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Challenge to the Left: Obama Sinks to Historic Lows Among Blue-Collar White Males

July 13th, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in 2012 Election, rightwing, Tea Party

By Ronald Brownstein
National Journal

The new Quinnipiac University and ABC/Washington Post national surveys out this week converge on one key conclusion: as the election nears, President Obama is sinking to historic lows among the group most consistently hostile to him.

Throughout his career on the national stage, Obama has struggled among white men without a college education. But in these latest surveys, he has fallen to a level of support among them lower than any Democratic nominee has attracted in any election since 1980, according to an upcoming National Journal analysis of exit polls from presidential elections.

Though pollsters at each organization caution that the margins of error are substantial when looking at subgroups such as this, each poll shows erosion within that margin of error for Obama with these working-class white men. The new Quinnipiac poll shows Obama attracting just 29 percent of non-college white men, down from 32 percent in their most recent national survey in April, according to figures provided by Douglas Schwartz, April Radocchio and Ralph Hansen of Quinnipiac. The ABC/Washington Post survey found Obama drawing just 28 percent of non-college white men, down from 34 percent in their May survey, according to figures provided by ABC Pollster Gary Langer. Romney drew 56 percent of the non-college white men in Quinnipiac and 65 percent in the ABC/Washington Post survey.

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Lesson for the Left: How the Tea Party Organized Wisconsin

June 14th, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in elections, Organizing, rightwing, Tea Party

The Tea Party Impact in Wisconsin

Photo: The Tea Party Express Bus Visited Wisconsin Twice in the Last Year

By Devin Burghart
IREHR Issue Areas

June 13, 2012 – On Tuesday, June 5, in a hotel meeting room two thousand miles away from a recall election that was being watched coast to coast, the Washington State coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, Woody Hertzog, regaled a small group of Tea Partiers assembled in the Puget Sound town of Silverdale with tales of his recent campaigning trip in the Wisconsin trenches. Hertzog told the group that he and other Tea Party activists from across the country poured into the state, becoming a door-to-door army in support of Governor Walker. The election was still taking place half way across the country, yet it was all these Puget Sound Tea Partiers wanted to talk about. Midway through the meeting, the results from the Wisconsin special election came in. When it was announced that Governor Walker and other Tea Party supported candidates were victorious, the room erupted in cheers and applause. One older man in the back of the room commented aloud, “I guess we can put away our guns, for now.”

Indeed, final results for the June 5 Wisconsin Recall Election showed Governor Walker with a 53%-46% edge over Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett. Incumbent Republicans were also victorious in the Lieutenant Governor recall, and three of the four state senate recall elections; all by similar margins. Only in the State Senate 21st district, in southeast Wisconsin south of Racine, did challenger Democrat John Lehman defeat the incumbent Republican, Van Wanggard, 51%-49%. Lehman’s victory means that Republicans will no longer have a majority in the state senate.

In examining what happened in Wisconsin, IREHR’s analysis points to four relevant factors: recall fatigue, procedural hurdles, money, and the Tea Party mobilization. If the Tea Party victory in the Indiana Republican Senate primary was the wakeup call reminding the country that Tea Party was still alive, the Wisconsin campaign put the Tea Party 2012 ground game on full display. The Tea Party Made A Difference (Again)

Tea Party groups have been engaged in the recall fight from the beginning last year. Starting in April, however, all of the national Tea Party factions ratcheted up their activity in Wisconsin. They built upon their already existing membership base in the state. With 6087 enrolled members as of May 2012, Wisconsin ranks 23th amongst all states in national Tea Party membership. When consider on a per capita base, however, the state’s national faction membership level is only 42nd overall, near the bottom. This lack of membership density may have been one of the reasons that national factions deployed so many out-of-state volunteers.

Map of Wisconsin Membership in National Tea Party Factions

Their rationale was simple and explicit. “Liberals are waging a war in Wisconsin and we must stop it before they bring it to other states around the country,” according to Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny Beth Martin. “Wisconsin could be the key to determining how the rest of this year plays out. If the Left is successful in Wisconsin, they will no doubt use their success as a model to spread havoc in other places around the country. We must stand with Wisconsin because if we Save Wisconsin, we can Save the Country!” she added to rally the troops.

On April 29th, local Tea Party Patriots groups across the country voted 98% to 2% to throw all their energy and resources into Wisconsin for the recall elections. “We are deploying hundreds of volunteers into each of the targeted recall districts,” noted Martin. “That’s 4,000 patriots going door to door and making phone calls! Our goal is to educate the voters in those key areas that Governor Walker’s policies are working and that turning back the clock on these reforms will bankrupt Wisconsin and lead to more economic misery. This will be Tea Party Patriot’s most advanced voter education effort ever. We want to absolutely flood these targeted areas of Wisconsin with Tea Party citizen-volunteers,” she added.

