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Month: December 2015

Paul Ryan: Judas

Published by digby on December 30, 2015

Paul Ryan: Judas

by digby

The social conservatives are very, very restless. Like everyone except lobbyists and billionaires, they feel betrayed and taken for granted by the GOP. These are valuable Republican foot soldiers and the establishment ignores their demands at their peril. It is the single biggest faction of the party. But giving in to them could mean a big loss at the ballot box in 2016.

That’s not to say they are alone, however. It’s likely that most people don’t fully realize just how overwrought the entire Republican base is over this latest budget deal. Political observers knew that when Speaker John Boehner resigned the fix was in for a budget deal for this year. His swan song deal to set the top line numbers for two years paved the way for the new speaker to pass an agreement during his honeymoon. There was a little hiccup with the presumptive successor Kevin McCarthy turning out to be a dolt whose loose lips sank Trey Gowdy’s ship on national TV, but eventually they brought in the BMOC Paul Ryan to get the job done.
Unfortunately, the rabid GOP base does not observe such antiquated concepts as political honeymoons and they refuse to admit that shutting down the government is not a useful tactic. They expect their representatives to hold the line, no matter what. And when they don’t, there is hell to pay.
Every day since the budget deal was reached, the inboxes of conservatives have been filled with angry, vitriolic screeds denouncing Paul Ryan for his treachery and threatening members of the Freedom Caucus with primary challenges. (And since those Freedom Caucus members were elected by the Tea Party those threats have some serious bite.) Talk Radio is boiling over with angry denunciations of Washington. Rush Limbaugh’s show last week illustrates their anger with a rant his website called “GOP Sells America Down the River”:
[T]he Republicans have the largest number of seats in the House they’ve had in Congress since the Civil War. And it hasn’t made any difference at all. It is as though Nancy Pelosi is still running the House and Harry Reid is still running the Senate. “Betrayed” is not even the word here. What has happened here is worse than betrayal. Betrayal is pretty bad, but it’s worse than that. This was out-and-out, in-our-face lying, from the campaigns to individual statements made about the philosophical approach Republicans had to all this spending. There is no Republican Party! You know, we don’t even need a Republican Party if they’re gonna do this. You know, just elect Democrats, disband the Republican Party, and let the Democrats run it, because that’s what’s happening anyway…
He wasn’t the only one. The entire activist base of the GOP is having an extended tantrum over this. They are now even comparing Paul Ryan to the hated Obama by calling him a Muslim — for growing a beard. The only reason it isn’t a bigger story is that Congress isn’t in session and the Trump Show is sucking all the energy out of everything else. (Rush actually begged Trump to add a criticism of this Omnibus “sell-out” to his repertoire of immigrant and Muslim hate-mongering.)
The “betrayal” in this case refers to the annual failure to end Obamacare and the continuance of the program for Syrian refugees.  But the one item that has them apoplectic is continued funding for Planned Parenthood. And there’s good reason for the agitation: The social conservatives are in total revolt. And that is a big problem for the GOP, which depends upon the evangelical churches to get out the vote.
Antiabortion activists were given to understand by Republican leaders that the Planned Parenthood doctored videos had changed the game on abortion rights and they believed the party would succeed in ending all federal funding for the organization. They are livid that they were misled. As Sean Illing of Salon reported last week, Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham and highly respected leader of the Christian right, announced that he was leaving the Republican Party. In a fiery Facebook post he wrote:
After all of the appalling facts revealed this year about Planned Parenthood, our representatives in Washington had a chance to put a stop to this, but they didn’t. There’s no question—taxpayers should not be paying for abortions! Abortion is murder in God’s eyes. Seeing and hearing Planned Parenthood talk nonchalantly about selling baby parts from aborted fetuses with utter disregard for human life is reminiscent of Joseph Mengele and the Nazi concentration camps! That should’ve been all that was needed to turn off the faucet for their funding… This is an example of why I have resigned from the Republican Party and declared myself Independent.
