Kanye Walks
By Mitch Berg
They said if I voted for Barack Obama, racism would prevail.
And they were right:
“Down in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later,” he begins, “there’s a law, federal law — when you get reconstruction money from the federal government — called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when you get federal money, you gotta give a ten percent match. The local government’s gotta come up with ten percent. Every ten dollars the federal government comes up with, local government’s gotta give a dollar.”
“Now here’s the thing,” Obama continues, “when 9-11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act — said, ‘This is too serious a problem. We can’t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you gotta put in. Well, here’s ten dollars.’ And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation. We don’t expect you to come up with y’own money, here. Here’s the money to rebuild. We’re not gonna wait for you to scratch it together — because you’re part of the American family.’”
That’s not, Obama says, what is happening in majority-black New Orleans. “What’s happening down in New Orleans? Where’s your dollar? Where’s your Stafford Act money?” Obama shouts, angry now. “Makes no sense! Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!”
It’s a remarkable moment, and not just for its resemblance to Kayne West’s famous claim that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” but also because of its basic dishonesty. By January of 2007, six months before Obama’s Hampton speech, the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina. Compare this to the mere $20 billion that the Bush administration pledged to New York City after Sept. 11.
Even if you are a low information voter, this has got to be sinking in, doesn’t it?
October 3rd, 2012 at 9:04 am
Sadly, for those already inclined to vote for the President, they either believe everything he says in this speech, or fear it to be true. For those who are inclined to vote for Romney, what he says in this video is no surprise. For the undecided few, they are less concerned with his racial ideas than his economic ideas. And among that group, there are some who just don’t care as long as they get their money and benefits.
October 3rd, 2012 at 9:56 am
Do LIV’s, low information voters – you know – morons, have an information threshold? Or, does their physiology consist of the obvious: Junk in/junk out?
I have FB friends of a low intelligence threshold (is that a nice way of dressing a pig?) who cannot see the constitutional cliff – nor could a gun to their head of their children convince them Romney isn’t a ticket to fascism.
What, in nature, is the antidote to stupid?
October 3rd, 2012 at 10:20 am
Clearly, this is Barry’s “Be nice to the black man” campaign. Now, when the FACTCHECKING is brought to light, his dimwitted supporters can blame it all on teh BIGOT HATE.
October 3rd, 2012 at 10:34 am
The only dishonesty is pretending this statement:
“By January of 2007, six months before Obama’s Hampton speech, the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina. Compare this to the mere $20 billion that the Bush administration pledged to New York City after Sept. 11” has anything to do with waiving the Stafford Act requirement for local buy-in. Obama was not upset about the amount of money spent on various disasters, he was upset that in some places the Stafford Act was waived and in other places not.
October 3rd, 2012 at 10:47 am
RickDFL, Stafford Act was waived several times in NOLA post Katrina.
October 3rd, 2012 at 11:17 am
“What, in nature, is the antidote to stupid?” Death. Works every time.
October 3rd, 2012 at 11:19 am
Is the baby he is talking about an abortion survivor?
And why is he using a speach pattern/dialect that sounds like Bill Clinton or Al Gore speaking at a Black church?
And why does an Atheist say “praise God” randomnly in a speach?
October 3rd, 2012 at 11:21 am
I remember Katrina. I gave $50 to the Humane Society to assist with animal rescues. Then I raed that there were 100s or millions of dollars in waste and fraud with gov’t money in New Orleans. Kind of makes my $50 insignificant and not neccesary.
October 3rd, 2012 at 11:25 am
PJ, Obama was taking his info from the Wall St. Journal (that left wing media rag).
http://righthandthief.blogspot.com/2007/01/chris-coopers-wsj-story.html
“The White House has kept in force a set of rules known as the Stafford Act. Under its guidance, rebuilding funds must be accompanied by a 10% match from local governments, . . . The Stafford Act has been waived in the past — it didn’t apply to Manhattan in September 2001 or South Florida following Hurricane Andrew in 1992 — but it remains in place along the Gulf. President Bush dropped the Act for a time for certain projects, such as emergency repairs and debris removal, only to reinstate it later.”
While there may have been partial waivers for some areas, Obama was complaining that NOLA did not get the same extensive waivers that NYC and S FLA got. And per the WSJ that seems to be true.