Tea Party Patriots brought activists to Wisconsin and did door-to-door canvassing, and had others make calls from their homes and spread the word on social media. Some of those activists were sponsored, with their costs covered by Tea Party Patriots. Most, however, came on their own, volunteering their time to go door-to-door canvassing voters—a sign of their ardor for their beliefs.

As others have already noted, Tea Party Patriots, Inc., which is registered with the IRS as a 501c4 non-profit organization, may have run afoul of its tax exempt status with this electoral activity. Federally registered non-profit organizations with a 501c4 status are prohibited from devoting all of their energy and resources to support electoral campaigns. At times, Martin and other Tea Party Patriots leaders have tried to suggest that the group was just engaged in GOTV (Get Out the Vote) efforts or some form of civic engagement, other times they’ve told their supporters that “Tea Party Patriots—in conjunction with other local and national Tea Party groups—will spearhead efforts to help Walker and other candidates.”

The Tea Party Patriots were joined by other national factions. Accroding to the website for Tea Party Express, “Wisconsin has become ground zero in the fight against labor union tyranny, and this battle is one we must win if we want to preserve our American Dream. 2012 is a decisive year for our nation’s future, and the momentum from these recalls in Wisconsin will be carried into Election Day in November. This is our chance to stand side-by-side with true conservative leaders and push back against the liberal agenda that threatens the America we know and love.”

This group brought its bus tour to Wisconsin twice in the last year, including a nine city tour in August 2011 and a six city stop in June 2012, which included their new mobile phone banking bus for a “massive GOTV push.”

The FreedomWorks Super PAC was also active on the ground. FreedomWorks for America set up eighteen distribution centers across the state to circulate materials through local Tea Party network and the WalkerforJobs.com website. The Super PAC distributed over 5,000 yard signs, 3,500 bumper magnets, and 50,000 door hangers across the state.

Tea Party Nation’s Judson Phillips, who last year compared Wisconsinites who protested against Walker to Hitler’s “Brown shirts,” kept the recall issue alive. He threw most of his support behind Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefish, who he called “an amazing candidate.”

The Patriot Super PAC, run by the same people as the Patriot Action Network jumped into the race during the last week of the election with a radio ad supporting Walker. Patriot Action Network also sent a campaign fundraising appeal allegedly from the Walker campaign, which claimed the governor was a “a paid sponsor of the Patriot Action Network.”

The 1776 Tea Party (aka TeaParty.org) also got into the act by distributing the same campaign fundraising email, claiming that the Walker campaign sponsored the email. The Walker campaign denied doing so, according to Stephanie Mencimer on the Mother Jones website.

Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers supported organization that has done some training of Tea Party outfits, also worked feverishly in Wisconsin. It deployed sixty paid organizers on the ground. It was enough for the aforementioned Woody Hertzog to tell the Tea Party meeting in Silverdale that it seemed that just about every time he turned the corner out in Wausau, Wisconsin he’d see either the green shirts worn by Americans for Prosperity activists or the blue shirts of the Tea Party Patriots. Wisconsin’s Tea Party Base

As was true in Indiana, the momentum from perpetual campaigning kept the Wisconsin Tea Party grassroots robust with only moderate attrition from previous years. And the national groups piggybacked on the work of the many local Tea Party chapters in the state.

IREHR tracked 54 different local Tea Party chapters active in Wisconsin at the time of the election. The majority of the local chapters are aligned nationally with the Tea Party Patriots. Others maintain a connection to FreedomWorks.

Wisconsin Local Tea Party Chapters

Throughout this period, local Tea Party chapters in Wisconsin championed a wide range of far right issues, including a most assured universal distain of labor unions. They also made racist birther attacks on President Obama, promoted anti-Indian bigotry, and Second Amendment and survivalist "preparedness." Christian nationalism, anti-environmental conspiracies, nativism, and Islamophobia, were also on their agenda, topped by debt, bailouts, and taxes.

Take, for instance, the Northwoods Patriots of Eagle River, Wisconsin. The group is affiliated with the Tea Party Patriots national Tea Party faction. As a member of the Wisconsin Patriot Coalition, the Northwoods Patriots work closely with other local Tea Party groups across the state. The group campaigned relentlessly for Walker. While the group spent much of the past two years attacking unions and supporting the governor’s tax cut legislation, their website engaged in racist conspiracy mongering about the president’s birth certificate and his religion. Also on the site were other conspiracy theories promoted by the group, including discussion of Agenda 21 and “the New World Order.” Leaders of the group have gone so far as to openly support the radical notion of states’ rights nullification, “States may resist federal law deemed to be uncondtitution[sic] which results in some Federal law being rendered, in practice, null and voir[sic] or unenforceable” Among the grassroots Tea Party groups in Wisconsin, the orientation of the Northwoods Patriots is more the rule than the exception. The importance of support for the Tea Parties in this partisan race

Votes fell heavily along partisan lines: 94% of Republicans backed Walker, as did 86% of conservatives. Barrett received similarly strong support from Democrats, winning 91%, and liberals (86%). Once again, independent voters gave an edge to Walker, giving him 54% compared to 45% for Barrett. That was down slightly from 2010, when Walker received the votes of 56% of independents, and Barrett 42%.

