after re-election.

Obama diversity disappoints again

By JENNIFER EPSTEIN, Politico

5/5/13 7:04 AM EDT

There were, after all, just eight women among the 23 Cabinet-level officials in Obama’s first term. And that number will be even lower in his second.

After picking an all-white, all-male slate to fill departures at key departments including State and Treasury, Obama urged critics to be patient. Given time, he promised just before his second inauguration, he’d erase concerns sparked by an entirely white and male group of top picks.

“I would just suggest that everybody kind of wait until they’ve seen all my appointments – who is in the White House staff and who is in my Cabinet – before they rush to judgment,” he said. “Until you’ve seen what my overall team looks like, it’s premature to assume that somehow we’re going backwards. We’re not going backwards, we’re going forward.”

Now the second term Cabinet is complete, with final selections that include both Pritzker and Anthony Foxx, an African American, for Transportation secretary. Still, Obama’s put together a less diverse Cabinet than in his first term, when his picks were criticized for being too white and male. And quite a few of the people Obama had asked to hold off until the picture was complete say they they’re not so sure it was worth the wait.

…

(O)verall, there’s no denying the group he wound up with isn’t just less diverse than the current demographics of the country, and far less representative of the coalition of voters that got Obama reelected. It even falls short in virtually every category of the marks he set in his first term.

…

If Foxx is confirmed, there will be three African Americans in the Cabinet, one fewer than before. The number of Asian Americans has dropped from 3 to just 1: first-term holdover Eric Shinseki, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. And if Labor Secretary-designate Thomas Perez is confirmed, the number of Latinos will have officially made an identical slide.

…

“I at least expected that more than a third of the jobs would go to women,” NOW’s president, Terry O’Neill told POLITICO. “Women should be half the Cabinet. We’re 51 percent of the population, and more than half of us voted for the president’s reelection.” Instead, women have been picked for just seven of 23 Cabinet posts.

The numbers speak for themselves.

Reprinted from 5/5/2012

The name simply means “The Fifth of May” and it’s an oddly U.S. American holiday.

Except in the State of Puebla they don’t much celebrate the victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in Mexico which makes it much more like Patriot’s Day that we here in New England get to celebrate almost every year as an extra filing day (I understand there’s also a foot race in Boston).

Interestingly enough it was a stand up fight against the banksters which they lost (those who do not remember history…).  Some people say that the French intervention was intended to establish a supply line to aid the Slave Owner’s Rebellion (or as the more charitable put it, The War of the Rebellion).

Not Congressionally recognized until 2005, celebrations started in California as early as the mid 1860s and for over 100 years were most common in Southwestern States with a large population of people of Mexican descent.  Now of course it’s just another excuse to over consume the cheap crappy Tequila and Beer that Mexico exports (don’t get me wrong, there are good Mexican Beers and Tequila but Corona, Dos Equis, and Jose Cuervo are not them) and ignore real, actual factual Mexican history because we’re so fucking exceptional that understanding and caring about the countries we border is as beneath us as even knowing which ones they are.

Just don’t mistake it for Grito de Dolores.

Adapted from 5/5/12

This was no ordinary homecoming.  This was a do-or-die attempt to lay the ghost of years of rejection from the horse-rearing elite and the literati who sat in those privileged boxes overlooking the track and those unprivileged craven hordes who grovelled around the centre-field where he had suffered as a boy.

The clubhouse as I remember was worse, much worse than I had expected.  It was a mess.  This was supposed to be a smart, horsey clubhouse, oozing with money and gentry, but what I saw had me skulking in corners.  It was worse than the night I spent on Skid Row a month later, back in New York.  My feet crunched broken glass on the floor.  There seemed no difference between a telephone booth and a urinal; both were used for the same purpose.  Foul messages were scrawled in human excrement on the walls and bull-necked men, in what had once been white, but were smeared and stained, seersucker suits, were doing awful things to younger but equally depraved men around every corner.  The place reminded me of a cowshed that hadn’t been cleaned in fifteen years.  Somehow I knew I had to look and observe.  It was my job.  What was I being paid for?  I was lucky to be here.  Lots of people would give their drawing arm to be able to see the actual Kentucky Derby which was now hardly an hour away.  Hunter understood and was watching me as much as he was watching the scene before us.

Something splattered the page I was drawing on and, as I moved to wipe it away, I realized too late it was somebody’s vomit.  During the worst days of the Weimar Republic, when Hitler was rising faster than a bull on heat, George Grosz, the savage satirical painter, had used human shit as a violent method of colouring his drawings.  It is a shade of brown like no other and its use makes an ultimate statement about the subject.

‘Seen enough?’, asked Hunter, pushing me hastily towards an exit that led out to the club enclosure.  I needed a drink.  ‘Er… one more trip to the inner-field Ralph I think,’ I heard Hunter say nervously.  ‘Only another half-hour to the big race.  If we don’t catch the inner-field now, we’ll miss it.’  So we went.

While the scene was as wild here as it had been in the clubhouse, it had a warmer, more human face, more colour and happiness and gay abandon – the difference in atmosphere between Hogarth’s Gin Lane and Beer Street.  One harrowed and death-like the other bloated with booze but animal-healthy.

