There is more truth in this seven minute segment of the Melissa Harris-Perry show than you will see in the eleven hours of Sunday morning news shows programming and highlights a few of my personal bugaboos about the dishonesty of the state of American media.

There are legitimate issues that affect this country. In the wealthiest nation in the world, there is no reason that we should see the level of poverty that we see. And poverty touches on so many other areas as well: the cost of health care, food insecurity, social development, social safety nets, jobs, housing, etc.

And yet who do we see discussing poverty and solutions? Nominally, it's Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan, who sneer and smear those living in poverty, employing the well-trod myths of the welfare queen and the lazy looking for a hand out. It's the same people, week after week, framing the debate.

But you know who never gets a seat at the table? Actual people living in poverty. People who have struggled with homelessness, food insecurity, health care affordability and the rest of the struggles that come with poverty.

Meet Tiana Gaines-Turner, a mother of three children and member of the advocacy group Witnesses to Hunger. Twice homeless, Tiana now points out that these lawmakers (and Democratic politicians are not immune to this, either, their silence is complicity) are making judgments and laws without knowing the real world impact:

“Invite me to the table, invite my brothers and sisters to the table,” she said. “Don’t assume you know what it’s like.”[..]

People who have waited for years for Section 8 housing, who have used government food benefits, Gaines-Turner told Harris-Perry, “know the solutions” and act as “mythbusters,” who can counter assumptions many people have about who lives in poverty.

“Until we can all sit at more tables like this, nothing is going to happen,” Gaines-Turner said.

The entire show was an amazing and sadly rare intelligent and honest discussion. If you missed MHP, you can watch segments via the MSNBC homepage.

The title of this clip by MSNBC is odd, because Rand Paul really isn't mentioned, but his unique version of conservative libertarianism is of discussion.

I've truly never understood how one can be conservative AND libertarian in the way that Paul embraces, because the notion of limited government and personal liberty seems to fall apart when it comes to civil rights. And that is what reproductive rights for women is: it is the denying of personal agency over a living, breathing, walking-around actual woman, it is determinative of her economic choices, her personal health, her emotional health and sometimes even her physical safety. It is absolutely restricting the personal liberty of a citizen over what can only be considered a hypothetical human at that point (remember, an estimated 31 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage and some suggest the rate is actually much higher and miscarriage occurs before a woman is even aware she is pregnant).

Krysten Sinema (D-AZ) points out rightfully that there is absolutely nothing libertarian about Paul's political stances. Wanting to be able to smoke pot and pay less taxes answers nothing when you choose to expand government over half the population.

I have been abundantly blessed. I am a white, happily married woman in a high enough socio-economic class that I have the freedom to stay home to raise my kids. I have grown up with people who valued education, family, diversity, culture, progressive politics, open-mindedness, debate and giving back to others. I live in a fairly liberal and diverse area that is not struggling economically as much as other areas. I haven't known poverty, hunger or deep struggle first-hand. I have had my share of misogyny, but I've never known racism and honestly, haven't been around people who say racist things, either.

This is not a humblebrag. This is to acknowledge from the outset that I am completely aware my life does not necessarily mirror the struggles of others in this country. I'm not a Romney or a Rockefeller, but to complain about the problems I do grapple with would be yet another example of white privileged First World Problems, annoyingly out of touch.

But I am not without empathy. And it is that empathy that impels me to look past my white privilege and see the struggles of others who are not as fortunate as me in birth. It is that empathy that forces me to look at how deep the undercurrents of racism still inform our daily lives, decades after Jim Crow and demand that I analyze how much of the assumptions I make are due to privilege of my birth. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a column that points straight to that ugliness with which people of color must live every single day.

The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive [actor Forrest] Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.

But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

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This moment on This Week wasn't earthshaking. There are no snappy soundbites, no one to get your blood boiling. Yet, it was one of the most interesting topics raised on a Sunday show in a long time not only because of the content but also because it offered a glimpse into how political media looks at political media.

In the course of his interview for 60 Minutes aired Sunday, President Obama addressed the role of Fox News and conservative media on our political reality, saying "If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you'll see more of them doing it."

He mentioned it again at another point in the interview in the context of the balkanization of news, and political news in general. These two mentions raised a rare point of self-examination among the panel members. What I found most interesting was what Steve Inskeep from NPR had to say:

HUGHES: I think that there's a growing sense that there's a need for a media -- for media outlets and media opportunities that are not necessarily centrist, but that have different perspectives and make it easy for us to hear people that we might disagree with and actually engage on the merits, rather than just recycling old ideas.

RADDATZ: Steve?

