A Gentleman’s view.

The Big Spill, Two Years Later

Friday is the second anniversary of the explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers and spilled upwards of five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks partly to nature’s resilience, some progress has been made. The gulf is open to fishing, beaches are mostly clean and President Obama has resurrected an ambitious oil exploration plan that he shelved immediately after the spill.

War…This is for REAL. The Democrats versus the Republicans. If the Republicans win we’re back to SLAVERY esp for WOMEN ” PREPARE TO FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE “………Harvey Edwards

REPORTING THE FACTS……

It took Bush, Cheney and the Republicans eight years to destroy our country let alone the world and you expect President Obama to correct years of destruction they have caused to be reversed in three years. That is simply and truly IMPOSSIBLE.

I am living in the realistic present. If you ride a horse to work today I will listen to you otherwise these are the facts: The Republican party has changed and has moved to the far right and has become a party for the rich and powerful leaving the poor hopeless with no chance to succeed in life. Their only option, which I stand behind, is to fight whenever wherever the Republicans and the conservative right wing are.

We have lost hope in America because of the REPUBLICANS. AMERICA IS NOT GOD BUT THE REPUBLICANS THINK THEY ARE. I am 64 years old and all that I invested in is gone, and I AM POOR so is my country. What happened, well you can start by blaming  Bush and Cheney and the REPUBLICANS for an illegal war that KILLED many of our great Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent women, children and men. It also drained trillions of dollars and nobody has ever brought them to justice and nobody will.

The death of THE AMERICAN DREAM due to the banks, the war, deregulation, the rich, big business, basic healthcare for all and the list goes on and on all under the watch of BUSH, CHENEY and the REPUBLICANS. The rich control the country and somehow we must revolt and give every WOMAN, MAN and CHILD the opportunity to have a life. Remember you must take charge of your own fate for if you don’t it then is taken out of your hands and you will certainly regret that. Women in this country must have the right to make decisions about their own lives and the government esp the REPUBLICANS, WHO DO NOT CARE IF YOU LIVE OR DIE must stay out. This is a must…..

We only go around once in life, don’t make your life theirs to control. Write, call, protest in front of their office, home or when you see them but to do nothing will only bring injustice in your life. We must bring back hope for at this point in time we have lost it..When President Clinton left office we had money in the bank , now are broke with no hope in sight. I can’t believe the Republicans on so many levels. Now the REPUBLICANS want to control WOMEN’S RIGHTS and KILL HEALTHCARE and THE LIST GOES ON….

Now is the time to go after them in any way you feel justified. The Democrats say yes and, without even reading a plan, the Republicans will say no. I believe if this does not stop we will have a revolution and maybe we need one to change. I know some of those who read this will say ridiculous but please look around and tell me things are good. There is so much fake spin out there you get dizzy. How can anyone be proud of this country right now? If you are well off you want it to stay the same. Forget about the children going to bed hungry, those homeless, no jobs, can’t meet your basic needs, those that are dying since they have no health insurance and can’t afford it, taking care of our brave vets, making sure our existence in our country is taken care of first. I see no hope for the future. We were once a great nation and now we are becoming a third world nation. And then you see a Hummer drive by, do they care? I don’t think so. We must take care of our family first and this country is our family. Who is Harvey Edwards ?

The Science of Fox News: Why Its Viewers are the Most Misinformed Chris Mooney

Authoritarian people have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape factual challenges to their beliefs.

In June of last year, Jon Stewart went on air with Fox News’ Chris Wallace and started a major media controversy over the channel’s misinforming of its viewers. “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart asked Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

Stewart’s statement was factually accurate, as we’ll see. The next day, however, the fact-checking site PolitiFact weighed in and rated it “false.”In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,” PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error—and later, doubly ironically, failed to correct it. How’s that for the power of fact checking?

There probably is a small group of media consumers out there somewhere in the world who are more misinformed, overall, than Fox News viewers. But if you only consider mainstream U.S. television news outlets with major audiences (e.g., numbering in the millions), it really is true that Fox viewers are the most misled based on all the available evidence—especially in areas of political controversy. This will come as little surprise to liberals, perhaps, but the evidence for it—evidence in Stewart’s favor—is pretty overwhelming.

My goal here is to explore the underlying causes for this “Fox News effect”—explaining how this station has brought about a hurricane-like intensification of factual error, misinformation and unsupportable but ideologically charged beliefs on the conservative side of the aisle. First, though, let’s begin by surveying the evidence about how misinformed Fox viewers actually are.

Based upon my research, I have located seven separate studies that support Stewart’s claim about Fox, and none that undermine it. Six of these studies were available at the time that PolitFact took on Stewart; one of them is newer.

The studies all take a similar form: These are public opinion surveys that ask citizens about their beliefs on factual but contested issues, and also about their media habits. Inevitably, some significant percentage of citizens are found to be misinformed about the facts, and in a politicized way—but not only that. The surveys also find that those who watch Fox are more likely to be misinformed, their views of reality skewed in a right-wing direction. In some cases, the studies even show that watching more Fox makes the misinformation problem worse.

So with that, here are the studies.

Iraq War

In 2003, a surveyby the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found widespread public misperceptions about the Iraq war. For instance, many Americans believed the U.S. had evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been collaborating in some way with Al Qaeda, or was involved in the 9-11 attacks; many also believed that the much touted “weapons of mass destruction” had been found in the country after the U.S. invasion, when they hadn’t. But not everyone was equally misinformed: “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news,” PIPA reported. “Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions.” For instance, 80 percent of Fox viewers held at least one of three Iraq-related misperceptions, more than a variety of other types of news consumers, and especially NPR and PBS users. Most strikingly, Fox watchers who paid more attention to the channel were more likely to be misled.

Global Warming

At least two studies have documented that Fox News viewers are more misinformed about this subject.

