Trump Supporter Punches 69 Year Old Woman Protester

As many in the GOP continue to deride Hillary Clinton for speaking the truth about many of Donald Trump's supporters and journalist continue to fabricate a false equivalency between Trump's foul behavior and statements to that of Clinton, a Trump supporter brought into clear focus the ugliness of the Trump base at a rally in North Carolina.  How?  Trump supporter Richard Campbell of Edisto Island, South Carolina,  cold cocked 69 year old Shirley Teeter, a woman who wears an oxygen mask to assist her breathing, and knocked her to the ground.  Seemingly, among today's GOP party based such conduct doesn't rise to the level of deplorable.    Once upon a time Republicans prided themselves of civility and some modicum of decorum.  No longer in the age of Trump where his rallies look like something out of early 1930's Germany or Putin's Russia.  Now, not only are minorities targets of violence, but so are  "uppity" women. A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the telling circumstance.  Here are highlights:

I've gotten depressingly familiar with protester beatings at Trump rallies. In the 21st century perhaps the iconic trappings of politics will be the flag, motherhood, apple pie and revenge beatings. Let's hope not. In any case, here's a new case that ups the ante and still has the capacity to shock. 69 year old Shirley Teeter, who wears an oxygen mask and lugs around a tank to support it, was protesting outside a Trump rally in North Carolina when a feral Trump turned on her and punched her right in the face. Cold-cocked her, as Shirley put it.

Just to jump to a critical point: she seems bruised and a bit cut up but basically fine. Police now plan to arrest Richard Campbell of Edisto Island, South Carolina.

Shirley is apparently a lifelong protester. She told local reporters she participated in Civil Rights and anti-war protests in the 1960s. And now Donald Trump is among her list of people she's protested against. As she describes it, the early part of the protest was relatively good natured: Trumpers shouting, Trump, Trump, Trump; her crew would respond Dump, Dump, Dump.

Then this happened. I quote from Western NC's WLOS 13 ...

After the rally, Teeter experienced something she had never seen in all of her protests. Peace teetered over into something else.

"I said you better learn to speak Russian, and I said the first two words are going to be, ha ha. He stopped in his tracks, and he turned around and just cold-cocked me," Teter said.

She was punched in the face.

She says she fell on her oxygen tank and has sore ribs, a sore jaw, and cut her elbow. She later went to the hospital and is thankful she did not break any bones.

In case you're keeping score at home, this is the same rally where a Trumper inside the arena assaulted three other protesters. Police have so far made five arrests during and after the rally, not including the man they plan to arrest for assaulting Teeter. [S]eriously, why is there so much violence around Trump rallies? It's almost as if there's some violence somehow embedded in the message itself.

Sadly, there is violence embedded in Trump's message - and Pence is going right along with it - where minorities, gays and others are on notice that they are not "patriots" or "real Americans" and are targets for open physical attacks.  My Republican ancestors must be rolling in their graves over the foul stench that now envelops the GOP.  Trump and the GOP are normalizing the deplorable. 

5th Circuit Strikes Down Texas Voter ID Law

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 turned 50 this week and as a gift to those who believe in the right to vote for voting age all citizens the United States Court of Appeals struck down Texas' anti-minority voter ID law, one of the most reactionary in the country.  The law had been pushed through the GOP controlled Texas legislature under the usual GOP pretense of preventing voter fraud - which had not been documented to be a problem - while aiming to restrict minority voting and voting by younger voters who tend to vote Democrat.  Rather than push policies and an agenda attractive to all, the GOP prefers to disenfranchise all those other than aging angry whites voters longing for the days of Jim Crow and a world of unchallenged white privilege.  The New York Times looks at the ruling.  Here are excerpts:

A federal appeals panel ruled Wednesday that a strict voter identification law in Texas discriminated against blacks and Hispanics and violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a decision that election experts called an important step toward defining the reach of the landmark law.

The case is one of a few across the country that are being closely watched in legal circles after a 2013 Supreme Court decision that blocked the voting act’s most potent enforcement tool, federal oversight of election laws in numerous states, including Texas, with histories of racial discrimination.

While the federal act still bans laws that suppress minority voting, it has been uncertain exactly what kinds of measures cross the legal line since that Supreme Court ruling.

The Texas ID law is one of the strictest of its kind in the country. It requires voters to bring a government-issued photo ID to the polls. Accepted forms of identification include a driver’s license, a United States passport, a concealed-handgun license and an election identification certificate issued by the State Department of Public Safety.

The plaintiffs, including individual voters, civil rights groups and the Department of Justice, said it was discriminatory because a far greater share of poor people and minorities do not have these forms of identification and lack easy access to birth certificates or other documents needed to obtain them.

Student identifications, voter registration cards and utility bills are not considered acceptable proof of identity.

Although the appeals court upheld the finding of discriminatory effect, the three-judge panel said the lower court must re-examine its conclusion that Texas acted with discriminatory purpose.

Texas could appeal to the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans or the United States Supreme Court.

In a 147-page opinion issued in the fall of 2014 after a two-week trial, a district court judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, said the law “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote” and blocked its enforcement.

She noted the lack of evidence that voter fraud was a threat and cited expert testimony that about 600,000 Texans, mainly poor, black and Hispanic, lacked the newly required IDs and often faced obstacles in obtaining them.

The evidence that the law violated Section 2 was relatively strong, said Justin Levitt, an elections expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, because the racial difference in impact was striking.

Another case, in North Carolina, involves what some say are more subtle effects, and could provide a more telling test of the Voting Rights Act.

There, civil rights advocates and the Department of Justice are challenging cutbacks in a range of measures used disproportionately by minorities, including early voting and same-day registration and voting.

A second case in Texas, involving a challenge to the state’s redistricting, could also set an important legal precedent.

Voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandered districts are the GOP's favored tools to cling to power in the face of a changing America where the hate and bigotry and embrace of ignorance that the GOP are peddling is less and less popular.  

House Republicans Seek to Revoke Birth Right Citizenship

Some in the GOP ranks seemingly never cease in their quest to attack immigrants and find ways to deport Hispanics in particular.  How this will help any GOP presidential candidate win votes outside of the shrinking angry white base of party is mind numbing.  But then again, much of the agenda of today's GOP is mind numbing and down right ugly.  The latest target of GOP hate: removing a provision of the 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil. One would have to be blind not to see that the motivation behind the effort is to revoke the citizenship of children of undocumented immigrants born in America which furthers the white supremacist demands of much of the GOP base.  The Washington Post looks at the effort.  Here are highlights:

The Civil War era’s 14th Amendment, granting automatic citizenship to any baby born on American soil, is a proud achievement of the Party of Lincoln. But now House Republicans are talking about abolishing birthright citizenship. 

A House Judiciary subcommittee took up the question Wednesday afternoon, prompted by legislation sponsored by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and 22 other lawmakers that, after nearly 150 years, would end automatic citizenship. 

The 14th Amendment, King told the panel, “did not contemplate that anyone who would sneak into the United States and have a baby would have automatic citizenship conferred on them.” Added King, “I’d suggest it’s our job here in this Congress to decide who will be citizens, not someone in a foreign country that can sneak into the United States and have a baby and then go home with the birth certificate.”

It’s no small task to undo a principle, enshrined in the Constitution and upheld by the Supreme Court, that defines the United States as a nation of immigrants. It’s particularly audacious that House Republicans would undo a century and a half of precedent without amending the Constitution but merely by passing a law to reinterpret the 14th Amendment’s wording in a way that will stop the scourge of “anchor babies” and “birth tourism.”

Judiciary Committee Republicans . . . .  had to search far and wide for people who would take this view, because they ended up with a bizarre witness: an octogenarian professor from the University of Texas named Lino Graglia.

This would be the Lino Graglia who caused a furor in 1997 when he said that Latinos and African Americans are “not academically competitive with whites” and come from a “culture that seems not to encourage achievement.” He also said at the time that “I don’t know that it’s good for whites to be with the lower classes.”

And this is the very same Lino Graglia whose nomination for a federal judgeship in the 1980s fell apart amid allegations that he had urged Austin residents to defy a court-ordered busing plan and had used the racist word “pickaninny” in the classroom.

Abolishing automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil, and having Graglia make the case, probably won’t help Republicans overcome their problems with minorities, who are gradually becoming the majority.

Democrats, by happenstance, presented a sharp contrast to the GOP effort Wednesday: Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and others met at Washington’s Carnegie Library with a coalition including immigration and civil rights advocates to launch a new jobs campaign, “Putting Families First.”

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) read aloud some of Graglia’s other comments about minorities. . . . . . The congressman asked that Graglia’s past statements be entered into the record. But Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) complained that the line of inquiry was “a non-germane subject for this hearing.”

The GOP seems hell bent to continue on a path of slow political suicide. 

Cultural Fascism and the GOP

It's not just the Virginia Republican Party that has been infiltrated by extremists.  To see the broader problem, one only had to follow the gather of lunatics and extremists at the recent CPAC confab where would be GOP presidential candidates paraded through doing everything but putting on rouge while holding a Bible under their arms as they prostituted them selves a crowd that worships ignorance and could have been confused for a religious gathering or a KKK convention.  The thought of Jeb Bush meeting with an extremists and hate monger like Tony Perkins ought to send chills down the spines of saner Americans.  A piece in Salon looks at the larger problem of today's GOP although the CPAC gathering certainly provided a frightening glimpse at the ugly reality of today's GOP.  Here are excerpts:

Another CPAC came to an end this weekend. The hungover millennials are back to campus by now, with their backpacks full of Rand Paul buttons, and the oldsters are counting their profits. The consensus in the press is that this year’s extravaganza was a more sedate affair than usual, with the “Happiness is Hillary Clinton’s face on a milk carton” T-shirts relegated to the dustiest corners of the hall.

Brent Bozell issued a predictably turgid assessment of the threat America faces from terrorists the left:

“Tyranny is knocking at our door,” he warned, before declaring that the left “will do anything, using any means at their disposal, legal or otherwise” to strip conservatives of their freedom of speech and saying that the government isn’t “all that different from the East German Stasi.”  “Cultural fascism has arrived in America,” Bozell said. “Let us understand this soberly and unequivocally”

But despite the fact that the new CPAC organizers encouraged a slightly less fringy tone, they were unable to do anything about the fringy policies. Even the Great Whitebread Hope, Scott Walker (who, predictably, committed yet another embarrassing gaffe), reversed his position on immigration reform. He was for it before he was against it. And needless to say, the legislative game of chicken the House of Representatives was playing in the background over the funding of the Department of Homeland Security proved that the Tea Party wing of the GOP isn’t dead yet. Until the establishment is able to put a stake through its zombie heart, they have a big problem on their hands.

One little discussed CPAC panel on demographics discussed a new bipartisan report that reveals a daunting statistic that will make it very, very difficult for Scott Walker or any other anti-immigration Republican to win the White House in 2016. Ariel Edwards-Levy at Huffington Post reported:

“The fundamental challenge for my side is the seemingly inexorable change in the composition of presidential electorates,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres, whose clients include Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), said during a panel discussing the report. “And there’s no reason to believe that that’s going to stop magically.”

The demographic change poses little problem for the GOP in midterm elections, when young and minority voters are far more likely than older, white voters to stay home. But in the run-up to 2016, the demographic trend has some Republicans citing a need for change.

