Pew Center Data Is Trouble for GOP

If you want to know why RNC Chair Michael Steele and his allies have become so shrill, it's not only because these guys are unhinged.

They have access to electoral data and a changing America spells trouble for a major political party that is overwhelmingly white, xenophobic, hateful and ignorant. These guys are desperate and Rush and the crew are increasingly impotent.

Consider the just-released Pew Research Center data in the Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in U.S. History report.

Black, Hispanic and Asian participation is up, and white voting is down. As a percentage of the population, whites' share of the voting electorate has decreased from 84 percent (1988) to 76 percent (2008). That's because the composition of eligible voters has changed in roughly the same proportion.

White voters did support John McCain (55%) over Barack Obama (43%) nationwide.

But white voters alone do not decide who is president, no matter the voter suppression efforts of John McCain and the GOP.

And the sub-headline at Pew: "Black women had the highest voter turnout rate in November's election -- a first". There goes the neighborhood.

Clueless Pundits

Mark Nickolas at Huffington has a great piece out on the foolishness of pundits, including UW-Madison alum Jeff Greenfield.

On this historic day, I thought it would be instructive to look back on just how wrong some of the pundits were when Barack Obama (D) launched his bid for the presidency two years ago, including the embarrassing remark by an esteemed member of the self-described 'Best Political Team on Television' (CNN):

'Illinois Senator Barack Obama's announcement this week that he's likely to enter the Presidential race adds a dash of glamour and excitement to the Democratic field. But all of his media attention doesn't change the basic truth of the 2008 primary contest: The race is between Hillary Rodham Clinton and everybody else.'
- The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Jan. 18, 2007

'Ask yourself, is there any other major public figure who dresses the way [Obama] does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of 'GQ' to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable. And maybe that's not the comparison a possible presidential contender really wants to evoke... Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful. But an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread. Or is that threads?'
CNN Senior Analyst Jeff Greenfield, 'The Situation Room,' CNN, Dec. 11, 2006

Bruce and Barack

The Rising
- Bruce

Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me
Lost track of how far I've gone
How far I've gone, how high I've climbed
On my back's a sixty pound stone
On my shoulder a half mile of line

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Left the house this morning
Bells ringing filled the air
Wearin' the cross of my calling
On wheels of fire I come rollin' down here

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Li, li, li, li, li, li, li, li, li

There's spirits above and behind me
Faces gone black, eyes burnin' bright
May their precious blood bind me
Lord, as I stand before your fiery light

Li, li, li, li, li, li, li, li, li

I see you Mary in the garden
In the garden of a thousand sighs
There's holy pictures of our children
Dancin' in a sky filled with light
May I feel your arms around me
May I feel your blood mix with mine
A dream of life comes to me
Like a catfish dancin' on the end of my line

Sky of blackness and sorrow (a dream of life)
Sky of love, sky of tears (a dream of life)
Sky of glory and sadness (a dream of life)
Sky of mercy, sky of fear (a dream of life)
Sky of memory and shadow (a dream of life)
Your burnin' wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness (a dream of life)
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Li, li, li, li, li, li, li, li, li

LGBT Community Needs to Fracking Chill on Obama and Warren

Update: Percentage of Americans who believe that God created man pretty much in his present form in one instance within the last 10,000 years: 47 percent. ... Rick Warren is one of these people.

Most here have heard the indictment that Barack Obama's inauguration will include a "humiliating" (Maddow) slap at the LGBT community for the incoming administration's political benefit.

Rick Warren, pastor and author (at right), will deliver the invocation at Obama's swearing-in ceremony on the Capitol steps.

Warren possesses a bright mind, and happens to hold benighted and bigoted views on gays perforce making the man an ignoramus popular in rightwing circles.

Warren's delivery of the Obama invocation has brought down a shower of condemnation from the civil rights community summed up by Rachel Maddow and John Aravosis of AmericaBlog [wouldn't bother reading Andrew Sullivan ...—"[It's] shrewd politics, but if anyone is under any illusion that Obama is interested in advancing gay equality, they should probably sober up now... ."—Sullivan is of the couldn't-make-of-his-mind-to-support-Bush-or-Kerry fame in 2004; and Sullivan's a disingenuous showboat anyway].

