down.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
~George Santayana

MSNBC Panel Lectures Conservatives On The Nature Of ‘The Republican Brain’

MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes hosted a panel discussion on Saturday about the nature of the “Republican brain” and why it seems, according to the intellectuals that populate weekend cable news programming, that conservatives reject scientific advances. What followed was a myopic, masturbatory, self-aggrandizing exercise in liberal “confirmation bias,” in a discussion on Republican’s supposed “confirmation bias.”

RELATED: Chris Hayes Asks ‘Republican Meteorologist’ To Help Convince GOP Of Climate Change

Hayes opened the panel with author of The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney, describing the findings in his book. He conceded that he found liberals have their biases, but the arch of history bends toward the truth on their side of the aisle. Conservatives, meanwhile, dig in their heels and reject new and potentially contradictory information.

Hayes was vexed by the scale of the problem, as it seemed to dawn on him that he was going to be largely unsuccessful over his career in winning conservative hearts and minds.

“How do we avoid a bleak landscape of will-to-power nihilism, in which no one can persuade anyone of anything and I come to work every day hoping to, like, you know, bring some information to the public and I completely bang my head against the wall and my life is meaningless,” Hayes asked, one would have to imagine, rhetorically. Fortunately, he went to break before his fawning panel could respond to this ego-stroking lament.

After the break, Hayes asked a leading, 47-second question about the nature of the “enlightenment project” – the magnum opus in which one presumes he believes himself to be engaging.

Author of The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt, told Hayes that science is based on premises being challenged and tested and eventually confirmed or discarded. So, science and understanding evolves overtime whereas religion tends to avoid that level of critical introspection. Conservatives, they say, for the most part reject this process.

Finally, the brilliant and entertaining New York Daily News columnist John McWhorter chimed in and challenged the presumption of the theory of evolution from an atheist’s perspective. He said he had engaged the scientific community recently and asked how they would account for what he suggested were the holes in the theory that do not account for grand jumps in biological advancements. Shockingly, he found that the liberal scientific community – which perceives itself to be the pinnacle of open-mindedness – was rather unaccepting of his heretical questioning of what is presumed to be, and this is the appropriate term, gospel.

“The liberal scientists thought that I was the worst thing,” said McWhorter. “This was the kind of behavior that is associated with conservatives. There was a circling of the wagons, not reason, because I was trying to make sense – I wasn’t making a godly argument – that happened. It’s over. But, it leads me to think that this is perhaps human behavior.”

His thought provoking question was immediately shot down — Mooney told McWhorter that he was injecting god into the conversation whether he knew it or not. DailyBeast columnist Michelle Goldberg told McWhorter that he was contradicting science and that, in fact, his presumption that there are instances when the evolutionary theory is not entirely explanatory were factually incorrect.

So, McWhorter was both willfully spouting misinfromation and was buying into religious propaganda. And suddenly, there is no critical thought required. Phew! That was close.

What McWhorter admirably attempted to do was provoke actual discussion – even potentially contentious discussion. The panel’s immediate revulsion to his attempt to impose some level of objectivity on his fellow panelists confirms the findings in a much-discussed Pew Center poll from March which showed that the average liberal is twice as likely to block material online that they find politically disagreeable than conservatives. Those close-minded right-wing nuts actually seek out information and opinion that challenges their beliefs more than liberal. Who knew? Well, probably John McWhorter.

“The mistake you made was to talk to the devil,” said Haidt. “A principle in my book is to follow the sacredness, and around it you’ll find a ring of motivated ignorance.” Gosh, that does sound so enlightening.

Haidt said that the scientist in question, who McWhorter cited when asking his genuinely curious question of the scientific community, “was not a respected scientist, so you basically committed treason by even just talking to him.”

Gotcha. So, religious conservatives are ignorant and closed-minded but liberals, who are enlightened opinion leaders, suggest that even talking to people you don’t agree with amounts to “treason.”

Hayes concluded the panel saying that he drew the line at opponents of the theory of anthropogenic climate change, and would not have those heretics on his show. He said it was a dangerous philosophy to espouse… And we’re the ones who get lectured on “confirmation bias.”

Look, religious conservatives (or rather, religious people of all political stripes) take certain tenets of their faith literally. Some sects accept evolution, some do not. But the issue has become politicized and the discussion is no longer about the science on either side of the aisle. On the right, the issue serves as a coalescing force that draws like-minded individuals together. Guess what? It’s precisely the same on the other side of the aisle. And when they get together, they have the same conversation about how awful the other side is using practically the same parlance.