The Tea Party effort focused on strategically targeted rural and suburban parts of Wisconsin. And it worked. Barrett convincingly won the vote in cities of more than 50,000 people, with a 62%-37% margin. That vote only accounted for about 21% of the total, however. Walker won the suburbs, which accounted for 47% of the voters, 56%-44%. The Governor also won small cities and rural areas, 60%-39%. That accounted for remaining 33% of the voters. Thus the suburban and small town vote trumped the city vote.

According to exit polls, Tea Party support was often a deciding factor. The Tea Party got out more voters and won over more “neutral” voters than did unions and progressives. Voters supporting the Tea Party made up 36% of total, the largest grouping according to exit polls. Those who registered support for the Tea Party voted 93%-7% for Walker. Of the 27% of voters who claimed to be neutral on the Tea Party, they also voted for Walker, though in a smaller 53%-46% margin. Those who opposed the Tea Party made up 35% of the voters, and voted for Barrett, 86-14%.

On the central question of the rights of public sector union, Wisconsin voters were somewhat at odds. On the one hand, exit polls showed that voters expressed a favorable view of public employee unions – 51%-45%. At the same time, voters approved both limiting collective bargaining and how Walker handled collective bargaining by a nearly inverse number of 52%-47%. Recall Fatigue

Exit polls point to a critical, but generally overlooked, reason for Walker’s victory: “recall fatigue.” Remember that this was the second round of contentious recall elections in the state in just over a year. Opinion in the state swung decidedly against using the recall process for partisan or policy aims. To many Wisconsin voters, recalls were meant to be different.

In fact, 60% of voters told pollsters that recall elections are appropriate “only for official misconduct.” Ten per cent said they were “never” appropriate. Only 27% felt they were appropriate “for any reason.” Of those in the “only for official misconduct” category, 68% voted for Walker. Despite Walker’s general unpopularity, voters were reluctant to remove a sitting governor absent corruption or other criminal misconduct.

The timing of the recall election also hurt those arguing he had committed misconduct. The misconduct claims centered on the way Gov. Walker rammed through anti-union legislation. But those concerns had faded away for most Wisconsinites by the time he was eligible to be recalled. Further, the FBI’s so-called John Doe investigation into activities during Walker’s time as a county executive had not yet resulted in any charges against the governor.

The Talking Points Memo tracker of Governor Walker’s favorability rating nicely captures the voter’s diminishing attention to Walker’s misdeeds. By Thanksgiving 2011 the favorability trend line had already turned in Walkers favor.

The recall effort, and Barrett’s campaign in particular, failed to conclusively make the case in the closing weeks. The refrain that Walker was running around being a “rock star of the far-right” was true, but it wasn’t enough to get people over the recall hurdle.

Moreover, the selection of Barrett as the Democratic opponent, may have added to the sentiment that the recall was political sour grapes instead of an extraordinary circumstance. Barrett was Walker’s opponent in the 2010 race for governor. In the end, the 2012 recall margin of victory for Walker was almost identical to the margin he beat Barrett by in 2010.

The Recall Process Problem

Recall supporters also ran into a procedural problem with the recall system, that added an additional burden on the candidate ultimately selected to run against the governor.

In January 2012, as soon as Walker was eligible, recall supporters submitted one million signatures to trigger the recall election. Walker, however, had been running against a potential recall since the protests over his anti-union legislation erupted in February 2011. Walker became a Tea Party hero, and support rushed in from across the country. In essence, Walker had a fifteen month head start in campaigning and fundraising.

On the other side, Barrett had to go through a contentious primary battle that didn’t conclude until the May 8 election. The timing gave him less than a month to mount a general election campaign against Walker.

While Walker was a national star in conservative circles (and infamous in progressive circles), Barrett was never able to reach that level of name recognition or enthusiasm. When he wasn’t able to immediately close the gap in the polls, the Democratic National Committee and other national Democrats were reluctant to invest in the race, leaving labor and state Democrats to fight alone. The Money

As has been noted often by others, Walker had a significant financial edge in this election. He benefited from a campaign finance loophole that allowed him to raise unlimited cash until the recall process formally started. Big money Republican donated six figures or more directly to Walker’s campaign. Barrett started way behind and couldn’t catch up. Democrats were ultimately outspent by more than 7-to-1.