Who would have thought I was after the gristle, the blood-throbbing veins, poisoned exquisitely by endless self-indulgence, mint juleps, and bourbon.  Hide, anyway, behind the dark shades you predatory piece of raw blubber.

The race was now getting a frenzied response as Dust Commander began to make the running.  Bangles and jewels rattled on suntanned, wobbling flesh and even the pillar men in suits were now on tip-toe, creased skin under double-chins stretched to the limit into long furrows that curved down into tight collars.

Mouths opened and closed and veins pulsed in unison as the frenzy reached its climax.  One or two slumped back as their horses failed, but the mass hysteria rose to a final orgasmic shriek, at last bubbling over into whoops of joy, hugging and back slapping.  I turned to face the track again, but it was all over.  That was it.  The 1970 Kentucky Derby won by Dust Commander with a lead of five lengths – the biggest winning margin since 1946 when Triple Crown Champion, Assault, won the Derby by eight lengths.

‘I think it’s time I was thinking of getting back to New York.  Let’s have a meal somewhere and I can phone the airline for plane times.  What day is it, we seem to have lost a weekend.  I need a drink.’

‘You need a lynching.  You’ve upset my friends and I haven’t written a goddamn word.  I’ve been too busy looking after you.  Your work here is done.  I can never come back here again.  This whole thing will probably finish me as a writer.  I have no story.’

‘Well I know we got a bit pissed and let things slip a bit but there’s lots of colour.  Lots happened.’

‘Holy Shit!  You scumbag!  This is Kentucky, not Skid Row.  I love these people.  They are my friends and you treated them like scum.’

Ralph Steadman- The Joke’s Over

As Horse Racing Season Heats Up, Industry Examines Itself To Keep Horses Safer

By Travis Waldron, ThinkProgress

May 4, 2013 at 9:00 am

Saturday will mark the 139th running of the Kentucky Derby, when the top three-year-old horses from around the world will compete for the garland of roses in America’s oldest continuous sporting event. The Derby has gone off on the first Saturday in May uninterrupted since 1875, and as the years have worn on, the crowds and ceremonies have only grown.

The Sport of Kings may not hold the prominent place in American culture it once did, but it hasn’t been immunized from the debates that have enthralled the sports that have taken its place. Like baseball, it has battled the spread of performance-enhancing drugs. Like football, it has faced its own existential crisis, a question about whether it is too dangerous and whether it can be made safe for its participants.

Like both sports, those battles have featured prominently in the national media – perhaps never more so than they did in 2008, when the Derby champion, Big Brown, was linked to steroids and runner-up, Eight Belles, collapsed in a heap after crossing the finish line and was euthanized on the Churchill Downs dirt. The sport was already facing questions – and asking them of itself – before that Saturday, and the questions have only grown stronger since.

American racetracks have one of the highest collective breakdown rates in the world, and even though horses here have more opportunities to enter the starting gates, they do so far less often than many of their foreign competitors. A New York Times analysis found that American race horses had an on-track incident rate of 5.2 per 1,000 starts; by comparison, a Toronto racetrack the Times studied had a rate of just 1.4 per 1,000 starts. The average number of starts for American horses plunged to an all-time low – 6.1 – in 2010; by comparison, foreign horses average as many as 18 starts in their careers.

Hmm… remind you of anything?  It should.  It’s just about the same as last year’s featured piece from The Atlantic.

That’s tradition for you.

If you want to you can watch Kentucky Derby coverage from 11 am ET (on Vs. where it actually started on Wednesday) until 7 pm (on NBC, where they spare you the pre-race hype until 4).

I suppose this is good thing since you can hardly be expected to follow Horse Racing unless you’re a tout or plunger in one of the few forms of gambling deemed socially acceptable (as opposed to Poker, which is not gambling at all) and 2 year olds don’t have much of a record to handicap.  Black Onyx is a last minute scratch and will not be replaced.

Ice Cream.  Get your Tutsi Frootsie Ice Cream.

It’s really mostly an excuse to wear hats that would be rejected from a 5th Avenue Easter Parade or Royal Wedding and get tanked up on Bourbon that is best sipped with a soda chaser and not muddled up with mint.

Mint Julep

Ingredients

• 4 cups bourbon
• 2 bunches fresh spearmint
• 1 cup distilled water
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• Powdered sugar

Directions

New York Times coverage-

• The Road to Louisville Is Now Paved With Points By RYAN GOLDBERG
• 2 Storied Lineages Share a Kentucky Derby Favorite By RYAN GOLDBERG
• Racing Family Dares to Dream of Victory By MELISSA HOPPERT
• With One Bet, Stablehand Becomes Stable Owner By JOE DRAPE
• 2 Big Changes Make Derby More Difficult to Predict By JIM SQUIRES
• The Gentle Heroes of Churchill Downs By JULIE JUNE STEWART
• Giant Finish, the Last to Arrive at Churchill Downs By JULIE JUNE STEWART
• Exterminator, a Long Shot to Remember By ELIZA MCGRAW
• Normandy Invasion Too Keen During Workout By ALEX BROWN
• Orb’s Workout Impresses a Top Observer By ALEX BROWN

Post Time is 6:24 pm ET.