This is not the case for everyone, of course. Most people accept evolution as science, and the majority of conservatives and liberals who accept evolution do not see this as a sign of their moral and intellectual superiority. But many on this panel appeared to view the acceptance of this scientific theory as evidence that they are imbued with some form of higher consciousness. Hey progressives, how do you think those religious conservatives who reject evolution feel about themselves and their faith? How much you want to bet they feel the precise same way?

Meet the Former Right-Wing Blogger Who Realized Conservatives Are Crazy

Charles Johnson was among the nation’s leading “anti-jihad” bloggers until he realized that his compatriots were totally nuts.

For years, Charles Johnson was a prominent right-wing “war-blogger.” On his site, Little Green Footballs, he coined the term “anti-idiotarian,” wrote frequently of a “leftist-Islamist axis,” called Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas “a fanatical, deadly enemy of Western civilization” and inspired the hawkish Israeli journalist Gil Ronen to gush, “If anyone ever compiles a list of Internet sites that contribute to Israel’s public relations effort, Johnson’s site will probably come in first, far above the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s site.” His comments section became an infamous hotbed of xenophobia and wingnuttery.

That was then and this is now. Visit LGF today, and you’ll find posts decrying his former fellow travelers’ knee-jerk Islamophobia, debunking the Breitbrats’ steaming piles of nonsense and defending the Obama administration against scurrilous charges from Fox News. Johnson has undergone a remarkable political transformation over the past five years, but it didn’t come without a cost; he is now among the top targets of the right blogosphere – an apostate drawing an enormous amount of venom from people he once considered his allies.

This week, Charles Johnson appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour. Below is a lightly edited transcript (you can listen to the whole show here).

Joshua Holland: Charles, I’ll be honest, I used to find you kind of terrifying. Not in a personal way, but as a prominent member of this group of so-called war bloggers. You were prominent in that group. You co-founded Pajamas Media and you were widely credited with helping to bring down Dan Rather after he reported on George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service. You used to be really filled with Islamophobia and xenophobia. James Wolcott of Vanity Fair once compared your site to “a disorganized Nuremberg rally.”

Charles Johnson: Yeah, I’ve heard worse. That’s a fair enough description. If you actually go back before the 9/11 attacks and read what I wrote on my blog you’ll find that I actually was never what you’d think of as a right-winger at all.

JH: You were always kind of an anachronistic right-wing blogger. You’re a highly accomplished jazz guitarist; you always seemed to care about the environment. What were your politics like on September 10 or during the Clinton years?

CJ: My politics in one sense didn’t change because even when I started to be more associated with right-wing blogs and that whole milieu I was still what you call a social liberal. I never went in for the religious right stuff. In fact the rising importance and power of those kind of people in the Republican Party is one of the reasons why I finally had to just go elsewhere.

JH: September 11th was a traumatic experience for the entire country. We all felt that way. Is it fair to say that you kind of snapped?

CJ: In a sense I guess you can say that. It hit me really hard. I grew up in New York and I was actually interested in architecture, so I followed the construction of the World Trade Center. It helped that I had a really personal connection to the area. It hit me really hard.

I don’t know if I snapped so much as I really wanted to know more about what was going on. I tend to focus real intensely on things when I get interested. That’s what happened with the blog. I focused on fundamentalist Islam and radical Islam. Over the years I began to be involved with people like Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney. If I had known some of the things I know about them now I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been associated with them, but you live and you learn, I guess.

JH: Right. You were a very early entrant into the blogging world. By the time I started reading blogs, maybe in 2002 or 2003, you were very much like Robert Spencer. You were using this method common to people who have a fear of Islam which is finding examples of Muslims doing terrible things, and then at least implying, if not stating outright, that these horrific incidents represent the Muslim community outright.

CJ: That’s a fair criticism, and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve changed my focus. I’ve realized that to be true. At that point I had to say to myself that this doesn’t really make sense, knowing what I know now about some of the motivations of people like Spencer and the like. That’s one of the big reasons I’ve changed the focus of my blog.

Just to be clear, I was never really known as a right-winger until after the September 11th attacks. On my blog there were some pretty harsh criticisms of George W. Bush prior to the 2000 elections. And I didn’t vote for him.

JH: OK, so along the way you began to see things a little differently and you started to criticize your erstwhile allies. You started calling out Fox News inaccuracies. You called Jim Hoft, the dumbest person on the internet, a “borderline illiterate bigot.”

CJ: I stand by those words.

JH: They’re not even controversial, Charles. Along the way, and correct me if I’m wrong because I was an outsider looking in, it seems the tipping point came in 2007 when you had this epic flame war with Pamela Geller, who remains one of the country’s biggest bigots to this day. Geller was behind this ridiculous Ground Zero mosque controversy and was an apparent inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered 70-plus Norwegians last year. Tell me about that incident. And what is Vlaams Belang?

