For the first time, the influx of Asians moving to the U.S. has surpassed that of Hispanics, reflecting a slowdown in illegal immigration while American employers increase their demand for high-skilled workers.
An expansive study by the Pew Research Center details what it describes as “the rise of Asian-Americans,” a highly diverse and fast-growing group making up nearly 6 percent of the U.S. population. Mostly foreign-born and naturalized citizens, their numbers have been boosted by increases in visas granted to specialized workers and to wealthy investors as the U.S. economy becomes driven less by manufacturing and more by technology.
“Too often the policy debates on immigration fixate on just one part – illegal immigration,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California-Riverside and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “U.S. immigration is more diverse and broader than that, with policy that needs to focus also on high-skilled workers.”
“With net migration from Mexico now at zero, the role of Asian-Americans has become more important,” he said.
Somehow, I don’t get the feeling that the usual xenophobes will any problem switching their attention from the “illegals” to the job stealing “yellow peril”. China bashing is already in vogue and as we’ve seen from their resurrection of the words “socialist and communist” I just have a feeling that they’ll have no trouble accessing all kinds of racist canards from the past.
Keep a couple of things in mind as you watch this unfold. It was only 15 years or so ago that they managed to create a yellow-peril scandal out of whole cloth. (A scandal, by the way, that destroyed an innocent scientist’s career.) And also remember that the neocon view on China has always been well … war. Obviously, there are major economic considerations but they tend to take the long view of such things and have no problem ginning up the kind of crisis needed to make people support all kinds of self-destructive actions. I think they probably believe they could make this work.
Anyway, I’ve long thought that the only way they could get out of the electoral bind they’ve put themselves in with Hispanics is by finding someone else for their neanderthals to hate. This could fit the bill.
I suppose I expect this sort of rationalization from the more fundamentalist religious types but I have to confess (no pun intended)that this surprised me:
In a rare interview with the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana, Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state, accused the media of “intentionally ignoring” the good things the Church does while dwelling on scandals.
“Many journalists are playing the game of trying to imitate Dan Brown,” said Bertone, referring to the best-selling author of novels such as “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons”.
“They (journalists) continue to invent fairytales and repeat legends,” he said.
The scandal involves the leak of sensitive documents, including letters written to Pope Benedict whose butler, Paolo Gabriel, was arrested last month after a large number of stolen documents were found in his home.
Bertone said the media were full of “pettiness and lies spread in these days,” adding that “outside Italy people have a hard time trying to understand the vehemence of some Italian newspapers”.
He said the Church was “an unequivocal reference point for countless people and institutions around the world” and added: “This is why there is an attempt to destabilize it”.
Bertone branded as false the image of the Vatican as a place of intrigue and power struggles, saying: “The truth is that there is an attempt to sow division that comes from the Devil”.
The Vatican as a place of intrigue and power struggles? Where in the world would anyone come up with something like that? It’s all fiction, written by … Satan. There’s no other possible explanation.
I’ve never followed this sort of thing all that closely, but I guess I thought the Catholic hierarchy was more … worldly? I honestly didn’t realize they were still flogging the Devil as the cause of all their woes. My bad. It does explain a lot though, I must admit.
Alberto the Quaint suddenly thinks that presidents have limits
by digby
You know, sometimes I think Graydon Carter’s fatuous post 9/11 declaration was right — irony is dead. It must be. And it’s come back in the bodies of Republican zombies:
Following President Obama‘s new immigration policy announcement, former George W. Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales voiced some concern about the means through which the president accomplished his goal. In issuing an executive order, he said, Obama may have violated his oath of office.
“To halt through executive order the deportation of some undocumented immigrants looks like a political calculation to win Hispanic votes,” Gonzales said at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference on Saturday, “and subjects him to criticism that he is violating his oath of office by selectively failing to enforce the law.”
