Cambridge Analytica Sent Foreigners to Advise GOP Campaigns

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix.

Things would seem to be getting worse and worse for the Republican Party as more and more information comes to light about the role that Cambridge Analytic played in Republican campaigns even before the 2016 presidential election.  Specifically, foreigners were involved in advising Republican campaigns in a number of congressional campaigns  across the country even though such activity was illegal.  It's all part of the GOP agenda to win no matter what be it through disenfranchising those perceived to be pro-Democrat to outright flouting the law. The obvious take away is that if this happened in 2014, it is pretty safe to assume that it happened in spades in 2016.  Just as tellingly, Steve Bannon and his ultra-right wing financiers were involved in the 2014 effort.  Note that John Bolton's name also comes up.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this new development.  Here are highlights:

Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by U.S. laws limiting foreign involvement in elections. Wylie, who emerged this month as a whistleblower, provided The Washington Post with documents that describe a program across several U.S. states to win campaigns for Republicans using psychological profiling to reach voters with individually tailored messages. The documents include previously unreported details about the program, which was called “Project Ripon” for the Wisconsin town where the Republican Party was born in 1854. Those [election law] restrictions were explained in a 10-page memo prepared in July 2014 by a New York attorney, Laurence Levy, for Cambridge Analytica’s leadership at the time, including President Rebekah Mercer, Vice President Stephen K. Bannon and chief executive Alexander Nix. The memo said that foreign nationals could serve in minor roles — for example as “functionaries” handling data — but could not involve themselves in significant campaign decisions or provide high-level analysis or strategy. Many of those employees and contractors were involved in helping to decide what voters to target with political messages and what messages to deliver to them, the former workers said. Their tasks ran the gamut of campaign work, including “managing media relations” as well as fundraising, planning events, and providing “communications strategy” and “talking points, speeches [and] debate prep,” according to a document touting the firm’s 2014 work. “Its dirty little secret was that there was no one American involved in it, that it was a de facto foreign agent, working on an American election,” Wylie said.

Two other former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear that they may have violated U.S. law in their campaign work, said concerns about the legality of Cambridge Analytica’s work in the United States were a regular subject of employee conversations at the company, especially after the 2014 vote.

[E]mployees worried the company was giving its foreign employees potentially inaccurate immigration documents to provide upon entering the United States, showing that they were not there to work when they had arrived for the purpose of advising campaigns. “We knew that everything was not above board, but we weren’t too concerned about it,” said one of the former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spent several months in the United States working on Republican campaigns. “It was the Wild West. That’s certainly how they carried on in 2014.” Cambridge Analytica, whose offices were raided over the weekend by British authorities, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing but did not reply to requests for comment from The Washington Post for this story. Project Ripon was described by Wylie and other workers as an ambitious effort in which Cambridge Analytica would advise American campaigns on how to use data to find “hidden Republicans.” Ripon also was the name of an online campaign management tool designed for the effort and described in a company brochure produced in London that was subtitled, “WINNING BACK AMERICA.” Company documents obtained by The Post show the U.S. program involved a staff of 41 employees and contractors, and spent $7.5 million between April and July 2014. Cambridge Analytica documents show it advised a congressional candidate in Oregon, state legislative candidates in Colorado and, on behalf of the North Carolina Republican Party, the winning campaign for Sen. Thom Tillis. The company, which asserted that Republican candidates won most of the races it worked on in 2014, also provided independent support for candidates in Arkansas, New Hampshire and North Carolina through a super PAC controlled by former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who was named last week by Trump to be national security adviser. Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer at Akerman LLP, said the accounts of Wylie and the other former Cambridge Analytica workers raises legal concerns. “If Mr. Wylie's allegations are true, the Justice Department could prosecute Cambridge Analytica and its managers for knowing and willful violations of the prohibition on foreign national contributions.” “It would be a problem for a U.S. super PAC — or any other domestic political actor — to have foreign nationals involved in running a political operation, including making decisions on strategy, targeting and expenditures for that political entity,” he said. “If foreigners were involved in the senior levels of decision-making for a political organization, that would be a violation of federal law.” The former Cambridge Analytica workers did not provide information about what transpired in 2016, when the company did work for Cruz and Trump.

The plot just keeps on continuing to thicken.   A piece in The Guardian has details on what may have transpired in 2016 here. 

Barack Obama - Operation Political Revenge

With the Christofascists/Tea Party loons still shrieking over Obamacare (which is successfully lowering the number of uninsured Americans), wailing over Obama's executive order on immigration and now traumatized by Obama's action on normalizing relations with Cuba, for a lame duck president, Barack Obama has certainly stirred the political pot and caused upheaval among his political enemies.  Frankly, it is fun to watch as the party of "No" ponders how to respond beyond merely stamping its collective feet and emitting plumes of spittle.  A piece in Politico looks at how Obama has turned the tables on his foes.  Here are excerpts:

It’s taken Obama – who spuriously predicted the 2012 election would break the “fever” of partisan gridlock – two miserable years to approach the level of presidential liberation he believes he earned that night. Yet there was always something slightly off about the idea that Obama would do better without a campaign in his future. The truth, according to current and former aides, is that the absence of a presidential election – the natural Obama habitat – actually contributed to the ennui and frustration that has hallmarked most of his second term.