In a late 2010 survey, Stanford University political scientist Jon Krosnick and visiting scholar Bo MacInnis found that “more exposure to Fox News was associated with more rejection of many mainstream scientists’ claims about global warming, with less trust in scientists, and with more belief that ameliorating global warming would hurt the U.S. economy.” Frequent Fox viewers were less likely to say the Earth’s temperature has been rising and less likely to attribute this temperature increase to human activities. In fact, there was a 25 percentage point gap between the most frequent Fox News watchers (60%) and those who watch no Fox News (85%) in whether they think global warming is “caused mostly by things people do or about equally by things people do and natural causes.”

In a much more comprehensive study released in late 2011 (too late for Stewart or for PolitiFact), American University communications scholar Lauren Feldman and her colleagues reported on their analysis of a 2008 national survey, which found that “Fox News viewing manifests a significant, negative association with global warming acceptance.” Viewers of the station were less likely to agree that “most scientists think global warming is happening” and less likely to think global warming is mostly caused by human activities, among other measures.

Health Care

In 2009, an NBC survey found “rampant misinformation” about the healthcare reform bill before Congress — derided on the right as “Obamacare.” It also found that Fox News viewers were much more likely to believe this misinformation than average members of the general public. “72% of self-identified Fox News viewers believe the healthcare plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly,” the survey found.

By contrast, among CNN and MSNBC viewers, only 41 percent believed the illegal immigrant falsehood, 39 percent believed in the threat of a “government takeover” of healthcare (40 percentage points less), 40 percent believed the falsehood about abortion, and 30 percent believed the falsehood about “death panels” (a 45 percent difference!).

In early 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation released another survey on public misperceptions about healthcare reform. The poll asked 10 questions about the newly passed healthcare law and compared the “high scorers”—those that answered 7 or more correct—based on their media habits. The result was that “higher shares of those who report CNN (35 percent) or MSNBC (39 percent) as their primary news source [got] 7 or more right, compared to those that report mainly watching Fox News (25 percent).”

“Ground Zero Mosque” 

In late 2010, two scholars at the Ohio State University studied public misperceptions about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”—and in particular, the prevalence of a series of rumors depicting those seeking to build this Islamic community center and mosque as terrorist sympathizers, anti-American, and so on. All of these rumors had, of course, been dutifully debunked by fact-checking organizations. The result? “People who use Fox News believe more of the rumors we asked about and they believe them more strongly than those who do not.”

The 2010 Election

In late 2010, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) once again singled out Fox in a survey about misinformation during the 2010 election. Out of 11 false claims studied in the survey, PIPA found that “almost daily” Fox News viewers were “significantly more likely than those who never watched it” to believe 9 of them, including the misperceptions that “most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring” (they do), that “it is not clear that President Obama was born in the United States” (he was), that “most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses” (it either saved or created several million), that “most economists have estimated the healthcare law will worsen the deficit” (they have not), and so on.

It is important to note that in this study—by far the most critiqued of the bunch—the examples of misinformation studied were all closely related to prominent issues in the 2010 midterm election, and indeed, were selected precisely because they involved issues that voters said were of greatest importance to them, like healthcare and the economy. That was the main criterion for inclusion, explains PIPA senior research scholar Clay Ramsay. “People said, here’s how I would rank that as an influence on my vote,” says Ramsay, “so everything tested is at least a 5 on a zero-to-10 scale.”

Politifact Swings and Misses

In attempting to fact-check Jon Stewart on the subject of Fox News and misinformation, PolitiFact simply appeared out of its depth. The author of the article in question, Louis Jacobson, only cited two of the studies above–“Iraq War” and “2010 Election”—though six out of seven were available at the time he was writing. And then he suggested that the “2010 Election” study should “carry less weight” due to various methodological objections.

Meanwhile, Jacobson dug up three separate studies that we can dismiss as irrelevant. That’s because these studies did not concern misinformation, but rather, how informed news viewers are about basic political facts like the following: “who the vice president is, who the president of Russia is, whether the Chief Justice is conservative, which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives and whether the U.S. has a trade deficit.”

A long list of public opinion studies have shown that too few Americans know the answers to such basic questions. That’s lamentable, but also off point at the moment. These are not politically contested issues, nor are they skewed by an active misinformation campaign. As a result, on such issues many Americans may be ill-informed but liberals and conservatives are nevertheless able to agree.

Jon Stewart was clearly talking about political misinformation. He used the word “misinformed.” And for good reason: Misinformation is by far the bigger torpedo to our national conversation, and to any hope of a functional politics. “It’s one thing to be not informed,” explains David Barker, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied conservative talk-radio listeners and Fox viewers. “It’s another thing to be misinformed, where you’re confident in your incorrectness. That’s the thing that’s really more problematic, democratically speaking—because if you’re confidently wrong, you’re influencing people.”

Thus PolitiFact’s approach was itself deeply uninformed, and underscores just how poorly our mainstream political discourse deals with the problem of systematic right wing misinformation.

Fox and the Republican Brain

The evidence is clear, then—the Politifact-Stewart flap notwithstanding, Fox viewers are the most misinformed. But then comes the truly interesting and important question: Why is that the case?

To answer it, we’ll first need to travel back to the 1950s, and the pioneering work of the Stanford psychologist and cult infiltrator, Leon Festinger.

In his 1957 book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger built on his famous study of a doomsday cult called the Seekers, and other research, to lay out many ramifications of his core idea about why human beings contort the evidence to fit their beliefs, rather than conforming those beliefs to the evidence. That included a prediction about how those who are highly committed to a belief or view should go about seeking information that touches on that powerful conviction.

