Maxine, the devil is upset with you.....

...He says that sending all those tea- party people to hell will only ruin the joint.

The first time I met Maxine Waters in person she was flirting with my friend from law school while we visited Washington some 15 years ago. (Relax Sidney, it was totally innocent. I won't even repeat what was said.) I have followed her career ever since. And it has, to say the least, been colorful. (No pun intended.) 

Girlfriend told the tea party folks to "go straight to hell", recently, and, as you can imagine, wingnuts are "fit to be tied."

“I’m not afraid of anybody,” said Waters. “This is a tough game. You can’t be intimidated. You can’t be frightened. And as far as I’m concerned, the ‘tea party’ can go straight to hell.”

Mrs. Waters, I am sure that they are all convinced that they are going to that other place. You know the one. Where they have all the Angels, milk and honey, and no black folks. So I bet that you telling them to "go straight to hell" must have really pissed them off.

Anywhoo, I love Maxine's fight. And before you wingnuts think it's only the right she has it in for, Maxine has made it quite clear that even our boy O is going to get the business from her if he doesn't get his s&^% together. She wants O to pay more attention to black folks, and she is letting her constituents know that she will be holding his feet to the fire. This seems to have become a trend: Black folks have become somewhat frustrated with O, and they are letting their politicians know about it.

"The economy, the loss of jobs, the pain is real. We’re talking about indisputable facts,” she said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“We’ve got to be in the discussion. We want to be part of the solution. We cannot continue to go on watching everybody talk about what the solutions are without us being included in it,”

I agree with her there. I know that O and his peeps will be looking for a large voter turnout from old reliable, and it would help him in key swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. But if these Negroes in places like Philly, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Tampa, and Jacksonville stay home, O better start packing his bags for that long ride back to the Windy City. It's no secret where the next presidential election will be won or lost: In northern suburbs with independent white voters, and the turn out in urban areas in key swing states. That's it. No need to listen to all the political pundits on television bore you for hours with red state blue state crap. I just gave you the key to winning in November, 2012 in a couple of sentences.

So Maxine is right.  O and his people have to address urban issues in the larger discussion about economic recovery. What good is it going to do if home values go up again and Tyrone keeps breaking in to my nice new home because he can't find a job or wants to support a drug habit? Or, unemployment drops for the rest of A-merry-ca and stays at double digits for poorly educated urban youths with nothing to look forward to but a long criminal record? We have all these great resources at our finger tips and at some point we are going to have to start connecting the dots.Politicians (both locally and nationally) are not doing that, and we are going to pay for it down the line. The truth is, we are probably paying for it already.

Finally, every time you think that Governor Big Hair is a legitimate candidate for president of these divided states, or every time he questions O's patriotism or love of country; just remember the following quote from him just a couple of years ago:

"Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that,” Perry said. “My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”

And with that, I rest my case.