Obama’s turnaround in recent weeks – he’s seized the offensive with a series of controversial executive actions and challenges to leaders in his own party on the budget — can be attributed to a fundamental change in his political mindset, according to current and former aides. He’s gone from thinking of himself as a sitting (lame) duck, they tell me, to a president diving headlong into what amounts to a final campaign – this one to preserve his legacy, add policy points to the scoreboard, and – last but definitely not least – to inflict the same kind of punishment on his newly empowered Republican enemies, who delighted in tormenting him when he was on top.

Obama, a political counterpuncher who often needs a slap in the face to wake up, got a gut-shot in November. The Democrats’ staggering loss in the midterms – like his disastrous performance in the first presidential debate against Mitt Romney in 2012 – seems to have jolted him to the realization that he’ll have to act boldly to preserve what he’d assumed was a settled legacy. (The Supreme Court’s decision to scrutinize the funding mechanism of the Affordable Care Act, in particular, has sent a shudder through the West Wing and provided an unexpected challenge from another hostile branch of government.)

[H]e can legitimately describe himself as an underdog. He feels at liberty to address any topic he chooses on his own terms — race, for instance — and, most importantly, he’s increasingly untethered from what he views as a petty, geriatric Democratic establishment he originally crusaded against as a presidential candidate in 2007.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says Obama’s newly aggressive stance – exemplified by his unilateral moves on immigration and Cuba – poses an early challenge to new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and to House Speaker John Boehner, who are trying to re-shape the GOP into a party that can actually run a government. “Mitch and Boehner have to deal with the fact that Obama is becoming bolder and more radical,” Gingrich told me a few days before Obama announced his move to normalize relations with Cuba.

Obama says he’s just taking action to deal with fundamental problems that a gridlocked, hopelessly partisan Congress won’t address. His executive action on immigration and his Cuba move this week represent only the highest-profile unilateral steps he’s taken this year. Under the direction of White House Counselor John Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff who has spurred the president to use executive power, Obama has issued dozens of orders and lower-profile memoranda redefining U.S. policies on emissions and wilderness area protections, created a new class of retirement accounts for low-income workers, capped student loan payments and toughened some firearms background checks.

But the truth of the matter is that Obama’s very good 2014 could turn into a check-mated 2015. The House isn’t likely to pass anything significant – or veto-proof – on immigration, but Republicans can, and likely will, block his Cuba policy by upholding the embargo and refusing to fund line items like the cost of building and staffing an embassy in Havana. “Congress is going to be a very different place than it was during the last few weeks if this year — there are still a lot of things that are on the president’s list that has go through Congress,” says former Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. “The question for the White House is not ‘What?’ it’s ‘How?’ … There’s two lists: The list of things you have to convince others to do and the list of things you can do without other people. They are going through the last list first.”

The GOP and the Rise of the Paranoid South

Today's Republican Party is best defined by who its members hate - typically anyone who isn't a white, heterosexual conservative Christian.   When one looks at The South and it's long history of being defined by who it hates - e.g., blacks followed by Yankees - it's no surprise that The South has become a bastion for the GOP.  Stated another way, a reactionary party now holds sway in a reactionary region.  A piece in Salon looks at The South's paranoia against those deemed "other" by the white establishment and how it is playing into the nation's political climate. Here are some highlights:

The Civil War ended in 1865. Before the war, it was common parlance in America to speak of two regions: the “North” and the “South,” which were divided, above all else, over the issue of slavery. After the war, however, the idea of the “North” gradually disappeared from American culture, but “The South” as a regional, cultural and ideological construction has lived on. The South still maintains a persistent hold on American culture, and while the Old Confederacy is unlikely to ever “rise again” in another militant bid for national independence, the South has continued to rise again as a political force to be reckoned with, most recently in the 2014 midterm elections . . .

Thus, we come to the vexing question of Southern history: Is the South “exceptional” when compared to the rest of the country?  Southern exceptionalism is a concept that historians discuss ad infinitum – yet it resists a straightforward definition. In the broadest sense, however, Southern exceptionalism is the idea that the South is a nation-within-a-nation: a distinct cultural region where the past maintains a persistent influence on both the present and the emerging future.

Southern exceptionalism, then, positions the South as a cultural and geographical “other” within the greater United States where, as Mississippi-born author William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This “othering” of the South has solidified in the region a cultural conservatism that manifests in a preference for laissez-faire economics, the existence of widespread inequality, a proclivity toward religious fundamentalism and racial strife, and suspicion of the federal government. When combined, these characteristics have constructed a cultural levee against a wave of outside forces that allegedly threaten to destroy Southern society.

Southern exceptionalism continues to rear its nebulous head. For example, consider the 2014 midterm elections. As the AP pointed out, the so-called “Solid South” — a regional political bloc that, in the not-too-distant past, gave its whole-hearted support to the Democratic Party — is now a solid political lock for the Republican Party. 