Festinger suggested that once we’ve settled on a core belief, this ought to shape how we gather information. More specifically, we are likely to try to avoid encountering claims and information that challenge that belief, because these will create cognitive dissonance. Instead, we should go looking for information that affirms the belief. The technical (and less than ideal) term for this phenomenon is “selective exposure”: what it means is that we selectively choose to be exposed to information that is congenial to our beliefs, and to avoid “inconvenient truths” that are uncongenial to them.

If Festinger’s ideas about “selective exposure” are correct, then the problem with Fox News may not solely be that it is actively causing its viewers to be misinformed. It’s very possible that Fox could be imparting misinformation even as politically conservative viewers are also seeking the station out—highly open to it and already convinced about many falsehoods that dovetail with their beliefs. Thus, they would come into the encounter with Fox not only misinformed and predisposed to become more so, but inclined to be very confident about their incorrect beliefs and to impart them to others. In this account, political misinformation on the right would be driven by a kind of feedback loop, with both Fox and its viewers making the problem worse.

Psychologists and political scientists have extensively studied selective exposure, and within the research literature, the findings are often described as mixed. But that’s not quite right. In truth, some early studies seeking to confirm Festinger’s speculation had problems with their designs and often failed—and as a result, explains University of Alabama psychologist William Hart, the field of selective exposure research “stagnated” for several decades. But it has since undergone a dramatic revival—driven, not surprisingly, by the modern explosion of media choices and growing political polarization in the U.S. And thanks to a new wave of better-designed and more rigorous studies, the concept has become well established.

“Selective exposure is the clearest way to look at how people create their own realities, based upon their views of the world,” says Hart. “Everybody knows this happens.”

Indeed, by 2009, Hart and a team of researchers were able to perform a meta-analysis—a statistically rigorous overview of published studies on selective exposure—that pooled together 67 relevant studies, encompassing almost 8,000 individuals. As a result, he found that people overall were nearly twice as likely to consume ideologically congenial information as to consume ideologically inconvenient information—and in certain circumstances, they were even more likely than that.

When are people most likely to seek out self-affirming information? Hart found that they’re most vulnerable to selective exposure if they have defensive goals—for instance, being highly committed to a preexisting view, and especially a view that is tied to a person’s core values. Another defensive motivation identified in Hart’s study was closed-mindedness, which makes a great deal of sense. It is probably part of the definition of being closed-minded, or dogmatic, that you prefer to consume information that agrees with what you already believe.

So who’s closed-minded? Multiple studies have shown that political conservatives—e.g., Fox viewers–tend to have a higher need for closure. Indeed, this includes a group called right-wing authoritarians, who are increasingly prevalent in the Republican Party. This suggests they should also be more likely to select themselves into belief-affirming information streams, like Fox News or right-wing talk radio or the Drudge Report. Indeed, a number of research results support this idea.

In a study of selective exposure during the 2000 election, for instance, Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues mailed a multimedia informational CD about the two candidates—Bush and Gore—to 600 registered voters and then tracked its use by a sample of 220 of them. As a result, they found that Bush partisans chose to consume more information about Bush than about Gore—but Democrats and liberals didn’t show the same bias toward their own candidate.

Selective exposure has also been directly tested several times in authoritarians. In one case, researchers at Stony Brook University primed more and less authoritarian subjects with thoughts of their own mortality. Afterwards, the authoritarians showed a much stronger preference than non-authoritarians for reading an article that supported their existing view on the death penalty, rather than an article presenting the opposing view or a “balanced” take on the issue. As the authors concluded: “highly authoritarian individuals, when threatened, attempt to reduce anxiety by selectively exposing themselves to attitude-validating information, which leads to ‘stronger’ opinions that are more resistant to attitude change.”

The psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba has also documented an above average amount of selective exposure in right wing authoritarians. In one case, he gave students a fake self-esteem test, in which they randomly received either above average or below average scores. Then, everyone—the receivers of both low and high scores—was given the opportunity to say whether he or she would like to read a summary of why the test was valid. The result was striking: Students who scored low on authoritarianism wanted to learn about the validity of the test regardless of how they did on it. There was virtually no difference between high and low scorers. But among the authoritarian students, there was a big gap: 73 percent of those who got high self-esteem scores wanted to read about the test’s validity, while only 47 percent of those who got low self-esteem scores did.

Authoritarians, Altemeyer concludes, “maintain their beliefs against challenges by limiting their experiences, and surrounding themselves with sources of information that will tell them they are right.”

The evidence on selective exposure, as well as the clear links between closed-mindedness and authoritarianism, gives good grounds for believing that this phenomenon should be more common and more powerful on the political right. Lest we leap to the conclusion that Fox News is actively misinforming its viewers most of the time—rather than enabling them through its very existence—that’s something to bear in mind.

Disinformation Passing as “News”

None of which is to suggest that Fox isn’t also guilty of actively misinforming viewers. It certainly is.

The litany of misleading Fox segments and snippets is quite extensive—especially on global warming, where it seems that every winter snowstorm is an excuse for more doubt-mongering. No less than Fox’s Washington managing editor Bill Sammon was found to have written, in a 2009 internal staff email exposed by MediaMatters, that the network’s journalists should:

. . . refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

And global warming is hardly the only issue where Fox actively misinforms its viewers. The polling data here, from the Project on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) are very telling.

PIPA’s study of misinformation in the 2010 election didn’t just show that Fox News viewers were more misinformed than viewers of other channels. It also showed that watching more Fox made believing in nine separate political misperceptions more likely. And that was a unique effect, unlike any observed with the other news channels that were studied. “With all of the other media outlets, the more exposed you were, the less likely you were to have misinformation,” explains PIPA’s director, political psychologist Steven Kull. “While with Fox, the more exposure you had, in most cases, the more misinformation you had. And that is really, in a way, the most powerful factor, because it strongly suggests they were actually getting the information from Fox.”

