Ta-Nehisi Coates has a post that points out how Conservatives have attempted to use Bill Cosby as a battering ram against Liberals in general and the Black community in particular. Cosby is well known for stating that Black fathers and families have to take more responsibility in instilling a moral code and educating the younger generation. In no way does Cosby state that poor Black people are to be left to their own devices. His latest book with Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, "Come on People", suggests solutions that involve parents (either single or together), communities and government working in combination to improve the situation in urban communities.

For the past decade Newt Gingrich has been called a "Thought Leader"—a glib PR term coined in the '90's and one which in my opinion should be stood up against a fence and shot along with gag-response phrases like "nuanced argument", "heavy hitter" and "core competency". Since his Speakership, Gingrich has amassed a fortune speaking and writing his thoughts on issues as diverse as home ownership, health care, abortion, cap and trade, and education—to name a few. It seems that Gingrich's thoughts matter. Stanley Elkin in his essay, "Some Overrated Masterpieces", stated that, "... the odd thing about words is the cockeyed weight they're permitted to bear." In Gingrich's case—even more so. He's quotable and printable.

What Gingrich's thoughts are worth in a Presidential run we are about to find out. His speaking style is facile. He is the invented character—used car salesman with a PHD. His followers regard him as very, very smart. His numerous segues from arcane references, to the appearance of moderation and then to hell-fire-demonizing of the Left occur at lightning speed. A reference to the Transcontinental Railroad will send his followers rummaging around the labyrinths of their minds to find an association and finding none they conclude that the man must be brilliant.

While most people spent election night watching the outcome of SB5 Ohio, I watched the election happenings in Maine. 1980 was a big year for me personally. It was the first time I’d lived in the United States since I was a small child.  I went to boarding school for my senior year of high school; my parents really thought I should know what it is like to be in America, to go to school in America and to learn to be an American. Boarding school… well that is a whole other story, but yes I ended up in Maine in boarding school and it was my first taste of living in the US for many years, I’d always been an expatriate, I was about to be something else.

Keith Olbermann was, for once, apoplectic.  They were doing it again!!!  The reactionary forces of the staus quo were at it again, sending the police after The People, intolerant of their cries of anguish and of their mission.   It was the Edmond Pettus Bridge again, Haymarket, the Moratorium Against the War, all wrapped into one.   And now, nobody would sleep on the slab of concrete off Liberty Street, between Church and Broadway a place laughingly called Zuccotti Park.

"The prize....there it is!"

There has been a comparison of the current Occupy movement and the Civil Rights movement of the 50's and 60's.  In some ways, there is a truth to that.  Whereas the latter looked to achieve racial equality, the former is seeking to achieve economic equality.  The problem is that racial equality is easier to grasp than economic equality (although the arena of the means to remedy the equalities is another matter - see affirmative action).

As a young lad in the 5th grade, I became fascinated with the Underground Railroad.  I still remember the delight of the school librarian when I asked her to help me find something on the topic just because I wanted to learn more about it and not because it was part of some assignment (although at the time I didn't understand the subtext of her glee).  This interest led me to the Civil Rights movement and the numerous stories about living in the segregated South.

I have a premise. I’ve spent months working on it while riveted to the television and internet, watching the 2012 Presidential campaign develop like an origami snake - one pointed crease and sharp fold at a time.

I’m certainly not the first person to ask themselves what vicious trick Fortuna is playing on us now. It can’t just be me who watches these GOP debates and thinks that scraping the bottom of the Republican barrel doesn’t even come close to describing what we are witnessing as a Nation.

I cringe when I imagine what the world at large thinks of the line-up of Unusual Suspects vying to be President of the United States. It’s that same feeling I had every time George W. Bush came out to the podium to speak during his two terms in office. I wasn’t sure what gaffe he would commit next, how many times in one conversation he’d mispronounce the word ‘nuclear’ and on which foreign land he’d declare war next. I just knew that anything was possible and I spent eight years popping Tums.

We live in troubled and ironic times. The times are certainly troubled. The IMF’s Managing Director has recently spoken with some justification of a looming “lost decade” for the global economy – warning of “dark clouds” blocking the capacity of the world’s leading economies to deliver a renewed bout of economic growth and generalized prosperity.[1] The times are also deeply ironic: since the governing solution to those dark clouds – in countries as substantial as Italy and Greece, and in institutions as powerful as the IMF – would currently appear to be the replacement of elected leaders by appointed technocrats. The solution favored by the powerful is the transfer of state authority from democratically chosen leaders to governors drawn predominantly from the ranks of the very bankers whose inadequate supervision of their own industry darkened the skies in the first place. In this manner, a global financial crisis that initially discredited bankers has incrementally morphed into one to be settled on terms directly specified by bankers themselves.[2] A crisis of economics has been turned into a crisis of democracy. It is an outrage.

The only thing challenging that morphing is the explosion of popular protest which has accompanied it. In key cities in Europe now, the battle lines are being drawn between the technocrats in the ministries and the protesters on the streets. In key cities in the United States, similar lines exist between those who control Wall Street and those who occupy it. If the next decade is not to be lost, it is absolutely vital that, in the clash between money and the people, the people win.

But will they? Only if, inspired by the occupation of Wall Street, a wider political constituency in the United States comes to recognize the force of four truths that the conservative media work endlessly to deny.

Cook ’em a free pizza and they will come.

No, it’s not a Herman Cain campaign motto. It’s the Republican Party’s new strategy for molding the next generation of conservative voters. And it begins in elementary school.

Fighting back against the Obama Administration’s increased restrictions on unhealthy, high sodium and fatty foods in school cafeterias, Republicans this week proposed a bill to re-designate pizza sauce, ketchup and fries as “vegetables” and overturn the administration’s push for more whole grain and (actual) vegetable options in schools.

We have been pretty quiet here at the Liberal Mob for the past couple of months. I assure it is not because we no longer yearn to provide you with our obvious liberal biases in the form of “wannabe” journalism. Alas, we are all full-time students and have had little time to devote to you, our tens of faithful readers. Let me disclose right of the bat that the title of this post is a bit misleading. So if you clicked on this blog post in the hopes of getting an in-depth explanation/analysis of republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s tax plan, stop reading now.

Unfortunately, thus far Mr. Cain himself has been unable to fully articulate how the plan will work. So I am currently unable to do an anlysis on it. I have recently been informed by Mr. Cain’s campaign that as a liberal voter I am incensed that there is an “articulate” African American Conservative candidate. So I would be unable to give an unbiased analysis anyway. I have been further informed by teh Cain campaign that, as an African American voter, I have been brainwashed by Barack Obama. So I guess that means that my analysis of anything Herman Cain says or does really doesn’t matter. Anyway...

Hawaiian guitarist, writer and singer Makana has performed in the Obama White House. He is a well known and popular Hawaiian artist.

He was invited to perform instrumental music at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)  in Honolulu Saturday. Instead he sang a song he had just written on the Occupy movement, "We Are The Many".