I’m sure I don’t have to remind anyone of Alberto Gonzales’ opinions on presidential power when he was working for George W. Bush. Let’s just say he didn’t see a lot of limits.
But you have to admit that it takes a lot of guts for a guy who condoned torture and indefinite detention and was forced to resign from office for trying to rig votes for the GOP to come forward with an opinion as to executive power. He’s just the little engine that could, I guess.
Much derision has already been piled on Sally Quinn’s laughable essay decrying the diminished influence of the Georgetown cocktail party circuit as the reason for the decline of bipartisanship in Washington. My brother Dante Atkins and Jonathan Chait both have elegant critiques of her piece. Here’s Chait:
The bipartisanship cargo cult in Washington is a rather sad tribe of people that laments the decline of bipartisanship, fails to grasp the larger historic forces that made bipartisanship appear and then disappear, and concludes that the problem is the lack of dinner parties. This is, believe it or not, an extremely common belief in our capital city. Seriously. Hardly a week goes by without somebody blaming partisan polarization on the lack of proper dinner parties or, in an occasional twist, lunch.
Quinn’s essay follows the general contours of this genre, but she adds her own uniquely mortifying touches. Her mourning of the decline of the Georgetown dinner party sweeps together such disparate trends as the appearance of a Kardashian at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Citizens United, hard times at newspapers, and the appearance on the scene of “25-year-old bloggers.” The result of all these baffling developments is that Quinn now has to have dinner with actual friends and not just people using each other for access to power:
It’s hard to understand why the issue of disappearing bipartisanship is so baffling for most people. There are many structural reasons for it including increased transparency, coordination of interest groups, communications technology that allows for more effective and aggressive lobbying, and an ever-increasing influence of money in politics.
But by far the biggest is that the bipartisanship of the mid-20th century was a special artifact of the uneasy alliance between traditional urban liberal tribes and religious Dixiecratic populists in the South and Midwest. As I’ve written before, FDR was quite able to aggressively take on the financial and corporate interests of his time with a broad coalition. But he couldn’t pass an anti-lynching law without destroying his support base, and he was all too willing to institute the Japanese internment camps. In other words, FDR could take on the power of big money with ease, but he couldn’t take on the power of Big Racism.
The result of this dynamic was an uneasy bipartisanship between otherwise competing interests. Men like Strom Thurmond would vote for “socialist” policies as long as only whites got the benefits.
The advent of the Civil Rights movement marked the beginning of the end of bipartisanship. As tax dollars were increasingly seen as going toward non-whites, Dixiecrats became Republicans and allies of big business interests. Similar dynamics occurred with anti-Hispanic sentiment in the West. All the religious fervor that had been reserved for progressive social justice issues by the “Progressive” movement in the late 19th century (which included, by the way, quite conservative ideas like the prohibition of alcohol: late 19th century progressives would have strongly opposed modern liberals on issues like marijuana legalization alone…) flipped to socially conservative issues. The women’s equality movement only added further fuel to the socially conservative patriarchal fire.
At this point it was easy and natural for the racist culture warriors to align completely with the corporatists. The need for uneasy alliances disappeared. The rationale for men like Strom Thurmond to support New Deal policies and chat about them at cozy cocktail parties disappeared. The battle lines were set. The competing interest groups became neatly and sharply aligned, with only Ron Paul style libertarians having issues that cross party lines. If there’s any hope for bipartisan coalitions, it lies in Ron Paul voters. But there’s frankly not enough of them, and their ideas make the Washington cocktail crowd deeply uncomfortable.
Ironically, insofar as “bipartisanship” exists, it lies within the Democratic coalition itself. With the entire South and much of the Midwest lost for generations, Democrats were forced to turn to the traditional Republican base of financial elites like the Rockefellers in New York. Neither FDR nor Obama Democrats have been able to stand up to Wall Street money and the racist South simultaneously. FDR’s choice was to hold the South while taking on the power of big money. With America making the proper moral choice to begin the end of racial and sex-based discrimination in the 1960s Democrats lost the racist and sexist vote, leaving them little choice but to stand up to the racists while creating a compromise coalition with the power of big money (particularly in a post-Powell Memo world.)