Conventional wisdom in electoral politics often holds that conservatives have the money, while progressives have the ground game (thanks to progressives and labor unions). Presumably whichever side better utilizes their resources wins. Nothing is conventional, however, since the Tea Party emerged. In Wisconsin, the Tea Party had a ground game that matched or bettered the trade union-progressive effort.

Back at the Tea Party meeting in Silverdale, Washington, when the celebration of Walker’s victory in Wisconsin died down, the local group of Tea Party Patriots got back to business. Organizers from the Private Enterprise Project, an alliance of business interests and Tea Party groups, started outlining a plan to target state congressional districts exclusively on Initiative 1185, an effort to renew the requirement that any tax increase by the state legislature must be passed by a two-thirds super-majority. The group is pushing forward despite the fact that the original measure, Initiative 1053, was ruled unconstitutional by a King County Superior Court. The group handed out initiative petitions and voter registration cards for targeted districts, in the hopes of turning Washington into Wisconsin.

All material © copyright Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, P.O. Box 411552, Kansas City, MO 64141.

Why Trump and the Birthers Won’t Go Away

June 1st, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in 2012 Election, GOP, racism, rightwing

The GOP’s Race Card:
Real Issue Is Obama’s Not ‘White’

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

June 1, 2012 – President Obama was indeed prophetic when he said at a press conference a year ago that his release of his long form birth certificate would not convince countless numbers of anti-Obama skeptics that he was a bona fide American.

Nearly a year after the president called it right on the bogus issue, the Public Policy Polling survey of GOP voters in Georgia, Tennessee and, more troubling, Ohio, because it’s the key battleground state, found that more than one third of GOP voters still didn’t believe he was born in the U.S.

The same high degree of doubt about Obama’s birth likely would be found among GOP voters in other states. Billionaire professional Obama basher Donald Trump almost certainly knew that, and that he spoke for untold millions when he calculatingly lashed out at Obama again with the phony birther charge.

Before Trump shoved the issue back into public debate, the hope was that despite the president’s warning and fear, and the negative poll findings, that birtherism had become a nonissue. This seemed even more the case when GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and the top GOP presidential contenders during the GOP primary campaign, all publicly rejected the birther claim about Obama.

But their public rejection of it as Trump has amply shown won’t put the issue to rest simply because birtherism is a serviceable political chip for the GOP. In the months immediately before and after the president released his long form certificate, bills were introduced in 14 states that required presidential candidates to show iron clad proof of their U.S. birth. None of the bills passed. However, the mere fact of introducing the birth certificate requirement legislation in these states was just enough to continue to fan the flames of anti-Obama sentiment. There’s even more to this apparent crackpot stuff.

The scurrilous ultraconservative attack line against Obama from the moment that he announced his presidential candidacy in 2007 is that he’s unpatriotic, a closet socialist and Islamic radical. This fit in with a tact that the GOP has honed over four decades and that’s to assault Democratic presidential candidates and presidents, and that’s character attack, character attack, and character attack some more. This ploy sows public seeds of doubt about Democrats even deeper, deflects attention from the real issues of the economy, health care, education and foreign policy concerns. In the case of Obama the birther issue has an added pay-off; it reinforces the latent and overt bigotry among many GOP voters, and more than a few Democrats. That was sadly apparent in polls that show some Democrats still won’t back Obama solely because of race. White Democrats in a recent Democratic primary in West Virginia went much further than anti-Obama racial talk and gave a white Texas felon running against Obama a significant number of their votes.

Add to that the legion of websites, bloggers, the conservative site WorldNetDaily, and the pack of right-wing talk show hosts, including Fox’s Sean Hannity, that relentlessly pound on the issue. They are read, watched and listened to, and believed, by millions of Americans. The birther issue is and always will be alive and well with them. It’s driven in part by naked racism, and in part by the GOP’s loathing of Obama’s economic policies, and moderate political views. The emergence of massively funded Super PACs may give yet another potential potent push to the birther issue as a weapon against Obama. A few GOP connected Super PAC bankrollers have floated straw man issues such as Obama’s long severed tie with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and the non-revelation that Obama once smoked pot to test whether these slurs would touch a public nerve. They didn’t. But it’s still early in the stretch drive of the 2012 presidential campaign. There’s little doubt that the search is on with a vengeance to scrounge up any piece of political muck that can be funded and pounded into a video hit against the president. The birther issue almost certainly will fit into the dirty attack campaign somewhere.

Obama hit Romney hard for his schmooze with Trump at the very moment that Trump blathered out again the zany birther line. The aim was to link Romney by association with birtherism despite Romney’s public disavowal of it. The president was right to go on the attack against him on this. But no matter, birtherism is just too juicy and too battle tested an issue not to revive in some way especially given the fact as Obama sadly noted when he released his certificate that so many want to believe the worst about him. Trump certainly knew that. That’s why neither he nor the birthers will go away.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.

