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This Super Bowl certainly has all the makings of another thriller, the perfect finish to a season that began in turmoil and wound up the most successful in league history.

The NFL couldn’t have planned it any better.

“It’s actually been a very fun week here,” said Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, seeking his fourth Super Bowl ring in 11 seasons, and doing it in the city where archrival Peyton Manning has worked for 13 years – if not for much longer, given his health issues and disagreements with Colts management. “It’s a bit surreal to be playing in Indy’s home stadium and to be practicing at their facility.”

It’s been even weirder for Eli Manning to have led the Giants here, only to find his superb season and chase for a second championship overshadowed by big brother.

The most popular storyline this week has been Peyton’s pain in his neck. Or, rather, his status following three neck surgeries in 19 months; whether the Colts will keep him around, at the cost of a $28 million roster bonus due in March; and whether he’s truly feuding with owner Jim Irsay’s rebuilding organization.

Eli, who will surpass his brother for NFL titles with a victory Sunday at Lucas Oil Stadium – yes, Peyton’s Place – claims his sibling’s issues are irrelevant to this game, in which New York (12-7) is a 3-point underdog.

“I’m proud of Peyton. I’ve talked to him this week. None of that comes up,” Eli said. “When I talk to Peyton, he does a great job of trying to keep me relaxed. (We) talk a little football and talk about New England some. He’s supported me this week. I know he’s just working hard trying to get healthy and I’m going to support him on that.”

While Eli would own two championships with a victory, to one for Peyton, Brady could tie his childhood quarterbacking hero, Joe Montana, and Terry Bradshaw with four. Coach Bill Belichick would equal Chuck Noll with the same number.

To get it, the Patriots (15-3) must protect their crown jewel. Four years ago, Brady was banged around so much by New York that it turned the Super Bowl in the Giants’ favor.

Yes, they needed David Tyree’s miracle pin-the-ball-against-the-helmet catch, then Plaxico Burress’ touchdown reception to shatter New England’s perfect season. But that victory was built on the relentless pressure applied to Brady.

The formula hasn’t changed.

“We feel that we certainly have a very strong group of men in the front,” Giants coach Tom Coughlin said. “It’s just the way we play and prefer to play. It’s a pressure group, and we have played better in the back end as well, probably as a result of the ball having to come out faster than it has at certain times during the year.”

Brady certainly remembers the pain, physically and emotionally, from the beating he took on the field and the scoreboard.

“Any time you lose, it’s a tough thing,” Brady said. “We’ve lost one Super Bowl. I remember waking up in Arizona the next morning after an hour of sleep thinking, `That was a nightmare, that didn’t happen.’ After time, you learn to move on and get over it.”

The Giants got all over Brady again during their regular season 24-20 win at Foxborough, the last time the Patriots lost. That victory preceded a four-game slide, and New York eventually slipped to 7-7 before turning it around.

Adding to the juicy potential of a down-to-the-wire reprise of 2008, both teams barely made it to Indy. The Patriots needed backup cornerback Sterling Moore stripping the ball from Baltimore receiver Lee Evans in the end zone in the final seconds, then for Billy Cundiff to miss a 32-yard field goal that would have forced overtime.

The Giants went into overtime in San Francisco, using two botched punt returns by the 49ers to advance.

“We feel very fortunate to be here, and I’m pretty sure they do, too,” Patriots Pro Bowl nose tackle Vince Wilfork. “But we also know we deserve to be here, and they know they deserve it. We are two very good and very confident teams.”

Teams owned by two of the key figures in solving the 4 1/2-month lockout of the players last year. New England’s Robert Kraft shuttled back and forth from the meetings to his dying wife’s bedside late in the negotiating process. Myra Kraft passed away days before the lockout was resolved.

His players wore a patch with her initials MHK on the left side of their jerseys this season.

“The fact that she was so dear to me and all of our players are wearing her initials above their heart is an endearing thing,” Kraft said. “What she represented is important and I hope that special sense of spirit comes through.”

Giants owner John Mara played an equally important role in the labor negotiations, and when both teams reached the Super Bowl, Kraft mentioned “a certain karma” about the matchup.