Nowadays, “bipartisanship” has come to mean in media parlance the small group of technocratic neoliberal elites who come to agreement on pro-austerity policies that misguidedly cut wages and social services in the interest of reinflating asset bubbles. It’s the Simpson-Bowles “consensus.” The problem is that while those ideas are quite popular among comfortable elites in Washington and newspaper pundits making six-figure salaries, they’re distinctly unpopular with most Americans. They also don’t work to do anything but destroy economies, as the failed austerity experiments in Europe are showing. Which means that “bipartisanship” on that front is both a fool’s errand and a deeply destructive feature to be avoided.
Bipartisanship is frankly dead. And there’s nothing that Sally Quinn, Tom Friedman, Linda Parks or any of the other bipartisan fetishists out there can do about it now. It will only come back when society has made enough progress against racism and sexism to allow it to return.
There’s been a lot written about Wisconsin, the death (or rebirth) of the union movement, locals vs nationals and the general problem with recalls as a political tool. But Rick Perlstein’s analysis strikes me as the one that gets right to the heart of what went wrong. Guess what? It’s the same thing that always goes wrong:
…therein hangs a tale: about grassroots Democrats who act like activists, who hold that slaps are sometimes what it takes to get the political job done, and Democratic leaders who act like you can solve all political problems with a hug. Which, pretty much, was Tom Barrett’s entire election platform. As I explained here in May, the leading candidate in the primary to face Walker in the recall ran with a take-no-prisoners strategy to restore union rights: she pledged to veto any budget that didn’t restore collective bargaining. That meant that if she won the statehouse, Republican legislators in Madison could hold on to their anti-union law only on pain of shutting down the state.
Then, out of nowhere, little more than two months before Election day, a new candidate announced: Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Two days earlier, he’d had a $400-a-plate fundraising luncheon, closed to the media, hosted by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Here was a signal: Barrett was the Democratic Party Establishment’s man. And the Democratic Establishment, in this age of Barack Obama, does things in a very certain way: it never takes any prisoners, never takes the most gutsy path (this is even true for the vaunted “tough guy” Rahm Emanuel, whose standing orders as White House chief of staff was never to take on any fights unless victory was assured in advance).
Barrett immediately announced a different plan to reverse the anti-union law if he became governor: He would call a special legislative session, in which he would introduce a standalone repeal bill. He would make it hard for his side on purpose. He would make the lions lay down with the lambs, Obama style. He would sell himself to the electorate as the peacemaker. He would follow the Bill Clinton strategy, triangulate against his own side. If swing voters hate union cronyism, he would prove he wasn’t a union crony. “I’m not the union guy,” he would say on the campaign trail – he was the guy the unions didn’t want; they even tried to talk him out of running.
There are many problems with this strategy. The first has to do with the way the media works. Programmed robotically to see any political issue in polarized terms, journalists will register “leftist” pugnacity no matter how conciliatory a Democrat behaves in actual fact – as with Bill Clinton in the 1990s and Barack Obama now. The second problem is that it requires Democrats to simultaneously surrender the actual benefits of being bold, tough partisans. The Republicans enjoy the grassroots energy of a fierce field army on the ground convinced they are fighting for nothing less than the survival of civilization (meanwhile they harvest moderates in a far more efficient way – using their money advantage to saturate the electorate with slick TV ads). Democrats appeal to moderates as their activist strategy – although, in an old saw Democrats have long ago forgotten, moderates are the people who don’t knock on doors on election day. Liberal activists who show up do so reluctantly – having already seen their candidate sell them out.