Over at The Plum Line Jamelle Bouie is a little irrationally exhuberant about the prospects for renewed action on Gun Safety based on promises of a new talking tour by Joe Biden and reports of deteriorating public polls for Ayotte, Baucus, Begich, and Murkowsi.

Well, not so fast buckaroo.

OFA’s first foray falls short

By: Reid J. Epstein, Politico

May 3, 2013 05:02 AM EDT

President Barack Obama’s man in North Dakota couldn’t pitch in to help shame Sen. Heidi Heitkamp for her vote against gun control – he was busy with his new job selling Toyotas.

Organizing for Action’s top Montana official wouldn’t canvass the state to turn up the heat on Sen. Max Baucus because there was no reimbursement for the gas money.

Alaska Sens. Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski haven’t had to worry about running up against OFA’s influence there, since Obama’s former state director there has turned back to building up her own political consulting business – “I need to get to making money,” she said.

…

Even in states Obama carried handily – places like Ohio and New Hampshire – the group couldn’t hold big rallies, blanket the airwaves with TV ads or motivate enough supporters to match the volume of phone calls from pro-gun advocates. Asked for demonstrations of the strong effort they were mounting, OFA staff pointed to “tweet your senator” pushes they encouraged in the days after the vote.

…

What that’s added up to so far: On the weekend after the background checks vote, seven OFA volunteers protested at the Tampa office of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “More than 30” came to protest Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) at his Bozeman office, according to a local TV station, though some of them were counter-protesters in support of Baucus’s no vote on background checks.

Just 20 people came to protest Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) at his Winston-Salem office. The OFA protesters were invited into the office two at a time to air their grievances to staff, a Burr spokesman told POLITICO. A few accepted the offer, but many did not.

There were no events in North Dakota or Alaska, each home to Democrats who voted no. In Arkansas, the lead state volunteer planned events in and around Little Rock, where he lives, and posted them to OFA’s website. Barely anyone showed.

Outside groups like Mayors Against Illegal Guns are counting on OFA to help them pack town hall meetings to confront senators who voted against the background checks bill.

But at New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte’s town hall meetings Tuesday, there was no discernible OFA presence. While there were protesters, many of them attended on their own to voice concerns to Ayotte about gun control or were organized by the Michael Bloomberg-backed group, which distributed signs saying, “Shame on you.”

OFA has just 19 paid state coordinators.  11ty Dimensional Chess my ass.

A Story for May Day: The Fed, Apple, and Trickle-Down Economics

Robert Reich

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

It would be one thing if Apple and other giant companies were borrowing in order to expand operations and create new jobs. But that’s not what’s going on. Apple, remember, is still sitting on $145 billion.

The reason big companies aren’t creating more jobs is consumers aren’t buying enough to justify the expansion. And government is cutting back on spending.

Big corporations are borrowing simply in order to push stock prices up and reward their investors.

It’s a sump pump with the Fed on one end buying up bonds to keep interest rates low, and shareholders on the other end raking in the returns.

Get it? Easy money from the Fed can’t get the economy out of first gear when the rest of government is in reverse.

Trickle-down economics is the first cousin of austerity economics. Austerity is nuts when so many millions are out of work. And as we’ve learned before, trickle-down is a fraud. Nothing ever trickles down.

A DocuDharma tradition.

Oh, wait- EVERYBODY!

Obama’s budget puts House Democrats in bind

By: Alex Isenstadt, Politico

April 30, 2013 05:00 AM EDT

How large a role Medicare and Social Security play in the 2014 debate remains to be seen – Democrats intend to highlight issues like immigration and gun control, with an eye toward driving minority and younger voters to the polls. But they also want to use entitlements as part of a broader message branding Republicans as overly ideological and uncaring about the middle class.

Driving home that theme, some Democrats say, will be tricky after the president’s controversial endorsment of chained CPI, a stingier way of calculating growth in Social Security benefits, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare cuts.

“It is highly problematic,” said one Democratic pollster and veteran of congressional races, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to be seen as picking a fight with the White House. “There is no question the entitlement debate makes for an easy campaign ad.”

…

In an interview with CNN after Obama unveiled his budget earlier this month, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden of Oregon called the plan “a shocking attack on seniors.”

“I’ll tell you when you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taken $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare and now coming back at seniors again, I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here in terms of denying access to seniors for health care in districts like mine certainly and around the country,” he said.

Walden’s remarks drew criticism from some in the GOP, which has come out in favor of chained CPI as a way of reducing the deficit. But the NRCC chairman’s point was made: Republicans had been given a free opportunity to hit back on entitlements, long a Democratic trump card.

Brock McCleary, a GOP pollster and former NRCC deputy political director, said Republicans couldn’t expect to gain an advantage on who’s most likely to defend programs but could try to fight the issue to a draw.

“The president has very clearly shown the way for how Republicans can keep voters in the lurch about which party is going to protect entitlements,” he said.

Electoral victory my ass.