So the question remains: is the South exceptional? I’d argue that, in one crucial way, it is. While no one can reasonably claim that the South’s ills and strengths are unique to that region alone, the South’s tendency toward one-party rule, fueled by a deep suspicion of the supposed threats posed by outsiders, continues to make Dixie exceptional.

[T]he supposed threats posed by outsiders has been a common thread running through this history of one-party dominance. As historian Glenn Feldman writes in “The Irony of the Solid South,” the locus of the modern Republican Party’s united power in the South can be traced back to the end of the Civil War, an era that planted the seeds of a “Reconstruction Syndrome,” characterized by “very strong anti-black, anti-federal government, anti-liberal, anti-Yankee, anti-outsider/foreigner, and pro-militarily patriotic beliefs.”

Since the end of Reconstruction, the South has been fertile ground for reactionary politics, and it’s no coincidence that the hallmarks of “Reconstruction Syndrome” echo the tenets of modern conservatism. And while these hallmarks are not unique to the South, they’re nonetheless most concentrated there.

[A] general fear of outsiders continues to fuel the reactionary conservatism that drives white Southerners to the GOP. The Republican South is, for all intents and purposes, the white South, and race is an issue that always simmers below its political surface. GOP dominance speaks to the white South’s need to protect itself from a host of nefarious outsiders. In this past, those outsiders consisted of blacks, abolitionists, Yankees and Republicans. These days, those groups have been replaced by liberals, gays, atheists, minorities and Barack Obama, who symbolizes a changing America that threatens the white South’s cultural clout.

Even as shifting demographics in Southern states like North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia threaten to erode the power of the white conservative vote, the 2014 midterm results demonstrate the enduring strength of a reactionary force powered by the long arc of Southern history. That history encompasses a potent mixture of change and stagnation, but until the unique power of the white South is curtailed, the echo of Southern exceptionalism will continue to reverberate like the Rebel yell across the American political landscape.

 Having lived in the South now for the majority of my life, at times it is like living in one huge insane asylum.  Indeed, if one looks at Mississippi and Alabama, parts of the South have become even crazier than they were 30 years ago.  It's no wonder the GOP is flourishing in much of the region.

The 2014 Midterm Elections: The Bigger Story that the GOP Is Ignoring

Click image to enlarge

As noted before some in the Republican Party - mostly the reality challenged Christofascists/Tea Party Crowd - are delusional and seeing the 2014 midterm election results as a blanket mandate to pursue their extremist agenda.  Meanwhile, changing demographics and beliefs indicate that the GOP victory could prove to be short term.  As one involved in politics for over 20 years, it drives me to distraction that the GOP seems to have no long term plan whatsoever.  A GOP activist has a column in the Houston Chronicle that hits on my frustrations with the GOP and its apparent long term death wish.  Even though the death of the GOP as presently comprised would be a definite positive for the nation, long term, two sane and functioning political parties is essential.  Here are highlights from the Chronicle:

Few things are as dangerous to a long term strategy as a short-term victory. Republicans this week scored the kind of win that sets one up for spectacular, catastrophic failure and no one is talking about it.

What emerges from the numbers is the continuation of a trend that has been in place for almost two decades. Once again, Republicans are disappearing from the competitive landscape at the national level across the most heavily populated sections of the country while intensifying their hold on a declining electoral bloc of aging, white, rural voters. The 2014 election not only continued that doomed pattern, it doubled down on it. As a result, it became apparent from the numbers last week that no Republican candidate has a credible shot at the White House in 2016, and the chance of the GOP holding the Senate for longer than two years is precisely zero.

For Republicans looking for ways that the party can once again take the lead in building a nationally relevant governing agenda, the 2014 election is a prelude to a disaster. Understanding this trend begins with a stark graphic.

Behold the Blue Wall (See above):

The Blue Wall is block of states that no Republican Presidential candidate can realistically hope to win. Tuesday that block finally extended to New Hampshire, meaning that at the outset of any Presidential campaign, a minimally effective Democratic candidate can expect to win 257 electoral votes without even trying. That’s 257 out of the 270 needed to win.

Arguably Virginia now sits behind that wall as well. Democrats won the Senate seat there without campaigning in a year when hardly anyone but Republicans showed up to vote and the GOP enjoyed its largest wave in modern history. Virginia would take that tally to 270. Again, that’s 270 out of 270.

This means that the next Presidential election, and all subsequent ones until a future party realignment, will be decided in the Democratic primary. Only by sweeping all nine of the states that remain in contention AND also flipping one impossibly Democratic state can a Republican candidate win the White House.

By contrast, Republicans control a far more modest Red Fortress, which currently amounts to 149  electoral votes. What happened to that fortress amid the glory of the 2014 “victory?” It shrunk yet again. 

The biggest Republican victory in decades did not move the map. The Republican party’s geographic and demographic isolation from the rest of American actually got worse.

A few other items of interest from the 2014 election results:

- Republican Senate candidates lost every single race behind the Blue Wall. Every one.

- Behind the Blue Wall there were some new Republican Governors, but their success was very specific and did not translate down the ballot.

- Democrats have consolidated their power behind the sections of the country that generate the overwhelming bulk of America’s wealth outside the energy industry. That’s only ironic if you buy into far-right propaganda, but it’s interesting none the less.