There is something about Democrats, and many liberals in general, that makes them desperate to be seen as reasonable to the exclusion of everything else, even winning. If I thought there was some great benefit to this, I might agree, but there is ample evidence that nobody ever sees them as “reasonable” and that they get nothing for their attempts.
Barack Obama didn’t win big because of his “reasonable” platform. He was widely seen as either a liberal change agent or someone who could make the other side agree with him by sheer force of his personality — or both. Now, that never made a lot of sense, but it hugely appealed to a large number of people. They didn’t love him for being “reasonable”, they loved him for being powerful. That was a rare race and he was a rare candidate. But as it turned out, he too wanted more than anything to be seen as the grown-up in the room, splitting the differences, making Grand Bargains, mediating between the two extremes and most of all, “changing the tone” which was a fools errand, but it didn’t stop him from trying.
Perlstein talks about the Bill Clinton rally in Wisconsin, in which the man who was dragged through the mud by his political opponents from the day he was elected and was even impeached over a sexual indiscretion said the same thing:
In jeans, his chalk-white hair flopping in the breeze, William Jefferson Clinton hit every one of the Barrett campaign’s talking points. Scott Walker, he said, had launched Wisconsin into a civil war – and a vote for Barrett was a vote to end the civil war. “Constant conflict,” he said, was “a dead-bang loser.” The reason people admire Wisconsin, he said, was for its tradition of holding “vigorous political debates, closely held elections” after which “people got together and figured out what to do!” All over the world, successful communities were the ones featuring “creative cooperation …. The ‘divide and conquer’ strategy is nuts.” He talked about the Tea Party Republican who unseated Richard Lugar, condemning the incumbent Republican Indiana Senator “for working together with a President from another party on national security,” promising, “I will never compromise.”
Here’s a little reminder of what Richard Lugar said about Bill Clinton befoire he voted to impeach him:
With premeditation, he chose his own gratification above the security of his country and the success of his presidency.
Mr Reasonable. Gosh, we’ll sure miss his kind in the Senate.
The thing is that it was Clinton’s ability to thwart these extremist nutballs that gave him his power — and made people feel loyal to him, even today. It’s not that his policies were beloved, believe me. It was that he was persecuted by a pack of jackals and he survived it — even thrived. ( And as Perlstein points out in his piece, he was also smart enough to run for re-election on saving the dreaded “entitlements” rather than putting them on the auction block.)
I don’t know what happened in Wisconsin. If I had to guess it’s that the air went out of the recall balloon because it took so long. (In California, we went very quickly — a short six week circus and then it was done. Electoral March madness.) Democrats on the ground went for the establishment candidate who promised to be “reasonable” and it appears that that was not what a majority of people in Wisconsin wanted. Go figure.
Still, once again, everyone’s ignoring the reality that the Democrats took back the senate and have now effectively stopped Walker’s agenda cold. I’m beginning to think that the biggest problem Democrats have isn’t overreach, it’s that they place so much hope in the Big Win that they fail to see how the little wins can add up to something bigger over time.
Update: Oh, and I shouldn’t lave out Perlstein’s punch line: they cheat.
Breaking: Progressives aren’t losing all their races
by digby
So the big storyline of the morning is that progressives are losers. Stop the presses. It’s based on this article over the week-end in the Washington Post about the alleged fact that progressives are all losing their primaries to moderates and conservatives. And once again, those of us who are working in this arena are all treated to solemn lectures about how we should get real and figure out that nobody likes us because we’re too liberal and that we need to … well, I’m not sure. Give up, I suppose.
The only problem is the facts are wrong. Of course some progressives have lost this season. Some tea partiers have as well. Also moderates. It’s the nature of primaries. But the article in question takes the example of the PCCC’s big three losing races — Sheyman, Griego and Saldana — as if they represent the whole country. It’s just not true. There have been winners as well, they just didn’t happen to be the ones the PCCC were involved in. (This is not to say the PCCC’s candidates were bad. They weren’t. Blue America endorsed them too. They just happened to have lost in this cycle.)
