Tag Archives: politics
Would Politicians risk the welfare of a country and their people to diminish a President because he is Black?
You betcha – Americans should be outraged and fire all those politicians. What gives them the right? After all they were elected by the people and they could be ousted by the people. Why are Americans remaining silent and watch their country go to the dogs because of some racist republicans? Do something people, don’t sit there like puppets.
Tuesday, Oct 1, 2013 03:10 PM PDT
The real story of the shutdown: 50 years of GOP race-baiting
A House minority from white districts want to destroy the first black president, and the GOP majority abets them
By Joan Walsh
**As a follow up, you need to check out:
“Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story” – 1.5 hour doc
c
clyde
On the day the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the U.S. government is shut down, and it may be permanently broken. You’ll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: It’s the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else. The fact that everything came apart under our first African-American president wasn’t an accident, it was probably inevitable.
People talk about the role of race in Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”: how Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips helped him lure the old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party permanently. Far less well known was the GOP’s “Northern Strategy,” which targeted so-called white ethnics – many of them from the Catholic “Sidewalks of New York” like my working-class family, in the words of Kevin Phillips. Without a Northern Strategy designed to inflame white-ethnic fears of racial and economic change, Phillips’ imaginary but still influential notion of a “permanent Republican majority” would have been unimaginable.
“The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it,” Phillips wrote. “Democratic ‘Great Society’ programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation.” Phillips was not trying to defuse that tension, far from it – he was trying to lure those white ethnics to the GOP (although he later broke with the party he helped create.) But his Northern Strategy truly came to fruition in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Where Nixon swept the South, Reagan was able to take much of the North and West, too.
I loved Chris Matthews’ book “Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked,” but as I said in my interview with him, I think he let Reagan off the hook when it came to race. Ronald Reagan picked up the political baton passed to him by Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan, and played his role with genial gusto. Reagan had trafficked in ugly racial stereotyping over the years, about “young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps and Cadillac-driving welfare queens. But the Reagan who got elected president was better at using deracialized language to channel racial fears and resentment. He and his strategists had succeeded in making government synonymous with “welfare,” and “welfare” synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American.
When Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg studied the voters of Macomb County, a hotbed of so-called Reagan Democrats – the county gave two-thirds of its votes to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and the same proportion to Ronald Reagan in 1980 — he found that they no longer saw Democrats as working-class champions. “Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives,” and they saw government “as a black domain where whites cannot expect reasonable treatment,” Greenberg wrote.
So for a lot of Democrat-turned-Republican voters, “government” was all about black people, Reagan knew. You didn’t have to be racist to thrill to Reagan’s declaration that “government is not the solution; government is the problem,” though it didn’t hurt. Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained exactly how it worked in a now-infamous 1981 interview that was secret for 30 years. Atwater explained how the GOP dialed down its racial rhetoric for fear of alienating white moderates who might buy the GOP’s anti-government crusade, but be uncomfortable with outright racism.
This is Atwater talking to an academic interviewer in 1981, Year One of the Reagan revolution:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N–ger, n–ger, n–ger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n–ger” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the bussing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N–ger, n–ger.”
And then you say “Defund Obamacare,” and everyone knows why.
* * *
To be fair to Republicans, not everyone is or was comfortable with this strategy. One of the things I remember best from Richard Ben Cramer’s legendary history of the 1988 election, “What It Takes,” was the way both George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole grappled with whether and how to reach black voters, in the wake of the Reagan revolution. Each man struggled, in his own way, to understand and accept exactly how party leaders, starting with Goldwater, had actively pushed African-Americans out of the party of Abraham Lincoln. Dole’s discomfort seemed a little deeper and more genuine; in the end, Bush acceded to Atwater and Roger Ailes, one of Richard Nixon’s media henchmen, to produce the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped torpedo Michael Dukakis.
Over and over, that’s how things got worse: Republicans who know better, who probably aren’t “racist” in the old-fashioned sense of believing in black inferiority and opposing the equality and integration of the races, nonetheless pander to those who are, for electoral gain. And when the election of our first black president riled up the racists and launched the Tea Party – supposed deficit hawks who tolerated skyrocketing government spending under George W. Bush — too many Republicans went along.
Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything they’ve been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: He’s not just black, he’s the product of a black father and a white mother. (That helps explain an unconscious motive for birtherism: They can’t get their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.) With his Ivy League degrees, they are sure he must be the elitist beneficiary of affirmative action. Steeped in Chicago politics, he’s the representative of corrupt urban machines controlled by Democrats – machines that ironically originated with the Irish and once kept African-Americans down, but which are now synonymous with corrupt black power. In Michele Bachmann’s words, Obama is a product of Chicago’s scary “gangster government,” or did she say “gangsta”?
Leading Republicans who know better have demeaned the president with a long list of racially coded slurs. Obama is “the food stamp president,” Newt Gingrich told us. He wants to help “black people” (or was it “blah people”?) “by giving them somebody else’s money,” Rick Santorum said. Even his so-called GOP “friend” Sen. Tom Coburn insists Obama is spreading “dependency” on government because “it worked so well for him as an African-American male.”
Where Mitt Romney’s father, George, stood up to the rising tide of racism in his party and marched in fair housing protests in the 1960s, Mitt himself embraced the birther-in-chief Donald Trump during the 2012 campaign. And when things got tough in the fall campaign, he and Paul Ryan doubled down on racial appeals by accusing Obama of weakening welfare reform – he hadn’t – and of giving white seniors’ hard-earned Medicare dollars to Obamacare recipients. And we all know who they are.
Now we have John Boehner, elected House speaker thanks to the Tea Party wave of 2010, shutting down the government over Obamacare. Boehner has the power to open the government by bringing a clean continuing resolution to the floor and allowing it to pass with the help of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. Should we expect such courage? In one of his first major media appearances after becoming speaker, he refused to rebuke the birthers in his caucus. “It’s not up to me to tell them what to think,” he told NBC’s Brian Williams.
Now he’s kowtowing to the roughly 30 House Republicans from bright red districts that also happen to be almost exclusively white, in a country that is more than one-third non-white. They want to shut down the government to torpedo Obamacare, the signature program of our first black president. Obviously, though he’s the leader, Boehner believes it’s not up to him to tell the GOP suicide caucus what to think. Although the speaker told reporters after Obama’s r-election that Obamacare was the law of the land, and that a government shutdown would be bad for the country, he changed his tune when confronted with an insurrection, and the de facto House speaker who happens to be a senator, Ted Cruz. (Cruz’s father, by the way, just joined the ranks of those who seem to believe Obama is a Muslim, telling a Colorado woman who made that claim: “[Sen. John] McCain couldn’t say that because it wasn’t politically correct. It is time we stop being politically correct!”
In the end, it’s all about Obama. I keep waiting for John Boehner to have his “Take this job and shove it” moment, since he’s not the House leader, he’s being led by Ted Cruz and the House suicide caucus. But I’ve been waiting a long time for Republicans to do the right thing and repudiate their party’s lunatic fringe, particularly its racist fringe. I assume I’ll be waiting a while longer.
Joan Walsh is Salon’s editor at large and the author of “What’s the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America.” More Joan Walsh.
$15000 human bill-board has to go
Who would agree to tattoo an uncertain political image on his face for $15000.00? A poor man who wants to feed himself and sees this as a golden opportunity. I think it is a lot for any political party to ask a person to do. This is the man’s face, not his back or arms. If the Ryan-Romney team had won it would have been a whole different ballgame but who wants to be reminded of the losing team! I hope the guy is going to get some money to help him take the tattoos off his face. Our political system has to change. This has gone too far.
Saving face: Ind. man removing Romney-Ryan tattoo
| November 30, 2012 | Updated: November 30, 2012 6:49pm
Eric Hartsburg, 30, poses for a photo showing his Romney-Ryan election logo tattoo Friday, Nov. 30, 2012 in Michigan City, Ind. Hartsburg, a professional wrestler, said he hoped the 5-by-2-inch tattoo would make politics more fun and had initially resigned himself to keeping it, but he is now planning to have it removed. Photo: Teresa Crawford / AP
MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. (AP) — A northern Indiana man who had the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan campaign logo tattooed onto his face “to make politics fun” says it’s time for it to come off.
Eric Hartsburg of Michigan City, Ind., says he plans to have the red-and-blue “R” removed from its prominent place next to his right eye.
He says a Republican supporter paid him $15,000 to get the tattoo and keep it until at least the election was over.