Last summer when the videos first surfaced, with  ample input from conservative members of Congress, the congressional leadership knew they had a problem on their hands. They did not want to shut down the government again before the election. Despite the erroneous belief among the rank and file that government shutdowns automatically lead to victory, these seasoned polls understand that presidential elections are different than midterms and that they could be taking a huge chance in not only losing the White House again but also their congressional majority if they engage in another dangerous game of chicken. But they need social conservatives to stay engaged so they turned the rhetoric up to 11 and tried to appease them with promises of hearings and witch hunts. Former Speaker John Boehner even convened a Select Committee called “Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives.”
But he gave the game away when he said, “The goal here is not to shut down the government, the goal is to stop these horrific practices of organizations selling baby parts!” and it cost him his job. The antiabortion zealots thought they had won.
At the bottom of Graham’s post resigning from the Republican Party, Graham posted a Huffington Post article by Robert Kuttner, which led off with this zinger:
Little noticed in the deal that Congress approved Friday is the fact that the anti-abortion lobby got wiped out.
After seeing that, no matter what the professionals tell them or what the polls say, the social conservatives are loaded for bear. Graham is embarking on a 50-state tour starting Jan. 5 in Iowa to spread the gospel and get the evangelicals to vote for people who share their values. And let’s just say that any plans the Republicans may have had about calling a truce in the War on Women have pretty much been exploded.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony List, ominously warned the Republicans, “Abortion will bubble over into the general election. If you don’t know how to handle this issue, you will be eviscerated.” And by “handling it” she means being even more doctrinaire and extreme on the issue than ever before. Today two of the more viable presidential candidates, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, now disapprove of abortion even in cases of rape and incest, a position that was until recently considered cruel and unreasonable even within the antiabortion movement.
And the presidential race will be unfolding as a number of other assaults on a woman’s right to choose will be happening in other political realms. The AP reported this week that antiabortion forces are readying a multifront offensive:
The Supreme Court will be hearing arguments, probably in March, regarding a Texas law enacted in 2013 that would force numerous abortion clinics to close. One contested provision requires abortion facilities to be constructed like surgical centers; another says doctors performing abortions at clinics must have admitting privileges at a local hospital.
The Texas dispute will have echoes in other states as social conservatives lobby for more laws restricting abortion. Americans United for Life plans a multistate push for a package of bills called the Infants’ Protection Project; one measure would ban abortions performed because of fetal abnormalities such as Down syndrome while another would ban abortions after five months of pregnancy.
Also unfolding during the campaign will be a new investigation launched by House Republicans to examine the practices of Planned Parenthood and other major abortion providers. The panel’s chair, Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, says its work will likely continue past Election Day.
New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio all have Senate races in which antiabortion candidates are having their feet held to the fire by the activist base.
Unfortunately for Republicans, this is unlikely to be a winning issue for them. The latest AP Poll released on Dec. 22 shows that the antiabortion base’s extreme positions are out of step with a majority of Americans: 58 percent of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal in most or all cases while 39 percent say it should be illegal in most or all cases. And 54 percent believe Planned Parenthood should keep its federal funding.
This will not deter the social conservative base even a little bit. They are still steaming over the recognition of marriage equality and, like the rest of the right wing, they feel the Republicans have let them down so they are taking things into their own hands.
But despite the solid support for legal abortion and Planned Parenthood, it would be very unwise of the pro-choice community to be too sanguine that they have this one in the bag. Emphasizing the issue at the ballot box may not help the Republicans, but that doesn’t mean they will not continue to make it more and more difficult for women to exercise their right to choose. For all their angry hand-wringing about being thwarted by the GOP, they know that on a state-by-state level they have been remarkably successful at restricting access to abortion. Indeed, if one didn’t know better one might think that their conspicuous caterwauling over Planned Parenthood is just part of their larger strategy to keep their own supporters charged up and ready to fight in all 50 states.

Happy New Year everyone…

Shocking news. GOP isn’t doing well with minorities and young people.