 In 2004, Republicans’ most recent presidential victory, George W. Bush won 58 percent of the white vote, and 26 percent of the non-white vote — numbers that would lose him the White House today, Ayres said.

‘”That’s the stunning part for me in running these numbers — to realize that the last Republican to win a presidential election, who reached out very aggressively to minorities, and did better than any Republican nominee before or since among minorities, still didn’t achieve enough of both of those groups in order to put together a winning percentage” for 2016, Ayres said.

Today the Republican Party is so aggressively hostile to minorities that many of them are willing to defund the federal police agencies entirely rather than allow the president to soften our policies toward undocumented workers. They are likewise unable to contain their most vicious bigots — an open David Duke ally is a current member of the House leadership. And neither can they keep their primitive patriarchs from promoting barbaric practices like forcing girls to give birth to their own siblings. They have, in short, taken several giant step backward from the time when George W. Bush eked out a win by getting a quarter of minority voters to cast their ballots for his ticket. The chances of them being able to even get half of that today are getting fewer by the minute. And according to their pollsters, they need to exceed his numbers to win.

Over the weekend you started to hear some rumblings from a few Republicans on TV who categorized the right-wing fringe in the House as “delusional.” But keep in mind that they don’t think they’re delusional because they are insulting massive numbers of voters without whom they cannot win the presidency.

But nobody should be fooled into thinking that the various calls from Republicans in recent days to end this game of chicken has very much to do with a sober realization that they cannot afford to keep alienating minority voters if they ever expect to win the presidency. That may be the reality but it’s a reality they simply cannot face. Their base simply won’t let them.

Despite their best efforts to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts in their favor and otherwise try to rig the system, they simply cannot win a national election unless they change their approach toward racial minorities. At the moment the white tail is wagging the multicolor dog and there’s little evidence that’s going to change any time soon.

If one isn't a white, heterosexual, far right Christian, you simply are not welcome in today's GOP.  And the fascists at CPAC plan on keeping things that way.

Supreme Court Blocks GOP Voter Disenfranchisement Law

This blog has repeatedly noted that part of the Republican Party's  playbook is to disenfranchise as many minority voters as possible so that the shrinking GOP base can still manage to cast a majority of votes.   In state after state, GOP controlled legislatures have passed strict voter ID laws under the guise of preventing nonexistent voter fraud.  This evening, the U. S. Supreme Court blocked the GOP passed bill in Wisconsin.  Similarly, a federal court in Texas has blocked that state's GOP enacted draconian voter ID law.  First these highlights from the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court on Thursday stopped officials in Wisconsin from requiring voters there to provide photo identification before casting their ballots in the coming election.

Three of the court’s more conservative members dissented, saying they would have allowed officials to require identification.

The requirement, one of the strictest in the nation, is part of a state law enacted in 2011 but mostly blocked by various courts in the interim. A federal trial judge had blocked it, saying it would “deter or prevent a substantial number of the 300,000-plus registered voters who lack ID from voting,” disproportionately affecting black and Hispanic voters.

In Texas, the Houston Chronicle looks at the breaking news in that state.  Here are excerpts:

A federal judge on Thursday blocked Texas from enforcing voter ID requirements just weeks ahead of the November elections, knocking down a law that the U.S. Justice Department condemned in court as the state's latest means of suppressing minority turnout.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Corpus Christi is a defeat for Republican-backed photo ID measures that have swept across the U.S. in recent years and mostly been upheld in court. However, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday night blocked Wisconsin from implementing a law requiring voters to present photo IDs.

Gonzales Ramos, an appointee of President Barack Obama, never signaled during a two-week trial in September that she intended to rule on the Texas law — rebuked as the toughest of its kind in the U.S. — before Election Day. But the timing could spare an estimated 13.6 million registered Texas voters from needing one of seven kinds of photos identification to cast a ballot.

The Justice Department says more than 600,000 of those voters, mostly blacks and Hispanics, currently lack any eligible ID to vote.

Rather than change its platform to meet the views and needs of a changing population, the GOP prefers to continue to prostitute itself to Christofascists and white supremacists.   Once again, I find myself ashamed to have ever been a Republican.  Today's GOP is very, very ugly. 

 

Republican Councilman: Explains Racist Facebook Posts: 'I Was A Very Active Republican'

GOP Facebook post - he was simply being a "very active Republican"

When not condemning gays, Republicans and their hate disseminating Christofascist/Tea Party party base seem obsessed with stirring up racism and encouraging white supremacists to work to disenfranchise minority voters and anyone else deemed :other."  Of course, when confronted, these people usually deny their agenda, but once in a while one finds a Republican who is honest about the racism that is now a pillar of the GOP.  A case in point?  Poplar Bluff, Missouri, councilman Peter Tinsley who explained his racist Facebook post by saying that he was just being "a very active Republican." No doubt Tinsley also sees himself as a  "godly Christian" since no one hates others more than the godly folk be they members of ISIS or a local Southern Baptist congregation.  Talking Points Memo looks at the mysognmy:

A Republican city councilman in Missouri apologized this week for posting racist messages about President Obama on Facebook, citing his own strong engagement with the Republican Party as the reason behind his actions.

According to television station KFVS, Poplar Bluff, Mo., councilman Peter Tinsley's offensive posts were brought up during a city council meeting on Monday night. Tinsley apologized for his behavior, saying he didn't intend to offend anyone when he made those posts last year, reported KFVS.

"I apologize from the bottom of my heart," Tinsley said. "At one time, I was a very active republican, very opposed to Obama."

KFVS reported that Tinsley's justification for posting the photos upset fellow Republicans and prompted another apology.

