Bilking the American Taxpayer of $4.6 BILLION to Settle ‘Lawsuits’!

This  notice of theft from the American taxpayer was writen by James Rowley at Bloomberg:

“The U.S. Senate yesterday approved spending $4.6 billion to settle two lawsuits: one by black farmers who alleged racial discrimination by government lenders and the other by 300,000 American Indians who said they had been cheated out of land royalties dating to 1887.

Passage of the measure, by voice vote, unblocks a legislative logjam that has thwarted payouts, negotiated by the Obama administration, of $1.15 billion to the black farmers and $3.4 billion to the American Indians.

“We are one step closer to ensuring that the black farmers and Native Americans in these suits are fully compensated for past failures of judgment by the government,” U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said in a statement after the Senate vote. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, said he hopes to seek a vote after Congress returns from a week-long recess on Nov. 29.

President Barack Obama praised the Senate action and urged the House to move forward with the bill “as they did last year.”

The House included the funding in war supplemental legislation it passed this summer, but it must vote on the settlements again. The Senate version of the war supplemental did not contain the funding to settle the lawsuits because Republicans objected to the proposed financing method, saying it added to the deficit.

At least seven times this year, Senate Republicans blocked efforts to include the spending provisions in pending legislation. Their objections prompted repeated complaints by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, who said in an Aug. 5 statement that Republicans’ “petty political calculations” were “denying justice to these Americans.”

Yesterday, Reid said in a statement that justice “will finally be served.”

Discrimination Alleged

The farmers’ 1997 class-action lawsuit alleged discrimination by the Agriculture Department’s lending programs. Under a negotiated settlement announced in February, qualified farmers can collect as much as $50,000, plus debt relief. Others may collect monetary damages up to $250,000.

The Obama administration requested $1.15 billion in its 2010 budget, on top of $100 million that Congress approved in the 2008 farm bill to finance the settlement.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement yesterday that the Senate’s “bold step” to finance the black farmers’ settlement “marks a major milestone in USDA’s efforts to turn the page on a sad chapter in our history.”

This notice of theft of taxpayer dollars was published at Bloomberg:

“One of the largest class-action cases filed against the U.S., the 1996 lawsuit by American Indian plaintiffs accused the Interior Department of mismanaging trust funds that collected royalties for grazing rights and the extraction of minerals, oil and natural gas from tribal lands. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the settlement of that case last December.

“This is a day that will be etched in our memories and our history books,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement yesterday. The settlement “honorably and responsibly addresses long-standing injustices,” he said.

Comment:  Mr. Salazaar must be hooked on weed for such a statement.   Thanks go to Dennis Prager fan, California Cole for sending me this article depressing though it may be.

Chris Christie Stars Again at Republican Governors Association Conference.

SAN DIEGO — When at least four possible presidential contenders – Govs. Haley Barbour, Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty and Mitch Daniels — shared a stage at the Republican Governors Association conference Thursday morning, along with Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, who do you think was the standout?

Yes, Barbour’s every word is quotable, Daniels has sewn up the David Brooks primary, and no one can say that Pawlenty doesn’t present well. But if you read Politics Daily’s Jill Lawrence, you might not be surprised to learn that it was Christie who got the most applause and laughs from the crowd.

What new governors can’t understand, he said, is that “I don’t care if you had a Democrat or a Republican before you,” you will still be up against the same “it’s never been done that way” mindset. He told governors-elect that their own political advisers will tell them, “Let’s not kick anybody you shouldn’t kick and you’ll be fine; let’s incrementalize, kick them a little and cuddle up to them at other times.” Which is fine, he said, if you want voters to “fog over” when you speak, throw down the newspaper when they read about you, and vote against you the next time.

Speaking about his own fight against the teachers unions, he said he likes teachers, too, “but I can’t stand their union.” Freezing teacher salaries for a year and asking teachers to pay 1.5 percent of their salary for health benefits was characterized as such an historic assault on schools that even his own first-grader, Bridget, was hurt as a result. Really? Sure, he said, and told a story about her supposedly coming home with her first report card and complaining that OF COURSE her marks were poor. “I can’t concentrate, I can’t study,” with a teacher whose pay has been frozen. “Dad, stop the madness!”

In answer to the huge laughter and applause from the crowd, he said, “You laugh, but that’s the crap I have to listen to in New Jersey.”

Spend your political capital while you have it, he advised those just elected, because if you stow it in a drawer for some time when you need it, you’ll open that drawer some day and find that is has dissipated.

Christie and Susana Martinez of New Mexico were chosen as at-large members of the RGA’s leadership team headed by incoming chair Rick Perry. Outgoing chairman Haley Barbour will remain on the team in the newly created role of policy chairman. Jindal will serve as gala chairman and Nikki Haley as recruitment chairwoman.

As for advice new governors got from others on the stage? Barbour told them to “do what you said you were gonna do. Anybody that thinks there’s one department in your state that can’t save money doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

Pawlenty said “every day there are threats to our freedom in the form of school board” and other governmental decisions. Taking one of several shots at the press, he said that when Republicans so much as mention the word freedom “some of our friends who are cynical in the media snicker at that.”

Daniels, who moderator Bill Bennett introduced as “the man on the motorcycle,” (Daniels rides a Harley) was in both dress and posture the most relaxed guy on the stage. In a baggy blue sweater over a T-shirt, he leaned way back in his chair and told new governors, “You’re going to have a field day, especially if you follow a Democrat” because there will be so much fat to trim from state budgets. “Low-hanging fruit,” he called it. “It’s what our military friends call a target-rich environment.”