“I’m not necessarily happy to be playing Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, I’ll tell you that,” Mara joked. “But yeah, I’m very happy for Bob because he put his heart and soul into those negotiations during a very difficult time for him and his family, so I think the success they’ve had is well-deserved.”

When they finally kick off Sunday, the two biggest stars will be Brady and Manning – yes, Eli. Not halftime performer Madonna, but the quarterbacks on whose arms, wits and leadership this Super Bowl will turn.

“They are both leaders on the field,” Wilfork said. “I think that position you have to be smart, you have to be intelligent. I think you have to understand what’s going on around you. I think both those guys have that.”

On Sunday, we’ll see which one adds to his championship legacy with another Super Bowl ring.

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But the former Massachusetts governor’s win here, coupled with his enormous Florida victory just days ago, proved Republicans have begun to coalesce around his candidacy in earnest. He swept nearly every voting group in Nevada including those that have been slow to come aboard, such as tea party activists and voters who describe themselves as extremely conservative.

And that spells trouble for his remaining rivals who now face a stark question: How do they stop him?

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum to break through. All trail Romney in money, momentum and organization in upcoming states. And with a calendar of primaries and caucuses favorable to Romney just ahead, no one else has a clear path to the nomination.

“February is really the death march for second and third tier candidates,” Republican strategist Rich Galen said. “If Romney sweeps February, the arc of his effort will be so strong, for most Republicans it will be over.”

A handful of states hold caucuses next week, including Maine, Minnesota and Colorado. Then comes a three week lull until primaries in Feb. 28 in Arizona and Michigan, where Romney grew up and where his father served as governor.

Romney’s confidence was clear as he stepped before cameras to claim his Nevada win, focusing on President Barack Obama.

“I’ve walked in Nevada neighborhoods, blighted by abandoned homes, where people wonder why Barack Obama failed them. Mr. President, Nevada has had enough of your kind of help,” Romney said to cheers.

He barely acknowledged his GOP rivals, Gingrich included.

The former House speaker’s hope for a serious head-to-head contest with Romney diminishes with each loss.

Gingrich is short on cash, and Southern states likely to be most receptive to his candidacy do not hold contests again until Super Tuesday, March 6. Gingrich’s one victory so far came in South Carolina’s primary January 21.

Restore Our Future, the deep-pocketed super PAC backing Romney, continues to pummel Gingrich with television ads attacking his record in Washington. The group has purchased advertising time in Minnesota, Michigan and Arizona.

The candidates will debate just once this month, in Mesa, Ariz., on Feb. 22. That hurts Gingrich, who has seen his political fortunes rise and fall on the strength of his debate performances.

Nevertheless, Gingrich brushed aside all talk of quitting the race, saying he was working to “find a series of victories which by the end of Texas primary will leave us at parity” with Romney by early April. He said he and his aides have spent much of the past four days retooling a campaign that twice has made him a leader in the polls, yet left him with only one victory in five states.

Gingrich may be able to hang on if casino mogul Sheldon Adelson makes another large contribution to Winning Our Future, a super PAC supporting Gingrich. Adelson and his wife have contributed $10 million to the group so far. But even that won’t make Gingrich’s path to the nomination any more plausible.

Paul, who campaigned hard in Nevada and has staked his entire strategy on winning caucus states, may be bordering on irrelevancy as a serious contender after this shellacking. By raising expectations for a strong finish in Nevada – only to place a weak third – the Texas congressman undercut himself going into the next round of caucus states.

Paul’s ultimate goal – keeping his libertarian-leaning platform part of the national political conversation – could also be damaged as his losses pile up.

Santorum has watched his candidacy lose steam since his win in the Iowa caucuses early last month.

The former Pennsylvania senator spent little time campaigning in Nevada; his strong social conservatism was never a good fit in a state best known for drinking, gambling and legalized prostitution. He’s looked ahead to caucuses in Colorado and the non-binding Missouri primary next week instead.

Santorum continues to campaign on the cheap, and is pulling in enough money – $1 million alone last week, his advisers say – to keep his shoestring operation alive. But few states outside of Iowa have proved to be receptive to Santorum’s sharp focus on social issues like abortion.