"I want people to know that I am very remorseful for it," Tinsley told KFVS. "That it was inappropriate. I believe I got caught up in an emotional moment of sharing jokes and at the time it seemed funny but today it's, it's, it's very serious and it's not funny at all. … That anything that I have said, that I referred to the activity because I was a Republican, that is not true. It's not an excuse, " Tinsley said.

Tinsley's efforts to shield the GOP are disingenuous.  Locally, a GOP chairman had to resign after disseminating racist "jokes" and just recently the Treasurer f the Republican Party of Virginia resigned after making anti-Muslim statements.  This behavior is the norm, not the exception.

Today's GOP - That Old-Time Whistle

As a former Republican I am continually sickened by the increasing racism that seems to have become a main plank of the GOP.  Worse yet, many GOP politicians are making less and less of an effort to even try to disguise the dog whistle messages being sent to the ugly base of the party.  While not all GOP politicians are racists, it is disturbing that far too many seem to have any problem being involved with outright racists.  A column in the New York Times looks at the disturbing phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.

So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.

Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People. 

Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.

We are told, for example, that conservatives are against big government and high spending. Yet even as Republican governors and state legislatures block the expansion of Medicaid, the G.O.P. angrily denounces modest cost-saving measures for Medicare. How can this contradiction be explained? Well, what do many Medicaid recipients look like — and I’m talking about the color of their skin, not the content of their character — and how does that compare with the typical Medicare beneficiary? Mystery solved.

Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees.

Right-wingers rage against tales of food stamp abuse that almost always turn out to be false or at least greatly exaggerated. And Mr. Ryan’s black-men-don’t-want-to-work theory of poverty is decades out of date.

In the 1970s it was still possible to claim in good faith that there was plenty of opportunity in America, and that poverty persisted only because of cultural breakdown among African-Americans. . . . . But over the past 40 years good jobs for ordinary workers have disappeared, not just from inner cities but everywhere: adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen for 60 percent of working American men. 

And as economic opportunity has shriveled for half the population, many behaviors that used to be held up as demonstrations of black cultural breakdown — the breakdown of marriage, drug abuse, and so on — have spread among working-class whites too. 

These awkward facts have not, however, penetrated the world of conservative ideology. Earlier this month the House Budget Committee, under Mr. Ryan’s direction, released a 205-page report on the alleged failure of the War on Poverty. What does the report have to say about the impact of falling real wages? It never mentions the subject at all.

And since conservatives can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of what’s happening to opportunity in America, they’re left with nothing but that old-time dog whistle.

Sadly, racism and hypocrisy have become two of the main pillars of today's GOP and the conservative movement in general.  It is a disgusting truth that those on the right refuse to admit. 

CPAC Topic: Minority Outreach. View: Largely Empty Room.

Big problem for GOP. Most important #CPAC2014 panel

A picture is worth a thousand words so the saying goes. And in terms of how interested the GOP base is in "expanding the big tent" which is actually more like a small teepee, the image above speaks volumes.  The GOP base is obsessed with continuing its slow suicide by pandering almost exclusively to aging, angry white Christofascists and racists.  The GOP deserves to die.

The GOP's Second Class Non-Citizen Immigration Reform Principles

Some things don't change with conservatives and the godly set

The House of Representatives has finally unveiled supposed immigration reform principles.  Like everything else the GOP does nowadays, the "reform" would leave some in a permanent non-citizen status and still panders to the white supremacists within the GOP base that frankly doesn't want anyone who doesn't have white skin to become an American citizen.  Not ever.   Because only white Christians are "real Americans."  It is a consistent theme with the GOP: some have rights and privileges and others do not.  This "do not" category includes non-whites, particularly blacks and Hispanics, non-Christians, gays, and in many instances, even white women.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the GOP House vision of "reform."  Here are excerpts:

The Republican proposal predicates legalization for the undocumented on stringent requirements and border enforcement. The House speaker, John A. Boehner, ruled out any “special path to citizenship” for undocumented migrants, but seemed to leave open the possibility that they could eventually be naturalized. Even that stance, however, is likely to raise hackles among conservatives.

Those who take this ultraconservative position (including many aligned with the Tea Party) are blind to the lessons of history. The United States has a long track record not only of legalizing illegal immigrants, by legislative or administrative action, but also of pairing legalization with a grant of permanent residency, the prerequisite for naturalization. 

Even the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, known mostly as a conservative immigration measure, included provisions for suspending deportation orders in cases in which deportation would separate families or otherwise result in hardship. These provisions also included adjustment to permanent resident status. The most recent legalization program, under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, granted permanent residency, or green cards, to 2.7 million people.

The rationale for the linking of legalization and permanent residency is straightforward. Legalization recognizes that the undocumented have become part of our society — by working, paying taxes, raising families, owning property and the like. In other words, we recognize their de facto inclusion and we adjust their status to align with that reality.

[S]ince the nation’s founding, we have always recognized that access to citizenship is the best way to promote social and economic integration, democratic participation and political equality. 

The alternative now envisioned by some House members — legal status without access to citizenship — would effectively create a new stratum of society, a permanent second class of Americans.

We have been down that road before, with grim results. The Asiatic exclusion laws, in force from the 1880s to the World War II era, were openly racist attempts to protect America from the “yellow peril” and “unassimilables.” These laws not only prohibited most prospective immigrants from China and other Asian countries from entering; they also excluded all Asians from naturalized citizenship, including merchants and professionals who were otherwise legal residents. In most Western states exclusion from citizenship also meant exclusion from owning agricultural property and from a range of occupations, from teaching to commercial fishing. 

Congress repealed the Chinese exclusion law in 1943, when China had become an American war ally. By 1952 all the other Asian exclusion laws had fallen. 

Today’s political opposition to a path to citizenship is out of sync with democratic principles, historical practice and the vast majority of public opinion. It is punitive in spirit. It also suggests an unease with the prospect of more Latino voters. Republicans seem divided between those who recognize the need to appeal to the growing Latino electorate and those who would rather shut out prospective Latino voters than try to win their support.