Interestingly, a main theme of today’s discussion was that this is a moment when the American public is prepared and willing to make sacrifices; that’s an argument that many of Obama’s fellow Democrats thought he should have made more explicitly.

McDonnell said this is a unique moment “in American history when people are willing to put up with more cuts. People manage resources better if you give them less of it.”

Later in the day, at a panel discussion modestly called “Saving America,” Newt Gingrich gave the only formal address of the conference, a 12-point plan delivered from a podium. In it, he said people receiving unemployment compensation should be required to go through a training course because “paying people to do nothing for 99 weeks is as wrong in unemployment compensation as it was in welfare.”

Another of his proposals is that every public school student be required to “reassert American exceptionalism” by studying the Declaration of Independence every year. “The time has come to reassert that we are Americans, and America is a learned civilization,” he said, pronouncing learned as a one- rather than two-syllable word.

(Article written by Melinda Henneberger at Politics Daily.

By the way….If you haven’t seen this antiObama in action, someone honest, direct, clear speaking  without “escape hatches,  so everyone in America will know his position on the issues,  a man with a sense of humor who knows who he is…..please click here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI1Y5zhjC78

When Will America’s Inner City Black Plantation Culture Come to an End?

Not as long as there is a New York Times establishment around most likely.

A  New York Times Black, Charles M. Blow wants more talk in the Race debate in his article at the Times, “Let’s Rescue the Race Debate”.  

Mr. Blow may be a fine man, many Lefty writers are.  But, dear America, do we need more gab about the American Race issue?   Do we need more gab determined  by the Establishment Left about what cannot be said according to its rules of Political Correctness?  Read the following  part of Mr. Blow’s article:

“According to an ABC News poll conducted last year, blacks are even more likely than whites to admit that they “have at least some feelings of racial prejudice.” Thirty-eight percent of blacks admitted to those feelings while only 34 percent of whites did. I use the word admit because people notoriously underreport negative behaviors on polls, and knowing which groups may underreport and to what degree is impossible to gauge. For more objectivity, we need more scientific measures like Project Implicit, a virtual laboratory maintained by Harvard, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia that has administered hundreds of thousands of online tests designed to detect hidden racial biases. Tests taken from 2000 to 2006 found that a whopping three-quarters of whites have an implicit pro-white/anti-black bias, while 40 percent of blacks had a pro-black/anti-white bias, about the same amount as those admitting racial prejudice in the poll.

Furthermore, a January poll by the Pew Research Center found that most blacks agree that blacks who can’t get ahead are most responsible for their own condition. Only about a third said that racial discrimination was the main reason.

This whole hollow argument is further evidence that many whites are exhibiting the same culture of racial victimization that they decry.

The latest evidence of this comes in a poll released this week that was conducted by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and financed by the Ford Foundation. The poll found that 62 percent of whites who identified as Tea Party members, 56 percent of white Republicans, and even 53 percent of white independents said that today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. Only 30 percent of white Democrats agreed with that statement.

It’s an extraordinary set of responses. And my question is the same one used by the right to defend the Tea Party against claims of racism: Where’s the proof? There’s a mound of scientific evidence a mile high that documents the broad, systematic and structural discrimination against minorities. Where’s the comparable mound of documentation for discrimination against whites? There isn’t one.

We can find racial prejudices in all segments of the population, but pretending that the degree and consequences are comparable is neither true nor helpful. And attributing to the agitation of the “colored” masses to the self-aggrandizement of a callous few is truly detrimental.

In fact, some on the right seem to be doing with the race issue what they’ve done with the climate-change issue: denying the basic facts and muddying the waters around them until no one can see clearly enough to have an honest discussion or develop thoughtful solutions.

I had thought that the reflexive denials and defenses of many on the right were simply an overreaction to, in their view, being unfairly accused of racism on too broad a scale. My present worry is that denial may be the new normal and that the hot language of the past summer has cooled and hardened into a permanently warped perception of the very meaning of discrimination and racism. I worry that the last bit of distance between where we are and where we want to be on racial reconciliation is being drawn through an ever-narrowing, ever-more-treacherous terrain.

In the name of progress, the public must reclaim the facts of the race debate in this country. Many racial problems have been solved but many remain. Some we must tackle within our individual communities and others must be dealt with between them. Racism isn’t everywhere we imagine it, but it is in far more places than we admit. If we can start from common points of agreement, we can come much closer to common ground. But to do that, everyone must step out of the shadows of denial and into the brutal light of honesty.”

Comment:  What is a pro-white bias?   What is a pro-black bias?   For God’s sakes why is the American conversation so diminished by the Establishment leftwing brain groomed by college graduates working at stumps like the Times?

Mr. Charles M. Blow writes as an Establishment Black hired by the New York Times to express the Times’ Establishment blue bred white’s views about the American black condition.   He writes that he wants more talk, more “race debate in this country”.   

I, for one, am sick of it…….unless some talk includes the truth of the matter…..

No group in America has imprisoned the American black into its  modern inner city plantation culture and all of the stereotypes emanating from it…… than the American black from the culture he has created.  That is the naked truth, Mr. Blow and the New York Time folks.  When will we be free to admit this?

I am old enough to remember the urban Negro  as a civil person wrapped up in the same cultural and religious, social and behavioral human being as anyone else.   The crime of the day was the Establishment which had assumed the Negro was not of the same culture and of the same values as fellow Americans and therefore preferred to live apart.  We lived under the weight of  depression and world war.