Indeed, this effect was even present in non-Republicans–another indicator that Fox is probably its cause. As Kull explains, “even if you’re a liberal Democrat, you are affected by the station.” If you watched Fox, you were more likely to believe the nine falsehoods, regardless of your political party affiliation.

In summary, then, the “science” of Fox News clearly shows that its viewers are more misinformed than the viewers of other stations, and are indeed this way for ideological reasons. But these are not necessarily the reasons that liberals may assume. Instead, the Fox “effect” probably occurs both because the station churns out falsehoods that conservatives readily accept—falsehoods that may even seem convincing to some liberals on occasion—but also because conservatives are overwhelmingly inclined to choose to watch Fox to begin with.

At the same time, it’s important to note that they’re also disinclined to watch anything else. Fox keeps constantly in their minds the idea that the rest of the media are “biased” against them, and conservatives duly respond by saying other media aren’t worth watching—it’s just a pack of lies. According to Public Policy Polling’s annual TV News Trust Poll (the 2011 run), 72 percent of conservatives say they trust Fox News, but they also say they strongly distrust NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN. Liberals and moderates, in contrast, trust all of these outlets more than they distrust them (though they distrust Fox). This, too, suggests conservative selective exposure.

And there is an even more telling study of “Fox-only” behavior among conservatives, from Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar and Kyu Hahn of Yonsei University, in Seoul, South Korea. They conducted a classic left-right selective exposure study, giving members of different ideological groups the chance to choose stories from a news stream that provided them with a headline and a news source logo—Fox, CNN, NPR, and the BBC—but nothing else. The experiment was manipulated so that the same headline and story was randomly attributed to different news sources. The result was that Democrats and liberals were definitely less inclined to choose Fox than other sources, but spread their interest across the other outlets when it came to news. But Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly chose Fox for hard news and even for soft news, and ignored other sources. “The probability that a Republican would select a CNN or NPR report was around 10%,” wrote the authors.

In other words Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. First, its existence creates the opportunity for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.

But at the same time, it’s also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what’s encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion towards allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.

And thus we find, at the root of our political dysfunction, a classic nurture-nature mélange. The penchant for selective exposure is rooted in our psychology and our brains. Closed-mindedness and authoritarianism—running stronger in some of us than in others—likely are as well.

But nevertheless, it took the emergence of a station like Fox News before these tendencies could be fully activated—polarizing America not only over politics, but over reality itself.

What Rick Santorum Wrought By CHARLES M. BLOW

AlterNet / By Nicholas Powers

11 Interracial Romances that Changed America

A history of how the interracial relationship has altered in culture through literature and film.

Remember your first interracial kiss? If not, chances are you’ve at least read about one or seen one on TV or film. And chances are the relationship ended in tragedy. Since slavery, American artists have imagined interracial desire as a danger to black women or to white purity or a moral crisis. Since it was impossible to imagine racism ending, in the narratives, society overpowered the lovers and they died or were split. Tragedy is the default genre for interracial romance in American culture.

Only recently do we see interracial desire that doesn’t end in death or failure, which means that art is finally catching up with real life. Mixed marriages are on the rise. Our president is the child of an interracial romance. We are on the precipice of post-racial storytelling in the genre of romantic love. As the taboo breaks down, it helps to look back on the history of interracial romance in American art.

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861)

Literature, not cinema, shaped public sentiment in 19th Century America. Black authors wrote that interracial desire was not romance, but rape. Sexual violence was a means of social control and wealth production. And the black female body was the site of violation. Frederick Douglass wrote of “the whisper that my master was my father” and escaped slave turned memoirist. Harriet Jacobs wrote how at 15 years old, “my master began to whisper foul words in my ear” and tried to rape her. Slave narratives set for the liberal mind the image of white male violence on black women.

2. Clotel or The President’s Daughter by William Wells Brown (1853)

Clotel was the first novel of this genre (based on Thomas Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemmings) to use the genres of romantic love and tragedy. The title character is a light-skinned slave who is the concubine of a white man. They love each other and have a child, but he sells them into slavery after marrying a white woman. Clotel escapes, but when cornered by slave catchers on a bridge, she throws herself into the river and dies. It is an early use of the “Tragic Mulatto” caricature, a mixed-race woman torn between races. Clotel repeated the trope of white male violence on black women in the form of betrayal.

3. Birth of a Nation (1915), based on the book The Clansmen by Thomas Dixon (1905)

Birth of a Nation remains the most racist film ever made. Aside from the Ku Klux Klan being championed as heroes, we see Union soldier Gus as the Brute caricature, an animal-like black male who tries to rape white women. Sharing screen time is Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) a “mulatto” orator who tries to force a white woman to marry him. In the racist mind, interracial desire from black men is a danger to be controlled through violence.

4. Imitation of Life (1959)

Like the earlier 1934 film, 1959’s Imitation of Life follows the tragic genre in which a light-skinned black woman Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) wants to pass for white. She is in love with a young white man who savagely beats her when he discovers she is black. Again the “Tragic Mulatto” character is a meter to gauge the vortex of desire and danger between the races. Again we see white male violence on the black female body and interracial desire ends in tragedy as she sobs over her mother’s coffin.

5. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

Released in the same year as the Loving vs. Virginia case, in which the Supreme Court overturned the ban on interracial marriage; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner uses the genre of romantic love and courtroom drama (set as debate between parents and lovers) rather than tragedy. It works against the history of Brute caricature by casting Sidney Poitier as Dr. John Prentice, a dignified black man who risks his white fiancés love for the sake of parental approval.