To be sure, Romney continues to face challenges of his own.

He was at his best as a candidate after Gingrich won South Carolina and appeared to be a real threat going into Florida and beyond. Romney quickly retooled his approach, sharpening his attacks on Gingrich on the campaign trail and in two back-to-back debates.

But without a strong rival, Romney’s weaknesses as a candidate and his propensity for gaffes become magnified.

With the recession-weary public still angry at Wall Street and big business, Romney has struggled to explain how the millions he made at the venture capital firm Bain Capital make him a plausible job creator.

He made an eye-popping unforced error this week, telling CNN “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” He went on to explain himself, saying those most in need can rely on social programs and that he wants to be a champion for the middle class instead.

But the comment, coming from a man of such immense wealth, struck a sour note – particularly as he campaigned into Nevada, which has the highest unemployment and home foreclosure rate in the country.

Romney attempted to clarify his remark later, saying he “misspoke.” But Gingrich has already used it as an attack line, as have Democrats working to weaken Romney.

Still, Romney’s position coming out of Nevada is strong and getting stronger.

“When you match this up with Florida, it may well mean this is the beginning of the triumphant march to the nomination,” said Galen, the GOP strategist.

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For this group – some descended from U.S. slaves, some immigrants with a separate history – “African-American” is not the sign of progress hailed when the term was popularized in the late 1980s. Instead, it’s a misleading connection to a distant culture.

The debate has waxed and waned since African-American went mainstream, and gained new significance after the son of a black Kenyan and a white American moved into the White House. President Barack Obama’s identity has been contested from all sides, renewing questions that have followed millions of darker Americans:

What are you? Where are you from? And how do you fit into this country?

“I prefer to be called black,” said Shawn Smith, an accountant from Houston. “How I really feel is, I’m American.”

“I don’t like African-American. It denotes something else to me than who I am,” said Smith, whose parents are from Mississippi and North Carolina. “I can’t recall any of them telling me anything about Africa. They told me a whole lot about where they grew up in Macomb County and Shelby, N.C.”

Gibre George, an entrepreneur from Miami, started a Facebook page called “Don’t Call Me African-American” on a whim. It now has about 300 “likes.”

“We respect our African heritage, but that term is not really us,” George said. “We’re several generations down the line. If anyone were to ship us back to Africa, we’d be like fish out of water.”

“It just doesn’t sit well with a younger generation of black people,” continued George, who is 38. “Africa was a long time ago. Are we always going to be tethered to Africa? Spiritually I’m American. When the war starts, I’m fighting for America.”

Joan Morgan, a writer born in Jamaica who moved to New York City as a girl, remembers the first time she publicly corrected someone about the term: at a book signing, when she was introduced as African-American and her family members in the front rows were appalled and hurt.

“That act of calling me African-American completely erased their history and the sacrifice and contributions it took to make me an author,” said Morgan, a longtime U.S. citizen who calls herself Black-Caribbean American. (Some insist Black should be capitalized.)

She said people struggle with the fact that black people have multiple ethnicities because it challenges America’s original black-white classifications. In her view, forcing everyone into a name meant for descendants of American slaves distorts the nature of the contributions of immigrants like her black countrymen Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay.

Morgan acknowledges that her homeland of Jamaica is populated by the descendants of African slaves. “But I am not African, and Africans are not African-American,” she said.

In Latin, a forerunner of the English language, the color black is “niger.” In 1619, the first African captives in America were described as “negars,” which became the epithet still used by some today.

The Spanish word “negro” means black. That was the label applied by white Americans for centuries.

The word black also was given many pejorative connotations – a black mood, a blackened reputation, a black heart. “Colored” seemed better, until the civil rights movement insisted on Negro, with a capital N.

Then, in the 1960s, “black” came back – as an expression of pride, a strategy to defy oppression.

“Every time black had been mentioned since slavery, it was bad,” says Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Reclaiming the word “was a grass-roots move, and it was oppositional. It was like, `In your face.’”