Despite the fact that people seem to think they don’t matter, a couple of the progressive winners were shockers, taking out establishment incumbents. The first was Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania who defeated Blue Dog Tim Holden and more recently Beto O’Rourke in Texas who defeated the longtime head of the House Intelligence Committee Silvestre Reyes. These were outsider races that anyone would have expected to be huge losses for the progressive challengers … and they weren’t. In both cases, the Party (unofficially) brought out the big guns to support their friends and big contributors kicked in large sums as well. But the progressives won. What does that mean nationally? You tell me. But it can’t mean less than the Griego and Sheyman losses, can it?
Meanwhile, Patsy Keever in North Carolina won her race against a handpicked DCCC anti-choice conservadem and Dr David Gill won his in Illinois running against Dick Durbin’s machine. And we still don’t know if Norman Solomon might have made it to the general, they’re still counting votes. (And even if he has lost it, he didn’t lose to a moderate or a conservative — he will have lost to a standard issue Northern California liberal .)
The fact is that we don’t have the 40 years of well-funded conservative infrastructure the Tea Party had to build on so the fact that we win at all is a miracle. The Republican party happily brands itself as far to the right as it can get, while the Democratic Party reflexively rejects the progressive and liberal labels and prefers to be seen as a moderate/center party, embracing all views under its big tent. The default is to move to the center, not move the party to the left, and primaries are, therefore, much more ideologically diverse and contentious.
And of course it is true that more voters identify as conservative than liberal. But I don’t know that people agree on what those labels mean, much less are able to place themselves within them ideologically. Many older Democrats like me tend to identify as liberal. Younger people call themselves Progressives. Some use both. There are even left libertarians. But a vast number of Democrats call themselves moderates. Why? Because the party goes to great lengths to brand itself as that. So, I’m not all that sure just how useful the designations really are in explaining primary wins and losses.
One thing that cannot be overstated is how really, really difficult it is for progressives to raise money, which in this environment is even more problematic than it has been in the past. They are at a serious disadvantage because their principles preclude them from going where the money is — corporate America while, sadly, wealthy liberals listen to the Party establishment and so spend their money protecting incumbents. And believe me, raising money online isn’t the cash cow some people may imagine. It takes much more effort on the ground, fundraising one dollar at a time, and perhaps a few losing races before progressive movement candidates can gain the name recognition and experience to win. It’s not like you can grow talented people who are willing to do all that on trees.
None of this is easy. The progressive movement, or what’s left of it after the whole thing pretty much dissolved in a fit of presidential ecstasy in 2008 (and 2010 absorbed what was left of the corpse) is very young and very poor and the only infrastructure it has are local grassroots and a few Netroots groups like Blue America, the PCCC, Moveon, DFA and PDA who are continuing to do this work. Under those circumstances, I think we’ve done pretty well.
I’m sorry that the progressive victories don’t get the hot headlines that every tea partier who wins a city council race gets, but then we’re not Real Americans so I wouldn’t expect that. But just because nobody has noticed doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Slowly, but surely, progressives are learning how to do this. And if we don’t get sidetracked by another charismatic leader who’s supposed to save us from everything, we might be able to build a progressive congressional bloc. It’s not sexy, but it’s necessary.
If anyone would like to lend a hand, we’ve still got some primaries coming up, notably Darcy Burner in Washington, if you’d like to lend a hand. Here she is talking about not giving up:
Losing their sense of decency one young person at a time
by digby
Who says the congress has moved right? I certainly don’t see any evidence of it. Well, maybe. Just a little:
Utah politicians accused President Barack Obama of pandering to Latino voters after he vowed Friday to block the deportation of young immigrants as long as they get an education or join the military.
This idea is modeled after the Dream Act, legislation that Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson once ardently supported but have since backed away from.