6. Star Trek episode: “Plato’s Stepchildren” (1967)

Although Cpt. Kirk (William Shatner) and Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) were forced to kiss by aliens, Nichols said studio executives were nervous. They had them do one scene where they kissed and one scene where they did not. In her memoir, she wrote, “When the non-kissing scene came on, everyone in the room cracked up. The last shot, which looked okay on the set, actually had Bill wildly crossing his eyes. It was so corny and just plain bad it was unusable. The only alternative was to cut out the scene altogether, but that was impossible to do without ruining the entire episode. Finally, the guys in charge relented: “To hell with it. Let’s go with the kiss.”

7. Jungle Fever (1991)

Class dynamics complicate this tragic romantic love story as Flipper (Wesley Snipes), an upper middle class black man has a passionate affair with his secretary, Angie (Annabella Sciorra), a working class Italian American. By inverting race with class and framing their love as adultery, Spike Lee upends audience expectations of interracial love as an easy-to-read moral fable. But he cannot envision a world where their love can survive. Inevitably the film becomes a tragedy as social violence from her family, friends and the police cause the pair to separate.

8. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (1995)

Hardly anyone read Dreams from My Father when it was first published. Today it has become a Rosetta Stone to the first African-American president. Often overlooked is the nuanced portrait of interracial love, and the children who inherit the contradictions left in its wake.

9. Monster’s Ball (2001)

This film of interracial desire repeats the tragic dramatic conventions of earlier decades. Leticia (Halle Berry), a working poor black woman, becomes the concubine of the white working class corrections officer Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton). Again, violence is focused on her psyche if not her body. The Jezebel caricature is invoked in the raw and rough sex scene where Leticia’s body is visually cannibalized. The film is more of a survivor’s story than a vision of love.

10. Something New (2006)

Upper middle class black woman Kenya McQueen (Sanaa Lathan) falls in love with a working class white gardener Brian Kelly (Simon Baker). Like Jungle Fever, director Sanaa Hamrii uses class dynamics to distance the characters from the violence and power imbalance of white male and black female interracial desire of older narratives. Happily, the film does not follow the tragic genre in killing the characters or destroying their love. Instead, it ends with them getting married.

11. Awkward Black Girl (2012)

The latest progressive portrayal of interracial love, The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl has J (Issae Rae) as the black female protagonist being wooed by two men. One is Fred, a husky, sincere black man from work who adores her but is boringly normal. The other is “white” Jay, an awkward white man who mirrors J’s deeply neurotic personality. Awkward Black Girl is the first glimpse of “post-racial” America. Race is not a moral crisis or a danger or source of tension. It is a source of humor, like when she jokes, “Oh yeah, we’re going to have mullato babies.” It is telling that the characters are of the same middle class, hipster urban set. It is more telling that the show runs on YouTube, a place where artists are freed from the dead weight of old storytelling. And in that new freedom, people can create art that doesn’t challenge or apologize for reality but simply reflects it.

WASHINGTON — For a long time, Larry Scheffler maintained a hard policy at his Nevada printing company: no credit for politicians. But when a friend called on behalf of GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich In January, saying the candidate needed signs for the upcoming Nevada caucus, Scheffler made an exception.

“They said they were going to pay right away,” Scheffler, 61, said in an interview.

Scheffler’s company, Las Vegas Color Graphics, produced a trove of campaign materials for Gingrich: 5,000 rally signs, 5,000 bumper stickers, 5,000 lapel stickers, 5,000 cards targeting Hispanic voters, and nearly 100 yard signs. The tab came to $7,439.62.

But more than two months after the caucus, Scheffler is still waiting for the check. “We got burned,” he said.

Like all the GOP presidential hopefuls, Gingrich has cast himself as a champion of small businesses, promising tax relief to American entrepreneurs and a deregulation plan that will spur job growth. But some small businesses are less than pleased with the former House speaker’s presidential campaign — in particular, some of the vendors who have performed work for it.

In interviews with HuffPost, many vendors listed in Gingrich’s Federal Election Commission debt disclosures said they’re still waiting to be paid, weeks or months after finishing work. Several said they’ve been given the runaround by campaign officials as they’ve tried to collect. Gingrich has vowed to slog on with his debt-ridden campaign, despite having won a mere 136 delegates, leaving some vendors to wonder when they can expect their checks.

Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond told HuffPost that Newt 2012 is doing its best to pay people. “Vendors have been contacted and we are paying bills as swiftly as we are able,” Hammond said.

Gingrich said Sunday that his campaign is “slightly less” than $4.5 million in debt, adding that he dipped into “personal funds” to help keep Newt 2012 moving “on a shoestring.”

“We owe much more than we wanted to,” Gingrich said on Fox News Sunday. “Florida got to be a real brawl. And I think, unfortunately, our guys tried to match Romney and it turned out we didn’t have anything like his capacity to raise money.”

Though Gingrich has long held himself up as a paragon of fiscal responsibility, vendors that include Noiseworks Media have found that the former speaker’s campaign is apparently spending money it doesn’t have. Based in Coral Gables, Fla., Noiseworks produced a handful of television and radio spots for the campaign, in English as well as Spanish, that aired in Florida and Arizona leading up to those primaries. Disclosure forms peg Gingrich’s debt to Noiseworks at $10,500, but the firm’s director, Tere Gutierrez, said the tab is closer to $24,000. The firm fronted nearly half of that money to actors, makeup artists and other contractors that the firm needed for the production, Gutierrtez said.

“It’s unusual that we don’t get paid — politicians are usually very good at that, they pay immediately,” said Gutierrez. But with the Gingrich campaign, “It’s getting from bad to worse. … It’s a lot of running around, ‘We’re going to get to you, we’re going to do a payment plan.’ We’re calling and emailing, calling and emailing, every day. And nothing.”

According to Gutierrez, Noiseworks had the choice to work for either Gingrich or frontrunner Mitt Romney. But like Larry Scheffler’s printing company, Noiseworks decided to do business with Gingrich because of a personal connection.