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Progress Starts with GOP Defeats

May 29th, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in 2012 Election, GOP, rightwing

The GOP is to Blame for Congressional Paralysis

By Brian Conners
Progressive America Rising via Yahoo Opinion

I’d like to say that each side is at blame, but that simply isn’t true and I’ll support this claim with data from recent history, not conjecture.

The March 1, 2010 article "The Problem with Filibusters–The Negative Impact of Political Obstructionism" lays out the facts and blames the GOP.

The article states "According to White House Communications Director, Dan Pfeiffer, the Senate cast more votes to break filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and ’60s combined. Politically savvy citizens observe that obstructionism is an increasing problem."

How can Congress help us if the GOP is obstructing every piece of legislation that the Democrats offered? The article states " Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island stated to the NewYork Times, "Republicans are dedicated soley to blocking legislative proposals for political purposes. He further stated on the Senate floor, "We have crossed the mark of over 100 filibusters and acts of procedural obstruction in less than one year. Never since the founding of the Republic, not even in the bitter sentiments preceding Civil War, was such a thing ever seen in this body."

Many people will say that the Democrats are proposing legislation that the GOP is entirely against-therefore they are partially to blame. Again, that is simply not the case.

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Turn on a Light, and Watch the GOP Rightwing Roaches Run

April 25th, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in 2012 Election, GOP, rightwing, Tea Party

Robert Draper Book: GOP’s Anti-Obama

Campaign Started Night Of Inauguration

By Sam Stein
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

WASHINGTON D.C. — As President Barack Obama was celebrating his inauguration at various balls, top Republican lawmakers and strategists were conjuring up ways to submarine his presidency at a private dinner in Washington, D.C.

The event — which provides a telling revelation for how quickly the post-election climate soured — serves as the prologue of Robert Draper’s much-discussed and heavily-reported new book, "Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives."

According to Draper, the guest list that night (which was just over 15 people in total) included Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican wordsmith. Notably absent were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who, Draper writes, had an acrimonious relationship with Luntz.

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.

"If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority," Draper quotes McCarthy as saying. "We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

The conversation got only more specific from there, Draper reports. Kyl suggested going after incoming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for failing to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes while at the International Monetary Fund. Gingrich noted that House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) had a similar tax problem. McCarthy chimed in to declare "there’s a web" before arguing that Republicans could put pressure on any Democrat who accepted campaign money from Rangel to give it back.

The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward:

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Why Republicans Must Be Defeated

April 21st, 2012 by admin | 1 Comment | Filed in 2012 Election, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, elections, rightwing, youth and students

New Curbs on Voter Registration Could Hurt Obama and Undermine Democracy

By Deborah Charles
Progressive America Rising via Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New state laws designed to fight voter fraud could reduce the number of Americans signing up to vote in this year’s presidential election by hundreds of thousands, a potential problem for President Barack Obama’s re-election bid.

Voting laws passed by Republican-led legislatures in a dozen states during the past year have sharply restricted voter-registration drives that typically target young, low-income, African-American and Hispanic voters – groups that have backed the Democratic president by wide margins.

A further 16 states are considering bills that would end voter registration on election days, impose a range of limits on groups that register voters and make it more difficult for people to sign up, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

The new laws – many of which include measures requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls – could carve into Obama’s potential support in Florida, Ohio and a few other politically divided states likely to be crucial in the November 6 election, analysts say.

The analysts note that massive registration drives in 2008 helped put millions of people aged 18 to 29 on voting rolls, and that age group – which makes up roughly one-quarter of the U.S. electorate – helped propel Obama to victory, voting 2-to-1 for him.

Rock the Vote, a nationwide organization that mobilizes young voters, said the new laws would make it more difficult for the group to educate people on how to sign up to vote.

"The types of laws have varied, but state by state they’ve added up to the fact that it’s going to be harder for young people to get registered and vote in this election cycle," said Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote.

"We have a very busy year ahead of us, and a very important one," she added. "What a shame if we can’t continue to engage this generation in the political process because these laws have made it harder."

PROBLEMS WITH REGISTRATIONS

Rock the Vote, which registered a record 2.25 million young voters in 2008, has set a considerably lower target this year: 1.5 million. The group says the drop is because of the new laws as well as the fact that unlike 2008, this election year has had a competitive primary contest only among Republicans.

The League of Women Voters also could sign up fewer voters this year, partly because it has joined Rock the Vote in suspending voter registration drives in Florida as the groups challenge that state’s new restrictions in court.

Another factor expected to drive down voter registration totals this year: the absence of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which registered more than 1 million mostly low-income voters in 2008.

Thousands of those registrations were for people who did not exist, submitted by ACORN-hired workers who were paid based on how many names they registered to vote.