Published by digby on December 30, 2015

Shocking news. GOP isn’t doing well with minorities and young people.

by digby

The percentage of Republicans among those likely to vote in the Nov. 8, 2016, election lags Democrats by 9 percentage points, compared with a 6-point deficit in the year leading up to Obama’s 2012 victory, according to an analysis of Reuters/Ipsos polling data from 2012 and 2015.

While the American electorate has become more diverse the last three years, the party’s support among Hispanic likely voters and younger likely voters has shrunk significantly.
[…]
An analysis of the Reuters/Ipsos polling data found:

– In 2012, Democrats made up 44.7 percent of party-affiliated likely voters, compared to 39.1 percent Republicans, a difference of about 6 percentage points, according to the analysis of 87,778 likely presidential voters polled leading up to the 2012 presidential election. The results have a credibility interval of plus or minus 0.3 percentage points.

– Three years later, that lead had grown to nine points, 45.9 percent to 36.9 percent, according to the analysis of 93,181 likely presidential voters polled in 2015. The results in 2015 have the same credibility interval as 2012.

– Among Hispanics who are likely presidential voters, the percentage affiliated with the Republican Party has slipped nearly five points, from 30.6 percent in 2012 to 26 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, Hispanic Democrats grew by six percentage points to 59.6 percent.

– Among whites under 40, the shift is even more dramatic. In 2012, they were more likely to identify with the Republican Party by about 5 percentage points. In 2015, the advantage flipped: Young whites are now more likely to identify with the Democratic Party by about 8 percentage points.

– Meanwhile, black likely voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic, at about 80 percent.

They have a problem. But so do the Democrats. They can’t get these voters out to vote in mid-terms and it’s making it very difficult to win the congress. Result: gridlock. Who knows where that eventually leads us?

Happy New Year everyone!

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But for the grace of God by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 30, 2015

But for the grace of God
by Tom Sullivan

Lauren Scott, a single mother and homeless, goes for a job interview:

Sixty-nine stops on a bus; a nine-minute train ride; an additional 49 stops on a bus; a quarter-mile walk.

Scott carries a spiral notebook with her “Plan of Action for the Week.” The Washington Post chronicles her struggle to find work in Atlanta. It would have taken 27 minutes in a car. It is a four-hour round trip on the bus. Getting to the interview is just one of the obstacles to climbing out of poverty. Rising prices in the city are driving low-income residents further from where the jobs are.

But even as their ranks have grown, the deeply impoverished in the Deep South have also increasingly found that they are on their own: They are less likely to receive the help of a spouse — or the government. Five of the six states with the highest proportion of single parents are in the Deep South. Meanwhile, policymakers have dismantled the cash assistance programs that used to provide critical support for the jobless with children. Those like Scott not only have less access to jobs, but also less of a safety net when they are unemployed.

It’s a good thing she doesn’t have to take a drug test before getting a bus pass. Scott had been self-sufficient, even if only hanging on. Her life was a Jenga game with too many pieces gone. Having a child brought it crashing down. There was no cushion left.

Other factors add to the difficulty of the poor finding work. Those who can’t afford to live in city centers often must depend on walking, hitching rides or laborious public transportation commutes. A 2011 Brookings Institution report ranking public transit in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas found that 15 of the weakest 20 systems — judged by coverage and job access — were in the South. They included systems in Birmingham, Ala.; Greenville, S.C.; Baton Rouge; and Atlanta — where, in earlier decades, majority-white suburbs voted against the expansion of a transit system they viewed as being primarily for black residents.

Let’s see. So suburbanites insist poor people get jobs they can’t get because they can’t commute to where the jobs are because they don’t have cars because they don’t have jobs. And the poor can’t use public transportation to commute to jobs they can’t get because suburbanites don’t want to pay taxes to expand public transportation they see as primarily benefiting poor people who can’t afford to move closer to jobs and the suburbanites don’t want them living in their neighborhoods anyway. This Catch 22 situation is a product of a moral failing on somebody’s part. The comfortable are pretty sure it’s the shiftless and slovenly Poors’ failing. Good luck finding support for a “basic income” upon which to build better futures.

