Month: May 2014

Comparing ObamaCare to the Holocaust isn’t racist in any straightforward way, but it’s hard to see how a politician could fail to understand how the comparison is offensive to both blacks and Jews. It’s offensive to Jews primarily because it diminishes the extent of their suffering. It’s offensive to blacks because it’s just one more example where a black president is shown a staggering degree of disrespect. He gets access to health care to millions of people for the first time, including many people living in black communities, and he gets compared to Hitler for his troubles.

This offense-giving is probably totally unintentional. Except in the limited sense that conservatives enjoy saying things that (they think will) annoy liberals, this clown’s comment was probably not intended to give offense. It was just intended to get attention and prove his “conservative” and “anti-ObamaCare” credentials.

But, as one Republican after another makes these kind of inane and insensitive remarks, there is a cumulative effect. They wind up just pushing everyone way from them.

Following on my last piece on How Race Distorts the Electorate, I want to discuss how Republican strategies during the Obama presidency have distorted the electorate. It’s hard to characterize the motives the GOP has had in each individual case but, collectively, they have pursued strategies that have had the effect of polarizing the electorate by race.

The most infamous example is the first-term obsession with the birth certificate. This was a naked example of using massive disinformation to alienate the president from low-intelligence white people. But it also absolutely infuriated black folks and made them more protective of the president than they otherwise would have been.

Similarly, the collective freak-out about ObamaCare and its characterization as some exotic un-American socialist scheme, was perceived by blacks as a barely-veiled racist attack both on the president and on their community.

The decision by Mitch McConnell and other party leaders to oppose Obama’s entire agenda before he even was sworn into office was seen by blacks as a totally unprecedented lack of respect that had never been done to any other president.

The decision to pursue widespread voter ID laws that disproportionately disenfranchise blacks was so toxic that it actually led to higher black turnout in the 2012 election than white turnout, for the first time ever. Following that up with the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act is like setting a nuclear bomb off. Attacks on Affirmative Action only exacerbate an already explosive opposition to the GOP in the black community. Holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt is another thumb in the eye.

The refusal to allow a vote on immigration reform in the House is infuriating Latinos.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media machine has been giving whites a steady diet of racial grievance. This has succeeded in driving up support for the GOP among whites, but the cost is an ever-increasing erosion of support among anyone of color.

Some Republican analysts, like Sean Trende, think that the GOP can continue to compete if they can get a greater share of the white voters. But he doesn’t fully appreciate how this is being done in practice. It’s done by stoking white resentment of racial minorities. Having a black president has made this vastly easier to do than it would have been with a white president.

And that’s what you’re seeing show up in the differential between the president’s approval number and the percent of the electorate that indicates support for Hillary Clinton. There will be a sling-shot effect that goes all one way. Ordinarily, we might expect a white presidential candidate to attract a less racially polarized electorate in both senses: they’d get more support from whites, but also less support from black, Latinos, and Asians. But the strategies the GOP has pursued have done two things to change that likelihood. They’ve permanently cut off the chance that people of color will vote for them, and they’ve made sure that people of color will be just as enthusiastic about voting for a white Democrat as they were to vote for a black one. Trying to take away people’s votes and health care, while showing them an unprecedented lack of respect will do that.

Put another way, the Republicans have mortgaged their future by making a deal with the devil. They tried to avoid changing by jacking up their support among whites to the maximal possible level, but they did it in a way that simply isn’t sustainable without a black president to rally against. Remove Obama, and the white voters start to trickle back, but there is no corresponding trickle back in the Republicans’ direction.

Some things just stick with you. I will never forget reading the following from one of Sean Quinn’s dispatches during the 2008 presidential election:

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

How can anyone forget something like that. It’s pure Archie and Edith Bunker, down to the smallest details. Things were so bad by October 2008 that even the Bunkers of the world were ready to give a black president a chance. But I don’t think he held their loyalty for very long. After years of uninterrupted disaster, these voters knew that they had to try something different, but Obama wasn’t part of their clan. He was too exotic. Too urban. Too intellectual. Too aloof. Too black.

I’ve been wondering where these voters stand on Hillary Clinton. I knew that there is a big set of people who are telling pollsters that they don’t approve of Obama’s performance in office but that they prefer Clinton to any likely Republican presidential candidate. I had a feeling that this group was made up of lower middle class white voters who don’t have a college degree, and that they are concentrated most heavily in rural areas, particularly in the South. Now, thanks to E.J. Dionne, my suspicions have been confirmed.