Citizenship is precious. That is precisely why it shouldn’t be held hostage to narrow, defeatist and racially discriminatory partisan interests.

Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Struck Down

With the nation's demographics changing against them Republicans have sought to limit the ability of those who are not angry white far right Christians and/or those primarily motivated by greed to vote.  Anything rather than change the party's homophobic, racist, anti-women vulture capitalism platform pillars.  One state where this was done was Pennsylvania whether some in the GOP boasted that the new voter ID law would insure a Romney victory in 2012.  Romney lost Pennsylvania and now that law has been struck down by a state court judge.  The judge's reason could equally apply to Virginia's new voter ID law that claimed to fix voter fraud problems that never existed. The New York Times has details.  Here are excerpts:

In a strongly worded decision, a state judge on Friday struck down Pennsylvania’s 2012 law requiring voters to produce a state-approved photo ID at the polls, setting up a potential Supreme Court confrontation that could have implications for other such laws across the country.

The judge, Bernard L. McGinley of Commonwealth Court, ruled that the law hampered the ability of hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians to cast their ballots, with the burden falling most heavily on elderly, disabled and low-income residents, and that the state’s reason for the law — that it was needed to combat voter fraud — was not supported by the facts.

“Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election,” the judge wrote in his 103-page decision. “The voter ID law does not further this goal.”

In addition, Judge McGinley ruled, the state’s $5 million campaign to explain the law had been full of misinformation that has never been corrected. He also said that the free IDs that were supposed to be made available to those without driver’s licenses or other approved photo identification were difficult and sometimes impossible to obtain.

Opponents of voter IDs called the ruling a “devastating indictment” of the Pennsylvania law.

James Schultz, the governor’s general counsel, said the state was studying the ruling. “We continue to evaluate the opinion and will shortly determine whether post-trial motions are appropriate,” he said. It was also unclear whether, if there is an appeal, the high court would be able to rule in time to allow the law to take effect for May’s primary.

As in other states that have passed similar voter ID laws in recent years, Pennsylvania’s law was spearheaded by Republican legislators and signed by a Republican governor, in Pennsylvania’s case without any Democratic legislative support.

Opponents contend that such fraud is rare — in Pennsylvania’s case, the state could not point to a single incident — and that the laws were intended to suppress Democratic turnout, since those who do not possess a state-approved photo ID are more likely to be in groups that tend to vote Democratic.

“The type of problem that is addressed by voter ID laws is virtually nonexistent, which does raise the question of why they are passing these laws,” Witold Walczak, legal director of the A.C.L.U. of Pennsylvania, said after Friday’s ruling. “And the answer is that it is a voter suppression tool.”

 

“The court really looked at the actual impact of the law,” Ms. Weiser said. “Some of the past decisions have come without doing a real, close look at the impact. The issue is how they affect people in practice, not in theory. And in practice, it turns out that a significant number of people can’t get the photo ID they need.”

The plaintiffs in the Pennsylvania case included several voters who believed they had been disenfranchised, as well as the N.A.A.C.P., the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters and Philadelphia’s Homeless Advocacy Project.

“We feel we are in a very good position to be able to defend this law when it goes before the Supreme Court,” Mr. Walczak said, “though it would be foolish to try to predict what the Supreme Court will do.”

 If a majority of voters will not support a political party's platform and/or candidates it ought to be a wake up call that the platform or candidates need to change.  When, if ever, will the GOP get that message?

Ken Cuccinelli Shares Stage with Anti-Semite; Mark Obenshain Pals With Same BigotUp

Ralph Northam 9-17-2013

Tonight the boyfriend and I attended a fundraiser for Democrat Lt. Governor candidate (pictured above) at the home of Hampton Mayor Molly Ward.  One of the things that Northam stressed is that in today's competitive global economy in order to prosper Virginia needs to be welcoming to all citizens, gay and straight, male and female, black and white, minority member and white, etc.  He also said that the contrast between the GOP statewide ticket and the Democratic ticket on this issue could not be more different.  Underscoring this reality, Ken Cuccinelli shared the stage in Northern Virginia with a far right talk radio host who was making anti-Semitic jokes.  Not surprisingly, GOP Attorney General candidate Mark Obenshain was paling around with the same anti-Semitic bigot.  Virginians need to wake up to the just how extreme and divisive Ken Cuccinelli, "Bishop" Jackson, and Mark Obenshain are and just how damaging they would be to Virginia's image in America and the worldwide community.  The Washington Post looks at the open bigotry at the Northern Virginia event.  Here are highlights:

People brought yellow lawn chairs with the motto “Don’t tread on me,” and at least one tricorner hat was visible in the crowd. John Whitbeck, 10th Congressional District Republican Committee chairman, raised eyebrows when he kicked off the festivities by telling a joke in which the head of the Jewish religion presented the pope with a long, elaborate document that the Jewish leader said was a bill for the last supper.

The crowd laughed uproariously. But American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal political action committee, tweeted about Whitbeck’s “anti-Semitic” opener and the state Democratic Party later circulated a video of the joke.

Sen. David W. Marsden (D-Fairfax), in an interview before the rally, said the gathering was proof that Cuccinelli and his backers were out of step with a Virginia that had evolved into a swing state. Marsden said the definition of liberty promoted by Cuccinelli and tea party members leaves out homosexuals, women seeking abortions and others.  

“The degree of fear and paranoia and misinformation that comes out of the tea party, it’s just chilling,” Marsden said. 