CJ: So you’ve been googling around a bit. Actually the split between me and the far-right blogging scene had begun before that, but that was one of the big schism points. It wasn’t just Pamela Geller, but Robert Spencer and those who called themselves the “anti-Jihad bloggers.” They had gone to Belgium to have a meeting with a bunch of European like-minded bloggers and other personalities. When I discovered that one of the people there was Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang party, which actually is a successor to a party called Vlaams Blok, which was banned by the Belgian government for their neo-Nazi roots and extreme-right hate speech. What they did is basically reform the image of the party, but didn’t change much else.

When I discovered that this was one of the people they were making alliances with, I said I can’t. This is not for me. I started to criticize people like Pamela Geller. Geller in response started to lash out at me with incredible viciousness, which is kind of her standard mode of operation, and it went from there. Basically the more I looked into and really started to investigate the connections that were forming between these people and the American anti-Jihad blogging scene, the more I realized there’s something really wrong here. We’re talking about people who are fascists, who not only have neo-Nazi connections but also have connections to real, oldtime Nazis, the real Nazis from the Third Reich.

At that point I had a real gut check. It was a moment where things kind of changed — I began to look at things differently.

JH: Geller continues to dance with European far-right-wing parties like the English Defense League as well. And, as you say, she lashed out with lupine ferocity. She wrote at one point that your “campaign to destroy the most effective voices on the right from within has been completely exposed.” That you “have been outed for the mole, the plant, the dis-informationalist” that you are.

CJ: Both her and Robert Spencer question who’s paying me. They have all kinds of conspiracy theories about who bought me out, and is that even really me anymore?

JH: It’s George Soros, right?

CJ: Of course! He’s always behind it. But really what they’re doing is trying to divert attention from the very real issues I bring up about the people they associate with. That’s the bottom line with those people. All these personal attacks are really an attempt to divert attention away from the facts.

JH: On some level, blogging communities do form. It must have been kind of nerve-racking to switch sides when you’d developed these allegiances in these ongoing blog wars. Did you have second thoughts? Were you worried about whether you would be villified?

CJ: Absolutely I had feelings like that. Emotionally, it wasn’t easy to go through all this stuff, but sometimes you have to and hopefully you come out the other side better. I’ve always looked at my blog not as something I wanted to be the most popular place. Believe it or not, I try not to do things that just make my blog more popular on purpose. What I try to do is be as honest, straightforward and factual as I can. That’s kind of always been my intent, and sometimes above and sometimes below the line. Whether a whole bunch of other bloggers suddenly stop linking to me or said bad things about me, I can’t let that influence what I do. It doesn’t make any sense, otherwise I won’t be doing it anymore.

JH: Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who studies the relationship between cognitive styles and ideology. He says that one of the attributes — and he says it’s a positive attribute — that conservatives display more prominently than liberals is loyalty. Loyalty is a good thing, but it has a dark side, which is tribalism. They’re more likely to have these tribal inclinations. I think you experienced what going against the tribe looks like first-hand.

CJ: That’s evident in my Twitter timeline — even in the last week, it’s been really nuts out there. I think it was Gandhi who said first they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win? They tried to ignore me, and now they’re going kind of in the mocking mode and graduating toward the attacking mode. Hopefully we’ll continue on with this analogy.

JH: The New York Times said you moved into a gated community because you were worried about these online threats. Is that true?

CJ: I’ve actually told other people that they kind of exaggerated that. They asked me what caused me to move into this gated community here. Really it was just that I found a nice place that happened to be in a gated community. It really wasn’t because I was worried about the threats, although I have had some threats, including one from a neo-Nazi who is a friend of blogger Stacy McCain. That was a concern, but it wasn’t the primary reason at all.

JH: Now what about the other side? From my perspective, once you shifted the focus of your writing I had no hesitation adding you to my RSS feed, and following you on Twitter. Were there people on the left who you’d tangled with in the past who had a harder time accepting you into their fold?

CJ: Absolutely. There have been one or two, but most people have been willing to just see where I’m at now and see what I’ve said about the stuff I wrote in the past. A lot of it I do regret, there’s no doubt about it. Hopefully all I can do is continue to do what I do, and be as straight and true to what I believe as possible.

JH: You say you have regrets. I wonder is there one thing that you regret more than others? Is there something that stands out in your mind?

CJ: I was totally wrong about Barack Obama. That’s one of my main regrets at this point. I really fell for a lot of the right wing propaganda, and I thought he was going to be a communist and a radical leftist and all that stuff. I believed a lot of the propaganda about him. If I could go back I would vote for him now, but we don’t have that time machine yet. That’s actually one of the main things. I should not have been so ready to accept it. That was one of the things that really woke me up, seeing the truth as opposed to all the lies that were being spread by this blizzard of propaganda.