Ask Janis Adkins about that. She wound up homeless in Santa Barbara after losing her nursery business. No wonder Trump’s faithful are so worried about immigrants and their own futures. Deep down, they know they could be next at the bottom of the ladder. Until then, no grace for those already there.

Maybe America needs a moratorium on saving souls until it finds its own.

A 2015 iconic pic

Published by digby on December 30, 2015

A 2015 iconic pic

by digby

“The single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘we.’ We the People. We shall overcome. Yes we can. That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given, to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.” — President Obama

I cannot help it — this moves me every time I see it. There are more 2015 pictures from the Obama presidency here.

Happy New Year everyone!

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QOTD: a villager

Published by digby on December 29, 2015

QOTD: a villager

by digby

Yes, I’m talking about Ruth Marcus and her inane column today in which she says that Bill Clinton’s past is fair game — a column that is being eagerly shared by every villager in Washington who wants to experience the thrilling freedom of talking about blow jobs in the office all day long without anyone getting mad.

Here’s the specific quote that really says it all:

Sexism isn’t the precise word for his predatory behavior toward women or his inexcusable relationship with a 22-year-old intern. Yet in the larger scheme of things, Bill Clinton’s conduct toward women is far worse than any of the multiple offensive things that Trump has said.

Marcus, like all Villagers of her generation makes the assertion about Clinton’s alleged “predatory behavior” based upon disputed facts. The facts that are not in dispute are those in which it
he confessed to a tawdry but consensual workplace affair while president. That’s not anything to be proud of,obviously, but it does not rise to the level of exterminationist, fascist demagoguery. Sorry.

And that’s what makes that statement so astonishing. Trump has said that he plans to torture and kill wives, girlfriends and children of people he thinks might be terrorists or “know something”. When asked if would bring back waterboarding he said “you bet your ass I will”, and “I’d do more than that because it works.” ““And even if it doesn’t they deserve it for what they’ve done to us.”

He has also said he plans to round up and deport 12 million or so people, including American children, and has spoken approvingly of what the government did in the 1950s which is drop them in the middle of the Mexican desert so they cannot come back — at least until he builds a wall to keep everyone out.

Perhaps Marcus doesn’t find these ideas worrying. It appears millions of Americans think they’re great so she’s not alone. But I’d guess the rest of us find that just a little bit “worse” than Bill Clinton’s tawdry past.

Update: Not that it matters but Ruth Marcus should probably refrain from giving Trump, of all people, a pass to condemn Clinton:

“I got a chuckle out of all the moralists in Congress and in the media who expressed public outrage at the president’s immoral behavior,” wrote Trump in The America We Deserve . “I happen to know that one U.S. senator leading the pack of attackers spent more than a few nights with his twenty-something girlfriend at a hotel I own. There’s also a conservative columnist, married, who was particularly rough on Clinton in this regard. He also brought his girlfriend to my resorts for the weekend. Their hypocrisy is amazing.”

Trump also wrote that Clinton should have refused to talk about his personal life.

“When confronted with the Lewinsky matter, Clinton should have stoutly refused to discuss his private life,” wrote Trump. “He should also have declined to answer, rather than perjure himself. If the Clinton affair proves anything it is that the American people don’t care about the private lives and personal of our political leaders so long as they are doing the job.”
[…]
Trump at one point compared himself directly to Bill Clinton, telling CNBC in 1998, “Can you imagine how controversial I’d be? You think about him with the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine?”

In a 2000 interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Trump even suggested people would have been more forgiving if Clinton had cheated on Hillary with a beautiful woman of sophistication.

“He handled the Monica situation disgracefully. It’s sad because he would go down as a great president if he had not had this scandal,” said Trump. “People would have been more forgiving if he’d had an affair with a really beautiful woman of sophistication. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were on a different level. Now Clinton can’t get into golf clubs in Westchester. A former president begging to get in a golf club. It’s unthinkable.”