INSKEEP: There's a specific problem, as well, in that we have all trained ourselves -- or many of us have trained ourselves to go directly past anyone's argument to their motivations, and that actually is what you hear a lot on the more partisan media networks. You don't actually hear the arguments being engaged. You don't actually hear a lot of analysis. You hear a lot people saying, "Remember, whatever he says, don't believe him. Don't trust him."

And that's a danger. That's a difficulty. We face it when we're interviewing people on NPR. Why are you talking to that person on the extreme right? Why are you talking to that person on the extreme left? We hear that from listeners. Why are you putting on this person who makes absolutely no sense? And at some point you have to get a variety of voices out there and trust people to listen carefully to them and actually listen to their arguments.

In a different era, I might actually have agreed with Inskeep on this. There's nothing dangerous about listening to other points of view and weighing their ideas against your own. Challenges to one's dearly-held principles are a good thing. But it's not possible in today's media environment.

Inskeep's idealism is admirable, but we live in the era of the Fox News phony outrage machine. As long as Fox News exists in its current form, we will continue to have balkanized media, on and offline. The only way to balance Fox is to work the refs on the other side, which MSNBC does occasionally, but not enough.

I want to ask Inskeep what price he thinks the craft of journalism has paid for having to contend with a right wing outrage machine whose sole objective is shove this country right and farther right.

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I remember many, many years ago when my dad decided to buy an old house for the rental income. The house itself was built at the turn of the last century and had originally been the servants quarters for a much larger house down the street. It was a charming little cottage, but required a lot of renovation before my dad could lease it out. But the one thing that my dad didn't count on was his largest expense: lead paint removal. The entire house, inside and out, was painted using lead paint. The contractor warned my dad that this 50 year old paint job could be killing us as we stood there, with lead dust flaking off the walls and into our lungs. That was all it took for my dad to remove my brother and I from the site and to sigh that his investment didn't seem as smart as it did at first.

I was reminded of that event when I read Kevin Drum's article this week in Mother Jones' on the correlations of lead toxicity and violent crimes, lower IQs and even ADHD.

The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades

Amazingly simple and yet compelling evidence. Rick Nevin has written a similar piece showing the same correlations in other countries. Per Drum, Nevin forecasts:

• The USA violent crime rate is now down about 50% from its peak in 1991, and I expect that the violent crime rate in Western Europe will be down by about 50% from its peak over the next 20 years, with the largest part of that decline over the next ten years.
• Eastern Europe will follow the same trend, but will take a few years longer because they left gasoline lead levels quite high through the end of the Soviet era.
• Crime will also plummet over the next 10 to 20 years in Latin America, where leaded gasoline use and air lead levels fell sharply from around 1990 through the mid-1990s.

It would be interesting if we took a far more holistic approach to these issues, looking at environmental issues as much as punitive measures.

I guess it should be taken as a small sign of progress that we have reached a point in our society that African Americans are being appealed to on this level, rather than the group to be feared. But I'm not comforted.

The anti-immigration group NumbersUSA was anything but subtle when it launched an ad last night which some say pits black Americans against immigrant workers.

The ad aired last night before the first presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney.[..]

NumbersUSA wants to see the rate of legal immigration to the United States decrease. On the about page of its website, the organization lists construction jobs and hospitality jobs as examples of work that used to have good wages but are now at “near-poverty levels.”

“Importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers into those occupations is a profound policy of injustice against the Americans struggling in them already,” the site reads.

Think Progress reacts to the ad’s message in a post saying that immigration boosts the economy:

Persistently high unemployment rates for African-Americans is a systemic problem that cannot be addressed simply by reducing the number of immigrants … The lies and distortions do not change the fact that immigration is good for the U.S. economy, and it is contemptible to try to pit Americans against each other and against immigrants to stop it.

The site suggests lawmakers work to increase job creation and training and to stop job discrimination instead.

Pitting minority groups against each other? Insinuating that the typically low-paying jobs that immigrants do would otherwise be done by African Americans? Ignoring the vast amount of institutional racism that affects all people of color? Keep it classy, NumbersUSA.

I honestly do not understand this mentality. It is not a zero sum game. The overall economy does better when there's less income inequality. But no, we have a few selfish bastards willing to take down the entire country in the long term for their own short term gain. And the rest of us let them.

But as Melissa Harris-Perry documents, hating on immigrants is not the only dangerous message African Americans are getting about this election:

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I'm getting so tired of these conversations about "fixing" our "broken" education system by Democrats and Republicans alike that ignore one of the biggest contributing factors to how education has failed our children: the ever-widening social inequality that exists in this country.