 When I attended a racially mixed public high school over fifty years ago, street crime was not a particular feature of Negro behavior, drugs were non-existent to any community, both communities believed in the same beneficient God,  students sang in the same choir, played on the same athletic teams, but were generally separate socially…..and many Negro teenagers left school to go to work  without graduating.   Some worked in the family store, others in industry.

At my high school we were taught  that the basic requirements of a healthy democracy demanded  good citizenship and Christian values.   A good education was vital.  It was human nature to seek TRUTH so the citizen could make better decisions for self and country for a better future.   

No one with any brain could at that time avoid  questions dealing with the condition of the Negro in our communities.   We had our own worries about growing up, but beyond that everyone I knew recognized there was a schism in the American society.   The schism was unfair.  It didn’t fit anywhere among the ideals our teachers had taught us about our beloved country……..fresh from the battles overseas.

We were told there were two kinds of segregation, de jure and de facto.   In the Twin Cities segregation was defacto.  We were told segregation  was wrong and we whites were to blame.

We had studied American History. We had excellent teachers in those days…..Teachers who loved teaching and had complete command of the subject matter they taught. 

 No one I knew objected to the blame. 

Then came the Progressives and their Welfare Programs……programs causing  the collapse of the Negro family and the rise of the inner city black plantation culture run by the nation’s Democratic Party and its field hands in charge of distributing Uncle Sam’s money.  Billions, perhaps trillions of dollars have  been spent over this fifty year period of American time of American institutions bribing this community to vote Left for their plantations’ rewards.   

The recipients  obeyed  and continue to obey year in and year out……and have earned the government and culture it has bought upon itself.    As the American dollar has corrupted in Africa so has the dollar corrupted its own citizens in order to shore up its Democrat Party’s  Progress toward Marxism.

A great disaster educationally, culturally, financially, and in every other way,  was the Progressive command to force blacks into buses driven to   other school districts…..to mix the races.   Anyone and everyone, both black and white, who objected to this absurdity was branded a racist.  Many in the school world both black and white, who objected,  lost their jobs.   Progressives had progressive plans which would make progress toward a better America…….bigger government making big decisions……such as forced busing of students “for racial equality”.   To hell with learning…get on the bus.

The American black citizen has earned his and her station in contemporary American life.  Some nowadays  have turned to Islam while in prison and have mixed religion with their other daily priorities.   Some as in Chicago learn true racism at Jeremiah “Goddamn America” Wright’s church.  Others still preach the classic teachings of Christianity which have  given birth to some of America’s best citizens.   Others are left in the streets.

It is time for the American black to end its plantation culture, end its own crippling racism,  and help Americans all regain those values which made America the wonderful community it has been.   I would advise American solutions for this American problem.

Peggy Noonan Tells Republicans to Move to the “Center” for 2012!

From my perspective reading the Wall Street Journal and following her views occasionally on television, Peggy Noonan is an eastern conservative……that is a person who lives east of the Appalachians in some large urban community on the fourth floor of something or another, isolated from the workers who make America America. 

There is no soil on her hands.   More and more American citizens are becoming Peggy Noonans.   Today  we hire Mexicans   to get soil on their hands and teach our own young to go to college so they can also live on the fourth floor of something or another in New York City, Philadelphia,  Boston, and these days even in Atlanta.  

Ms. Noonan writes about politics in the Wall Street Journal.  She has written both disparagingly and romantically about the Tea Party people.   She doesn’t like Sarah Palin.   She writes well, as well as possible,  living on the fourth floor of something or another in some eastern metropolis….I’d guess on the insular  community of New York City.

I read her regularly as I listen to President Obama regularly.   I’d  have to listen to the president every day, nearly every hour to keep up with his love for his voice.  But, I don’t have the time to go that far.

I like Peggy Noonan.  I do not at all like Barack Hussein Obama.  I believe he is distrubed.  I know he is duplicitous, disingenuous, and otherwise dishonest.   Americans should worry about their condition with Mr. Obama in charge.

Ms. Noonan wants Republicans to do well in 2012.   So do I.   Ms. Noonan does not think Sarah Palin is the ideal candidate for Republicans to oppose Mr. Obama.   I agree with her, although I think Ms. Palin is a wonderful gift to the American people, the conservatives, and those of us who still get soil on our hands.   I think I love her.  I know I’d like to hug and kiss her for the good she has aroused in America.

Ms. Noonan makes me think.   She writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“Most of my life we’ve lived in a pretty much fifty-fifty nation, with each cycle decided by where the center goes. Mr. Obama won only two years ago by 9.5 million votes. That’s a lot of votes. His supporters may be disheartened and depressed, but they haven’t disappeared. They’ll show up for a presidential race, especially if the Republicans do not learn one of the great lessons of 2010: The center has to embrace the conservative; if it doesn’t, the conservative loses. Add to that the fact that the White House is actually full of talented people, and though they haven’t proved good at governing they did prove good not long ago at campaigning. It’s their gift. It’s ignored at the GOP’s peril.

All of this means that for Republicans, the choice of presidential nominee will demand an unusual level of sobriety and due diligence from everyone in the party, from primary voters in Iowa to county chairmen in South Carolina, and from party hacks in Washington to tea party powers in the Rust Belt. They are going to have to approach 2012 with more than the usual seriousness. They’ll have to think big, and not indulge resentments or anger or petty grievances. They’ll have to be cool eyed. They’ll have to watch and observe the dozen candidates expected to emerge, and ask big questions.