In another Times story in 1999, Trump said Clinton would have been considered a hero if he cheated with a supermodel:

For example, Trump disapproves of President Clinton’s behavior in the White House over the past four years, though he suggested that he was bothered less by what Clinton did, than by whom he did it with.

“It was his choice,” Trump said. “It was Monica! I mean, terrible choice.” Trump, who showed off fashion magazines displaying cover-art of the latest in a line of models he has dated, suggested that if Clinton had confessed an improper relationship ( Trump offered a more earthy phrase to get the idea across) with a supermodel, as a opposed to a White House intern, “he would have been everybody’s hero.”

“I’m not making any justification for cheating on your wife,” added Trump, whose own extracurricular marital activities have been a tabloid staple.

Happy New Year everyone!

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Fundamentally promising #economicelectionindicatorslookingup

Published by digby on December 29, 2015

Fundamentally promising

by digby

This is for all you political fundamentalists who believe that elections turn on how people feel about the economy:

A new CNN/ORC poll found that 52% of respondents approve of the way that Obama is handling the economy—it’s only the second time since 2009 that a majority of Americans has felt this way. And it reflects the tentative, but growing optimism that the public has about the economy overall. “Overall, 49% say the economy is in good shape, 51% doing poorly. But more, 56%, say they expect things to be in good shape a year from now,” CNN explains.

I tend to think that people vote on more than pocketbook issues but it’s still a huge indicator no matter what. if the economy is doing better and people feel confident in the future they are much less likely to vote for big “change.”

Happy New Year everyone!

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What’s the matter with Kansas *now*?

Published by digby on December 29, 2015

What’s the matter with Kansas now?

by digby

I hate to pick on the state of Kansas. I lived there for a while when I was a kid and it’s a really nice place with really nice people. But damn, something is seriously wrong with the government there. They elect lunatics like Kris Kobach, the anti-immigrant, anti-abortion crusader. And they put up with authoritarian abuses like this:

In April 2012, a Kansas SWAT team raided the home of Robert and Addie Harte, their 7-year-old daughter and their 13-year-old son. The couple, both former CIA analysts, awoke to pounding at the door. When Robert Harte answered, SWAT agents flooded the home. He was told to lie on the floor. When Addie Harte came out to see what was going on, she saw her husband on his stomach as SWAT cop stood over him with a gun. The family was then held at gunpoint for more than two hours while the police searched their home. Though they claimed to be looking for evidence of a major marijuana growing operation, they later stated that they knew within about 20 minutes that they wouldn’t find any such operation. So they switched to search for evidence of “personal use.” They found no evidence of any criminal activity.

The investigation leading to the raid began at least seven months earlier, when Robert Harte and his son went to a gardening store to purchase supplies to grow hydroponic tomatoes for a school project. A state trooper had been positioned in the store parking lot to collect the license plate numbers of customers, compile them into a spreadsheet, then send the spreadsheets to local sheriff’s departments for further investigation. Yes, merely shopping at a gardening store could make you the target of a criminal drug investigation.

They tested some wet “plant material” with some dicey field test and determined it was marijuana. It turned out to be loose leaf tea which the lab said looked nothing at all like marijuana.

They were cleared but told nothing about why they had been targeted and were told the sheriff’s office was under no obligation to release any information about the case or tell them what they had used a probably cause. After spending $25,000 to get the information they filed suit. This is what happened:

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge John W. Lungstrum dismissed every one of the Hartes’s claims. Lungstrum found that sending a SWAT team into a home first thing in the morning based on no more than a positive field test and spotting a suspect at a gardening store was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. He found that the police had probable cause for the search, and that the way the search was conducted did not constitute excessive force. He found that the Hartes had not been defamed by the raid or by the publicity surrounding it. He also ruled that the police were under no obligation to know that drug testing field kits are inaccurate, nor were they obligated to wait for the more accurate lab tests before conducting the SWAT raid. The only way they’d have a claim would be if they could show that the police lied about the results, deliberately manipulated the tests or showed a reckless disregard for the truth — and he ruled that the Hartes had failed to do so.