Include Warren

Before arguing here for Obama's choice of Warren's inclusion in the inauguration, let's add that Aravosis found this gem at TNR by Alan Wolfe in which "Rick Warren outright told a Jewish woman, in front of a large gasping crowd, that she was going to hell because she hasn't converted to Christianity." Hey, Happy Hanukkah.

But such idiocies that Warren professes as consigning world Jewry to eternal damnation [or whatever fate in hell awaits our functionally fellow heathens, that's going to be some party] is a good place to begin.

Over the 2008 campaign, I wrote 10,000s of words on Barack Obama since I first heard about the man's candidacy, in any length anyway, from my Georgia-bred-and-raised Irish mother—[a greater foe of racism and bigotry I have not met than she, and I have been fortunate to meet many incredible people].

It's difficult to apprehend the American mind when, for instance, in knocking on 100s of doors on the south side of Milwaukee this summer and engaging charming people, a nice elderly house-bound woman proceeds to tell me that yeah, she's voting Democratic this year, things need changing, but it's just too damn bad the Mexicans and Blacks have "taken over" what in the past were largely Polish-white neighborhoods. [A joke among some political circles in Wisconsin is that the 27th street viaduct crossing I-94 in Milwaukee is the "longest bridge in the world" because it connects Africa (a very Black area) with Mexico (a mixed but quite Mexican and other Hispanic-populated area on the south side). The joke used to be Africa to Poland.] By the way, check out Gare-Bear's bar just on the Africa side: Cool people.

The 2008 race was historic. I felt more personally involved this year than in any race that I have worked in, in any manner. But I knew all through this Fall that some 41 percent (in a best-case scenario) of the vote would still go to the John McCain-Palin ticket and the self-conscious ignorance and bigotry this ugly reality of our political culture represents in the modern Republican Party.

Casting Jews to hell. The state controlling a woman's body. Disenfranchising LGBT folks by denying them equal protection under the law. Massive lies and mass murder (aka war). Jailing millions. Starving millions. Preventing the dreams and happiness of millions. An industrial policy that seemingly aims at restoring feudalism.

This is the reality of contemporary American society sustained by ignorance, isolation and depolicalization consonant with broadcast networks dedicating an untold number of hours on the personal lives of hot, blond woman [nothing wrong with hot, blond women mind you] vis a vis discussions of the continuing wars America is waging over the world to catastrophic results.

If one were to exclude from the inauguration and other official functions the imbecilic Americans who fervently believe that those unperfected Christians, aka Jews, are headed for damnation, then many mainline Christians would find themselves thinking, well, who knows what they think. But 10s of millions of Americans (many of them wonderful human beings not withstanding their array of anti-human sentiments) would be told in a message to get lost: All that Obama unity talk was crap.

But the 43 percent of voting Americans who did vote for McCain, or think that dinosaurs frolicked with early man and that biological evolution is a liberal plot are as American as we are.

So, does Obama who campaigned on unity and a presidency representing all American exclude these American among us who hold idiotic views?

And I don't know about you, but I'm into public policy and not the substance of an inaugural invocation. [My sister Joan, Brucie and my crazy nieces are going to the inauguration, but I doubt seriously that the invocation will stay etched into their minds.]

What is an invocation anyway other a banal, insipid address to an imaginary friend? Warren will intend well and I doubt that he'll use the occasion to cast down spells (prayers, whatever) on gays, Jews, and the rational among us.

Warren's just a guy, a fool to be sure, talking. So, lighten up.

Personally, I do without religion and its artifacts remaining in political ceremony, and the other foolish fare to ill-formulated questions from which the religious-minded among us run without apparently caring what precisely so frightens then.

But hey, people believe what they want to believe and they are our fellow citizens, finally being called by a president to engage in a common effort.

Our president is their president.

So to all of my fellow LGBT civil rights workers and political analysts outraged by the soon-to-be-forgotten address by Rick Warren: Forget about this silly exercise of the invocation, enjoy Obama's address, party down, and then get your asses back to work on public policy

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
- H.L. Mencken, Damn! A Book of Calumny, (1918)

The Way Forward

Don't be worrying about one Georgia Senate race.

Bruce and Obama

The Boss and Obama.

Wisconsin '08 Election Notes

Political writers who in February ridiculed the notion that Obama, flush with a 17-point primary victory here, could in November win substantial blocks of voters among the 'white working class' (WWC), appeal to white voters in Republican strongholds such as Waukesha County, and who crowed that their reading of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) federal election law was spot-on correct, are in a word: Wrong.