Who can lead? Who can persuade the center? Who can summon the best from people? Who will seem credible (as a person who leads must)? Whose philosophy is both sound and discernible? Who has the intellectual heft? Who has the experience? Who seems capable of wisdom? These are serious questions, but 2012 is going to be a serious race.

Good luck to those families having their meetings and deliberations on Thanksgiving weekend.”

I have no argument  with Ms. Noonan’s observations in the above paragraphs.  But the center has been moving left every year for the past 40 years.   Republicans have been whistling roughly the same Marxist tunes these American Progressives have ever since the disasters of the Viet Nam war and the cultural revolution of the anarchists in the 1960s and 1970s.   We have yet, as a nation, to raise ourselves out of the garbage heap the uncivilized have caused from that revolution.

As Dennis Prager moans, “America has lost what it means to be American”.

The center I believe in is very likely much more conservative than the center of Conservative Peggy Noonan.   Ms. Noonan is a Conservative, it seems to me…..I have no argument in opposition to these folks, my allies in Americanism.  But at my age and understandings I am an American conservative.   My religion I’d describe since I have to , is rather Christian Deist democrat  who believes very deeply a healthy culture know what a healthy culture is.

I used to live in a relatively  healthy culture, America pre Viet Nam war, now suffering from terrible cancers all over its body.   That healthy culture had pimples not cancers on its body.  Today, with Barack Obama and his crowd running the country, our democratic approach to our governance is in serious danger.  It is dying.

What is the center of such a society so diseased?…..Our society has no longer a soul…..It has no core.   Every year its “center” slips more leftward with less soul, less core.    Progressives flourish in these formless  environments and call their work  “progress”  when what they mean is another move closer to Marxist dictatorship with a government big enough to replace the citizen in deciding what is best for the human future.

Please, Peggy Noonans, let us know what you mean by the “center”.   What should America’s center be?   I, like Dennis Prager, believe the center should be based on traditional American values…..so spell them out….what are American values ?   Or, as so many in the East and far West,  those people dragging the nation into bankruptcy,  prefer, “Who needs values……we, Progressives, are spending money investing in a Progressive future!

Who knows where the American center will be two years from now?

A Look Into the Minnesota Shock of Nov.2, 2010, When Its Legislature Became Red!

Here is a report that is truly newsworthy for Minnesotans who woke up November 3, 2010 and discovered their legislature was no longer going to be run by the  Al Frankens.   This is a state with deep religious convictions.   The blue-blood wealthy pour treasure and pride onto their untouchables, the downtrodden,  the blacks and other racial ‘disadvantaged’, ‘disadvantaged’  females, ‘disadvantaged’ gays and lesbians, the ‘disadvantaged’  who suffer from alleged traditional midwestern Christian oppression, atheists, more gays,  muslims, Marxists, anarchists, and other University of Minnesota creations for this northland public to hate.  “Climate deniers” oppress Thomas Friedman of St. Louis Park, now at the New York Times, and so, is presently a popular “disadvantaged” something to stir the blue blood pocket book to invest more wealth into  Minnesota’s  Marxist pockets.

Minnesota’s Left is very proud of its accomplishments.

But what happened a couple of weeks ago?…….I admit, I was shocked.  I had followed election results until 2 AM Central Standard Time long enough to learn California had crowned itself with another Jerry Brown realm and the Mayor of Minneapolis, Democrat, but civilized, very confident that the state legislature was securely once again in the hands of his money spending fanatic colleagues.  

I retired to bed, confident he was right.           Well, we were wrong…..What happened?   Minnesota is bedrock blue.

Briana Bierschbach let’s us in on a bit of the answer here:

“Late last week, three of the principal architects of the Republicans’ Minnesota Senate takeover gathered in Sen. Amy Koch’s old office for one last time to talk about how they’d pulled it off. Next to piles of GOP election mailers and memos, Koch sat with Ben Golnik, a consultant with Golnik Strategies who was brought in after Senate GOP Chief of Staff Cullen Sheehan left to manage Tom Emmer’s gubernatorial campaign, and Michael Brodkorb, who serves as both deputy chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota and spokesman for the caucus.

Koch’s office is one of the last remaining signs of the group’s former minority status. Koch, whose efforts as caucus election chair helped her win the majority leader spot, will soon move out of the State Office Building to a new space in the Capitol. In the soon-to-be-vacated office, they discussed “the plan” that took them from the minority to a 37-30 majority in the chamber – a feat many Capitol observers thought barely possible.

It’s clear that, despite some predictions to the contrary, Minnesota Republicans did indeed ride a tidal wave of dissatisfaction with Democrats in Washington, a factor that played a major role on election night. But it took more than that to win the majority in the state Senate, a body that featured a veto-proof DFL majority and a Republican caucus that, as Brodkorb put it, “consistently underperformed the map in elections.”

“It was a good political environment, so you had the opportunity,” Golnik said, “but I think having a plan and really executing it made the difference between winning a handful of seats and winning the majority.”

Targeting vulnerable Dems

Despite the friendly electoral climate, Senate Republicans faced one very stiff obstacle: The long-entrenched DFL Senate caucus was outraising them for the year by roughly a 4-1 margin. The GOP’s Senate Victory Fund reported receipts of about $466,000 by the pre-general campaign finance deadline on October 18, with about $278,000 left in the bank; DFLers reported raising $1.9 million, with $547,000 left on hand.