- Vote suppression is working remarkably well, but that won’t last.

- Every personhood amendment failed.

- Almost half of the Republican Congressional delegation now comes from the former Confederacy. Total coincidence, just pointing that out.

- Republican support grew deeper in 2014, not broader. For example, new Texas Governor Greg Abbott won a whopping victory in the Republic of Baptistan. That’s great, but that’s a race no one ever thought would be competitive and hardly anyone showed up to vote in. Texas not only had the lowest voter turnout in the country (less than 30%), a position it has consistently held across decades, but that electorate is more militantly out of step with every national trend then any other major Republican bloc. Texas now holds a tenth of the GOP majority in the House.


- Keep an eye on oil prices. Texas, which is at the core of GOP dysfunction, is a petro-state with an economy roughly as diverse and modern as Nigeria, Iran or Venezuela. . . . Watch what happens if the decline in oil prices lasts more than a year.

- McConnell’s conciliatory statements are encouraging, but he’s about to discover that he cannot persuade Republican Senators and Congressmen to cooperate on anything constructive. We’re about to get two years of intense, horrifying stupidity.  

Republicans, with their traditional leadership on commercial issues should be at the leading edge of planning to capitalize on this emerging environment. What are we getting from Republicans? Climate denial, theocracy, thinly veiled racism, paranoia, and Benghazi hearings. Lots and lots of hearings on Benghazi.

It is almost too late for Republicans to participate in shaping the next wave of our economic and political transformation. The opportunities we inherited coming out of the Reagan Era are blinking out of existence one by one while we chase so-called “issues” so stupid, so blindingly disconnected from our emerging needs that our grandchildren will look back on our performance in much the same way that we see the failures of the generation that fought desegregation.

Something, some force, some gathering of sane, rational, authentically concerned human beings generally at peace with reality must emerge in the next four to six years from the right, or our opportunity will be lost for a long generation. Needless to say, Greg Abbott and Jodi Ernst are not that force.

“Winning” this election did not help that force emerge. This was a dark week for Republicans, and for everyone who wants to see America remain the world’s most vibrant, most powerful nation.

GOPLifer and I are on the same page.  I just wonder at what point GOPLifer will realize that the GOP is beyond saving and flee the GOP as my extended family and I did some years back.

Will Elizabeth Warren Transform the Democrat Party?

In most instances Democrats ran from Barack Obama and the liberal policies of the Democrat Party in the campaign leading up to the disastrous 2014 midterm elections.  Far too little was said about the progress made under Obama - improved economy, dropping unemployment, dropping gas prices, and so forth.  Playing moderate, in short, did nothing to stop losses.  Some are suggesting that had these failed candidates done more to talk up successes and embrace popular liberal policies, the results might have been different - and might have motivated more of the base which stayed home. A piece in Salon raises the question of whether Elizabeth Warren can lead the Democrats back to liberal issues that find wide popular support out side of Christofascist circles.  Here are excerpts:

Twenty years from now, assuming climate change has not yet ended the world as we know it, most American liberals won’t think of this fall as the time when Republicans finally retook control of the U.S. Senate. And they won’t think of it as the brief pause that separated the era of Barack Obama from that of Hillary Clinton. Instead, when the liberals of our near future look back on the current moment, they’ll remember it as the hour when the Democratic Party began to move decisively to the left, thanks in no small part to the continued ascendance of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

At this point, it’s not entirely clear what the folks nominally in charge of this infamously disorganized party are trying to do by elevating Warren. Because the former Harvard Law professor has been prominent in liberal circles since the launch of her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it can be easy to forget that she’s only been in Congress for a couple of years. And coming as it does after a truly disastrous midterm showing, this seeming vote of confidence from Democratic bigwigs has the risk of being a “glass cliff” situation. My former colleague Brian Beutler, for example, has guessed that Senate Dem leadership may have opted to bring Warren into the fold because they’ll need a popular spokeswoman to deliver the next two years’ worth of bad news to the “professional left.”

After many years of kvetching about their paltry influence — and following decade after decade of enviously watching the conservative movement refashion the GOP in its own image — lefty ideologues and organizers now have the chance to turn Warren into a kind of trojan horse for a resurgent politics of economic populism (or, as it used to be called, liberalism). And if they adapt and adhere to the script used many years ago by visionary right-wingers, who famously responded to an electoral drubbing in 1964 by staying the course and propelling a true believer to the White House less than 20 years later, it just might work.

I still think the conservative example offers activist liberals unhappy with the Obama record –which is most of them — some valuable lessons.For one, if left-wing troublemakers want to make Sen. Warren a Goldwater of their own, they’ll have to ignore the 2016 presidential race as much as possible. That doesn’t simply mean giving up on the lost cause of forcing Wall Street favorite Hillary Clinton to reinvent herself as a true progressive. And it certainly doesn’t mean wasting resources on a quixotic primary challenge, which in the present circumstances will do little more than help Clinton get back in the swing of triangulation. Instead, it means building institutional support from the bottom up by creating funding networks and community spaces outside of the Democratic Party’s reach, so lefties can feel personally invested in their cause without having D.C. grandees step in and tell them to be “serious.” 