As Blue Virginia reports, Democrat Attorney General candidate  Mark Herring quickly condemned the prejudice demonstrated by Cuccinelli and the his GOP/Tea Party extremists.  Here are highlights:

Democratic candidate for Attorney General Mark Herring condemned inflammatory comments made by 10^th District Republican Committee chairman John Whitbeck. Whitbeck – who has been a strong supporter of Mark Obenshain – made the offensive comments during a rally for Ken Cuccinelli. Herring released the following statement:.

“As a representative of Loudoun County, I have worked hard to foster an environment that is welcoming of people of all faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds. Mr. Whitbeck’s comments stand in stark contrast to those beliefs, and the efforts of so many in our community to promote acceptance.

“His comments were offensive, deplorable and a disgrace to Loudoun County and the Commonwealth of Virginia. Whitbeck needs to issue a public apology immediately for his statement, and every candidate on the Republican ticket should condemn these types of inflammatory comments.”

Naturally, if any apologies are forthcoming, they will be utterly insincere.  What one hears candidate say in their own intra-party gatherings and who they associate with tells the real story about their views and agenda, just as Mitt Romney's comments about "the 47%" said it all in the November 2012 presidential campaign.  The GOP statewide slate only cares about white, conservative far right Christians.  The rest of of us aren't "real Americans' and we are deemed as a problem to be criminalized, eradicated and or disenfranchised. The GOP ticket needs to be defeated and defeated badly on November 5th.

Obenshain and Anti-Semite John Witbeck

The GOP's Problems Are Deeper Than Just Hispanics

Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post is sounding more and more like me when it comes to deriding the republican party for its circular firing squad mindset which continues to cause the GOP to pander to angry, aging white Christofacists and racist voters and, in the process, drive everyone else away.    One has to wonder how the so-called GOP establishment sees this as a way forward rather than a form of slow suicide.  What makes matters worse is that the GOP is not even trying to reach out to minorities in any meaningful way even compared to what was being done 10 to 15 years ago.  Here are highlights from Rubin's column:

In the debate on immigration reform, nearly all of the discussion concerning the GOP’s appeal to minorities has focused on Hispanics. This, in many ways, underestimates the problem in the post-Bush 43 Republican Party.

Consider that in 2004 President George W. Bush got almost 12 percent of the black vote. Not much, you say, but that’s a figure most Republicans aspiring to national office would be glad to have.

Moreover, the party’s share of the Asian vote has plummeted. In 1992, 55 percent of the Asian vote went for George H.W. Bush in 1992.  .  .  .  .  .  In 2008, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) got only 35 percent of the Asian vote, and in 2012 Mitt Romney got a measly 27 percent of Asians.

If the GOP could simply get back to Bush 43′s numbers among minority groups (not merely with Hispanics), its ability to win presidential elections would improve immensely.

Others see a more fundamental problem with the party’s message and tone since Bush left office. A savvy African American conservative contends that ”the hard right embraces blacks who espouse a fierce, go-it-alone economic libertarianism with a hard-edged social conservatism and a penchant for off-base comparisons between welfare and slavery and Democrats and plantations.” That is a dead-bang loser, he says: “There is literally no evidence that such a message resonates in the black community and it probably isn’t meant to. To the contrary, it is intended less to persuade blacks than to ratify the hard right’s notions that expressing such views is not racist.”

That is tough talk, but he is on to something. Former Republican congressman Allen West and E.W. Jackson, Virginia’s right-wing candidate for lieutenant governor, may thrill white radio talk show hosts and conservative media, but theirs is not a message that offers much to African Americans other than “I’m pro-life and can’t possibly be racist.” 


So let’s recap. The GOP stopped reaching out to minorities. It adopted a harsh tone, opposing immigration reform and threatening to round up anyone here illegally. And its extra-harsh rhetoric on the evils of government (rather than the reform of government) didn’t connect with minority voters, who saw no obvious appeal in a message that castigated all receivers of benefits as moochers.

This should surprise no one, but the bearers of the anti-immigration reform and anti-government (as opposed to pro-reform) message don’t seem to get it. Hopefully GOP primary voters do and will choose candidates wisely.

Obviously, the extremists at the Virginia GOP convention did NOT get the message when they nominated the most extreme statewide ticket in Virginia history.

TownHall.com: E.W. Jackson All Wrong for Virginia GOP

Virginia GOP's triumvirate of bigotry and insanity

I have to say that there is some definite entertainment value in seeing even far right crazies jump on the band wagon of decrying the nomination of E.W. Jackson as the Virginia GOP's candidate for Lt. Governor.   What's telling of course, is that GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli is just as nuts as Jackson, albeit more discrete as to when and where he lets loose his verbal batshirtery.  Now TownHall.com - not exactly a rational site in most instances, although not as utterly insane as World Net Daily, a/k/a Wing Nut Daily - has joined in the Jackson bashing and lamentation that Jackson may drag down Cuccinelli and the likewise insane Mark Obenshain.  Here are excerpts from the anti-Jackson piece:

Any conservative, who thinks E.W. Jackson winning Virginia's 2013 Republican Lieutenant Governor nomination is a good thing, needs to have his or her head examined. A former marine, lawyer and minister, Jackson has made incendiary remarks in the past about gays, blacks and Democrats and yet refuses to retract anything he has said.

This “firebrand” won’t help the Republican ticket of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli for Governor and Mark Obenshain for Attorney General in a state that has become more purple than red and in which the race for governor remains rancorous and tight. Jackson referred to gays and lesbians as “sick” and “perverted” people and compared homosexuality to pedophilia. Defending traditional marriage is one thing; encouraging hate is another.

Jackson assailed Democrats for being “anti-God” and said Planned Parenthood “has been far, far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was.”

Jackson’s excuse for his offensive comments was he made them as pastor of Exodus Faith Ministries, the church he founded but now as a candidate he vowed only to about jobs and the economy. But Jackson is still the same person. As a native Virginian, born and raised in Richmond, I know something’s wrong when the Richmond Times-Dispatch, one of the most conservative paper’s in the country, is daily deriding Jackson as a right-wing nut. 