To make the most of their limited cash, Koch and her inner circle developed a list of about 15 key races where they believed there was a “realistic chance” to knock off an incumbent, and focused their efforts there. Among the targeted seats were several areas that leaned Republican but had been long held by Democrats. These included District 22, where longtime DFL Sen. Jim Vickerman retired, District 28, held by departing DFL Sen. Steve Murphy since 1992, and District 15, where Democrat Tarryl Clark opted to run against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Senate GOPers also targeted incumbent DFL senators in Republican-leaning suburbs, others who narrowly won their districts in the DFL wave years of 2006 and 2008, and senators in districts where Republicans had fielded strong, well-funded candidates. That list included Sens. Dan Skogen (10), Lisa Fobbe (16), Mary Olson (4), Rick Olseen (17), Ann Lynch (30) Sandy Rummel (53), Jim Carlson (38), Kathy Saltzman (56), Kevin Dahle (25), Leo Foley (47), John Doll (40), and Katie Sieben (57).

After recruiting candidates, Koch pushed them to hit the doors as early as April or May. Some were initially reluctant, she said, but she emphasized that the cash gap meant no GOP challenger could afford to be outworked by his or her opponent.

Shortly after the session ended, Koch brought on four field staffers who had campaign experience as well as background knowledge of the targeted incumbents and their districts: Adam Axvig, Mike Karbo, Brad Kusterman and Craig Sondag. Hiring them cost more than employing the sort of just-out-of-college field staff both parties had frequently used in the past, but Koch was hoping to get more bang for her buck.

“These guys were researched, they knew the bills and they knew the incumbents they were facing,” she said.  “That was calculated, we could have had more staffers, but we wouldn’t have had the certainty of how they would perform.”

Message discipline

From early on, Koch and the staff members were on the ground, hammering home their message on taxes, spending and the economy. “Our message was fiscal, fiscal, fiscal,” Koch said. “It was all [about] what they spent on and the tax increases that they voted for to pay for it. The economy and government spending was already on everybody’s mind, so we just took their local votes and drove it home. Our message discipline was really tight.”

In a Sept. 30 memo to Republican Senate candidates, Koch outlined the key issues they were going to use in their attack messaging.

“Every Democrat incumbent has a liberal tax-and-spend record (some worse than others),” she wrote. “Democrats have supported a pay raises for themselves, opposed cutting their own office budgets, voted for millions of dollars of pork projects….and voted for billions of dollars in new taxes and tax increases.”

Specifically, Democrats were attacked for voting for a 2007 proposal from then-Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller, DFL-Minneapolis, which increased per diem payments from $66 a day to $96 a day. They were also attacked for voting against a 2009 bill from Koch that would have reduced the postage cost allowance for legislators.

All DFLers were hit hard for voting in favor of various tax increases over the years, and much was also made of their votes for the 2010 bonding bill. Republican mail pieces highlighted “pork projects” in the bonding package, such as a gorilla exhibit and concert hall in St. Paul, the Minneapolis Orchestra Hall, the Walker Sculpture Garden and a roller skating rink in Roseville.

For the first time, the caucus also used its small pot of money to deliver that message through cable television buys.  In the top targeted races, the GOP bought 10 to 14 days of radio and cable television buys at “saturation” levels that ranged from $5,000 to $18,000 per race. It was the first time the Senate GOP caucus poured money into cable television buys, Golnik said, acknowledging that the stratagem was “a page out of the DFL’s book.” Senate Democrats first invested in cable buys in 2006.

Senate Republicans also shopped out work on mailers for the first time, doing five to six mail pieces in each targeted district. The team went with an outside company – Targeted Creative Communications out of Virginia – to produce the mailers, which were all done in-house before. The mail pieces were all negative, Golnik said.  “That’s Politics 101. Democrats started out with positive mail pieces, and those messages just don’t stick.”

Many of the Republican attack pieces followed the same themes. One widely used graphic pictured the state of Minnesota submerged inside a fish bowl with the incumbent’s photo clipped to the tank, suggesting that they helped put the economy underwater. Other common visual motifs: life preservers made of dollar bills and failing report cards.

The strategy of pouring all their resources into attacks on vulnerable DFLers involved a gamble: It meant leaving GOP incumbents to fend for themselves. The GOP invested small sums in just two already-Republican districts, including the open seat in Senate District 12, where Sen. Paul Koering had gone down to former House Rep. Paul Gazelka in the primary.

After losing the primary, Koering shook up the race by entering the general election as a write-in candidate. With two Republicans and Constitutional candidate Steve Park in the mix, some GOP strategists worried that DFLer Taylor Stevenson might sneak through to a win in the conservative district. The Republicans invested in mailers and staff time in the area, and despite about 3,000 write-ins, Gazelka still won with 52 percent of the vote.

Republicans also worked to protect Sen. Joe Gimse in District 13. Democrats, still sore from Gimse’s 2006 defeat of Senate Majority leader Dean Johnson, put out attack mailers against Gimse. Republicans helped door knock and attacked his opponent, Larry Rice, saying he was too liberal for the district. Gimse was ultimately victorious.

“If we were going to play this far afield, incumbents had to step up and protect their districts,” Koch said. “We had to take a calculated risk there.”

Underestimated

Despite Republican boasts during election season that the majority was within reach, there were few Democrats who conceded that was possible. Most believed the DFL would lose half a dozen or more seats, but not the majority.