[T]he success of right-wing activists from the past and present indicates that there can be long-term benefits in a short-term stint as the minority. To be clear, it’d be taking things too far to say that it’s a good thing Democrats now only control the White House. As the last four years have taught us, the powers of the imperial presidency don’t seem to extend very far into the realm of the domestic (at least not yet). So having a majority in Congress is vital, still. At the same time, there’s value, to a degree, in having a party with ideological coherence — increasingly so, I’d argue, in an era of institutional failure and partisan polarization. Most of the Democrats dissolved in the red tides of ’10 and ’14 were “blue dog” conservatives,

[W]hat lefty activists should learn from their right-wing counterparts is this: In a dysfunctional two-party system such as ours, in which voters are perpetually unhappy and ready for any excuse to throw the bums out and start all over, it’s only a matter of time until the losers of yesterday are once again ascendant. And as the GOP has shown in the years since its back-to-back wipeouts in ’06 and ’08, responding to electoral defeat by moderating is no longer necessary, while moving further away from the center is no longer a death sentence. Now that they have a political superstar and ideological true believer as their behind-the-scenes agent, lefty activists with an eye on the long term have a chance to, in the words of Warren, “frame the issues for the next few elections” and ultimately make the Democratic Party truly progressive.

The Worst Voter Turnout in 72 Years

The 2014 midterm elections were a disaster for Democrats largely because their base stayed home and did not vote.  The pundits have all kinds of reasons for the low turn out.  In the end, however, much of it has to do with a lazy and uninformed populace.  There, I've said it.  It takes little time to go vote, yet demographic groups most likely to be harmed by GOP policies sat home on their asses or drove on by the polling stations without stopping.  It's maddening and also frightening that so many care so little for democracy.  It's also disturbing that Republicans were able to successfully harness the racism of the GOP base and ignorance of whites who are too stupid to realize that while, yes, the Affordable Health Care Act has shifted funding sources for health care, they have already been paying for the uninsured through sky high health care costs compared to the rest of the world under a system that is also the least financially efficient in the world.  The New York Times laments the situation in a main page editorial. Here are highlights:

The abysmally low turnout in last week’s midterm elections — the lowest in more than seven decades — was bad for Democrats, but it was even worse for democracy. In 43 states, less than half the eligible population bothered to vote, and no state broke 60 percent.

In the three largest states — California, Texas and New York — less than a third of the eligible population voted. New York’s turnout was a shameful 28.8 percent, the fourth-lowest in the country, despite three statewide races (including the governor) and 27 House races.

Over all, the national turnout was 36.3 percent; only the 1942 federal election had a lower participation rate at 33.9 percent. The reasons are apathy, anger and frustration at the relentlessly negative tone of the campaigns.

Republicans ran a single-theme campaign of pure opposition to President Obama, and Democrats were too afraid of the backlash to put forward plans to revive the economy or to point out significant achievements of the last six years. Neither party gave voters an affirmative reason to show up at the polls.

The turnout among young and minority voters was slightly higher than it was in the 2010 midterms, perhaps reflecting new organizing efforts, but the number remained far too low. (Republicans have continued their effort to suppress the turnout of young, poor and minority voters, although it was hard to make a definitive link between those laws and Democratic losses this year.)

There was one useful lesson: When voting is made easier, more people vote. Colorado switched to a mail ballot system this year, and it had the fourth-highest turnout in the nation, substantially larger than in 2010. (It had a highly competitive Senate race, but did much better than many states with equally hot races.) Oregon, which also votes by mail, had the fifth-highest turnout, and Washington State, with a similar system, did better than the national average, though it had no major statewide races.

Early voting — which tends to be more popular among Democratic voters than mail balloting — also did well this year, despite Republican efforts to curb it. In North Carolina, early voting increased by 35 percent from 2010, even though Republican legislators cut the number of early-voting days to 10 from 17.

Showing up at the polls is the best way to counter the oversized influence of wealthy special interests, who dominate politics as never before. But to encourage participation, politicians need to stop suppressing the vote, make the process of voting as easy as possible, and run campaigns that stand for something.

 

Quote of the Day: Are Americans Insane?

By any objective standard, America is in much better shape than it was when Barack Obama took office.   Yet on election day last week, far too many Americans believed the lies disseminated by the Republican Party and its affiliated PACs backed by the likes of the Koch brothers and similar sleazy oligarchs who care not a whit for average Americans.  The irony, of course, is that the improvement that has occurred is despite of all the efforts of the GOP to sabotage everything Obama and the Democrats have sought to do to better the country.  Sometimes a disinterested third party can better see what those closer and hand fall to see.  Thus, this letter to the editor in Detroit Free Press from a Canadian:

Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections.

Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs, the country's adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%, U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

The dollar is at its strongest levels in years, the stock market is near record highs, gasoline prices are falling, there's no inflation, interest rates are the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil production is rapidly increasing, the deficit is rapidly declining, and the wealthy are still making astonishing amounts of money.

America is leading the world once again and respected internationally — in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden.

So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason.

When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?