For conservatives who need their memories jogged, after decades of Virginia voting Republican in presidential elections, President Obama won Virginia in 2008 and again in 2012. Mitt Romney lost because he lost the minority vote to Obama. Looking at these results, not to mention Tim Kaine’s victory over George Allen in Virginia’ 2012 Senate race, one would think Republicans in the state would learn their lesson and nominate candidates that would attract -- and not repel -- more voters.

As political analyst Larry Sabato said: “Cuccinelli brought this problem on himself.” Cuccinelli successfully got the Virginia GOP to change the nomination rules from a primary to convention format to ensure his victory over Lt. Governor Bill Bolling for the gubernatorial nomination before Bolling decided not to run.

Aside from the Jackson fiasco, I have read precious little about Cuccinelli taking his message beyond Virginia’s white electorate. With polls showing an exceedingly close race between Cuccinelli and Democrat Terry McAuliffe, every color vote will count in Virginia. Have Virginia Republicans learned any new tricks? If Jackson is the best they’ve got, then the GOP is more doomed than I thought.

The column author - a black woman - is 100% correct.  There is bound to be much more fun between now and November.

GOP Pines for New Messenger

Further confirming the GOP's denial of reality is a piece in the Washington Post that looks at the recent gathering of Republicans at the Republican National Committee’s three-day winter meeting.  The focus of the meeting was on finding a new messenger, especially for the 2016 presidential ticket.  No matter how good a candidate may be in terms of personal qualities, if her or she is peddling crap and pushing policies that are alienating voters, hello, they are going to be unsuccessful.  This is the fallacy of the GOP's quest for future success.  The fact that Tony Perkins, the president of the hate group Family Research Council - who by the way has past white supremacist ties - played a major role in drafting the GOP's "social issues" 2012 party platform underscores the clueless nature of these people.  Younger voters are leaving religion in droves and minorities clearly see the racist policies of the GOP, yet someone who is like a combination KKK Imperial Wizard/Grand Inquisitor drafted significant portions of the GOP platform.  And they wonder why they lost?  Here are some article highlights:

CHARLOTTE — The official slogan for the Republican National Committee’s three-day winter meeting here was “Renew Grow Win.” But it did little to resolve the bigger issue for the battered party, which could have been summed in one word: How?

If there was an undercurrent of hope at the gathering, which was the first of the party’s central committee since the election, it was in the fact that there is a rising generation of GOP leaders, some of whom are getting buzz as possible presidential candidates in 2016.

Somewhere from this diverse group, Republicans say, could emerge a Moses-like figure — maybe several of them — to lead the party out of its wilderness.

Many here pointed to the 30 Republican governors as having the potential both to set the party on a new course and produce from their ranks a successful 2016 presidential candidate.  One of them, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, gave a keynote address here where he warned: “We must stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults.”

Clinton did more than sharpen the Democratic Party’s talking points. He also helped reorient its philosophy, taking it in a more centrist direction on issues from crime to trade to welfare.

That sort of ideological shift is something that few Republicans are willing to advocate at this point. They still insist that the problem is not what they believe, but how they express it. 

“We do not need to change what we believe as conservatives — our principles are timeless,” Jindal said. “But we do need to reorient our focus to the place where conservatism thrives — in the real world beyond the Washington Beltway.”

Much of that work centers on addressing the GOP deficiencies that were laid bare by the 2012 election. They include a message that turned off swing voters, women and minorities; weak candidates who in some cases repelled those groups; and voter-turnout machinery that seemed decades behind that of Obama’s operation.

All of those things combined to limit the Republicans’ reach and their appeal. Rather than broadening their base, they deepened the perception that they are a party that stands on the side of wealth and privilege.

The GOP's real problem is that voters are not as stupid as they think them to be.  Policies and programs are what decides hoe votes are ultimately casts.  As long as the GOP's policies favor the wealthy, right wing evangelical Christians, and Tea Party extremists, voters will still see right through "improved messaging."

Colin Powell Slams Republicans Again for Their Voter Disenfranchisement Agenda

As noted before, Colin Powell - who insanely, in my view, continues to identify as a Republican - is none too happy with the GOP and its efforts through voter ID laws to disenfranchise as many minority voters as possible under the ludicrous smoke screen of "preventing voter fraud."  Even though most of the voter fraud in the just past election involved GOP misogamy and not illegal votes by minorities.  Truth be told, rather than change its unappealing agenda of tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy and a dismemberment of programs for the poor and needy, the GOP simply prefers to take away voting rights from as many blacks, Hispanics and other minorities as possible.  Powell's views mirror my own on this issue.  The GOP is simply the party of angry white bigots and hate filled Christofascists.  Politico looks at Powell's latest venting against GOP racism and bigotry.  Here are highlights:  

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that Republicans should not have tried to reduce voter turnout during their failed effort to win the White House, doubling down on his recent criticism of the GOP.

“Should we really have gone after reducing the turnout of voters in those places where we thought it would make a difference? The Republican Party should be a party that says, ‘We want everybody to vote,’ and make it easier to vote and give them a reason to vote for the party, [whereas] not to find ways to keep them from voting at all,” Powell said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Powell, who worked under President George W. Bush, continued: “What’s happened in the last few years, is the party has shifted dramatically to the right — that’s perfectly acceptable, but if you stay that far to the right, you’re losing where the country is.”

But while the GOP has headed to the right, the nation has moved to the middle with changing demographics.

“The country is moving more toward the center. There are social changes taking place in this country that are irreversible and there is demographic change … you can’t just say, ‘Well, we’ll fix our message,’” he said. “It’s not the message. You have to appeal with policies and programs to these people who are going to be the leaders of our country in a generation.”