Nobody had to pull strings to get Gregory Fournier doing work for the Gingrich campaign. The president of Florida-based political consulting firm Insite Political, Fournier also happened to be a Gingrich campaign chairman for Volusia County, home to Daytona Beach. Fournier happily performed roughly $5,000 of work for Newt 2012, having signs made for a Florida event and obtaining voter data for the Sunshine State’s primary. But getting paid was like “going to war,” Fournier said.

“At first it was, ‘Well, they sent out the check, it went out in today’s mail.’ Then, ‘The check was pulled. You have to contact the campaign manager.’ He never returned any emails,” said Fournier. “Luckily, I saved every single document of the state committee people asking me for stuff.”

Fournier was eventually paid in full about a month ago, but the experience left him with a bad taste. Adding further insult, he’d made a $2,500 donation to the campaign. He figured all of his support would maybe warrant a handshake, an autographed book or a thank-you, but he said he never got to meet the former speaker. Even so, he still supports Gingrich.

“It’s not the speaker — I believe in the speaker,” Fournier said. “I think logistically his campaign was a mess.”

Not all the vendors reached by HuffPost had bad experiences with Newt 2012. Daniel Coats, the president of Red Cyclone, a Georgia-based company that produces campaign materials for conservative candidates, said the campaign paid him promptly. “They made good on everything,” Coats said, though he also noted, “Our policy is we don’t ship until we receive payment.”

Angel de la Portilla, an Orlando-based political consultant, didn’t have such a policy. He said the Gingrich campaign owes him $6,000 for setting up events with Hispanic voters ahead of the Florida primary. (The campaign reported to the government that it owes de la Portilla $3,840.)

“I have not yet been paid,” de la Portilla said. “I have been told numerous times by different people at the senior level of the campaign that I would be paid. I got an email telling me the check was in the mail.”

It turned out the check wasn’t in the mail. “It’s just disappointing they way it’s being handled,” de la Portilla said.

Gingrich’s campaign bounced a $500 check last month for the fee to qualify for the Utah ballot, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. The campaign has not responded to the state’s calls and a certified letter, according to the report. The campaign has until April 20 to pay the fee or Gingrich won’t be on Utah’s June 26 ballot.

Some vendors may never get paid. Given that the campaign has little in the way of assets, Gingrich would likely need to either pay out of his own pocket or raise enough money from donors to settle the campaign’s debts. Raising money becomes less likely as Gingrich’s presidential hopes diminish. Vendors can wait years for a campaign to settle up. Former presidential candidate John Glenn famously took 23 years to pay off the roughly $3 million he ran up in campaign debt in 1984. Gingrich himself was trailed by 30 years’ worth of debts and lawsuits leading into the campaign.

Gingrich on Tuesday vowed to continue his campaign in the wake of Rick Santorum’s departure. “I am committed to staying in this race all the way to Tampa so that the conservative movement has a real choice,” Gingrich said in a statement.

Scheffler, head of the Las Vegas printing company, said his firm has 150 employees and about $30 million in annual sales from printing and mailing political signs.

“It’s not gonna shove us down,” he said of the Gingrich campaign debt. “It just really makes me mad they got the better of me when I knew better.”

Scheffler said he’d been calling three different Gingrich campaign officials about the debt, but none have gotten back to him in weeks. On Tuesday morning he saw a clip of Gingrich on Fox News, insisting his campaign wasn’t going to end. “I am not conceding to Gov. Romney,” Gingrich said in the clip, taped the previous evening.

Scheffler was not impressed. “I can’t believe he’s talking like this with all the money he owes and he couldn’t care less about the small businesses he’s ripping off.”

Tuesday afternoon, Scheffler said he reached Gingrich on the candidate’s mobile phone and said he wanted to be paid. “He said, ‘We really ran behind when we were in Florida. I’ll try to scrape up some money to get you paid.’”

Scheffler said Gingrich hung up without taking down details of the debt.

Goodbye, Rick Santorum By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

Rick Santorum announcing the suspension of his candidacy for the presidency Tuesday in Gettysburg, Pa.

Rick Santorum never had a chance. The Republican leadership and many Republican primary voters are borderline delusional, but they don’t have a death wish.

That’s not to say I wasn’t glued to the television when Mr. Santorum announced on Tuesday that he was dropping out of the race — or rather, “suspending” his campaign, which means he can go on spending his donors’ money. As I watched him wander off into the vast wasteland of presidential also-rans, I asked myself what, exactly, the man formerly best known for comparing gay sex to man-on-dog sex had accomplished.

Mr. Santorum showed that he could appeal to the far right, and the way far right, and the way, way far right, and that he could use that base to make things really hard for Mitt Romney. And he illuminated the dark heart of the G.O.P., the part that thrives on fear and xenophobia and intolerance. Mr. Santorum said on Tuesday that this was “as improbable as any race you’ll ever see for president.” Seems about right to me.

He also proved that he has a remarkable ability to spout absurdities — some of which, arguably, rival the aforementioned man-on-dog comment. So I decided to honor Mr. Santorum with a fond retrospective of his lowest moments.

Throwing up: I’ve got to start with Mr. Santorum saying that John F. Kennedy’s seminal speech on the separation of church and state made him “almost throw up.” Mr. Santorum completely misrepresented Mr. Kennedy’s speech; he claimed that the slain president had opposed talking about religion “in the public square.” What he actually said was that he would not be bossed around by the pope or the Roman Catholic Church.

Natural instincts: The candidate said women should not serve in combat because men’s “natural instinct” to protect women might prove too distracting.

Trashing higher education: He called President Obama “a snob” for urging students to attend college. Emphasizing higher education, he said on ABC’s “This Week,” “devalues the tremendous work that people who, frankly, don’t go to college and don’t want to go to college because they have a lot of other talents and skills that, frankly, college — you know, four-year colleges may not be able to assist them.”