The scandal helped lead to the demise of ACORN and inspire some of the anti-fraud laws affecting registration drives this year.

The episode involving ACORN, which folded in 2010 after it lost federal funding, showed a need for the new anti-fraud laws, said Brian Darling, a senior fellow for government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Like other conservatives, Darling rejected the notion that Republican-led legislatures had passed the laws to try to prevent certain groups from voting.

"There have been problems of voters being registered who weren’t real voters," Darling said. "Just look at the ACORN scandal."

The new laws have led to a flurry of lawsuits across the country.

FLORIDA’S LAW DRAWS FIRE

The new anti-fraud election laws vary from state to state, but Florida’s has received much attention largely because the state will be crucial in determining the winner of the November 6 presidential election.

Last May, Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, signed a law that imposes tough new restrictions on third-party groups if they do not turn in voter registration forms quickly.

State legislators in Florida – the state at the center of the disputed 2000 presidential election won by Republican George W. Bush – said the law was aimed at preventing fraud and adding credibility to elections.

But the groups that try to register voters say the law – which requires the groups to register with the state and turn in voter forms within 48 hours of obtaining them or face at least $5,000 in fines – are onerous and discriminatory.

The law also cuts the number of days for early voting and no longer allows voting on the Sunday before Election Day. Some activists said that unfairly targeted blacks and Hispanics, who went to the polls in large numbers the Sunday before Election Day in 2008 through programs called "Pews to the Polls" and "Souls to the Polls.

In Ohio, another crucial state in the election, the Obama campaign has asked supporters to rally against a proposal to curtail early voting, arguing weekend polling hours allow many workers more of a chance to vote.

COMPLICATIONS IN WISCONSIN

Other states’ voting laws complicate things for groups seeking to register voters.

In Wisconsin, new laws require licensing for anyone who registers someone else to vote, and the rules for licensing vary in the state’s 1,800 municipalities.

That could mean a volunteer for a voting drive in a school district would have to take a course and get licensed in a dozen different municipalities in that one school district, said Jeannette Senecal, director of elections for the League of Women Voters.

Senecal called Florida’s law the most "extreme" of the new regulations. She said the impact was already being felt across the state, with about 81,000 fewer voters registered this year than at the same time in 2008.

"Since they’re making it more difficult for organizations like ourselves to participate in the process," Senecal said, "it does cut back on the amount of opportunity that we have to register these unregistered voters."

Senior Obama campaign officials would not comment. But in some states, the campaign began its own voter registration efforts earlier than it did in 2008, to try to make up for the impact of the new laws.

The Heritage Foundation’s Darling said Democrats and voter registration groups were overplaying the impact of the new laws.

"Voter registration drives are great and all that, but it’s not the end-all and be-all of voting," he said. "If (people are)going to vote, they should take the initiative to go register themselves."

(Additional reporting by Eric Johnson in Chicago; Editing by David Lindsey and Peter Cooney)

Bringing Democracy to Mississippi

April 20th, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Organizing, rightwing, Tea Party, trade unions

How Mississippi’s Black/Brown Strategy Beat the South’s Anti-Immigrant Wave

Photo: Frank Curiel (R), an organizer for the Laborers Union and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, talks with Samuel Holguin, owner of the La Veracruzana market in Laurel, MS. Photo credit: David Bacon.

By David Bacon
Progressive America Rising via The Nation

Jackson, Mississippi, April 20, 2012 – In early April, an anti-immigrant bill like those that swept through legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina was stopped cold in Mississippi. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Tea Party Republicans were confident they’d roll over any opposition. They’d brought Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who co-authored Arizona’s SB 1070, into Jackson, to push for the Mississippi bill. The American Legislative Exchange Council, which designs and introduces similar bills into legislatures across the country, had its agents on the scene.

Their timing seemed unbeatable. Last November Republicans took control of the state House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction. Mississippi was one of the last Southern states in which Democrats controlled the legislature, and the turnover is a final triumph of Reagan and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. And the Republicans who took power weren’t just any Republicans. Haley Barbour, now ironically considered a “moderate Republican,” had stepped down as governor. Voters replaced him with an anti-immigrant successor, Phil Bryant, whose venom toward the foreign-born rivals Lou Dobbs.

Yet the seemingly inevitable didn’t happen.

Instead, from the opening of the legislative session just after New Years, the state’s Legislative Black Caucus fought a dogged rearguard war in the House. Over the last decade the caucus acquired a hard-won expertise on immigration, defeating over two hundred anti-immigrant measures. After New Year’s, though, they lost the crucial committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to kill those earlier bills. But they did not lose their voice.

“We forced a great debate in the House, until 1:30 in the morning,” says state Representative Jim Evans, caucus leader and still AFL-CIO staff member in Mississippi. “When you have a prolonged debate like that, it shows the widespread concern and disagreement. People began to see the ugliness in this measure.”