For starters, let’s look at the size of this set (from the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll):

Obama’s approval rating in the survey was just 41 percent, both with the general public and among registered voters. But in a hypothetical matchup with Jeb Bush for the 2016 presidential race, Clinton was favored by 53 percent of registered voters, Bush by 41 percent.

The roughly one-eighth of voters who disapprove of Obama but nonetheless support Clinton for 2016 may be the most important group in the electorate.

So, we’re talking about 12.5% of the electorate. That’s the size of the set that disapproves of Obama but plans to vote for Clinton anyway. Who are these people?

A comparison of those who back Clinton but disapprove of Obama with the group that is both pro-Clinton and pro-Obama suggests that the swing constituency is much more likely to be blue-collar and white — 71 percent of the mixed group are white, compared with only 57 percent of the pro-Obama, pro-Clinton group, and it is also somewhat more Latino. Whites without college degrees constitute 47 percent of the Hillary Difference Voters but only 30 percent of the pro-Clinton, pro-Obama group. In keeping with this, 62 percent of the Hillary Difference Voters have incomes of less than $50,000 annually.

So, Clinton has a greater appeal with potential Democratic voters who are less educated and less affluent, including among Latinos.

Ideologically, the swing group includes significantly fewer self-described liberals. Among the Hillary Difference Voters, only 29 percent call themselves liberal; among those who both favor Clinton and approve of Obama, 43 percent are liberals. Nearly a third of the mixed group are white evangelical Protestants compared with only 10 percent of those who react positively to both Democrats. Clinton also runs ahead of Obama’s approval rating among voters aged 30 to 49, among white Southerners and among independents, including those who say they lean Republican.

Clinton is more popular with less liberal Democrats, with white evangelicals, and with white Southerners. None of this a surprise to me, but it’s nice to see it confirmed.

Progressive political junkies may be scratching their heads over some of these results. After all, Obama was preferred to Clinton specifically because he promised a less hawkish foreign policy. While Obama has continued an aggressive foreign policy in some areas, no one knowledgable thinks that Clinton would have been less aggressive. Obama’s economic policies may be wanting, but we haven’t seen any return of the Democratic Leadership Council. Clintonian Democrats like Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, and Harold Ford are still decidedly on the outs. The party as a whole, including its congressional make-up, has moved far to the left of where it stood in 2000, and the Blue Dogs have been decimated. Why, then, is there such widespread enthusiasm for a Clinton restoration?

The answer is in these poll numbers. A large number of potential Democrats aren’t reachable for the president. They’re not reachable not because of his record but because of who he is. On most measurables, Obama’s record and positions should be more popular with these Democrats than Hillary’s, but that’s irrelevant. The Clintons may be Ivy League-educated, rich, and part of the national Establishment, but they still have their down-home Arkansas roots. Being from the South, having a more moderate reputation, and being “tough” on foreign policy have a certain attraction to some voters, at least, until you get into the specifics. But specifics have almost nothing to do with these poll results. This is a visceral thing. There’s about 12.5% of the population that thinks that Obama isn’t on their side but Hillary Clinton is. It’s partly racial, it’s partly regional, and it’s partly just a difference in their political brands. But it’s not based on anything substantive.

This is frustrating for progressives who want to win, but also want to move the party in a progressive, not regressive, direction.

But it’s hard to argue with poll numbers that show Hillary beating Jeb by 53%-41%. If those numbers held up and the two candidates split the undecideds, Hillary would get 57% of the vote. For comparison, Eisenhower was reelected in 1956 with 57.4% of the vote, and Ronald Reagan was reelected in 1984 with 58.4% of the vote. Ike lost only seven states that year, and in 1984 Reagan won every contest but Minnesota and the District of Columbia.

Can Hillary pull something like that off?

And, even if she can, can we trust her instincts on foreign policy?

The Onion is going to go out of business if Fox News keeps this up.

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Disinviting Ayaan Hirsi Ali for a convocation speech and honorary degree is not equal to shun a college president to speak at a Jewish shul in Winnipeg. Invoking the freedom of speech argument doesn’t hold up in the Brandeis University criticism by the right-wing press and organisations in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The shunning of David Barnard is a viscious reprisal by the leadership in the Winnipeg Jewish community, I would label as ‘price-tag’ for a decision based on the Manitoba’s human rights code.