Keep in mind that this was a ruling for summary judgment. This was not a trial. To dismiss the suit at this stage, Lungstrum needed to view the facts in a light most favorable to the Hartes. And yet he still found that at no point did the police violate the family’s constitutional rights.

He found the police did everything right. They tracked people who were shopping at a gardening store for things that are commonly used to grow vegetables. Then they found some wet loose tea leaves in their garbage and rather than using a legitimate test to see if it was some kind of illegal substance they relied on a dubious method which returned an invalid result. Then they raided an innocent family’s home and terrorised the them.

All of this was absolutely fine. No harm done.

Over pot. And a silly PR stunt.

By the way, the people who support this kind of thing also like to talk a lot about freedom and liberty.

Happy New Year everyone!

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If you can’t let them join you, kick them out of the country #immigrants

Published by digby on December 29, 2015

If you can’t let them join you, kick them out of the country

by digby

“There’s a reason why I think the new politically correct term is no longer illegal aliens; it’s undocumented Democrats.” — Ted Cruz

I have written a ton of stuff about immigration over the years. It’s been bubbling up in the GOP as a major voting issue for decades.  I have this up today at Salon:

Ever since African-American men were granted the right to vote with the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, programs were enacted to make it impossible for them to exercise the franchise. And needless to say, the passage of the 19th Amendment 50 years later, which opened the franchise to women, only resulted in even more programs to deny African-Americans their ability to vote in many states. All of this was quite legal under the states’ rights doctrine until the 1960s, when President Johnson and Congress finally passed the Voting Rights Act, which put the federal government in charge of monitoring the election processes of jurisdictions that were proven to have discriminated in the past. Trying to keep racial and ethnic minorities from voting is as American as apple pie.
Over the years, the right wing, which has always been hostile to the idea of “too much” democracy, worked to create an illusion that there was a great threat of “voter fraud” in America that needed to be dealt with by enacting extremely restrictive voter eligibility requirements. There is no evidence of systematic voter fraud anywhere in America, but that hasn’t stopped the right from doing everything in its power to make it difficult for ordinary people to exercise the right to vote. (If only they were as vigilant about preventing the very real threat of gun violence.)
And they have been helped in this task, unbelievably, by Democrats who are so afraid of right-wing hysteria that they actually helped the Republicans destroy one of their voting rights institutions, ACORN, when a right-wing con artist produced a doctored video to tarnish its reputation. They didn’t even wait for the facts; they immediately wrung their hands and joined the metaphorical lynching. It was a low point in recent civil rights history and it proved that voting rights activists cannot count on the political class to have their backs even when it means their own party will suffer.
Vote suppression was, of course, the way they kept African-Americans from voting during Jim Crow, so even as they destroyed ACORN, the usual suspects simultaneously worked to undermine the VRA and finally succeeded in having a right-wing Supreme Court majority overturn it. Now Republican state governments are much freer to restrict voting so that the undesirable minorities, whom they assume will vote for the Democratic Party (and rightly so since Republicans are openly hostile to them), will have a much more difficult time voting. They will naturally keep up their assault on the ability of urban black voters to participate by eliminating polling places and reducing early voting, which makes it difficult for hardworking people to participate. But the latest attacks are coming from a number of other directions, some of which are openly undemocratic, and are increasingly focused on Hispanics.
For instance, the argument in Evenwel v. Abbott, the latest voting case to come before the Supreme Court, is that only eligible voters are entitled to representation by the government. This means, essentially, that children, legal residents, former felons or the mentally ill have no representation. Obviously, it will mean that undocumented workers, many of whom are counted in the census, will not be represented. As a practical matter this will have the fortuitous result (for Republicans) of making voting districts more rural and more white. And that is the point.
Nobody knows how such a thing can be implemented because there is no count of “eligible voters” — the census doesn’t ask the question and there would be no way of determining its validity anyway. But the consensus among legal observers seems to be that the court will likely divide along the usual partisan lines and thus change the way representation is apportioned to favor white Republicans once again.