Typical among today's brand of Republican commentators, such admissions have not been forthcoming.

White Working Class

As Ruy Teixeira writes: While losing the "white working class" (WWC) vote nationally by 18 points, "(o)n the state level, Obama did stunningly well among WWC voters in four of the five highly competitive states they won in 2000 and 2004 (MI, MN, OR and (Wisconsin)). The average WWC deficit for Kerry in these states in 2004 was 8 points. In 2008, Obama had an average advantage in these states of 6 points, a pro-Democratic swing of 14 points."

Waukesha County

Looking at Waukesha County, Kerry lost by 81,000 votes; Obama lost by some 60,000 votes. That's an improvement in one county of about twice the Democratic nominees' statewide combined winning margins in 2000 and 2004.

Informed (let's be honest non-Republican) observers saw McCain as a long shot here, with prospects dimming with each passing negative ad run.

But the Republican political campaign itself never gave up though its top strategists recalled later that they could read the writing on the wall.

McCain-Palin co-chair Van Hollen, Amen-Corner Know-Nothings

But the campaign soldiered on, including the contemptible attempt by McCain-Palin co-chair and AG J.B. Van Hollen to use the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to force widespread provisional ballot voting, disqualify eligible voters, suppress the black turnout in Milwaukee [where the blacks were getting uppity], and basically sow confusion into the voting process.

They lost that battle too.

And now Republican commentators, facts aside, claim victory: Victory in their arguments—citing the Government Accountability Board's (GAB) recent decision to maintain the Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS), a voters list, by comparing it with State Department of Transportation data, per HAVA.

Some facts that continue to elude such writers as Waukesha's James Wigderson:

- The text in HAVA mandates that Wisconsin takes due care to see that eligible voters are not thrown off the voter rolls. The GAB has been and is exercising that care. Thus, as the GAB press release reads: "The six-member Board of former judges ruled that a mismatch of voter information contained in the Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) with Wisconsin Department of Transportation (DOT) data, in and of itself, shall not result in disqualification of a voter."

- The GAB has said repeatedly that it will implement the cross-checking as Van Hollen, the GOP, and know-nothings like Wigderson screamed was demanded by the "law." But the disagreement was over the timetable, the GAB's versus the GOP's.

As the GAB press release reads: "The Board’s decision prevented potentially thousands of Wisconsin voters from being disenfranchised ... on November 4, solely because the spelling of the voter’s name was not exactly the same in the DOT database and the SVRS database. In its August 27 decision, the Board said that it would revisit its action after the fall election. ... 'Since being directed by the Board at its August 27 meeting, it has been our intention to work with our local election partners after the General Election to identify a protocol that ensures consistency and standards for cross-checking all voters in SVRS with DOT records,' (said) Kevin Kennedy, GAB’s Director and General Counsel, and Wisconsin’s Chief Election Officer. '"

The GAB is revisiting its action now, like it said it would.

So Wigderson says he was right all along, citing the decision of the GAB to do what it said it was going to do, and refusing to disenfranchise voters because bureaucrats' databases do not match.

Republican commentators like Wigderson live in a world undisturbed by facts, replete with an utter inability to comprehend this issue. And they are treated seriously by some--especially in journals that should know better.

Thankfully, the reality-based community will take over both the legislative and executive in America and Wisconsin in 2009 having swept away reality-challenged minds.

- via mal contends

In Defense of Joe Lieberman

Update: Hartford Courant: Secret Ballot To Decide Lieberman's Fate - "Joe Lieberman votes with me a lot more than a lot of my senators. He didn't support us on military stuff, and he didn't support us on Iraq stuff. But you look at his record, it's pretty good."
- Sen. Harry Reid

I don’t care for Joe Lieberman as a U.S. Senator.

Lieberman went right along with the obscenity of the Iraq Invasion and the Patriot Act, among other imbecilities.

I don’t care for Joe Lieberman as a public man.

Even among elected officials in Congress, Lieberman stands out as a lying propagandist.

Lieberman used Republican talking points and lies in his failed attempt to prop up John McCain’s candidacy that would have been devastating to a reeling economy and a shredded American Constitution.

