A look at the political week that was…

  • The New York Times published a report on a proposed but rejected top secret plan to take down President Obama using the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  The $10 million dollar proposal titled, “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama” was going to be bankrolled by Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts and has wonderful quotes in it calling the president a “metrosexual Abe Lincoln” and detailing the need for a “extremely literate conservative African American” to be the spokesperson for the plan.
  • The Obama campaign launched a new attack ad and website called “Romney Economics” targeting Romney’s time as CEO of venture capital firm Bain Capital.  The ad focuses on GST Steel in Kansas which Bain profited off of as the workers were laid off and pensions were bailed out.  How fiscally conservative of him!  If the central premise of Romney’s run for president is “I was in the private sector and I know how to create jobs better than Barack Obama” Romney will have to come up with much better explanations for why he slashed so many jobs in the private sector. Last time we checked laying off people doesn’t create jobs.
  • Congress still hasn’t gotten it together to pass the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act.  In the House, six Democrats voted for the watered down House version of the bill which stripped out provisions to assist LGBT citizens, undocumented immigrants, and Native Americans who are victims of domestic abuse.  Violence against women as a partisan issue…how dreadful.
  • Republican Virginia Senate candidate Bob Marshall declares that sodomy is not a civil right,” when explaining his opposition to an openly gay judicial nominee in the state.  Apparently, he’s not familiar with the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas.
  • It turns out that President Obama’s new found support of marriage equality has had a big impact on Black voters in North Carolina.  New polling shows an increase in the approval for marriage equality has gone up 11 points since Obama’s announcement.  The same poll shows that black support has not been hurt by the president’s marriage equality shift despite a lot of media tours by bishops acting “disappointed” in Obama who never supported him in the first place.

Zerlina Maxwell is a political analyst and soon-to-be attorney.  You can follow her on Twitter: @ZerlinaMaxwell