Apartheid in Winnipeg: Speakers Disinvited over Israel Politics

(The Forward) – The struggle over Israel in the Jewish community is heating up in Winnipeg, Canada. David Barnard, the President of the University of Manitoba — the city’s largest university — has been publicly un-invited to speak at one of the larger shuls in the city, Shaarey Zedek. The president was to have spoken at an interfaith service during Yom HaShoah.

He was uninvited, according to Ian Staniloff, the synagogue’s executive director, because he had allowed Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) to go ahead on the university campus. “Our board and congregation and community leaders felt it completely inappropriate that he take part,” said Staniloff, “because it’s visceral and personal and such a solemn occasion for us. We were more concerned in the perception that by having him here we’re basically endorsing him as an individual who would be representative of the community in speaking about this.”

What an extremely disappointing decision.

As is often the case with these things, politics and legal maneuverings preceded IAW. It appears that the Student Union removed an organization promoting IAW, Students Against Israeli Apartheid, from official university status. Barnard did not override that decision, but he allowed an outside group to host IAW events on campus because, we are told, a legal opinion noted that preventing IAW from taking place would violate Manitoba’s human rights code.

Unlike British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta, Manitoba’s current Human Rights Code does not have “anti-hate speech” provisions. In this province, The Code has a much narrower focus. It prohibits the publishing, broadcasting, circulating or publicly displaying signs and statements that discriminate or advocate discrimination in an activity to which The Code applies.  During a Commission round table discussion on the topic of hate speech, some participants passionately believed that The Code needs to be strengthened, while others feared an infringement of freedom of expression.

Brandeis Univ.: Manitoba Bars Anti-Israel Group for Human Rights Violations

Winnepeg College Chief Shunned by Shul for Allowing Israel Apartheid Week

Synagogue uninvites U of M prez for Israeli Apartheid Week decision

(Winnipeg Sun) – Last year, UMSU revoked the Students Against Israel Apartheid’s status on campus, making them ineligible to rent student space. The group applied to rent campus space as an external group, which the university allowed.

In a statement, Barnard said lawyers advised the university that it could be in violation of the Manitoba Human Rights code if it refused the group space on campus.

“I am deeply saddened by the insinuations made about me personally and more importantly about the institution I lead,” Barnard said. “The decisions made in regard to the Israel Apartheid Week activities were independent of any personal views concerning (the Canada-Palestine Student Network) and its stance. The University of Manitoba enjoys a meaningful and respectful friendship with the Jewish community. This relationship has been built over many years and informs the fabric of our institution.”

In a statement, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg said the school’s decision to rent the space was “unfortunate.”

“We wish to reiterate that we have enjoyed a long and mutually beneficial relationship with the University of Manitoba and its president,” the statement said. “Within the next few days, the leadership of the Jewish community and the of the University of Manitoba will be meeting (to) discuss issues (that) affect both the Jewish and broader Winnipeg communities.”

Israeli Apartheid Week is an annual event held in cities and campuses across the world portraying Israel as an apartheid state for its treatment of Palestinians. It promotes a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, according to CAMERA, an Israeli lobby group.

CAMERA’s High Tech Lynching of Palestinian Christian Group, SABEEL

Canada’s University of Manitoba Students’ Union Becomes the First in NA to Ban ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’  by Rhonda Spivak, L.L.B, Editor, April 14, 2013

(Jewish Defense League) – The University of Manitoba Students Union (UMSU) has become the first in North America to vote to ban Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) on campus and strip the group Students Against Israel Apartheid (SAIA) of official student group status.

The motion bars SAIA from receiving student union funding or using activity space in student-union controlled buildings and is a stunning setback for proponents of Israel Apartheid Week. The motion passed by secret ballot 19 to 15.

The motion is the brain child of Josh Morry, a student with savvy debating skills who is graduating this year form the Asper School of Business. The motion relies on UMSU Policy 2009 which states that “UMSU does not condone behaviour that is likely to undermine the dignity [or] self-esteem … of any of its members.” It further states that “UMSU is committed to an inclusive and respectful work and learning environment free from discrimination or harassment as prohibited in the Manitoba Human Rights Code (the “Code).”

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Josh Morry is creating an Arab-Jewish dialogue group at the University of Manitoba.

Morry argued that by referring to Israel as an apartheid and racist state, SAIA essentially labels Jews, (the vast majority of whom identify with the state as Zionists), as well as students who are Israeli on campus as “racists,” which is likely to undermine their dignity.