In America, we don't have an education crisis; rather we have a poverty crisis. The latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores indicate that American schools that serve few low-income students rank higher than the world's top-scoring advanced industrial countries. But when they are averaged with the scores of schools with high poverty rates, the United States sinks to the middle of the pack. At nearly 22 percent and rising, the child-poverty rate in the United States is the highest among wealthy nations in the world. (Poverty rates in Denmark and in Finland, top global performers on the PISA exams, are below 5 percent). In New York City, the child-poverty rate rose to over 30 percent in 2010. Like other aspects of the inequitable U.S. distribution of wealth, our child poverty crisis seems to fall within a national blind spot.

Childhood poverty has a profound impact on learning. Achievement gaps for disadvantaged children begin before they start school and widen throughout their school careers.

No demonizing of teachers' unions (looking at you, Michelle Rhee) or touting of charter schools (especially for personal profit) will improve the state of education for those who need it the most, because we ignore that these children live lives of instability, hunger, violence and poverty. How realistic is it to expect that with just the right combination of demoralized teachers, standardized testing and parent triggers these children can rise above all those obstacles? Instead of treating teachers like antagonists in this scenario, how much more could we achieve towards improving education by treating teachers as allies?

if you want to improve teaching, you probably won’t succeed by disbanding their unions or getting them to work longer hours for the same pay. A more likely strategy--employed by America’s overseas competitors--is to raise the wages and status of elementary and secondary teachers. Although there are many excellent teachers now, that would probably attract better-educated and more committed teachers who would be willing to brave the enormous difficulties of teaching kids who have a bleak view of their own future. An OECD report sums up the situation of American teachers:

Teachers in the U.S. earn substantially less than their peers with similar educational backgrounds. Salary scales are typically also less steep than in other countries. A high school teacher in the U.S. with 15 years of experience can expect to receive only 65 percent of the earnings of a tertiary-educated individual working in another profession, a proportion substantially below that observed in other OECD countries (85 percent). The relatively low wages for teachers in primary, secondary, and upper secondary education compared with the earnings of people with similar educational backgrounds in other occupations suggests that salaries alone may not attract the most talented students to the education profession in the U.S.

Right now, the education reform movement wants teachers to behave like doctors or lawyers without enjoying anything like their income, status, or authority. In the documentary, Waiting for Superman, an anthem to the education reform movement, the narrator declares that “in Illinois, one in 57 doctors loses his or her medical license, and one in 97 attorneys loses his or her law license, but only one teacher in 2,500 has ever lost his or her credentials.” These statistics are often cited to argue that teachers don’t deserve tenure or union protection. The statistics, as it turns out, are unconfirmable, but even if they were accurate, they are still based on a false premise that what should apply to physicians and lawyers should apply to school teachers. Perhaps in Europe, but not in the United States.

School reform? It was an important movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. John Dewey certainly did understand that educational reform had to be coupled with economic and social reform. Dewey was also a member of the American Federation of Teachers. But with some exceptions, today’s version of education reform, led by StudentsFirst or Stand for Children or All Children Matter, much more resembles one of those political fads--I think of technocracy during the 1920s--that periodically energize rich people and politicians who are unwilling to contemplate the obvious kinds of changes that the society needs – changes that might threaten their wealth and power -- and fixate instead on utopian visions and dystopian demons. These dreamers are, to paraphrase a former president, much more part of the problem than the solution.

It's rare that you see this level of emotion on a weekend news show. But it's righteous, completely justified anger, amplified if you had watched the one and a half hours that preceded it.

One of Melissa Harris-Perry's guests for the entire duration of the show was Monica Mehta, described as a "business and finance expert" and author of an upcoming book entitled The Entrepreneurial Instinct. I've not seen her on any other shows, probably because I avoid business channels like the plague. For all of Mehta's supposed expertise, her knowledge seems fairly limited to conservative talking points. When discussing women's reproductive rights earlier in the show, Mehta dismissed it as less important to women's voters than the economy and jobs. She shrugged off commentator Nancy Giles' point that not having control over one's own reproductive system directly affects women's ability to participate in the economy, though the point is indisputable. Mehta also interrupted Wake Forest University professor David Coates as he pointed out that economic mobility has dropped radically as income inequality has risen.

Because Mehta still lives in the rarified world of privilege and the myth of meritocracy, she cannot or will not expand her world view to see that there are vast swaths of the American population who--through no fault of their own--don't get to go to Wharton Business School, work in private equity and carve out a media pundit career. Not because they're lazy or undeserving, but because those avenues are closed off to them economically. In my opinion, Mehta also suffers from the delusion of value by virtue of the size of one's portfolio, a common ailment of conservative thinkers. Her story is proof that the system works. Her success is all from the risks she took, not from the luck of her birth, nor the doors opened by attending a prestigious business school. But the truth is, where was Mehta's risk? It wasn't her money she invested. If she gives erroneous business advice in an appearance on television, or if her book isn't worth the paper it's printed on (scroll down for review), who has suffered? Not Mehta.

So perhaps Melissa Harris-Perry had had enough of the conservative delusions by this point in the program. But after calling out the barely veiled dog whistles of the attacks on welfare by the RNC last week and how here, in the wealthiest country in the world, conservatives can call a ridiculously meager subsistence for the most vulnerable among us an "entitlement" but think tax breaks for the very, very wealthy are great, Harris-Perry did not want to hear about how we must reward 'risk-takers' (starts at 8:14)

“What is riskier than living poor in America? Seriously! What in the world is riskier than being a poor person in America? I live in a neighborhood where people are shot on my street corner. I live in a neighborhood where people have to figure out how to get their kid into school because maybe it will be a good school and maybe it won’t. I am sick of the idea that being wealthy is risky. No. There is a huge safety net that whenever you fail will catch you and catch you and catch you. Being poor is what is risky. We have to create a safety net for poor people. And when we won’t, because they happen to look different from us, it is the pervasive ugliness.”

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There's a major right-wing freakout right now over remarks made by several prominent and vocal African-American media personalities over their thoughts about Independence Day.

The point, as Harris-Perry says in the video at the end of this post, is that Independence Day has a different meaning to African Americans than it does to white Americans. Her point in saying so at all is to remind all of us that no matter how far we've come, there's still a long way to go.

Cue the freakout. Michelle Malkin and other Creatures of the Night shriek that anyone who actually points out the warts on the pages of the Declaration of Independence can't be "real Amuricans." And that's damn true especially if they happen to be African Amuricans. They squeal about values and things, but with only pure love for true America in their hearts.

Bill O'Reilly joined the chorus Thursday night, when he and Gretchen Carlson cherrypicked Melissa Harris-Perry's three-minute ponderance of Independence Day (video embedded below).

Harris-Perry was reflecting on the imperfect, improbability of our nation as a whole. She begins by pointing out the idealism of the founders, the "unlikely narrative of young men so inspired by an age of ideas that they threw off the yoke of colonialism and founded a free nation."

Funny how that part which was just ahead of the section they clipped didn't make it into the segment, huh?

Then yes, she does also point out the contradiction and the founders' imperfection as a contrast. On the one hand idealists, yet on the other, willing to steal the land to found their nation of ideas, enslave labor to build the nation, and consign their mothers to second-class citizen status, a condition that exists to this day and which Harris-Perry notes by her use of the present tense when referring to women.

And then she moves to the contrasts again, pointing out that we all benefit from the spoils (residuals) of oppression and we are each harmed by the realities of inequality, casting those in terms of "imperfect fabric" which we have at times stained and at other times mended and repaired.

She ends by noting that for as much as we own the negatives -- imperialism, genocide and slavery -- we also own the positives, "liberation and the hope and deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of this."

Strangely, BillO's clip didn't include anything past her remarks about inequality and oppression. As if to actually confirm what it was Harris-Perry was saying, he goes on to refer to her as "that woman."

You know. "That woman who works at that network." Her. That woman. No name, no face of humanity on her, and despite the fact that even Gretchen Carlson had to swallow her bile long enough to admit that Harris-Perry had said nothing at all that was incorrect or factually wrong. Nay, nay. The outrage was over THAT WOMAN not having the decency to let just one day go by without pointing to the negatives of our nation, something they view as uniquely "leftist."

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Stop it. Just stop it now.

Who knew in a country where we are have serious debates about taking away women's access to contraceptives for others' religious freedoms and mandating that they be forced to look at the monitor while being violated by a transvaginal probe, there are still people who insist that women can "have it all"?

Frankly, I don't know what "all" is, but I'm pretty sure that no one has it. Male or female. There are only so many hours in the day and I've yet to meet anyone who can balance work, relationships, children and other activities without making serious and painful sacrifices fairly regularly. In my own life, I made the choice to sacrifice my career (and my Social Security income later in life, as I'm informed annually) to raise my kids. My husband sacrifices time at home with his kids (and often, outside interests) in order to succeed at work. But that success enables me to stay home with them. It's a trade-off I personally question occasionally (especially when the kids are being bratty), but works for us.

But seriously, after three or four 'waves' of feminism (or whatever it's been now), we're still having this conversation that posits that somehow women--and women only--should aspire to it "all"? Why? Why these impossible standards to which we never hold men? When was the last time a male politician was asked whether he should run with a young child at home?

Or write articles on their clothes?

Or their hairstyles?

Or whether they should consider plastic surgery?

So let's just agree to stop. "Having it all" isn't possible. And it's unfair to hold women to that impossible standard.