Just months before Obama’s speech a GOP Senator was blocking Democrative legislative efforts to waive the Stafford Act for NOLA.
http://righthandthief.blogspot.com/2007/03/unnamed-republican-senators-blocking.html
October 3rd, 2012 at 1:17 pm
Chuck wrote:
And why is he using a speach pattern/dialect that sounds like Bill Clinton or Al Gore speaking at a Black church?
Because Obama was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia and attended elite schools. He thinks that needs to put on a hokey accent to fit in with real urban blacks and descendants of slaves. He spoke that way before black audiences for exactly the same reason that Clinton and Gore did.
Rick DFL-
The clip is the exact equivalent of GW Bush putting on a hokey hillbilly accent before a crowd of white working people, while he tells them they’d all have great jobs if it weren’t for that affirmative action.
Except that Bush never did that.
October 3rd, 2012 at 1:34 pm
RickDFL, I just love how you drooling sycophants on the left fringe still won’t admit that your Black Messiah screwed the pooch! Most of you keep attempting to provide cover for his economically illiterate policies and his communist leanings. Wake up! Keynesian economics have failed repeatedly, yet DemocRATs keep using them, trying to convince their followers that this time they will work.
October 3rd, 2012 at 1:56 pm
Bosshoss, Obama is not a keynesian. Keynes would be horrified at what Obama is doing. It really is obamanomics, he’s using theories he invented himself or he heard pronounced by lefty professors who were big on “justice” but short on mathematical skill.
What does Obama mean, exactly, when he says he says he wants to grow the economy “from the middle out, and the bottom up”? If that could be done, every president in the last hundred years would have run on that platform, won re-election by a landslide, and every industrial nation would have copied his plan.
Why doesn’t Obama get called on this? It’s as though he says he’s going to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil by replacing it with unicorn hair and pixie dust.
October 3rd, 2012 at 2:16 pm
Ah yes, the fact-based rebutals for which SITD is so proud. Two responses and not one word about the Stafford Act or New Orleans.
October 3rd, 2012 at 2:28 pm
Ah yes, the fact-based rebutals (sic) for which RickDFL is so proud.
PJKelly @ 10:47
Boss: Obama did not screw the pooch. He ate it.
October 3rd, 2012 at 2:42 pm
The ol’ “prove a negative” ploy, RickDFL? maybe you should be commenting over at Penigma’s joint.
You don’t really think that Obama was leveling intelligent criticism of the U.S., do you? He was speaking in front of an audience of race hustlers. He spoke to them as he did so they would think that he was one of them — despite his lack of experiencing the racism that (he assured them) underlay every act of the American government.
This was very much the “old Obama”, the one who made the famous anti-war speech back in 2003, carefully pronouncing the Jewish-sounding names of Bush’s advisers: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/17/281927/-Obama-s-2002-Speech-At-A-Chicago-Anti-War-Rally
October 3rd, 2012 at 2:54 pm
CNN is doing total cover mode for this, good to know some people in the MSM know their place…
October 3rd, 2012 at 3:49 pm
Loren: The rebuttal (thx for spell chx) comes after the claim not before. I pointed out to PJ that, according to the WSJ, NOLA got a far more limited Stafford Act waiver than NYC of S FLA. So far he has not responded, nor has anyone else claimed that Obama was wrong to say that NOLA did not get the same Stafford waiver that NYC and S FLA got.
Terry: I don’t know where you get the prove a negative ploy. Tucker Carlson is positively wrong that “the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina” contradicts Obama concern about not waiving the Stafford Act. Indeed, because there was no waiver, much of the $110 billion was not spent in NOLA. That is the point of the WSJ article. Tucker knows you are lazy and that you assume “sent $110 billion” means spent $110 billion. But Obama knew that by not waiving the Stafford Act, the Feds prevented NOLA from accessing the $110 billion. Do you like it when reporters hide such basic facts from you?
As for your characterization of what Obama is doing/saying, how can I tell unless I know whether he is right on the facts. For example, do you agree that NOLA did not get the same Stafford Act waiver that NYC and S FLA got?