“There is no question that Democrats are running uphill this year, but the hill got a little less steep in the last few weeks,” Senate elections staffer Mike Kennedy told Capitol Report in late October. “I’m not convinced that the Tea Party and voter anger are going to be a huge factor. That’s certainly not what our local candidates are finding at the doors.”

There was also the money factor. It’s still unclear exactly how much DFL cash got poured into Senate races in the final weeks – and how much may have been funneled to the state DFL Party to help with the governor’s race – but GOP operatives who were on the ground say they didn’t feel a major push, especially in districts where Republicans ran cable ads (Foley and Rummel’s districts) and Democrats did not.  The DFL spent heavily on incumbent Sens. Kathy Saltzman, Ann Lynch, Lisa Fobbe and Jim Carlson, but lost each of those seats.

Golnik estimated that DFLers spent about $500,000 on cable ad buys in 2006. This year, his calculations put the party’s buys between $150,000 and $175,000, or less than twice as much as the GOP’s $100,000, he said. “We always said, ‘Hey if we were outspent two to one and not 10 to one, then we knew we were in the hunt,” Golnik said.

Brodkorb predicts that year-end campaign finance reports will show Democrats with a sizable amount of cash on hand. “I just don’t think they were mapping and prepared for the climate,” he said. Brodkorb also said the DFL underestimated the influence of the national wave, and tried to localize the races. “We watched as the Democrats nationalized the race in ‘06 and ‘08,” he said. “This year it was our chance.”

Koch said the Democrats’ message was “disparate,” targeting small, “nit-picky” issues instead of sticking with larger themes. In some cases, DFLers tried to use the national GOP wave to their advantage. In the Senate District 17 race, Democrats sought to defend incumbent Sen. Rick Olseen while at the same time exploiting the national anti-incumbent sentiment. In lit pieces, the Democrats would refer to Sean Nienow, Olseen’s Republican challenger, as a senator. Nienow served in the Senate until 2006.

“They tried to make him look like the returning senator and ignored the fact that Rick Olseen had been serving for the last four years,” Koch said. “That strategy obviously didn’t work out for them.”

(Thank you, Mark Waldeland, for this article.  Mark and I are also pleased..  ‘That strategy didn’t work out for them.”)

Atlanta’s Public Housing Revolution, Howard Husock at City Journal

But if you think that America no longer encourages long-term dependency or underclass poverty, you haven’t been paying attention to public housing. Like cash welfare before the reform, public housing is dominated by extremely poor single-parent families (53 percent of public-housing households nationwide earn less than $10,000 a year, and only 13 percent have two adult residents). Like welfare, public housing offers recipients a disincentive to marry: because rents are fixed at 30 percent of household income, there’s good reason not to put a second wage earner on the lease. And like welfare, public-housing projects—and the closely related voucher programs run by housing authorities—impose neither a work requirement nor a time limit on recipients. So not only do 2.2 million people live in public-housing units in America; they spend an average of more than eight years in them. And dwarfing their ranks are the 5 million living in private, voucher-paid housing, where the average length of residency is six years.

In short, American housing policy encourages the formation of households in which low-income single women raise children—exactly the sort of homes where kids’ prospects are bleakest. Crime rates, moreover, are consistently high in and around public housing, and voucher units have been widely implicated in the spread of social problems to formerly safe areas. The problem is financial, as well: housing vouchers alone, which didn’t even exist until 1974, now cost taxpayers $18 billion, more than the $16.9 billion that we spend on welfare. And it’s a policy that disproportionately affects the African-American poor. Nearly 45 percent of public-housing tenants are black, as are 42 percent of voucher recipients.

All this makes what Renee Glover is doing in Atlanta so important. Since 1994, Glover, a child of Jim Crow–era Jacksonville, Florida, has led the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA)—the nation’s fifth-largest public-housing system, with 50,000 tenants and voucher recipients, 99 percent of them, like her, African-American. She has drawn national recognition for the fact that during her tenure, Atlanta became the first city in the United States to tear down virtually all its projects. But Glover’s plan is far more ambitious than demolition: she has set out to transform the dysfunctional behavior that condemns people to languish for years in public housing. Her approach is the most dramatic change in any city’s public-housing system since Franklin Roosevelt created the program in 1937.

When Glover first took charge of the AHA, just 18.5 percent of household heads in the city’s bleak projects held jobs. At a time when Atlanta overall had the nation’s highest murder rate, crime was six times higher in the projects than the city average. Lawlessness prevailed in these campus-style complexes. Drug gangs had their own apartments for conducting business, such as grisly initiation ceremonies (in one, teenagers performed oral sex on a six-year-old boy to prove that no act was too horrible to commit). Calls to 911 were so numerous, Atlanta police lieutenant Scott Kreher recalls, that reports of anything but the worst violent crime had to wait, sometimes for more than eight hours. “It was very common to start the night shift with 50 or 60 calls pending,” he says. In part, that’s because the projects came alive at night, especially during the summer. With so few residents working, most slept during the heat of the day and came out after dark. “You’d think it was midday at midnight. Everyone was out barbecuing, partying on the porches. And you were always hearing gunfire.”

All this was happening in places built to eradicate slums, whose immorality had so shocked progressives a century ago. Not surprisingly, real-estate development in the neighborhoods surrounding the projects was essentially nonexistent for decades, though the rest of the city boomed, say Atlanta development officials.