House Republicans Meet at a Former Slave Plantation to Practice Talking to Black People

UPDATED: NBC News has also picked up on the irony of where the House Republicans are meeting to discuss how to better attract minority voters.  One GOP spokesman described the party's problems as follows:

the GOP had a “good message” for minorities but had suffered from a recent "bad communications."

When are these people going to stop drinking Kool-Aid and face reality?

This article in Gawker was just too good to pass up because it underscores how clueless the Republican party is when it comes to facing the reality of why minorities are voting for Democrats by huge margins.  The conventional wisdom in the GOP - if one can credit any form of wisdom to today's GOP - is that the party has a messaging problem.  Never mind that it is the GOP's POLICIES and open racism and bigotry that are the real problem, not poor "messaging."  Efforts to disenfranchise non-whites, slash programs that disproportionately aid minorities and the admission of those who can only be described as white supremacists into positions within the GOP have nothing to do with the Party's problem of attracting minority votes in the minds of these greed and religious extremism drive party apparatchiks.  So as the House Republicans gather to discuss their so-called messaging problem, where better to meet than at a posh resort located on a former slave plantation near Williamsburg, Virginia.  For those not familiar with this area, the Kingsmill Resort and its affiliated gated community, are very nice - and very, very white with most minorities to be seen only working as servants or waitstaff (some things never really change in Virginia) - and it is located on lands once part of a slave owning James River plantation. Here's how Gawker describes the GOP soul searching gathering:

The House Republicans are holding their annual winter retreat in quaint tourist village Williamsburg, Virginia, this weekend in order to recuperate and prepare for upcoming legislative battles. Besides partaking in discussions about the debt ceiling and gun restrictions, GOP congressmen and women will also be getting schooled in the fine art of how to have "successful communication with minorities and women."

One might presume that people elected to high office in America have at least a general understanding of how to talk to and about minorities and women without saying unimaginably offensive things, but one would be wrong. Far too many Republicans have a remarkable way of saying the absolutely worst thing time and again about everything from rape to Kwanzaa. Sadly, a lesson about why it's wrong to equivocate about a woman being raped or why it's not a great idea to make all your House committee chairs white men is exactly what the GOP needs.

And what better place to talk about making inroads with oppressed groups than in a room named after a famous Williamsburg plantation [i.e., Burwell Plantation], located in the tony Kingsmill Resort, which itself is on the site of another plantation? The GOP has heard your complaints, blacks and Latinos and women, and they're going to try to suss it out while sitting atop dead slave bones.

The link in the article takes you to a page from the Colonial Williamsburg website that looks at the slave owning Burwell family.  One part of the right up is telling: "The seven lists of slaves recorded by four members of the Burwell family between 1746 and 1839 fill ten pages in the Ann Powell Burwell Commonplace Book." Another telling passage:

[T]he widow Burwell noted the births of five children born to four of her enslaved women in Williamsburg between March 1754 and May 1756. She made these entries on the same page that Armistead Burwell used to list “my house Negro’s” in July 1746. There is no evidence that either Armistead or Christian Burwell purchased slaves for their Williamsburg household. The number of urban slaves grew through natural increase. Christian Burwell added a comment below her husband’s 1746 list of “Negro’s sent to Roanoke.” She noted, “The Negroe’s in Lunnenburg 1764 are 18 men and 17 Women.” There were also an unknown number of enslaved children on the family’s Southside property. 

In short the Burwell Plantation Room couldn't be a more appropriate place for the House Republicans to meet since many likely yearn for the "good old days" when the Burwell family was at the height of its wealth and power.

Colin Powell: GOP Has"A Dark Vein ofI Intolerance"

Unlike myself, Colin Powell continues to at least nominally consider himself to be a Republican.  But, unlike many of my one time GOP compatriots who seem to be drinking the Christofacist/Tea Party mind altering drug laced Kool-Aid, Powell at least can recognize the toxic bigotry and intolerance which have become the hallmarks of today's Republican Party.  The question remains how log before Powell feels he can no longer identify even nominally with the GOP.    But back to Powell's recent remarks on the GOP.  Politico has coverage and here are details:

While continuing to identify as a Republican, former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday criticized the GOP for a series of racist attacks against President Barack Obama.

"There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party," Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities."
Powell, who endorsed Obama, pointed to a number of statements that were directed at Obama as evidence that there is still racism within the party. 

"When I see a former governor say that the president is 'shuckin' and jivin'.' That's a racial-era slave term," Powell said, referring to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin using the term to describe Obama's response to the attacks in Libya.

Powell also pointed to former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who was an aggressive surrogate for Mitt Romney, for calling Obama "lazy" after the first debate during the campaign.

"He didn't say he was slow, he was tired, he didn't do well; he said he was 'lazy,'" Powell said "Now, it may not mean anything to most Americans, but to those of us who are African Americans, the second word is "shiftless," and then there's a third word that goes along with it."

Powell also eschewed the "birther movement." "The whole birther movement: Why do senior Republican leaders tolerate this kind of discussion within the party?" Powell asked. "I think the party has to take a look at itself."

Powell said overall the Republican Party has been moving to the right, creating problems for the GOP.  "In recent years, there's been a significant shift to the right, and we have seen what that shift has produced: two losing presidential campaigns," Powell said. "I think what the Republican Party needs to do now is take a very hard look at itself and understand that the country has changed. The country is changing demographically. And if the Republican Party does not change along with that demographic, they're going to be in trouble."

Powell's assessment is on target, although rather than state that there is still racism in the GOP, I would argue that the racism is increasing at an alarming rate.  That and hate dripping homophobia  and a frightening desire to strip women of control over the women's lives and bodies.