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Popular Front vs. Finance Capital, Anyone?

April 7th, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in 2012 Election, financial crisis, rightwing, Wall Street

The Banksters…

The Fable of the Century

By Robert Reich
Progressive America Rising via RobertReich.org

April 5, 2012 – Imagine a country in which the very richest people get all the economic gains. They eventually accumulate so much of the nation’s total income and wealth that the middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going full speed. Most of the middle class’s wages keep falling and their major asset – their home – keeps shrinking in value.

Imagine that the richest people in this country use some of their vast wealth to routinely bribe politicians. They get the politicians to cut their taxes so low there’s no money to finance important public investments that the middle class depends on – such as schools and roads, or safety nets such as health care for the elderly and poor.

Imagine further that among the richest of these rich are financiers. These financiers have so much power over the rest of the economy they get average taxpayers to bail them out when their bets in the casino called the stock market go bad. They have so much power they even shred regulations intended to limit their power.

These financiers have so much power they force businesses to lay off millions of workers and to reduce the wages and benefits of millions of others, in order to maximize profits and raise share prices – all of which make the financiers even richer, because they own so many of shares of stock and run the casino.

Now, imagine that among the richest of these financiers are people called private-equity managers who buy up companies in order to squeeze even more money out of them by loading them up with debt and firing even more of their employees, and then selling the companies for a fat profit.

Although these private-equity managers don’t even risk their own money – they round up investors to buy the target companies – they nonetheless pocket 20 percent of those fat profits.

And because of a loophole in the tax laws, which they created with their political bribes, these private equity managers are allowed to treat their whopping earnings as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent – even though they themselves made no investment and didn’t risk a dime.

Finally, imagine there is a presidential election. One party, called the Republican Party, nominates as its candidate a private-equity manager who has raked in more than $20 million a year and paid only 13.9 percent in taxes – a lower tax rate than many in the middle class.

Yes, I know it sounds far-fetched. But bear with me because the fable gets even wilder. Imagine this candidate and his party come up with a plan to cut the taxes of the rich even more – so millionaires save another $150,000 a year. And their plan cuts everything else the middle class and the poor depend on – Medicare, Medicaid, education, job-training, food stamps, Pell grants, child nutrition, even law enforcement.

What happens next?

There are two endings to this fable. You have to decide which it’s to be.

In one ending the private-equity manager candidate gets all his friends and everyone in the Wall Street casino and everyone in every executive suite of big corporations to contribute the largest wad of campaign money ever assembled – beyond your imagination.

The candidate uses the money to run continuous advertisements telling the same big lies over and over, such as “don’t tax the wealthy because they create the jobs” and “don’t tax corporations or they’ll go abroad” and “government is your enemy” and “the other party wants to turn America into a socialist state.”

And because big lies told repeatedly start sounding like the truth, the citizens of the country begin to believe them, and they elect the private equity manager president. Then he and his friends turn the country into a plutocracy (which it was starting to become anyway).

But there’s another ending. In this one, the candidacy of the private equity manager (and all the money he and his friends use to try to sell their lies) has the opposite effect. It awakens the citizens of the country to what is happening to their economy and their democracy. It ignites a movement among the citizens to take it all back.

The citizens repudiate the private equity manager and everything he stands for, and the party that nominated him. And they begin to recreate an economy that works for everyone and a democracy that’s responsive to everyone.

Just a fable, of course. But the ending is up to you.

Money-Rigged Elections Are Not Enough. The GOP Wants to Steal Votes as Well

March 8th, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in 2012 Election, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, racism, rightwing

Five Million Voters May Lose

Rights in the 2012 Elections

A voter leaves a polling station in a rural farming area during the state’s primary election on January 21, 2012 in New Hope, South Carolina. Photo: Richard Ellis/Getty Images

By Brentin Mock

Progressive America Rising via ColorLines.com

March 6 2012 – Today’s Super Tuesday primary involves 10 states and 437 delegates at stake for the Republican Party’s presidential prospects. There are two states among that crop that are worth taking a look at: Georgia and Tennessee. Both are emblems for a growing, and troubling, legislative trend in which new election laws mandate citizens to produce photo identification to vote, ask people to prove their citizenship to vote, or outright curtail voter registration efforts.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as five million eligible voters could meet difficulties this Election Day due to these new, imposing voter laws.

There are currently eight states with photo voter ID laws containing specific criteria for what qualifies as “identification” for voting purposes. Some states require that identification be state-issued and only for the state a person is voting in; some prohibit college IDs; some demand that the full name and address on the card be current; while some require that an ID card has an expiration date.