Questioning the president’s faith: Mr. Santorum rarely missed an opportunity to play to those who doubt Mr. Obama’s Christian faith. “I believe the president is a Christian,” Mr. Santorum said once on “Face the Nation,” before adding, “He says he’s a Christian.” In January, at a campaign event in Florida, a woman said that the president “is an avowed Muslim and my question is, why isn’t something being done to get him out of our government?” Mr. Santorum was not going to let that pass. He looked the woman in the eye and declared: “Believe me — I’m doing everything I can to get him out of the government.” He later explained that he’s under no obligation to correct supporters.

No right to choose, no matter what: In January, Piers Morgan asked Mr. Santorum what he would do if one of his daughters had been raped, was pregnant and was “begging you to let her have an abortion.” His response: “I would do what every father would do – try to counsel your daughter to do the right thing.”  But he didn’t stop there: “I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life and accept what God is giving to you.” He said his daughter ought “to make the best out of a bad situation.”

This list is far from comprehensive. Share your favorite Santorum moments in the comments.

6 Reasons the Koch Brothers Had a Very Bad Week By Adele M. Stan

An FBI investigation, a new documentary, and a negative court ruling: here’s a look inside the Kochs’ worst week in a while.

Were there a way for a few billion clams to wipe a week off the calendar, one imagines that Charles and David Koch, the multibillionaire principals of Koch Industries, would like to see the final week of March 2012 vaporized, at least in the public mind. For the Kochs, it was a week of bad news: a new documentary about their political activity and corporate negligence was making a splash — on the same day a story broke announcing an FBI investigation of two Wisconsin groups tied to Americans for Prosperity, the political ground organization they founded and fund. (Full disclosure: AlterNet is a supporter of the documentary, Koch Brothers Exposed, and I appear in the film.)

Things got even worse the next day, Friday, March 30, when the billionaire brothers learned that a federal court handed down a decision that may ultimately require certain non-profit groups, such as Americans for Prosperity, to reveal their full donor list, and the New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer, who wrote a devastating profile of the brothers last year, reported on the Kochs’ involvement in a barrage of anti-Obama ads sponsored by a tax-exempt non-profit called the American Energy Alliance, which may also now be required to reveal its donor list.

On the very same day, another federal court struck down portions of Wisconsin’s controversial law that stripped collective bargaining rights from most of the state’s public employees – a law championed by Americans for Prosperity, and rammed through the state legislature a year ago by the AFP-supported Gov. Scott Walker. Here, we take a closer look at the Kochs’ very bad week.

1. An FBI Investigation

Just hours before the premiere showing of Koch Brothers Exposed in Manhattan on Thursday, March 29, the Miwaukee Journal Sentinel‘s Daniel Bice broke the news that the FBI was investigating possibly illegal activity by two groups led by Mark Block, former director of the AFP Wisconsin chapter, during his stint as campaign manager for former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. (The Hermanator famously referred to David Koch as his “brother from another mother” at an event hosted by the oil baron in Washington, DC, last year.) Among documents Bice uncovered last year was a profit-and-loss statement for Prosperity USA, a nonprofit group headed by Block, which details travel costs for a visit last year with David Koch and Americans for Prosperity president Tim Phillips in Washington, DC.

While that’s not proof of wrongdoing, it is proof of David Koch’s link to Block, a shady character who has been prosecuted in the past for violating Wisconsin election law.

The Journal Sentinel reports: “FBI agents have been talking to donors and other individuals connected with Prosperity USA and Wisconsin Prosperity Network,” both non-profits founded by Block while he was at the helm of AFP-Wisconsin. (AlterNet has published several reports involving the Wisconsin Prosperity Network, here,  here and here.)

In correspondence with the Center For Public Integrity’s iWatch News last year, AFP spokesperson Levi Russell acknowledged that “there were financial dealings with Prosperity USA and/or the Wisconsin Prosperity Network.”

2. Revelation of Koch Involvement in Group Running Anti-Obama Ads

Already, March 29 was looking like a tough day for the Kochs when Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel burst forth with an article revealing the involvement of the Kochs in an organization, the American Energy Alliance, that launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign against President Barack Obama on Friday. The ads put forth the specious claim that the president’s policies are driving up gasoline prices.

According to Politico:

The group launching a $3.6 million ad campaign hitting President Barack Obama on gasoline prices has deep ties to the billionaire libertarian industrialists Charles and David Koch.

[...]

The groups are run by Tom Pyle, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Pyle regularly attends the mega-donor summits organized by the Koch brothers, including the 2012 winter summit in Indian Wells, Calif., where the Kochs raised more than $150 million to be directed to groups ahead of the general election.

[...]

The ads come after the Kochs’ primary political group, Americans for Prosperity, earlier this year launched a $6 million ad campaign calling out Obama over the now-defunct, government-subsidized maker of solar power components, Solyndra.

The following day, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer followed up with a closer look at the American Energy Alliance:

So who is behind the advertising campaign to push the line that Obama is to blame? Bill Burton, senior strategist at the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA believes that it comes from a familiar source. “The Koch brothers and other oil barons are using profits from high gas prices to fund false political attacks benefitting Governor Romney,” he says.

[American Energy Alliance Communications Director Benjamin] Cole retorts that there is “not a single penny of Koch money” paying for the two-week ad campaign. But he declined to confirm or deny reports, including one by Politico, that the Koch brothers, whose privately owned conglomerate, Koch Industries, is a major domestic-oil refiner, have steered funds to both the American Energy Alliance and the Institute for Energy Research. A spokesperson at Koch Industries did not respond to questions on the Kochs’ ties to the groups.