JH: I had Eric Boehlert on the show a few weeks ago. He’s with Media Matters. He said something really interesting. He said that in the era of Obama, when things have really gone off the deep end on the right, they don’t bother debunking a lot of the right-wing media outlets that they used to track regularly because they’ve become so transparently crazy that nobody pays attention to them.

CJ: That’s a great point. Sometimes I actually stop myself from copying or covering that stuff as well, because it does seem like just another crazy or absurd thing. At this point they’re so far out there that there’s absolutely no concern for reality on these blogs. And they never back down and never correct anything.

JH: They certainly don’t. Do you think that their influence has truly waned? We saw Mitt Romney try to court right-wing bloggers this week.

CJ: I think influence is an interesting thing that’s hard to measure. The effects of the Tea Party on the Republican Party was definitely exacerbated by the right-wing blogs. I don’t really know how much of that Mitt Romney meeting was just pandering and how much of it was a genuine attempt to curry favor with the base. Some of the people they invited are weird choices if you really know their background. Some of these people have been incredibly vicious toward Romney, but that’s politics.

Breaking: Obama Endorses Same Sex-Marriage

President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage in an interview with ABC.

Today, less than 24 hours after North Carolina’s hateful passage of the discriminatory Amendment One which bans gay marriage and curbs civil unions, President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage in an interview with ABC.

Earlier in the day, the rumors began to circulate that this kind of announcement was coming. But nothing was confirmed until the 3pm publication of the attention-grabbing, much-sought-after headline: “Obama: ‘Same-Sex Marriage Should be Legal’ followed by “President says his position on marriage has evolved.”

The president’s actual words in the interview “…it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” He also credited his family for helping him move forward on the position.

Shorly therafter, Rick Jacobs, President of the Courage Campaign, emailed supporters that “this day will go down in history as the beginning of the end of legalized discrimination against LGBT people in America.” It is the first time a sitting president has come out for marriage equality.

The President’s “evolution” on the issue is not entirely linear. Back when he was a younger, more radical politician, he endorsed gay marriage on a questionnaire, then reversed course for what appeared to be political expediency.

Even now, Richard Kim at the Nation wants us to focus on the actual impact of these historic words, legal rights-wise: none.

Obama, however, stopped short of lending full support to the multi-state legal and political campaign for marriage equality. According to ABC News, the President stressed that his is a “personal position,” and he continues to think that states should decide the issue independently.

Indeed, the White House’s talking points, leaked and reported on BuzzFeed, read “We make it absolutely clear that we are talking about civil marriages and civil laws. This isn’t a federal issue.”

These reminders are sobering. And of course, they feed into another sobering point: actual policy, far more than words, has the lion’s share of impact on the civil rights for LGBTQ Americans.

Sadly, in that area our nation has so much room for improvement it’s not funny. Couples with and without state marriage rights have to jump through hurdles for adoption, hospital rights, taxes. State-level budget austerity leads to cuts in shelter programs for LGBTQ kids who are kicked out of their homes. Bullying and teen suicide remain a plague. Outright homophobia persists in and beyond ultra-religious circles. The scourge of killings and beatings of transgender individuals is abetted by the lack of encoded protections (in ENDA and elsewhere) for them. Gay couples whose love crosses international borders don’t have the benefit of being able to marry for citizenship. All of these issues and many more affect the day to day lives of LGBTQ citizens–as do the currently dire issues of poverty, reproductive rights, and civil liberties–and need desperately to be addressed.

Still, culture resonates, and activists need wind in their sails to get things done. So Obama’s position as an influencer of the zeitgeist, a rock star and celebrity in many circles, a charismatic leader and an eloquent spokesman for the causes he chooses to champion shouldn’t be entirely underestimated either. Young questioning and LGBT people watching TV or reading the web will know that the president supports them. So will their parents. There’s a dignity conferred by the President’s statement, and that’s important.

So here’s to a whole lot more “evolution” for the President, his advisors, the GOP, and the rest of the country on this issue. We’re already evolving at a rapid rate, after all, as MSNBC’s first read points out, the polls on the issue have totally reversed in a few short years:

Same-sex marriage is hardly the hot-button issue it was compared to the last decade, though. Support for it now eclipses opposition; 49 percent of Americans said that favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry, according to the March NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, while 40 percent oppose it. (In October 2009, 49 percent opposed same-sex marriages, while 41 percent supported them.)

Crucially, that shifting number includes political independents–which may have figured into the President’s calculations.