Afro-American was briefly in vogue in the 1970s, and lingers today in the names of some newspapers and university departments. But it was soon overshadowed by African-American, which first sprouted among the black intelligentsia.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is widely credited with taking African-American mainstream in 1988, before his second presidential run.

Berry remembers being at a 1988 gathering of civil rights groups organized by Jackson in Chicago when Ramona Edelin, then president of the National Urban Coalition, urged those assembled to declare that black people should be called African-American.

Edelin says today that there was no intent to exclude people born in other countries, or to eliminate the use of black: “It was an attempt to start a cultural offensive, because we were clearly at that time always on the defensive.”

“We said, this is kind of a compromise term,” she continued. “There are those among us who don’t want to be referred to as African. And there also those among us who don’t want to be referred to as American. This was a way of bridging divisions among us or in our ideologies so we can move forward as a group.”

Jackson, who at the time may have been the most-quoted black man in America, followed through with the plan.

“Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical, cultural base,” Jackson told reporters at the time. “African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”

The effect was immediate. “Back in those days we didn’t talk about things going viral, but that’s what you would say today. It was quite remarkable,” said the columnist Clarence Page, then a reporter. “It was kind of like when Black Power first came in the `60s, there was all kinds of buzz among black folks and white folks about whether or not I like this.”

Page liked it – he still uses it interchangeably with black – and sees an advantage to changing names.

“If we couldn’t control anything else, at least we could control what people call us,” Page said. “That’s the most fundamental right any human being has, over what other people call you. (African-American) had a lot of psychic value from that point of view.”

It also has historical value, said Irv Randolph, managing editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, a black newspaper that uses both terms: “It’s a historical fact that we are people of African descent.”

“African-American embraces where we came from and where we are now,” he said. “We are Americans, no doubt about that. But to deny where we came from doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Jackson agrees about such denial. “It shows a willful ignorance of our roots, our heritage and our lineage,” he said Tuesday. “A fruit without a root is dying.”

He observed that the history of how captives were brought here from Africa is unchangeable, and that Senegal is almost as close to New York as Los Angeles.

“If a chicken is born in the oven,” Jackson said, “that doesn’t make it a biscuit.”

Today, 24 years after Jackson popularized African-American, it’s unclear what term is preferred by the community. A series of Gallup polls from 1991 to 2007 showed no strong consensus for either black or African-American. In a January 2011 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 42 percent of respondents said they preferred black, 35 percent said African-American, 13 percent said it doesn’t make any difference, and 7 percent chose “some other term.”

Meanwhile, a record number of black people in America – almost 1 in 10 – were born abroad, according to census figures.

Tomi Obaro is one of them. Her Nigerian-born parents brought her to America from England as a girl, and she became a citizen last year. Although she is literally African-American, the University of Chicago senior says the label implies she is descended from slaves. It also feels vague and liberal to her.

“It just sort of screams this political correctness,” Obaro said. She and her black friends rarely use it to refer to themselves, only when they’re speaking in “proper company.”

“Or it’s a word that people who aren’t black use to describe black people,” she said.

Or it’s a political tool. In a Senate race against Obama in 2004, Alan Keyes implied that Obama could not claim to share Keyes’ “African-American heritage” because Keyes’ ancestors were slaves. During the Democratic presidential primary, some Hillary Clinton supporters made the same charge.

Last year, Herman Cain, then a Republican presidential candidate, sought to contrast his roots in the Jim Crow south with Obama’s history, and he shunned the label African-American in favor of “American black conservative.” Rush Limbaugh mocked Obama as a “halfrican-American.”

Then there are some white Americans who were born in Africa.

Paulo Seriodo is a U.S. citizen born in Mozambique to parents from Portugal. In 2009 he filed a lawsuit against his medical school, which he said suspended him after a dispute with black classmates over whether Seriodo could call himself African-American.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m from Africa, and they are not!” Seriodo wrote at the time. “They are not allowing me to be African-American!”

And so the saga of names continues.

“I think it’s still evolving,” said Edelin, the activist who helped popularize African-American. “I’m content, for now, with African and American.”

“But,” she added, “that’s not to say that it won’t change again.”