That’s not the only thing they are doing. For obvious reasons, the biggest fear among Republicans these days is no longer the threat of black Americans voting. They will certainly continue to do everything in their power to make it hard for them to exercise their rights  — they are the Democrats’ most reliable constituency. But the major threat today comes from the fast-growing Latino population. Indeed, the campaign to deport immigrants and end birthright citizenship is hugely influenced by their fear that they will be demographically smothered in a few years by the American offspring of undocumented workers. The “path to citizenship” has them terrorized as they see it as an obvious electoral advantage for the Democratic Party.
There was a time when this prospect was actually considered an opportunity for Republicans who believed that they could appeal to this voting bloc through their shared belief in family values and small business entrepreneurship. One of George W. Bush’s greatest assets was considered to be his ability to attract Hispanics and he managed to get almost 40 percent of the vote in 2000. Unfortunately for Republicans, their older white constituency wants nothing to do with this — indeed, they are repelled by the idea of being in the same party as a group of immigrants who don’t look and sound like them. George W. Bush was abandoned by his party not only because of his Iraq debacle, but because he was widely considered to be soft on immigration.
As you can see from the presidential campaign, notwithstanding the party leaders’ understanding of their electoral challenge, this has hardened into a litmus test within the party. Republican voters want immigration stopped, they want a wall, they want deportation of undocumented immigrants and they want birthright citizenship to be repealed. (The last may require a constitutional amendment, although there are some cranks who insist it can be done legislatively. With this right-wing majority, they may even be able to get that endorsed by the Supreme Court.) GOP presidential candidates are required by the older white base to be openly hostile to Latinos, which ensures they will not get their votes. In that case, since the Latino population is growing very fast and is younger than the white population, the only option (aside from ethnic cleansing) is to try to prevent them from voting for Democrats by making it difficult at the voting booth and diluting their representation.
Jim Rutenberg is writing a series on this subject for the New York Times Magazine that exposes the depth and breadth of this program. It’s being road-tested in Texas where there exists a serious possibility, if they are unable to succeed in turning back the tide, of a Democratic majority in a very few years due to the rapid growth in the Hispanic population. They are pulling out all the stops from local reapportionment of city council seats to the above-mentioned Supreme Court case attempting to deny representation to people who are ineligible to vote.
And unfortunately, the Republicans have one very big advantage: fear. They have managed to make the process so harrowing that many Latinos don’t feel comfortable voting even though they have a perfect right to do so. And perhaps more relevantly, they are discouraged and depressed about participating in the system because of the invective and hostility coming from so many white Americans, particularly those in power. Getting them to turn out to vote is a huge challenge.
But then that’s nothing new either. Historian Rick Perlstein quoted documentation on the subject back when he was researching his book “Before the Storm” about the 1964 Goldwater campaign and the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party. It’s a memo written by a Johnson staffer outlining the GOP vote suppression scheme called “Operation Eagle Eye.”
This quote from the memo says it all:
“Let’s get this straight, the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confidence in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.
But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. It is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.”
Some things never change.
Operation Eagle Eye was in every state in 1964, for all the good it did them. One Republican lawyer very assiduously worked in Arizona that year to keep Hispanic voters from the polls and was reputed to have been very effective at intimidation. His name was William Rehnquist. He went on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court. His successor, John Roberts, worked with the recount team during the infamous election theft of 2000, presided over the 2008 “voter fraud” case that allowed states to require ID, and wrote the opinion overturning the Voting Rights Act in 2014.
These people play a very long game. But it’s unlikely they will be able to suppress the Latino vote forever. Their hostility may be intimidating to an older generation but the new generation is not going to accept this. And there are a whole lot of young Americans of Hispanic descent. If they vote, this right-wing program will finally fail and fail spectacularly. And it will likely take the whole Republican agenda down with it. These young Americans will never identify with such a party. These conservative bigots are sowing the seeds of their own demise.