The Republicans are still officially considering six cities to host their 2016 convention: Kansas City, Denver, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dallas, and Las Vegas. However, it appears that the latter two have emerged as the front-runners. I know that there are odd factors that influence these decisions. The GOP has to pay for the damn thing, after all, and so they need access to a lot of top donors. They probably don’t want a repeat of 2008 and 2012, when natural disasters curtailed the festivities. They want a city with sufficient hotel space and a compact layout so that things aren’t too spread out.

I get all that. But it seems to me that the overriding motivator should be twofold. First, what does the selection say about the party. Second, does the selection boost the party’s chances of winning the state in which the convention is to be held?

The Democrats held their 2008 convention in Denver and went on to win Colorado in the fall, which was no slam-dunk. After narrowly winning North Carolina that year, they chose Charlotte for the 2012 convention. They narrowly lost that state in the fall. Say what you want, but those selections made sense.

It seems to me that Dallas would be a particularly inept choice based on these two criteria. The message it would send is that the party is still in the thrall of Texans. I don’t think people are quite over the last Texan president, who also happens to reside in Dallas. It would also do nothing to improve their candidate’s chances of carrying Texas. In any case, if Texas is a swing state in 2016, the GOP’s problems won’t be solved by their convention.

Las Vegas seems more promising. Despite having a Republican governor, Nevada isn’t great turf for the Republicans in a presidential election. But one big reason for that is that their state party is in shambles. They could really use a big infusion of cash and organization and enthusiasm. Probably nothing short of that is likely to turn Nevada red in 2016.

On the other hand, choosing Las Vegas would send a message inconsistent with the party’s family values brand. This is less because Las Vegas isn’t family friendly (it certainly is) than because Las Vegas has a lingering reputation as a den of sin and adultery. I think, however, that this would be more of a problem for individual delegates than for the party’s national image. Picking Las Vegas would make some sense.

The biggest objection to it that I have is that Nevada simply isn’t that delegate-rich. Its six delegates aren’t enough to swing an election is most plausible scenarios.

Kansas City would do almost nothing for the GOP and I don’t understand why it is even under discussion. Columbus and Cincinnati, I think, make the most sense from a strictly political point of view. Ohio is a state that the Republicans simply have to figure out how to win.

The failure of the latest round of Israel-Palestine talks is going to result in a rude awakening for Israel. The administration isn’t hiding that they almost exclusively blame Israel for the failure. Specifically, they blame the settlers and their most ardent supporters, and the fact that Netanyahu’s government cannot survive if he makes certain required concessions. Here’s an anonymous senior government official closely involved in the talks:

“There are a lot of reasons for the peace effort’s failure, but people in Israel shouldn’t ignore the bitter truth – the primary sabotage came from the settlements. The Palestinians don’t believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when, at the same time, it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state. We’re talking about the announcement of 14,000 housing units, no less. Only now, after talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale. That does not reconcile with the agreement.

“At this point, it’s very hard to see how the negotiations could be renewed, let alone lead to an agreement. Towards the end, Abbas demanded a three-month freeze on settlement construction. His working assumption was that if an accord is reached, Israel could build along the new border as it pleases. But the Israelis said no.”

It’s hard not to laugh out loud at: “Only now, after talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale.” If senior officials in the U.S. Government were operating under a different assumption, that’s over now.

They had other warnings for Israel, too.

“The international community, especially the European Union, avoided any action during the negotiations. Now, a race will begin to fill the void. Israel might be facing quite a problem.

“As of now, nothing is stopping the Palestinians from turning to the international community. The Palestinians are tired of the status quo. They will get their state in the end – whether through violence or by turning to international organizations.

“The boycott and the Palestinian application to international organizations are medium-range problems. America will help, but there’s no guarantee its support will be enough.

“There’s a bigger problem threatening Israel in the immediate future. This is a very concrete threat. If Israel tries to impose economic sanctions on the Palestinians, it could boomerang. The West Bank economy will collapse, and then Abbas will say ‘I don’t want this anymore. Take this from me.’ There’s great potential for deterioration here, which could end with the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority. Israeli soldiers will have to administer the lives of 2.5 million Palestinians, to their mothers’ chagrin. The donating countries will stop paying up, and the bill of $3 billion a year will have to be paid by your Finance Ministry.”

Reading between the lines, the Americans are basically telling the Israelis that they just screwed themselves. And I think that’s, sadly, true. They could have had an agreement reached by mutual settlement, along with the good will of most of the world. They will not get that now. Instead, they will get boycotted and the international community will rally around the Palestinians.