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Anthony Bernard Lumpkin, 32, Rico Dehaven West, 19, Eddie Lewis Green, 46, Michael Davis, 23, and Timothy Lamar Johnson, 34, and Jason Dozier, 36, broke into the Jackson home Thursday at approximately 6:30 p.m. while Nicholas and his sister Nikia Jackson, 17, were home alone.

Dozier, who has served four different terms in Georgia prisons dating back to 1993 for robbery and aggravated assault, was just recently released from Telfair State Prison.

Nicholas Jackson, Sr. told the AJC that he believed that his son, who was shot in the heart before dying at a local hospital, startled the intruders when they kicked in the door:

“He got up to see what the ruckus was,” Jackson said. “The shots seemed to be fired as the suspects retreated.”

Older sister, Nikia, was emotional when talking about Nicholas. She witnessed the intruders fleeing in a mini-van and soon discovered her brother trying to roll over. “[The crime] seems so senseless; [He] is the best brother anybody could have.”

The former junior high valedictorian played football at Norcross High School and had plans on attending Alabama State University, his grandmother, Sherry Reid, told Channel 2 Action News.

Dr. Burrell Pope, principal at Hopewell Christian Academy where Nicholas attended for three years, said that he was a “model student” who was known for his helpful, friendly nature as well as his football skills:

“[Jackson] was the type of kid who stayed away from trouble,” Pope said. “That was his motto, he wanted always to stay away from trouble.”

“He was a young man of integrity, a mentor to a lot of the students who were younger than him,” he continued. “He was always willing to help out when needed.”

Norcross Police Capt. Brian Harr said that the mini-van was located about a mile from the scene and several other weapons were found inside of the vehicle.

Counselors were on site at Norcross High as students struggled with the violent lose of one of their shining stars. Maribel Arellano, a junior at the school, said that although she just recently met Nicholas, he would leave a lasting imprint:

“It’s sad how he got shot,” Arellano told the AJC. “It’s scary to know that someone can be in your life one day, and then the next day not be there.”

According to his father, Alabama State University’s football program has already said that they plan on sending equipment to place in his son’s casket.

Funeral arrangements for Nicholas will be planned next week.

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The Grio’s Political Analyst, Perry Bacon, Jr., examines the unemployment numbers and what it could mean in a potential Romney/Obama match-up in November:

The job news puts Romney in a complicated situation, as he must in some ways root for the jobless rate to go back up or not dip too low, as that would further threaten his route to the presidency. At the same time, he must of course avoid rhetoric that sounds like he is not enthusiastic about economic growth.

The alternative for Romney is to acknowledge the positive news, but say the economy would have rebounded even faster if he were president, a kind of counter-factual that is hard to convince voters of. [President Barack] Obama has struggled with this problem for three years, as voters have largely not supported his argument the recession would have been even worse without the 2009 stimulus.

The GOP candidate took this approach on Friday, after the jobs’ numbers were released.

“We welcome the fact that jobs were created and unemployment declined,” Romney said in a statement. “Unfortunately, these numbers cannot hide the fact that President Obama’s policies have prevented a true economic recovery. We can do better. He added, “long-term unemployment remains at record levels.”

With Romney still rebounding from his “I’m not concerned with the very poor” gaffe, this evidence that Obama may just be on to something does not bode well for the Massachusetts millionaire. Conversely, the fact that unemployed people who have stopped seeking jobs were not included in the latest statistics — leaving open the possibility that when they hit the market again the numbers will rise — means that Obama shouldn’t rest easy just yet.

Read more on what the unemployment numbers means for election 2012 at TheGrio.com

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Paul has a strong following but is unlikely to win the nomination and Romney is hoping that Paul supporters will help him defeat President Barack Obama in the upcoming election.

The Washington Post reports:

The Romney-Paul alliance is more than a curious connection. It is a strategic partnership: for Paul, an opportunity to gain a seat at the table if his long-shot bid for the presidency fails; for Romney, a chance to gain support from one of the most vibrant subgroups within the Republican Party.