Happy New Year everyone!

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Christmas Week Democratic debate gets lowest ratings of any debate this year, by @Gaius_Publius

Published by digby on December 29, 2015

Christmas Week Democratic debate gets lowest ratings of any debate this year

by Gaius Publius

Digby had much to say on this subject — “The warning bell tolls for thee DNC” — but I wanted to add my bit. This is just a news piece, so you know how bad it was. At DNC headquarters, they’re marking this “mission accomplished.” Adam Edelman at the NY Daily News reports (my emphasis):

Saturday night 2016 Democratic debate gets lowest ratings of any debate this year

It was live on Saturday night but dead in the TV ratings.

The third 2016 Democratic debate got the lowest TV ratings of any debate this cycle, preliminary figures released Sunday showed.

About 6.71 million viewers tuned into the prime-time debate between Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, Nielsen data showed, well below all of the other Democratic and Republican debates this year.

The first and second Democratic debates drew 15.3 and 8.5 million viewers, compared with 6.7 million for the most recent one. If this were a TV show, it would be cancelled. Contrast those numbers with the three highest-rated Republican debates, which garnered 25 million viewers, 23 million viewers, and 18 million viewers.

If it wasn’t already obvious that party leadership is picking the candidate, and not its voters, it should be by now. I fear there may be an in-kind response to that, but later, maybe by the voters in November, at which point no one will be pleased. After all, this is the season in which both party’s voters are rejecting the self-dealing players seated at the money-flush insider table. If I’m the Democrats, I’m not sure I’d stand in front of the train the Republicans are looking at. They do seem determined to, however.

Digby is exactly right. The warning bell is ringing loud and clear. Will the money that runs the DNC listen and stand down? 2016 is will be one of the most important election years in the history of this country. For one thing, on the climate front, if the next president is a money-serving incrementalist, no matter the party, well … I’m definitely not feeling lucky about that.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

That was the year that was by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 29, 2015

That was the year that was
by Tom Sullivan

A tip of the hat this morning to Tom Lehrer.

The year 2015 will go down as the year Donald Trump destroyed the Republican Party, writes Eugene Robinson. But he had help. “Trump has given voice to the ugliness and anger that the party spent years encouraging and exploiting. He let the cat out of the bag, and it’s hungry.”

Globalization, the shrinking middle class, terrorism, immigration. The Party flogged the issues for years to stoke anger in the base and garner votes, but did not deliver change. Robinson explains:

The Republican Party promised — with nods, winks and dog-whistle toots — to change all of this and make everything the way it used to be . In practice, however, party leaders were compelled to deal with the world as it actually is. Hence, for example, the establishment view a couple of years ago in favor of comprehensive immigration reform.

Enter Trump, who has the temerity to point out that the party establishment says one thing but does another. He launched his campaign by calling the GOP’s bluff on immigration: If the 11 million people here without documents are really “illegal,” as the party loudly proclaims, then send them home. Other candidates were put in the position of having to explain why, after claiming that President Obama was somehow “soft” on immigration, their position on allowing the undocumented to stay is basically the same.

The base woke up to the fact that the GOP’s leaders consistently fail to deliver what they conditioned voters to want. No liberal could convince them of that. It took one of their own emperors declaring the others had no clothes. And Trump did, letting slip the dogs of intraparty war. Conservatives are already accusing new House Speaker Paul Ryan of betraying America for attempting to do the job for which he is being paid.

Feeding the crazy worked, and may still work, just not for party regulars. Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz are the beneficiaries, if we can call it that. The Daily Beast’s Andrew Kirell sampled some of what Cruz fans are dishing on at a rally in Mechanicsville, VA:

One guy wants a Christian “warrior priest” for president [timestamp 6:40]. Cruz, naturally.

♫And everybody hates the Jews Muslims: