Why do African-American voters overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party?

To hear conservative radio host Laura Ingraham tell it, it has nothing to do with their support for liberal policies on issues like jobs, healthcare and education. Nor is it a reaction against the ugly racial rhetoric emanating from leading Republicans or the vile voter suppression measures pushed by the Republican Party. Instead, Ingraham asserted on her radio program today, black voters support Democratic candidates because Democrats won’t allow “the black population” off “the plantation.”

Highlighting the case of an African-American pastor who alleges that the robbery of his church may be linked to his endorsement of Illinois GOP gubernatorial nominee Bruce Rauner, Ingraham decried what she depicted as Democrats’ demonization of African-Americans who stray from the liberal fold.

“Look at what they did to Col. Alan West. Look at what they did to Justice Clarence Thomas, or tried to do. This is what they do,” Ingraham argued.

I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who planned for a public-service career in Republican politics. But I am a Republican no longer.

There’s an old joke we Republicans used to tell that goes something like this: “If you’re young and not a Democrat, you’re heartless. If you grow up and you’re not a Republican, you’re stupid.” These days, my old friends and associates no doubt consider me the butt of that joke. But I look on my “stupidity” somewhat differently. After all, my real education only began when I was 30 years old.

This is the story of how in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and later in Iraq, I discovered that what I believed to be the full spectrum of reality was just a small slice of it and how that discovery knocked down my Republican worldview.

I always imagined that I was full of heart, but it turned out that I was oblivious. Like so many Republicans, I had assumed that society’s “losers” had somehow earned their deserts. As I came to recognize that poverty is not earned or chosen or deserved, and that our use of force is far less precise than I had believed, I realized with a shock that I had effectively viewed whole swaths of the country and the world as second-class people.

I have a few points to make about this vid.
5:40-6:00
Even though the popular vote is all but irrelevant in determining who becomes president, I think it should be noted that Obama won the popular vote both times. He is the first president in decades to win the popular vote twice with over 50% of the vote, and he won the majority of the vote in every non-white group. It wasn't just one single group that put him over the top.
6:15-6:45
There have been quite a few elected officials with pro-people/populist agendas. There's Bernie Sanders, for starters. There's Elizabeth Warren, Sharrod Brown, and the list goes on. Even Obama's agenda has been fairly progressive (though I even have a few disagreements with him), doing things like pushing for an end to the Bush top tax cuts, and pushing for a jobs bill a few years ago that was eventually blocked by Republicans in Congress.
7:40-8:10
I agreed 100% about how more should be done with regards to the prison industrial complex and Wall Street. However, sitting out elections is clearly not going to solve those problems. If people want those problems fixed, they need to either find more candidates who care about those issues, or run themselves.
Outside of prisons and Wall Street, there are many other issues that face the country that our two major parties hold vastly different views on. For example, there is the fight for the right to vote PERIOD, the fight to get guns out the hands of criminals and lunatics, the fight for health care, education, taxation, women's rights, gay rights, a higher minimum wage, etc. Sitting out elections is EXACTLY what the money-grubbing elites and the bigots want the working class (and especially Black folks) to do. Why else have many states like Florida and North Carolina made voting more inconvenient for us during the past few years if voting doesn't change anything? In fact, there would be no Social Security, no Civil Rights Act, and no public highways if voting were supposedly so ineffective. California would still have the budget deficit leftover from the Schwarzenegger era if voting truly didn't make a difference.
Compared to other countries, voter turnout in the U.S. is atrocious. It's a shame that some people today seem to take for granted the rights that people died for in the past. There is no excuse for sitting out an election, and a person has no right to complain if he or she isn't politically-active.

The woman who accused Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch of assault and property damage in August was charged with making a false statement to a public servant, according to the Seattle Times.

Jammie Lynn Ficarelli, 31, of Everett, Wash., was charged Thursday in King County District Court. Ficarelli claimed that Lynch assaulted her in a Bellevue apartment and damaged her purse on Aug. 10.

Bellevue police recommended that Ficarelli be charged with making a false or misleading statement after finding out that Lynch was at a hotel about a mile away from where the incident occurred.

Two witnesses also told investigators that Ficarelli's injuries were caused by a fall.