“The fact that the president would use children as an election-year ploy is offensive,” said Hatch, who like many other Republicans also argued Obama’s new rule is an unauthorized expansion of power. “A policy issue like immigration needs to go through Congress.”
Hatch, who is seeking a seventh term in November, first sponsored the Dream Act in 2001, and Matheson signed on as a co-sponsor in 2004. The idea has fallen out of favor since then with conservatives, and Hatch and Matheson opposed the measure in 2010 when it fell short in the Senate.
Hatch vocally opposed it then but missed the vote for family reasons.
“I just personally feel that it is brought up at this time for pure political purposes,” Hatch said then, “and I resent that.”
Matheson took a position similar to that of many Republicans.
“We are a nation of laws, and until we demonstrate that we can secure our borders and address our broken immigration system through comprehensive reform, I cannot support piecemeal measures no matter how well-intended,” Matheson said at the time.
They are, quite simply, cowards who are afraid of the most retrograde members of our society — their own voters. Both of these men know very well that we are talking about young Americans, people who were raised here, educated here and identify as American in the same way their kids and grandkids do. They know that. And yet they are willing to let them be deported.
They once had a conscience, or at least a modicum of decency. Now they have none. Therefore, we have proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the congress has moved to the right.
After spending President Obama’s first term emboldening the most ideologically intense elements of the conservative movement, elected Republicans are now finding themselves in a box on critical issues like health care and taxes with limited options to avert national crises.
On health care, Republicans are coming to grips with the prospect of owning a mess of a system if the Supreme Court overturns ‘Obamacare’ this month.
The central pillars of the health care reform law — guaranteed coverage regardless of health status, an individual mandate to buy insurance and subsidies delivered via exchanges — were originally crafted by moderate conservatives and have long enjoyed support in the GOP. But after Obama embraced the template, Republicans ran to the right and abandoned it in an effort to undermine him politically. Now, as they try to sneak back closer to the center, the hard-right base that they’ve empowered is giving them hell.
First came the warning shots from activist groups like FreedomWorks and Club For Growth, which most recently purged the longest serving Republican senator for taking moderate positions in the past. Then came the cries of opposition from conservative legislators in the party. The anger is reflected among high-profile conservative activists who are actively confronting party leaders for straying — and apparently making them nervous.
Of course, that presumes that Republicans are actually interested in governing. Or that they care if healthcare is in a crisis. Or that they actually care about either unemployment or deficits. Or, more darkly, that they aren’t actively seeking a crisis.
It’s understandable that many progressives are disenchanted with their electoral choices. On one side are socially liberal but economically neoliberal technocrats seeking vainly to prop up the current system by reinflating asset bubbles and hoping that the confidence and investment fairies will work their magic to reduce unemployment. Within that group are a small but growing number of people who actually do push for economically progressive positions but are usually drowned out by the big money boys.
On the other is a economically libertarian, socially authoritarian radical doomsday cult with no ideological variance to speak of.
A distasteful choice is still a choice, and it still has dramatic consequences.
“I ask a number of people close to the area of subject to come in and present their views,” Romney said. “I like having debate. I like having two sides. I didn’t go to law school, I didn’t practice law, but I like the idea of arguing points back and forth and sorting through them, and being able to probe, in some cases you need to go back and get more information.”
[H]is father, by now serving in President Richard Nixon’s cabinet as United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, advised him that a law degree would be valuable to his career. Thus he became one of only fifteen students to enroll at the recently created joint Juris Doctor/Master of Business Administration four-year program coordinated between Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School He graduated in 1975 cum laude from the law school, in the top third of that class, and was named a Baker Scholar for graduating in the top five percent of his business school class.
I’m beginning to think that Mitt Romney is the guy they all falsely accused Al Gore of being. This is just weird. He went to Harvard Law and graduated cum laude.WTH?
Update: Apparently he was misquoted, which is, frankly, a relief. It’s too scary to think that someone could be that pathological and running for president. .