For Glover, the projects were clearly a “toxic environment” to be leveled—and she proceeded to do it. Starting with grants from the Clinton-era Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and then using private financing, she reduced the city’s 14,000 public-housing units to 2,000, most of them in complexes for the elderly. Gone were crime-ridden projects like Bowen Homes—immortalized in a rap lyric by the Shop Boyz: “My hood I love them ladies, / My hood I love them babies, / I can’t forget my niggas, / Bowen Homes we love you baby!” Glover then leased the land to private developers, who built apartment and townhouse complexes there; in return, the developers agreed to dedicate 40 percent of the new units to tenants who qualified for public housing. Two-fifths of the projects’ residents relocated to these “mixed-income” complexes. The remaining three-fifths received housing vouchers and used them to move into other private apartment buildings.

Such “vouchering-out” has happened elsewhere—notably in Chicago, after the infamous Robert Taylor Homes and other South Side high-rises were knocked down. But the AHA, using special autonomy that the George W. Bush–era HUD granted it under a program called Moving to Work, imposed a unique requirement on both the voucher recipients and the tenants of the new mixed-income complexes: as of 2004, they had to work (or be enrolled in a genuine limited-time training program). Today, the AHA is the only housing authority in the United States to require its beneficiaries, like recipients of cash welfare, to work. Those not working risk losing their right to a subsidized apartment. Further, the management of both the mixed-income complexes and the ordinary apartment buildings where vouchers are used have broad discretion to kick out tenants for not working or misbehavior. Over the past two years, the AHA reports, 109 tenants have been evicted for failing to comply with the work requirement and another 67 for criminal activity.

The AHA is clearly serious about changing the culture of those living in subsidized housing. And Glover may go even further: she is considering a “sunset” rule for AHA tenants—a time limit of the same kind that applies to welfare recipients. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution observes of Glover’s initiatives: “For those who believe that the alternative to cradle-to-grave dependency on government is to give individuals incentive[s] to make responsible choices, Atlanta is a conservative’s dream.”

The success of the new complexes isn’t assured. Though the buildings have been maintained well so far, the 60 percent of renters who pay the market rate may lose interest as the units age, especially if the surrounding neighborhoods lack amenities. The AHA has found, for instance, that major supermarkets are reluctant to open in neighborhoods near the new complexes—not because of fear of crime but because the median income remains too low.

On the other hand, knocking down the projects has surely benefited surrounding areas. The part of downtown Atlanta next to Centennial Homes, for example, has become a thriving nightlife hub. The Atlanta Development Authority reports that in and around areas redeveloped through the AHA, the assessed value of property has increased by some $1.1 billion since 1998. Glover has effectively unfrozen large tracts of Atlanta.

Glover’s tool kit includes much more than demolition, construction, and the work requirement, as complex and unusual as they are. Her least-known but most ambitious effort is what she unabashedly calls “human transformation,” an effort to instill in the public-housing poor the habits needed to join the social and economic mainstream. Glover’s memory of her childhood in the segregated South inspires the program. “We had a very strong and very strongly knitted community,” she recalls. “There was never a day that passed that we didn’t hear that we were being prepared to be the next leaders of the country.”

To re-create that culture of ambition and discipline, the AHA has invested nearly $27 million in what amounts to intensive counseling for public-housing tenants. The counselors—twenty-first-century versions of the Victorian “friendly visitors” who sought to encourage independence among the poor—follow the relocated tenants to their new homes and check up on them there, verifying that they’re employed or in school. They try to teach them the things that most Americans learn from their families: how to get a job and then get a better one; why it’s important to meet your children’s teachers and go to PTA meetings; how to live frugally and save for the future. It’s a striking example of what political scientist Lawrence Mead calls “the new paternalism.”

The troops in this war on dependency are employees of the Integral Youth and Family Project, a for-profit subsidiary of the leading private developer of complexes to replace Atlanta’s projects. They are called “family support coordinators” (FSCs)—a sort of Peace Corps for the underclass—and are virtually all African-Americans in their twenties and early thirties. Some have made the journey out of public housing themselves. Kenya Tyson went from Atlanta’s Harris Homes to Morehouse College and now counsels families who lived in the now-demolished Harris. Teaera Raines was raised by her grandparents in Macon, Georgia, after her parents succumbed to drug abuse; she went on to get a master’s degree in management from Troy University.

One senses in the group the same spirit of pragmatic idealism that characterizes Teach for America and the KIPP Schools: the belief that people whom others have written off can be reached. Every day, the FSCs fan out in their own cars to visit three or four households relocated from the demolished projects. They give their cell-phone numbers to their “clients” and understand themselves to be on call at all times—including when the call concerns an angry boyfriend, domestic violence, or where to find shelter with the kids at midnight.

The FSCs are unblinking in describing the situations they see. There are horror stories, such as that of the seven-year-old who was sexually abused on a regular basis by his mother’s live-in boyfriend, threatened suicide, and sprayed the household’s food with Raid in an effort to kill his family. More common are the frustratingly casual attitudes that the FSCs encounter. Many households, the group tells me, have never paid bills for themselves: utility costs came with public housing, food stamps helped with groceries, and everything else was paid for in cash. Not surprisingly, the priority was to keep receiving benefits and, if possible, to increase them. That meant keeping live-in boyfriends—even if one was the father of a child in the household—off the lease, lest their income lead to a hike in rent. It also meant suggesting to school authorities that a child might have a learning disability—such a designation could bestow nearly $300 a month in Supplemental Security Income (SSI) on the household. (School officials are reportedly often eager to comply because excluding hard-to-teach students could boost schoolwide test results.)