Richard Brunt, Victoria, British Columbia

As I have said before, a part of me believes that Americans deserve the misfortunes they bring upon the nation all be cause of their own idiocy and bigotry.

Why Right-Wing Christians Believe Republican Lies

A piece in Salon written by Frank Schaeffer, a former evangelical himself, looks at why the Republican Party's lies play so effectively.  Part of it is the evangelical Christian's rejection of logic, reason, and objective reality.  Part of it also is because of evangelical Christians' rejection of science and knowledge.  Indeed, many seem to celebrate the embrace of ignorance.  But overall, Schaeffer argues it's because they have been brainwashed into believing lies all their lives.  Here are some article highlights:

The Republican Party base is white evangelicals. So it’s no wonder that GOP lies about the country, the economy and the president worked. The folks who base their lives on religious mythology have spent lifetimes being trained to believe lies. On Tuesday they won. Lies won.

Since the economy has rebounded and healthcare reform has worked, all that remained for the GOP was to lie. And since the base of the GOP is white aging southern evangelicals, the GOP was in luck. 

These are easy folks to lie to. That’s because they already accept an alternative version of reality. Also, of course, since the lies are about a black man, that doesn’t hurt. Yes, race is still an issue.

The midterm election boiled down to xenophobia about the “other.” Ebola was the president’s fault! ISIS is coming to get us! We aren’t safe!

None of this is true, but no matter. In fact, judging by actual facts the Obama presidency has been successful in spite of GOP obstruction. The economy is back. Jobs are up. We’ve been kept safe from terror attacks. America is strong.

What we’ll now see is a reinvigorated religious right. And since lies worked so well we’ll have more of them. Creationism, anti-gay initiatives, anti-choice initiatives, and of course pro-Koch-brother-financed lies upon lies to bury climate change debate are on the way.

The Republican-dominated Supreme Court stands ready to back corporate- and religious right-financed attacks of the environment, pro-Wall Street laws and all the rest.

Racism won. Evangelical myth won. Wall Street won. The banks won. America lost.

When Wrong Wins Out

Just because a political party wins elections doesn't mean that it has right on its side or that the citizenry hasn't made a horrible mistake.  Let's not forget that the German people first legitimately elected Adolph Hitler to office before he proved to be a demented monster.  More recently, George W. Bush got elected president twice.  Talk about bad decisions. All too often, the larger public makes bad decisions.  The same holds true for the results of the elections on Tuesday.  When people are motivated by racism and hate - which is the GOP base's real motivation - the results are almost sure to be wrong.  A piece in the New York Times looks at when wrong wins out in the electoral field.  Here are excerpts:

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet midterms to men of understanding. Or as I put it on the eve of another Republican Party sweep, politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth. Still, it’s not often that a party that is so wrong about so much does as well as Republicans did on Tuesday.

I’ll talk in a bit about some of the reasons that may have happened. But it’s important, first, to point out that the midterm results are no reason to think better of the Republican position on major issues. I suspect that some pundits will shade their analysis to reflect the new balance of power — for example, by once again pretending that Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposals are good-faith attempts to put America’s fiscal house in order, rather than exercises in deception and double-talk. 

So now is a good time to remember just how wrong the new rulers of Congress have been about, well, everything.

First, there’s economic policy. According to conservative dogma, which denounces any regulation of the sacred pursuit of profit, the financial crisis of 2008 — brought on by runaway financial institutions — shouldn’t have been possible. But Republicans chose not to rethink their views even slightly. They invented an imaginary history in which the government was somehow responsible for the irresponsibility of private lenders, while fighting any and all policies that might limit the damage.

So here we are, with years of experience to examine, and the lessons of that experience couldn’t be clearer. Predictions that deficit spending would lead to soaring interest rates, that easy money would lead to runaway inflation and debase the dollar, have been wrong again and again. Governments that did what Mr. Boehner urged, slashing spending in the face of depressed economies, have presided over Depression-level economic slumps. And the attempts of Republican governors to prove that cutting taxes on the wealthy is a magic growth elixir have failed with flying colors.

In short, the story of conservative economics these past six years and more has been one of intellectual debacle — made worse by the striking inability of many on the right to admit error under any circumstances.

Then there’s health reform, where Republicans were very clear about what was supposed to happen: minimal enrollments, more people losing insurance than gaining it, soaring costs. Reality, so far, has begged to differ . . .

And we shouldn’t forget the most important wrongness of all, on climate change. As late as 2008, some Republicans were willing to admit that the problem is real, and even advocate serious policies to limit emissions . . . 

But if Republicans have been so completely wrong about everything, why did voters give them such a big victory?

Part of the answer is that leading Republicans managed to mask their true positions. Perhaps most notably, Senator Mitch McConnell, the incoming majority leader, managed to convey the completely false impression that Kentucky could retain its impressive gains in health coverage even if Obamacare were repealed.

But the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. . . . This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.

Will things change now that the G.O.P. can’t so easily evade responsibility? I guess we’ll find out.

