Posts Tagged ‘Blacks’
Republican agenda moves – as always – to the people they love to hate the most!
That didn’t take long.
As we’ve gotten around to casting votes to select a Republican presidential nominee, the antiblack rhetoric has taken center stage. You just have to love (and despise) this kind of predictability.
On Sunday, Rick “The Rooster” Santorum, campaigning in Iowa, said what sounded like “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” At first, he offered a nondenial that suggested that the comment might have been out of context. Now he’s saying that he didn’t say “black people” at all but that he “started to say a word” and then “sort of mumbled it and changed my thought.”
“Uh huh.”
Newton Leroy Gingrich has been calling President Obama “the best food stamp president” for months, but after plummeting in the polls and finishing fourth in Iowa, he must have decided that this approach was too subtle. So, on Thursday in New Hampshire, he sharpened the shiv and dug it in deeper, saying, “I’m prepared, if the N.A.A.C.P. invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” On Friday, Gingrich defended himself, as usual, by insisting that exactly what he said wasn’t exactly what he said. He was advocating for African-Americans, not disparaging them.
“Uh huh.”
How the Gulf of Mexico became the nation’s ‘toilet bowl’
When Nazia Dardar looks at the seemingly endless lake of water behind her stilted bayou home, the 76-year-old sees what once was a farm. Cows roamed there, she says, back when the lake was land.
“C’est le jour et la nuit,” she says in French, the most common language down here on the farthest and swampiest reaches of the Mississippi River delta. “It’s day and night.”
Perhaps nowhere is the protracted death of the Gulf Coast more apparent than in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana, and other indigenous bayou communities where, decades before the BP oil disaster, the marsh started disintegrating and environmental problems washed in from as far away as North Dakota and New York.
The Gulf of Mexico became, in effect, the United States’ toilet bowl — known for its seasonal “dead zones,” high erosion rates, dirty industry, ingrained poverty and, now, for the biggest oil disaster in the history of the country. Compare that legacy on the Gulf Coast with the East Coast, with its wealth, and the West, with its more-sterling record of environmental stewardship…
These wetlands, a 20-minute boat ride from the stilted homes of Pointe-Aux-Chenes, provide nearly all the needs of people here. Shrimp, crab, fish and oysters spawn and hide in the protective grasses. Those creatures are the basis for the local economy.
They’re also what everyone eats…
Since 1932, more than 1,875 square miles of Louisiana have shriveled and died, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That’s enough land to nearly cover Delaware…
The Corp of Engineers – BTW – can take credit for the taxpayer-funded portion of the destruction.