Romney’s aides are “quietly in touch with Ron Paul,” according to a Republican adviser who is in contact with the Romney campaign and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its internal thinking. The two campaigns have coordinated on minor things, the adviser said — even small details, such as staggering the timing of each candidate’s appearance on television the night of the New Hampshire primary for maximum effect.

Read More At The Washington Post

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Terra Hall of Fox4 Kansas City recently reported that a slave named York helped Lewis and Clark gain access with American Indians during their trudge through the Midwest. American Indians saw York’s dark skin as a sign of strength and power.

“He’s [York] the first known African American known to make it all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back.  So he’s one of the greats as far as the explorers are concerned,” said Richard Edwards of the National Frontier Trials Museum in Independence, Mo.

For the entire month of February, Edwards will be sharing tales of York and other Black Americans who were instrumental in shaping America’s place in history.

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“He was glad that the president attended, but he felt that there were 364 days in a year to give a speech on your policies or campaign rhetoric,” said Gingrey spokeswoman Jen Talaber.

In a puzzling move, President Obama decided do a little blurring of church and state by enumerating the many ways that Christianity influences his economic policy:

If I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense. But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’ teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’ It mirrors the Islamic belief that those who’ve been blessed have an obligation to use those blessings to help others, or the Jewish doctrine of moderation and consideration for others.”

Then, in a subtle jab at the current GOP front-runner, Mitt Romney, who — in addition to being Mormon — recently “mis-spoke” when saying that the “poor aren’t [his] concern,” Obama seemed to pull Romney’s religion card by suggesting that his own Christian values ensured that he cares about those in poverty:

“[It's] a biblical call to care for the poor and to follow the responsibility we’re given in Proverbs to ‘Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute,’” said the president.

Oh, it get’s better. Obama, who has made it a point to surround himself with Wall Street heavyweights during his first term, such as Lawrence Summers, Michael Froman, Neal Wolin, William Daley and Tom Donilon — or as National Review writer, Kevin D. Williamson so brilliantly put it, B.H. Obama & Co. LLC: A Wall Street Cabinet Company — then said that his Wall Street policy followed the commandment of God:

“The Wall Street reform [I] championed makes the economy stronger for everyone and abides by God’s command to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself,” said Obama.

These remarks did not sit well with Gingrey. Going into further detail on what is sure to be viewed as another disrespectful action against the president — akin to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer losing her mind at pointing her finger in the president’s face like he was an errant school child –Talaber said that Gingrey was most upset at the president’s lack of reverence for the occasion:

“He was disappointed, because he wanted to know what was in the president’s heart, and not just rhetoric,” the spokeswoman said. “So he said that he decided to quietly get up and leave because he felt that it wasn’t the time or the place, and that the president didn’t seem to be aware of the meaning of the breakfast or why so many people came to hear him speak. He was offended by the very tone of the speech.”

I was too, Rep. Gingrey; though, I’m sure, that my reasons have very little in common with yours.

My issue is that President Barack Obama has transparent pandering down to an exact science. Just in time for Black History Month, he managed to insult the intelligence of millions of Black Americans by concocting an end-zone campaign to ensure that the same voters he’s ignored for almost four years make it their mission to “Barack the Vote” in November. It’s amazing that he can’t specifically address the issues that plague our communities — because he’s the president for all Americans — yet, he has no problem specifically asking for our vote.

However it’s not just us; no “special interest group” is exempt.

He claims to be pro-choice, but then goes out of his way to symbolically sign an executive order in March of 2010 to show his unwavering support for the long-standing Hyde Amendment, which effectively bans the federal government from financing elective abortions.

He consistently shrugs his shoulder with that boyish grin when asked about his support of the legalization of same-sex marriages; veering hard to the right, the president repeatedly says that “he’s working on it.” In the mean time, as he continues to deny the LGBTQ community equal rights under the law, he was proud to eradicate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, effectively “allowing them” to fight and die for a country that finds suppression of their civil liberties “fair.”

President Obama is passionate about green energy. If we don’t hear anything else, rest assured that we will hear about green energy. Ironically, when the president had the opportunity to stand firmly behind the Environment Protection Agency and a regulation that would ensure a dramatic decrease in smog production, he caved to business and Republican protest and rejected the potentially life-saving measure. The American Lung Association was so disgusted that they threatened to pursue legal action against the current standards, which  were proposed by George W. Bush.