Democrats - Seeking a Future in the South

The midterm elections were bad for Democrats overall, but nowhere was the bloodbath worse than in the South.  Why so bad in the South?  My conjecture is three fold: racism against a black president since the GOP tried to frame the election as a referendum on Obama, the GOP's willingness to prostitute it to evangelical Christians who are most populous in the South, and white voters incensed that their white privilege is, at least in their minds, eroding and that "those other people" are rising.  It was yet another last stand of the old Confederacy.  So what are Democrats to do other than wait for further demographic change, including the literal dying off of aging, angry whites?   A piece in the New York Times looks at the soul searching taking place.  Here are excerpts:

Burns Strider, a native Mississippian who has advised the Democratic Party on faith issues, spent Tuesday night watching the election returns with a couple of other Democratic consultants and a bottle of small-batch bourbon. It was that kind of night.

The Republican wave on Tuesday washed over the whole country, including Massachusetts and Maryland, but it was in the South that the swamping of statewide Democratic prospects appeared most complete.

In the foggy hangover of Wednesday morning, Democrats in the South maintained in interviews that such Republican gains should not be considered permanent. But neither were they kidding themselves about the length and difficulty of the road ahead.

In perhaps the most emblematic victory, a Republican, Rick Allen, beat John Barrow of Georgia, the last white Democrat in the House from a Deep South state. His defeat was a testament to just how rare white Democrats have become in the region, a rarity that cuts across categories. In Georgia, according to exit polls by Edison Research, 80 percent of whites who did not graduate from college voted for David Perdue, the Republican Senate candidate. Among white college graduates, that number was not much lower, at 70 percent.

“It’s Obama,” Mike Beebe, a Democrat and the departing governor of Arkansas, said in his office at the State Capitol on Wednesday. “It wasn’t just Arkansas. It was all over the country. There’s only one common denominator.”

“We needed to change the electorate,” Mr. Reed [Mayor of Atlanta] said. He faulted the campaigns of Michelle Nunn, who was following in her father’s footsteps in running for the Senate, and Jason Carter, a grandson of Jimmy Carter who was running for governor, for not spending more time and resources to register and turn out what he said were roughly 600,000 unregistered black voters in Georgia, and 200,000 unregistered Latinos.

Many also believe that the older, rural, white working-class voters who were once the bedrock of the Democratic Party in the South are now permanently out of reach, and that attempts to attract them are a waste of time.

Bill Fletcher, a Democratic consultant who was raised in rural Tennessee, agreed that this year’s race was mainly a rejection of Mr. Obama, adding that his presidency had given rise to “a nasty strain of racism that many of us thought and hoped had gone away.”

Some Republicans, while flush with victory, were fully aware that the whiter and older electorate that gave Republicans such a resounding victory on Tuesday could not be counted on forever, and are already planning to secure and even expand on their gains in the South.

“If we just assume we’re safe, we’re wrong,” said Henry Barbour, a Mississippi-based lobbyist and a member of the Republican National Committee. “Mississippi, like the rest of the country, is changing. If Republicans don’t do a genuinely good job of engaging African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians, women and young voters, it becomes much more plausible for a statewide Democrat from Mississippi to win.”

Five Antigay Nightmares Now That the GOP Controls Congress

Like many I am less than thrilled with the outcome of yesterday's elections - I simply keep repeating to myself "we survived eight years of Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Chaney, so we can survive two years of a GOP controlled Congress."  Surprisingly, I even had my ex-boyfriend who now lives in North Carolina call me this evening lamenting over the fact that his state is becoming crazy land.   But seriously, the Republican "wave" as some are calling it does not good things for LGBT Americans.  Anti-gay organizations like NOM are exulting in the defeat of pro-gay candidates and Ted Cruz, a gay-hater extraordinaire, are seeming themselves as enjoying a mandate.  A piece in Queerty looks at some of the far right batshitery that we can expect over the next two years.   Here are some excerpts which sadly are not tongue and cheek:

Here are five antigay issues that are bound to arise now that the GOP has full rein of Congress…

1. Endless attacks on marriage equality
At this point, there’s not a lot that Congress can realistically do about marriage equality. The Supreme Court has pretty much spoken, and states are falling in line. But the same could have been said about Obamacare, and that didn’t stop Republicans from shutting down the government for 17 days last year in the vain quest to kill the law. Realism is not the GOP’s strong suit these days, especially in the Ted Cruz wing of the party.

What will happen is a lot of symbolic gesturing that will still be damaging to the LGBT community. There will be bills to resuscitate DOMA and resolutions trumpeting support for traditional marriage. None of these will have any practical effect, but they will have a psychologically one, by de-legitimizing same-sex marriages and empowering opponents of marriage equality. To some extent, we will still have to play defense, particularly since the Supreme Court has chosen not to issue the final word yet.

2. Open war over Supreme Court nominees
And because the Supreme Court ducked the issue this year, any vacancy on the Supreme Court will immediately become an all-out war over marriage equality. Marriage equality will be as much a litmus test as reproductive rights. Republicans controlling the Senate will never allow an openly pro-marriage nominee to be seated on the bench. (Given their embrace of obstructionism to date, they may never allow an Obama nominee on the bench at all.)