And Lieberman veered right up to and past neo-McCarthyism questioning the patriotism of those not sharing his discredited militarism.

But let’s look to history.

Did the Democratic Party attempt to marginalize and punish Senator
Henry "Scoop" Jackson in 1977, for example, the dedicated militarist of the 1960s-70s who shared with Lieberman the sanctimonious commitment to state violence?

No.

Because to cast out Jackson would have been to indict a whole generation of Democratic leaders without whose dedicated support and lies the Vietnam Invasion would not have been waged.

If we take seriously the arguments to sanitize by sanctioning Lieberman after the Democratic Party’s electoral victories in 2008, more than Joe Lieberman need to stand and account.

The effort to punish Lieberman smells of scapegoating.

We just had an election. What are we going to do, punish Vice-president Biden, Clinton and Kohl for their historically horrendous votes and sometimes unsavory politics?

Of-course not.

Obama has it right. Let’s look to the future.

Sam Cooke

Someone to go to the well with

President Lyndon Baines Johnson nationalized the old Texas sentiment of confidence and respect: "He’s someone to go to the well with."

As we approach the end of the Bush-Cheney administration and the promise of President-elect Obama, we are presented with the consequences of eight years of nihilistic politics, greed-and-crony finance, and feeding of hatreds and division among our brothers and sisters.

That catastrophic bequest is the lack of confidence and uncertain liquidity in our financial system that threatens to squander our life savings, and kill innovation and the common effort.

Hard work and innovation with a common effort deserve the kind of respect that led LBJ to recognize that the civil rights movement in more ways than one restored the promise of America for all Americans.

The legacy of Bush-Cheney is the loss of that confidence and respect, the belief that we’re all in this together with men and women who are people we would go the well with.

That's what electing Obama means for us. The guy actually believes that our government should serve us; that the loss of much of our life savings can be recouped, that education is not for the few.

So as the GOP smirks at voting rights today, as the GOP warns Obama to go slow, let's look to the bleak near future of the economy with the same commitment and guidance that the civil rights movement offered all of us: We're in this together and we respect and value our fellow citizens.

And with a common effort, nothing can stop us as we go to the well together.

A Change Is Gonna Come

Go for the Juggler, Obama

Paul Krugman has a piece in the Times this morning advocating that President-elect Obama pursue a full-blooded “progressive agenda.”

In opposition to the warnings of the center-right pundits who recommend that Obama go slow and not attempt too much change, Krugman echoes most citizens in our democracy who advise or more accurately demand: Change.

That rabble! And it’s all going so well.

Seriously, in light of the gargantuan problems facing our country and the irrefutable electoral mandate, in which direction do you think Obama will direct his legislative and administrative agendas?

Putting aside the ludicrous notion that we are a center-right country that discredited-by-facts pundits are spewing (and didn’t we just have an election or two these last two years repudiating the thesis?), Obama can be counted on to go for the juggler.

That sage advice decided upon by the American people in the 2008 election is called an “electoral mandate.”

Following the radical interventions of the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve System into the financial systems (without which we would be looking at, at best, a deep L-shaped recession as critical confidence dissipated), Obama is assembling the toughest political operation available to fight for the people who elected him to bring about change, and offer hope.

Obama, contra Bush, will save Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, and expand the health care system to: Provide health care for more Americans.

Obama will likely push an array of innovations across the board that will be geared to help working Americans achieve the American Dream, or at least give them a fighting chance to survive and prosper during what we hope will only be a short-lived U-shaped recession.

The fact is that Bush was spot-on correct to bail-out critical streams of the financial system.

And Obama is equally spot-on correct to directly bail out the American public by giving them a fighting chance to make their children’s’ futures brighter than what may seem apparent during these next couple of years.

Cries of “welfare” and “socialism” or other such nonsense emitted by the rightwing who saw the results of their economic fantasies and orthodoxies obscenely played out in front of the American people these last 10 years will not sit well because voters aren’t likely to soon forget the great bail-out.

As Krugman says, “… a serious progressive agenda — call it a new New Deal — isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.”

And politically it’s exactly what enough politicians require to stay in office.
- via mal contends

Hillary's Excellent Endorsement Address

Hi

Barack Obama Nomination Victory Speech in St. Paul 6/03/08

Update II: Clinton Concession Speech: Suspends Campaign, Endorses Obama

Update: How Obama Did It