Noticing a theme here? Obviously, President Obama has perfected the art of the Beltway Two-Step as if he’s been dancing it his entire life. Still, in no arena is he as obviously awkward as when pouring on the hallelujahs. His blatant merger of church and state is the antithesis of words spoken earlier in his career when he spoke eloquently against the very idea.

In one of the most intelligent explorations into the hypocrisy and infeasibility contained within portions of the Bible, a little known speech given by a young Senator Obama at turns ridicules the Good Book (see: Leviticus, stoning and shellfish) and refers to religion as a hindrance to Democracy. He makes it clear that America is not a Christian nation, and that if it ever was, “it’s not anymore.” He quips that if Abraham (see: Genesis) had attempted to slash his son Isaac’s throat in modern society, at the very least, “police would be called and child and family services would be expected to take Isaac away from Abraham.” He convincingly makes the point that faith has no place in politics, because we do not share common spiritual eyesight, we can only share common laws. Most powerfully, he says that “religiously motivated [politicians] must translate their concerns into universal — not religious — values.

Where was that Obama at the Prayer Breakfast?

The president’s injection of personal faith into politics — when he so clearly stands against it — was about as bizarre as Sarah Palin being anointed by a witch-hunter who  asked Jesus to fund her campaign and as laughable as four GOP candidates, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain, claiming that God led them all to run for president — he was clearly wrong about three of them because only Perry remains.

In Matthew 5:17,  Jesus says “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I didn’t come to destroy them, but to fulfill them.” Unfortunately, when it comes to conservative politics, Wall Street cronyism and now his politically advantageous blurring of church and state, that is one verse in the Bible that Obama obviously takes to heart.

He doesn’t seem to understand that not everyone is going to like him, but we should be able to respect him. I’m not referring to that generic “respect the office of the president,” I’m speaking of literally respecting him. He can’t continue to say that the sky is blue at 8:00 a.m around blue lovers, then tell yellow lovers that it’s actually a lovely shade of saffron at noon. He needs to find a position that he’s comfortable with and play it, regardless of who tries to tackle him; if he doesn’t, he will continue to be viewed as ineffective and untrustworthy by many people who worked tirelessly to get him elected in 2008.

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The responses were a mix of incredibly funny and, shall we say, disturbing insights into how out of it many white people are about black Americans. To give you a teaser, when a white couple was asked, “Who is your favorite black person,” the woman replied “We’ll that would require me to know a few personally. I know one at work. His name is Ray Ray.”

Oh, yes. She did say that.

And, if you want to hear more ridiculously hilarious answers on white people’s favorite black people, check out the video below.

White People Say Who There Favorite Black Person Is

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Dubbed in the press as the “strip club bill,” the legislation received a whopping 395-27 vote. Essentially, the bill would prevent welfare recipients from accessing their benefits in strip clubs, casinos, and liquor stores. The Republican-backed proposal was phrased as an attempt to cut down waste and abuse of the federal program.

However controversial, the bill’s aims are not new; House Republicans voted in similar fashion back in December during the payroll tax extension debacle. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.), the mastermind behind bill H.R. 3567, created the bill because he was against the “fraudulent misuse of funds.”

House Republicans are voting on the bill again as part of negotiations between the House and Senate for a yearlong payroll tax extension package and have put pressure on Democrats in Congress to accept the changes since it has passed previously. Some Democrats are going along with the bill in order to speed past other legislative roadblocks.

House Democrats, nearly defenseless, argued in a debate before the vote that the ban would effectively bar citizens from buying necessary food items from a liquor store in case of an emergency.  However, Republicans were careful to not include those stores in the ban and were declared exempt.

Honestly, one has to wonder how many welfare recipients are or have been caught at the strip club. With Americans fighting historic poverty levels, regarding unemployment and foreclosures, why are House Republicans worrying about passing bills that affect welfare recipients?

While Boustany is ironically concerned about the “fraudulent misuse of funds,” Americans must ask themselves if our elected officials are grossly misusing our funds.

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