Looking at those stipulations, it’s not hard to imagine how low-income citizens, African Americans, Latino Americans, college students, and elderly voters—groups the Brennan Center has identified as the most burdened by new voter laws—might get tangled up on voter day. The Center estimates that as many as 11 percent of eligible voters lack proper identification right now. For African Americans, it’s 25 percent—that’s 5.5 million voting-age black Americans who could get turned away at the polls for being undocumented and unphotographed.

(more…)

2012: Reasons to Defeat the GOP

February 27th, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in 2012 Election, rightwing, trade unions

Five Things All the GOP Candidates Agree On

By Ed Kilgore
Progressive America Rising via The New Republic

By the very nature of political journalism, the attention of those covering the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest tends to be focused on areas of disagreement between the candidates, as well as on the policy positions and messages they are eager to use against Barack Obama. But there are a host of other issues where the Republican candidates are in too much agreement to create a lot of controversy during debates or gin up excitement in the popular media. Areas of agreement, after all, rarely provoke shock or drive readership. But the fact that the Republican Party has reached such a stable consensus on such a great number of far-right positions is in many ways a more shocking phenomenon than the rare topic on which they disagree. Here are just a few areas of consensus on which the rightward lurch of the GOP during the last few years has become remarkably apparent:

1. Hard money. With the exception of Ron Paul’s serial campaigns and a failed 1988 effort by Jack Kemp, it’s been a very long time since Republican presidential candidates flirted with the gold standard or even talked about currency polices. Recent assaults by 2012 candidates on Ben Bernanke and demands for audits of the Fed reflect a consensus in favor of deflationary monetary policies and elimination of any Fed mission other than preventing inflation. When combined with unconditional GOP hostility to stimulative fiscal policies—another new development—this position all but guarantees that a 2012 Republican victory will help usher in a longer and deeper recession than would otherwise be the case.

2. Anti-unionism. While national Republican candidates have always perceived the labor movement as a partisan enemy, they haven’t generally championed overtly anti-labor legislation. Last Thursday, however, they all backed legislation to strip the National Labor Relations Board of its power to prevent plant relocations designed to retaliate against legally protected union activities (power the NLRB is exercising in the famous Boeing case involving presidential primary hotspot South Carolina). Meanwhile, at least two major candidates, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, have endorsed a national right-to-work law, and Romney and Perry have also encouraged states like New Hampshire to adopt right-to-work laws.

3. Radical anti-environmentalism. Until quite recently, Republicans running for president paid lip service to environmental protection as a legitimate national priority, typically differentiating themselves from Democrats by favoring less regulatory enforcement approaches and more careful assessment of economic costs and market mechanisms. The new mood in the GOP is perhaps best exemplified by Herman Cain’s proposal at the most recent presidential debate that “victims” of the Environmental Protection Agency (apparently, energy industry or utility executives) should dominate a commission to review environmental regulations—an idea quickly endorsed by Rick Perry. In fact, this approach might represent the middle-of-the-road within the party, given the many calls by other Republicans (including presidential candidates Paul, Bachmann, and Gingrich) for the outright abolition of EPA.

4.Radical anti-abortion activism. Gone are the days when at least one major Republican candidate (e.g., Rudy Giuliani in 2008) could be counted on to appeal to pro-choice Republicans by expressing some reluctance to embrace an immediate abolition of abortion rights. Now the only real intramural controversy on abortion has mainly surrounded a sweeping pledge proffered to candidates by the Susan B. Anthony List—one that would bind their executive as well as judicial appointments, and require an effort to cut off federal funds to institutions only tangentially involved in abortions. Despite this fact, only Mitt Romney and Herman Cain have refused to sign. Both, however, have reiterated their support for the reversal of Roe v. Wade and a constitutional amendment to ban abortion forever (though Romney has said that’s not achievable at present).

5. No role for government in the economy. Most remarkably, the 2012 candidate field appears to agree that there is absolutely nothing the federal government can do to improve the economy—other than disabling itself as quickly as possible. Entirely missing are the kind of modest initiatives for job training, temporary income support, or fiscal relief for hard-pressed state and local governments that Republicans in the past have favored as a conservative alternative to big government counter-cyclical schemes. Also missing are any rhetorical gestures towards the public-sector role in fostering a good economic climate, whether through better schools, basic research, infrastructure projects, and other public investments (the very term has been demonized as synonymous with irresponsible spending).

Add all this up, and it’s apparent the Republican Party has become identified with a radically conservative world-view in which environmental regulations and collective bargaining by workers have strangled the economy; deregulation, federal spending cuts, and deflation of the currency are the only immediate remedies; and the path back to national righteousness will require restoration of the kinds of mores—including criminalization of abortion—that prevailed before things started going to hell in the 1960s. That Republicans hardly even argue about such things anymore makes the party’s transformation that much more striking—if less noticeable to the news media and the population at large.

Ed Kilgore is a special correspondent for The New Republic. Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/the-permanent-campaign/95054/gop-hard-money-anti-union

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