And the American left is about fed up, even at the highest levels of our government.

There was a time when Christians were pretty universally opposed to the practice of feeding people to lions. The reason was simple. They were the ones being fed to lions in the Roman Colosseum. These days, however, there’s a bit of division over the practice within the Christian ranks.

On Tuesday, an Oklahoma inmate named Clayton Lockett was slowly tortured to death after a botched execution left him conscious and convulsing while strapped to a gurney. He eventually died of a heart attack 43 minutes into this ordeal.

Oklahoma state Rep. Mike Christian (R), however, apparently sees no problem with Lockett’s slow and painful death. According to a local news report, Christian said that he doesn’t care if inmates are killed by lethal injection, electrocution, a firing squad, a hanging, the guillotine or “being fed to the lions.”

The tip-off to me that this state representative is a Christian was that he is named Mike Christian. But I would have been safe assuming he’s a Christian just by knowing that he is an Oklahoma Republican. He’s probably an evangelical, too.

The early Church fathers wouldn’t recognize him as one of their own.

Ian Swanson thinks the decision to have a special House committee devoted to investigating the administration’s reaction to the Benghazi attacks is part of a midterm strategy. He actually thinks the issue has the power to hurt Democrats with independent voters, which is laughable. If there is a strategy behind the move at all, it is clearly aimed at tarnishing the reputation of Hillary Clinton in the hope that her approval numbers will come back to Earth. But I kind of doubt that we can explain this decision rationally at all.

After all, the real issues involved (security for embassies and consulates, the decision to get militarily involved in Libya, the CIA’s role in Benghazi) aren’t even under discussion. The Republicans are upset that the administration said that an anti-Muslim video was responsible for creating a spontaneous riot that led to the attacks in Benghazi. That turned out to be only partially true. So, is the problem that the administration was wrong?

No, that’s not it. The presumption is that they lied. Okay, so what if they lied? Did they lie about something that mattered? Have there been any follow-on attacks on our government officials in Libya? Did they misdiagnose the problem? Have there been any negative consequences for anyone from this alleged lie?

It’s hard to understand why the Republicans think that anyone beside themselves cares in the slightest about their version of the Benghazi controversy.

The latest iteration of outrage is that the Obama administration released an email to the public that the Republicans feel should have been released to Congress last year. Okay, perhaps the email should have been released to Congress last year. What is the appropriate penalty for failing to promptly and fully comply with a congressional subpoena? Is impeachment the proper penalty? And, for whom? It’s not as if President Obama was in charge of combing through White House emails to see what was germane to the Benghazi attacks. Should he fire his legal counsel?

What is actually going to be investigated? Not how better to protect our CIA officers in the field. Not how better to protect our consulates. Not who is responsible for the crime. So, what, then?

Are they seeking to prove that the administration knowingly misled people and then impeded a congressional investigation about it? Because they’ll never prove that. The people that are convinced of it don’t even know why it is supposed to matter. They know next to nothing about Libya or the militant groups that menace Benghazians. They don’t admire the State Department or care much about the safety of its workforce. They have offered nothing in the way of policy advice for Libya. And they were acting strangely deranged about this issue long before this latest email came up, so that can’t explain their seeming dementia.

It’s almost as if they think that the president was only reelected because he lied about Benghazi, and that proving that would somehow make Mitt Romney the president.

One of those current events that I totally missed on Thursday.  Don’t Presidential Proclamations tend to carry some weight with lefties and righties?  Or have they become so common and banal that nobody pays them any mind?  

Who knew that Loyalty Day has been an official US holiday since 1958?  And every year the current President issues a Loyalty Day proclamation?  2014 is no exception.  

Presidential Proclamation — Loyalty Day, 2014.

Skipping all the “what fors” and “whereases,” leaves:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2014, as Loyalty Day. This Loyalty Day, I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance, whether by displaying the flag of the United States or pledging allegiance to the Republic for which it stands.

Not just any old day in the year was worth appropriating for “Loyalty Day.” It had to be May Day just in case any USians got any ideas about celebrating International Workers’ Day.

The Cold War was always dreadful and particularly so during the 1950s when crap such as “Loyalty Day” was created, “in God we trust” was stamped onto coins and currency, and “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance.  USians longing for a return to The Cold War are nuts.

On a related “US loyalty issue,” Glenzilla took on Hayden and Dershowitz and apparently kicked some butt on the motion:

Be it resolved state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedoms…

Note to self — Find Two Hours to Watch