October 3rd, 2012 at 4:16 pm
RickDFL. I read your claim ” Obama was not upset about the amount of money spent on various disasters, he was upset that in some places the Stafford Act was waived and in other places not.” to mean that you believed that Stafford requirements were waived in some places (NYC and FL) but not in another (NOLA). I merely stated the easily provable truism that Stafford requirements were waived post Katrina, numerous times. See, e.g. this report to the Congressional research service, which also shows many other cases in which Federal agencies waived requirements for those affected by Katrina.
You now appear to be making the claim that NYC got more waivers than NOLA. You should also note that the article to which you link refers not to NOLA specifically, but to the region. that fact alone makes the President’s claim that this was some proof of racism facially incorrect. So, go ahead and read the report to which I linked, and let me know what waivers would have been appropriate, and when.
Until then, I will try to stop laughing at the concept of a Democrat complaining about bureaucratic red tape.
October 3rd, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Rick – You neglected to excerpt the next paragraph which might have given the context of why the Stafford rules weren’t waived as they were in NYC & SoFLA…
“Meanwhile, both Louisiana and Mississippi have been so keen to burnish their images that they created their own set of lumbering regulatory bureaus and antifraud audit shops. The Stafford Act has been waived in the past — it didn’t apply to Manhattan in September 2001 or South Florida following Hurricane Andrew in 1992 — but it remains in place along the Gulf. President Bush dropped the Act for a time for certain projects, such as emergency repairs and debris removal, only to reinstate it later.
The region’s reputation for corruption is one reason why. Influence peddling on the coast has a long history, from 1930s Louisiana Gov. Huey Long to Edwin Edwards, a three-term governor currently serving a 10-year prison sentence. Recently, Mississippi was named the most corrupt state in the nation by Corporate Crime Reporter, a Washington, D.C., publication.”
This information contained in the 2nd paragraph might mitigate then candidate Obama’s subtext that race was the factor in why NOLA wasn’t given waivers from Stafford as NYC and SoFLA. It should also be pointed out that 9/11 was a terrorist attack unlike the natural disasters that beset South Florida and NOLA.
October 3rd, 2012 at 5:10 pm
PJ, I should have been clearer in my initial statement. Obama was upset that not waiving the Stafford Act’s 10% local upfront requirement, as had been done for NYC and S FLA, was preventing NOLA from accessing available Federal $s. The CRS report you cite, lists a number of waivers of Fed Regs under the Stafford Act, but none of them are the 10% local upfront requirement. As the WSJ points out (although the language is less than precise) NYC and S FLA got a blanket waiver of the 10% requirement and NOLA did not. It got only a brief and temporary waiver the the 10% requirement for some projects. Lack of a full waiver, prevented full access to the money for NOLA that Congress appropriated. NYC and S FLA, on the other hand, could access all Fed appropriated $s without putting up local money.
All of which brings us back to the inadequacy of Tucker Carlson’s statement. The $110 billion he says the Feds “sent” to NOLA was not fully available because the Feds would not waive the 10% requirement as Obama said. Tucker implies that NOLA got treated the same as NYC and S FLA, that is clearly not the case.
If you concede NOLA got treated differently than NYC and S FLA vis a vis the 10% waiver, I will happily concede, and suspect Obama would too, that a variety of factors may explain the difference. Obama cites Federal indiffernce to the plight of imporverished African-Americans as one factor. That hardly exludes other factors. Whether race was a partial factor at all is probably a longer argument for another day.
October 3rd, 2012 at 5:25 pm
If you concede NOLA got treated differently than NYC and S FLA vis a vis the 10% waiver, I will happily concede, and suspect Obama would too, that a variety of factors may explain the difference. That is fine, Rick, but what was the President’s point?
Obama cites Federal indiffernce to the plight of impoverished African-Americans as one factor. That was the only factor he discussed in his speech. He wanted them to believe that the indifference was racial. It was not, which we know, because areas affected by the same storm that were predominantly white received no different treatment.
That hardly exludes other factors. Factors which did not make it into the speech. It’s called pandering.
October 3rd, 2012 at 6:24 pm
PJ. Having agreed Tucker failed to provide adequate rebuttal, we can move on.
“It was not, which we know, because areas affected by the same storm that were predominantly white received no different treatment.”
We don’t know that. If the school in the black part of town gets less funding than the school in the white part of town, you can not prove there is no racism simply by pointing out that there happen to be white student in the first school who are getting underfunded equally with their black schoolmates. Sometimes white people get harmed by racism along with black people.