3. Federal Court Sets Stage for Revelation of Americans For Prosperity Donors

The Koch brothers are notoriously secretive about where they put their money when it comes to their influence on the political process. Their vehicles of choice are a particular sort of nonprofit organization – those that fall under either 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Service tax code. Under current Federal Election Commission regulations, organizations sponsoring so-called “issue” ads — even those with with the (c)(3) or (c)(4) designation — have not been required to reveal their donors. Americans for Prosperity, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the American Energy Alliance all fall under one of these designations. In her report on the anti-Obama ads discussed above, Mayer explains it on the New Yorker‘s Web site:

Technically, the ads have been produced and aired by the Washington-based American Energy Alliance, a 501c-4 social-welfare organization under the Internal Revenue Service’s tax code, whose activities, under the law, have to be largely non-political. This group shares office space and personnel with a sister organization, the Institute for Energy Research, a 501c-3, whose tax status is typically reserved for charities. Its activities have to be strictly non-partisan and non-political.

Even though the American Energy Alliance and Americans for Prosperity are rather blatantly political in their activities, lax enforcement has allowed the groups to get away with their ads and political rallies while shielding their donors from disclosure.

A decision made on Friday by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia could change all that, laying before the eyes of the world the extent of the Koch brothers’ spending through such organizations.

As the Huffington Post’s Paul Blumenthal reported:

Friday’s court ruling could reverse a trend started by the FEC rules, and aggravated by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, that led to an explosion in undisclosed contributions to electoral efforts. The percentage of independent spending that went undisclosed jumped from 1 percent in 2006 to 43.8 percent in 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Advertisements falling under the rubric of “electioneering communications” include those run against President Barack Obama by the American Energy Alliance and Americans for Prosperity, both non-profits linked to the Koch brothers. All ads run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are classified as “electioneering communications.” The ruling would require for the first time that contributions to these groups, and many more, be disclosed.

The FEC, whose nondisclosure rules were challenged by Rep. Chris Van Holland, D-Md., could appeal the ruling if four of the six FEC commissioners vote to do so.

4. Recall This: A Legal Defeat for Koch-Funded Wisconsin Gov. Walker

Just as the date was being set for a recall election for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a federal court struck down portions of the anti-labor law that all but ended collective bargaining for the state’s public employees. When first introduced in the state legislature, the anti-union measure sparked an uprising in the Dairy State last year that led to an 18-day occupation of the state capitol building. Walker was elected in 2010 with a substantial assist from the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity (then under the leadership of Mark Block, now a person of interest in the aforementioned FBI investigation). Judge William Conley took aim at several portions of the law: those that forbade the automatic deduction of union dues from public employes and demanded yearly union elections. Such provisions treated certain groups of public employees differently from others with similar jobs, apparently according to their loyalty to the governor.

From Amanda Terkel’s report on Huffington Post:

The court ruled that the state cannot prevent public sector unions from automatically deducting dues from workers’ paychecks and cannot require them to be recertified annually.

The law, known as Act 10, requires most public sector unions to hold annual votes on whether a majority of its members want to recertify the union. It also took away the rights of some unions to automatically collect dues from members’ paychecks.

The court kept most of the law in place, but it ruled that the state did not have the power to pick and choose which unions could deduct dues. Under Act 10, only “public safety unions” — those representing firefighters and police officers — could continue to take out payments automatically.

AlterNet’s Steven Rosenfeld explains the loyalty issues involved:

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge William Conley, which struck down those sections of the law, held that the legislature had the right to deny union bargaining rights, so long as that policy was applied evenly across all state employee unions–not just the ones opposing the governor’s or his party’s policies. In Act 10, Walker generally exempted state police and public safety unions from the bargaining and dues-collecting restrictions.

“The Act’s treatment of the Capital Police, who endorsed the governor’s opponent, in comparison to its treatment of state vehicle inspectors, who endorsed the governor, best illustrates this suspect line-drawing,” Conley wrote, saying that targeting of some unions violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

5. ‘Koch Brothers Exposed’ Debuts

If you’re trying to keep a secret — say, one about the amount of money you’re investing in organizations that put out disinformation in order to sway the political process in your favor, or maybe one about the cancer affecting nearly every family in a neighborhood downriver from your paper plant — a documentary raising questions about these things is never a good day. On Thursday, March 29, filmmaker Robert Greenwald unveiled a feature-length film, Koch Brothers Exposed, at a screening co-sponsored by AlterNet and Greenwald’s Brave New Foundation.

But given all the other fires that had popped up in Kochland — the court ruling against Scott Walker, the FBI investigation of Mark Block, the Politico report on the Kochs’ support of the American Energy Alliance, and the New Yorker‘s exploration of the Alliance’s Koch links — you’d expect that public relations wizards for the Kochs and their proxies would be falling all over themselves issuing statements and doing spin-control on these developments. Instead, radio silence:

From Politico:

A spokesman for the Koch brothers did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

From the New Yorker:

A spokesperson at Koch Industries did not respond to questions on the Kochs’ ties to the groups.

The Kochs’ political operatives were hardly more responsive. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in its report on the FBI investigation that involves the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity:

Block did not return texts, emails or calls asking for comment on Thursday.

From the Huffington Post, in its report on the court decision against parts of the Scott Walker anti-union law:

Walker’s office did not return a request for comment.

Instead, the PR professionals at Koch Industries focused on filmmaker Greenwald, posting an attack on him on their Web site, and complaining of “harassing phone calls” from Brave New Foundation staffers who were requesting comment on the documentary, and making a big deal of a bad joke made by one of the staffers after he thought he had hung up. When a behemoth corporation — in this case, the second-largest privately held corporation in America — uses its corporate Web site to attack an individual the way Koch Industries went after Greenwald on Friday, there’s usually a bit more to the story. In this case, it appears the public relations geniuses at Koch were hoping to deflect attention away from the Kochs’ very bad week.