Hope Boldon, executive director of the Integral Youth and Family Project, says that it was common for four generations of female-headed households to live this way in the projects, combining housing, Medicaid, SSI, and food stamps to “get over.” That was originally a church expression for overcoming obstacles, one derived from the biblical account of crossing the river Jordan and immortalized in the old Mahalia Jackson hymn: “You know my soul look back in wonder / How did I make it over?” In its new, cynical usage, the phrase has become synonymous with successful hustles.

But as adept as those in the public-housing world have grown at maximizing government benefits, they’re usually utterly unprepared to make their own way in life. As Raines puts it, “They basically say to us, OYou’re trying to tell me to live a life I don’t know anything about.Ëœ ” Take a woman we’ll call Darlene—a single mother of two teenage boys whom Pamela Elder, another FSC, began to visit six months before tenants left the soon-to-be-demolished Bankhead Courts. Darlene, a longtime employee of the fast-food chain Checkers, had recently been fired because of attitude problems. She wasn’t an irresponsible mother; she insisted that her boys stay inside their apartment to avoid gang life. But neither was she ambitious for them. Asked what future she envisioned for the boys, Darlene said that they would “work at McDonald’s or someplace like that” and then added, tellingly, “That’s what we do.”

Two years after Elder first visited Darlene, that defeatism has vanished. Once she moved from public housing into a subsidized private apartment—and faced the requirement to work—Darlene did indeed start working again. In fact, she has a far better job than she ever had: cleaning airplanes at Atlanta’s international airport. (“I’d never even been on an airplane before,” Darlene told Elder.) With her own circumstances and living situation improved, she has encouraged her sons, whom Elder describes as “smart” and “athletic,” to stay in school, and the elder of the two has been nominated for a selective Atlanta program for public school students displaying leadership qualities and academic promise.

Most instructive about Darlene’s story are the many steps over many months that helped it come to pass. Elder insisted that Darlene attend a job fair—to prepare for which Elder went to a local discount store, Value Village, to buy an outfit for her to wear, since Darlene had always worn either sweatpants or her fast-food uniform. Darlene had to give up her marijuana habit to pass her new employer’s drug test and get the airport security badge that she now sports with pride. Elder taught her how to apply makeup and lip gloss, how to prepare for a job interview, and how to put together a résumé. Darlene, like all the clients, had to write down a “family wealth plan”—a list of goals (“educational, employment, family development, financial, health, and personal development”) and “steps needed to achieve goals.”

Such questions about goals and plans—which get at the essence of how to escape the underclass—didn’t fall on immediately receptive ears. Urged to think about her future, Darlene erupted, “All that’s easy for you to say—you’re white!” The outburst stunned Elder, who was not only darker-skinned than her client but had herself been a teenage mother in Atlanta before earning a counseling degree from Georgia State. “Just because I’m married and drive a Honda Civic, now I’m white,” she says. Her colleagues join her bemused laughter. I ask them whether, from the perspective of the projects, Barack and Michelle Obama are white. “Definitely,” one says. “Success is white,” says another, “except for athletes and rap stars.” The FSCs’ challenge is to make clear that in America, success isn’t simply the result of privilege. Raines uses herself as an example: she tells her clients that “they can achieve, just as I did.”

The stories don’t always have happy endings, of course. Kenya Tyson describes one that “will stick with me for the rest of my life” involving a mother and her six children, formerly of the Hollywood Homes project. State officials took the children away from their mother because of her drug abuse; once the household was reunited, the father of the youngest four raped one of the older two, an act that the mother denies taking place, despite the daughter’s pregnancy. The rape victim is now “making suicidal comments,” says Tyson. “I am currently seeking an in-home certified and clinical counseling agency for the family to deal with these issues. I am also working diligently trying to get the daughter enrolled into an adult literacy class because she is 18 and can’t read and write.”

The cost of the Integral Youth and Family Project is substantial. From 2002 to 2009, the AHA has paid it $26.7 million to work with 14,281 people. But that’s a substantial percentage of metropolitan Atlanta’s 81,000 black poor, meaning that the program has the potential not only to help individuals but to change broader social norms.

The statistical results are impressive, though it’s impossible to determine which part of Glover’s plan, the work requirement or the counseling, deserves more credit. The most recent figures show that 62 percent of AHA-supported household heads in Atlanta are employed. Before the recession, the figure had reached 70 percent. Recall that when Glover took over, it stood at 18.5 percent. A falling rate of attrition for those who fail to find work—in 2007, 23 percent of all voucher recipients were not recertified and left the program, a fraction that had declined to 12 percent by 2009—shows that the tenants have adjusted to the new standards, argues the AHA. “On so many occasions, people have said, OThank you for believing in us,Ëœ ” says Glover. “So all of a sudden, we were into a completely different planning process because we were not planning for poor people who were incapable, who could not be responsible. We were in the process of planning for God’s children.”

One must be wary, though, of overstating the pace of change in Atlanta. In 2004, when Glover imposed the work requirement, tenants had spent an average of seven to eight years in projects and voucher-paid housing. That figure hasn’t budged. In addition, police say that while violent crime in Atlanta has dropped steeply since the demolition of the projects, property crime has risen—a trend that Lieutenant Kreher attributes to the dispersion of voucher holders through the city.

It is also clear that even deep, long-term personal counseling can go only so far in repairing broken lives. Consider how the FSCs respond to an obvious suggestion: that they encourage their clients to marry, both to pool incomes and to provide fathers for boys apt