The questions was did the the Katrina area (whites and blacks together) get treated differently (it was, we agree) because (at least, in part) it was viewed as predominatley populated by African Americans.
“It’s called pandering” or it’s called speaking to your audiences legitimate concerns. Depends on how big a role you think race plays in America and in the Katrina response. That is one of the major things Ds and Rs disagree about.
October 3rd, 2012 at 7:01 pm
Rick, I’m pretty sure we know that the Stafford thing with the President as described in his speech was pandering. He wanted them to believe that the failure to waive Stafford requirements was racial, or at the very least he wanted his african american audience to think that he believed that.
For some reason, though, he failed to mention that he himself had declined the opportunity to help them out. House bill 2206 in 2007, voted on May 25, 2007 waived Stafford requirements (Section 5 of the bill).
Link
The bill was introduced by that right wing tea party radical David Obey, and passed into law over the objection of 14 United States Senators.
Do you care to hazard a guess as to how then Senator Barack Obama voted when it came time to show “ the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!” ?
And pandering is telling your audience what they want to hear, whether you believe it or not. Strong leaders will appear before hostile groups, like Mitt Romney speaking to the NAACP, and Paul Ryan speaking to AARP. Candidate Obama was too afraid to even appear on Fox News.
Let me help you with that.
October 3rd, 2012 at 7:49 pm
Having agreed Tucker failed to provide adequate rebuttal, we can move on.
Half-wit RickDFL, stumbling over himself to explain his preferred candidate’s blatant race demagoguery, declares victory and moves on.
October 3rd, 2012 at 8:00 pm
The real punchline is Senator Obama voted against the waiver of the Stafford act for NOLA post Katrina. Rich Irony.
October 3rd, 2012 at 8:02 pm
Seems then Senator Obama voted against the bill authorizing the waiving of Stafford in the emergency appropriation of aid to the Katrina ravaged areas:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=1&vote=00181
Got to give credit though, at least Obama didn’t vote “Present”. Maybe in all the reporting on this it might have come up to add a little nuance to the news of the speech. Ah, that Tucker Carlson never getting the full story, eh?
““It’s called pandering” or it’s called speaking to your audiences legitimate concerns.”
Hey, Romney should try that out on his 47% crack.
You may now return to the comfort of your prejudices.
October 3rd, 2012 at 8:02 pm
Turns out that Obama voted against waiving the Stafford Act for Katrina in 2007
What a racist bastard he is.I guess his white half showed up in the senate on the day of the vote. RickDFL won’t be able to vote for Obama now. His finely-honed sense of outrage won’t allow it.
(Sec. 4501) Sets the federal share of assistance provided for Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Texas in connection with Hurricanes Katrina, Wilma, Dennis, and Rita under the Stafford Act at 100% of eligible costs. Provides that such federal share shall apply to disaster assistance applied for before this Act’s enactment.
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=1&vote=00181
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR02206:@@@L&summ2=m&
October 3rd, 2012 at 8:03 pm
I got beat to it.
October 3rd, 2012 at 8:26 pm
Twice.
October 3rd, 2012 at 8:46 pm
That’s because I verified before I commented, Kermit. Wouldn’t want to go around accusing folks of being racist without a good reason.
Y’know, I’m pretty sure that when Reverend Wright made his “God Damn America” speech, Obama probably high-fived him and led the parishioners on a chant of “GOD DAMN AMERICA! GOD DAMN AMERICA!”
I have no proof whatsoever that Obama did this, but it sounds like the kind of thing he would do. Plus, he can’t prove that he didn’t do it, and that means that it happened.
October 3rd, 2012 at 9:38 pm
According to the Powerline boys, Obama voted against waiving the Stafford requirements just a few weeks before he made that nasty speech to the race hustlers. If true, that moves Obama from the “lying politician” column to the “evil lying politician” column.
October 4th, 2012 at 9:51 am
New York City did not get more sympathetic treatment in the news and in the halls of power than New Orleans got because New York is home to major media and the damage was caused by a unique terrorist event rather than one-in-a-series-of-hurricanes striking some corrupt backwater burg in flyover country. Those sort of differences don’t matter, that sort of condescending snobbery never happens, nobody would ever believe it.
No, the difference was because REPUBLICANS HATE BLACKS. It must be. There is no other possible reason. Why is that so hard to understand?
.