The fight will be especially fierce if one of the departing justice is one of the five that struck down DOMA. That means a single vote in the opposite direction could halt the progress of marriage equality. This will become a do-or-die battle for the right, and Republicans getting ready to go into the 2016 presidential campaign will be in no position to stake out a middle-of-the-road position. The right wing has signaled it’s ready for a party civil war on this issue, and the Supreme Court nominee will be a call to arms.

3. Enshrining religious liberty in legislation
Looking to shore up the party base in advance of the presidential election, Congressional Republicans will likely turn to the refuge of the homophobic: religious liberty. In order to make the world safe for anti-marriage bakers, the GOP will look to create a right-wing version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that will specifically exempt individuals from following laws that they object to on religious grounds. That would mean not just marriage equality laws, but even nondiscrimination laws.

4. Kiss ENDA goodbye
ENDA has about as much chance of passage in a Republican-controlled Congress as Mitch McConnell has of winning RuPaul’s Drag Race. Two more years of delay doesn’t mean much to a bill that’s been kicking around for nearly two decades, but at some point the stench of failure becomes impossible to remove and the bill becomes a zombie–dead but not buried. It also means that nondiscrimination protections in the workplace will still be hit-or-miss, leaving many states where you can both get married and get fired.

5. Creating a forum for nutburgers
The loony right will always be with us, but now they will have a loudspeaker in Congress. We will be subjected to all kinds of ‘expert’ testimony from antigay activitists. It’s already happening in the House, where the head of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty recently testified before a subcommittee about the “apparent hostility” the Obama administration was showing to evangelicals in the military. 

President Obama can stop a number of these problems. He can veto bad legislation, and Republicans won’t have enough votes to override his veto. But he can’t stop the efforts to erode, derail or otherwise delay the gains we’ve made. He won’t be able to make things happen that might help us.
 
The problem could be short-lived. The 2016 Senate map favors the Democrats, so Republicans may hold onto the Senate for just two years. (It will be a while before they lose control of the House because Republican-controlled states have redrawn districts to ensure the maximum number of GOP seats.) In the meantime, though, the damage will have been done.

The only upside: voters won’t take kindly to restarting the culture wars. In the end, the party may end up doing as much damage to itself as it does to us. But after this election’s results, that’s pretty cold comfort.

Warner Squeaks By Gillespie in Bleak Night for Democrats

The Midterm elections were a disaster for Democrats - and by extension LGBT citizens and other minorities.  Thankfully, Virginia Senator Mark Warner squeaked by GOP lobbyist Ed Gillespie with slightly under 17,000 votes (1,067,342 v. 1,050,534).  Elsewhere, the GOP used a combination of hatred for Barack Obama and hatred for gays and minorities to turn out its base of angry whites.  As Democrats, I suspect voter turnout figures will prove that many just stayed home and by default, voted for Republicans.  Hate it seems is a far stronger motivator than belief in progressive policies and believing that the nation benefits through the common good.    What is perhaps most frightening is the extremism of some of the new Republican senators who, delusional as they are, will see yesterday's results as a mandate to enact all kinds of batshitery.  For blacks who stayed home, brace yourselves for more measures to disenfranchise minorities.  For gays who stayed home, expect legislation granting special rights to discriminate against us.  The Washington Post looks at Mark Warner's close win.  Here are excerpts:

U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D) declared victory over Ed Gillespie (R) late Tuesday in a remarkably close contest for a second term that is likely to tarnish the Democrat’s image as an untouchable force in Virginia politics.

The contest was so close that Warner’s opponent declined to concede, but the Democrat promised to serve a second term working across the aisle with a new Republican majority in the Senate.

The outcome represented a shocking reversal of Warner’s sweeping victory in 2008, which first propelled the former governor into the Senate. A recount is possible, and Gillespie didn’t rule out requesting one in remarks to supporters late Tuesday.

The race came against a national backdrop that was expected to be bad for Democrats, especially for incumbents with close ties with President Obama and his trouble-plagued health-care law. But Warner had been expected to escape that fate, with polls giving him an increasingly narrow but consistent lead through the final days of the race.

This year, the senator saw his support in rural Virginia drop off sharply. He had forged ties to Southside and Southwest even before he ran for governor, earning goodwill in the economically depressed regions as a job-creating entrepreneur.

“It breaks my heart to say it, because these are my people, but racism was a huge factor in this,” he said. “I think in many areas of rural Virginia, racism is still prevalent, and they dislike Obama more than they like Mark Warner.”

Gillespie’s chief line of attack was that Warner’s moderate image was just that — one that did not match reality. He said Warner had voted with the president 97 percent of the time, most notably for the Affordable Care Act.

Election night results showed an electorate of over 2 million, about even with the 2010 election but far below the 3.8 million who came out to vote in 2012, the Department of Elections said.

There's more in the article.  Note that 1.8 million fewer Virginians voted than in 2012.  Besides chiding Democrats who stayed home, let me make one thing clear, rural Virginia - especially Southwest Virginia - is VERY racists.  And it seems to be getting worse.  As is the far right hysteria over gay marriage being legal in Virginia.  I can only wonder when tourists from the Northeast are going to start avoiding the backwards areas all together.   You won't find the husband and me visiting rural Virginia outside the areas around Charlottesville or to visit my daughter and her family.