Weeks after President Barack Obama defeated the former Massachusetts governor in the Nov. 6 election, Hartsburg says “now to me it represents not a losing campaign, but a sore losing campaign.”
Hartsburg says he reached out to the Romney campaign about the tattoo, but feels snubbed that no campaign staffer ever contacted him.
What happens when religion gets dirty
Every one loses. In America religion is too involved in politics. Politics and religion do not go hand in hand. Politics is a dirty game, religion is supposed to be clean but when our religious leaders get entangled in the web of power and greed, they get even more dirty and less focussed on saving souls and creating peace in the midst of chaos. Where will people turn?
The trending topic in religious circles these days is how to grow abundance, how to become rich and influential by manifesting . It is amazing how popular culture is leading our religious leaders into the pit of materialism and soul-less culture. Religion appears to be more about selling books than preaching to the poor. Nuff said read the article below
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/gop-insider-how-religion-destroyed-my-party?
….August 7, 2012 |
Like this article?
Join our email list:
Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.
The following exceprt is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from ” The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted ,” by Mike Lofgren. Copyright © 2012 by Mike Lofgren.
Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.
Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln…..
Hail to the voice of democracy in Burma – Aung San Suu Kyi
Congraulations are in order for the people of Burma. It is a small win in the war to freedom and democracy.
Former political prisoner and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi won a seat in Myanmar’s parliament Sunday. Suu Kyi spent years under house arrest by the military.
And one day she will be lead her people to freedom. I hope it is sooner than later
Want to run the world? Here’s How
Law and Public Policy
(Podcast with Transcript)
Parag Khanna on ‘How to Run the World’
Parag Khanna is a leading geo-strategist, world traveler and author of the international bestseller, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. Stephen J. Kobrin, Wharton management professor and publisher of Wharton Digital Press, recently spoke with Khanna about his latest book, How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/2811.cfm
Michelle Bachmann reach for the pulpit not the cesspit
Instead of wasting your time on the planet to grab power, your time might be better served trying to save souls. Your work at this level will produce better and lasting results than trying to grab political power. Leave politics to the politicians and preaching to the preachers. You are a preacher. “Render unto Cesar what is Cesar’s”, “Be not a part of this world”.
Politics of sex or sex and politics
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, left, is all smiles with PM Raila Odinga during last year's swearing-in ceremony but since then relations have soured
For once sex is being used for a good purpose in addition to its childbearing function and it took African women to see the opportunity. The campaign was organized by G-10, an umbrella group for women’s organizations. It called on the wives of President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga to join the cause.
Activists in the East African country are urging women to withhold sex for a week. We are asking even sex workers to join the cause, even if we have to pay them ourselves,” said Patricia Nyaundi, executive director of the Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya. The fragile coalition is breaking at the seams and women know instinctively that in any fall out they will be holding the shorter end of the stick. Women in Kenya need their leaders to work together for the good of the country. They claim coalitions are happening in other countries and working why can’t theirs work.
“We cannot allow our leaders to argue over non-issues while relegating the issues that affect this country to the back burner. When this happens, women suffer the most,” said Ann Njogu, director of Centers for Rights Education and Awareness, which describes itself as a non-partisan organization that “seeks to empower the society on women’s human rights.”
Imagine if women start using this tactic all across the world… imagine what could result. A whole new spate of homosexuals or a hasty deal to settle the dispute.
President Obama sets his sights on higher power
President Obama is putting God in the picture. In an appearance before the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama called on believers of all faiths to set divisions aside “to lift up those who have fallen on hard times.” Read more
Japan’s Prime Minister Resigns Suddenly
The unpopular Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Yasuo Fakuda, 72 has tendered his resignation from the Japanese Parliament and as leader of the Liberal Democrats. His resignation has come as a surprise to many yet not totally because it appears that this Prime Minister like his predecessor, Shinzo Abe were not high on the popularity rating. Abe only lasted as year as well. Imagine that.
My question is this, is the Japanese politicians more honourable than those in the West who hang on to power no matter how low their overall rating falls. How is it that we have never had a prime minister voluntarily offer his resignation when clearly they are no longer supported by the electorate? Is this being stubborn, egotistical, foolhardy or machismo on the part of Western political leaders.
I think it is commendable when a politicians knows when he or she is no longer effective and instead of standing in the way of progress, elect to step aside. I find something honourable in that, don’t you.
parentsunderground123 