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9. Gingrich Surges With Old, Familiar Ploy: Racist Attacks on Poor People
January 19, 2012
by Seth Freed Wessler
Newt Gingrich looks to be winning the race-baiting competition this Republican primary season. Fueled by a new version of his well honed attacks on the safety net, Gingrich celebrated Martin Luther King Day on Monday by restating what has become a staple of his stump speeches, calling President Obama the “best food stamp president in American history.”
The remark came, this time, after debate moderator Juan Williams asked if Gingrich’s campaign-trail suggestion that poor students be given jobs as janitors might me “viewed at a minimum insulting to all Americans, but as particularly to African Americans?” “The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barrack Obama than any president in American history,” Gingrich said before an audience that erupted into vociferous applause.
Gingrich argues that the reason so many people are on food stamps is not that the economy has thrown millions into poverty, but rather that lazy black families are getting on the dole and don’t want to work. Earlier this month, Gingrich told an audience in New Hampshire, “If the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”
Gingrich’s attack on the food stamp program is not surprising; it’s the kind of politics that he’s been helping to perfect for over 30 years. He’s been waging the conservative counterrevolution against economic justice for a generation, using whatever Southern Strategy relics he can get his hands on.
Read more: http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/01/newt_gingrich_racist_food_stamps_attack.html
10. Newt Gingrich: Food Stamp President Dog Whistle Racism
January 20, 2012
11. Study: Hate of Obama fuels 755% growth in extremist groups
March 9, 2012
by David Edwards
Fears that the nation’s first black president will be re-elected has fueled the dramatic growth extremists groups in the U.S. over the past year, according to a report from a civil rights organization that tracks these groups.
The number of groups in the anti-government “Patriot” movement have sky rocketed 755 percent since President Barack Obama has been elected, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) yearly report found.
“These groups are becoming more and more aware as they watch the primary season unfold that Obama is fairly likely to win and some of them are having meltdowns over this,” Southern Poverty Law Center senior fellow Mark Potok told Raw Story. “They’re looking at four more years under a very hated black president — hated by them. So, we’re seeing signs of real anger over that. People saying we’re at war already, saying go out and buy AK-47s and hollow-point bullets, get tools to derail trains.”
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/09/study-hate-of-obama-fuels-755-growth-in-extremist-groups/
12. Michigan City Councilman in hot water as video of Obama's head on a spike emerges
August 9, 2012
via The Detroit News
Sterling Heights— The City Council called for Councilman Paul Smith to resign over a video that shows him holding inflammatory signs depicting violence against President Barack Obama and others during a tea party rally in 2009.
Read more: http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/scarce/michigan-city-councilman-and-tea-partier-ge
13. Ohio senator: ‘Jim Crow has been resurrected’
August 14, 2012
by Arturo Garcia
An Ohio Democratic senator slammed her state’s Republican party and accused them of racially-motivated voter-suppresion tactics during an interview with CNN’s Deborah Feyerick Tuesday.
“It’s tragic that in the 21st century, 2012, we have voter suppression going on,” Sen. Nina Turner (D-OH) said. “Jim Crow has been resurrected, making repeat performances in the south and has packed his bags and moved north, in Ohio, in particular.”
A past analysis of voter tendencies in 2008 by the Dayton Daily News indicated that Democratic voters voted earlier than Republicans. While not citing that study, Turner did point at what she called efforts to stifle voting hours in urban and Democratic-leaning areas while extending them for Republican-dominated precincts, echoing a report by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week.
“Even Ray Charles could see what is going on here: flat-out voter suppression in democratic areas and also areas that are predominantly African-American,” Turner said.
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/14/ohio-senator-jim-crow-has-been-resurrected/
14. Republican Voter Suppression Campaign Rolls Back Early Voting
August 18, 2012
by Dan Froomkin
But early voting was apparently too much of a success for some people. In Ohio and four other states -- Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and West Virginia -- Republican-led legislatures have dramatically reduced early voting in 2012 as part of what can only be explained as a concerted effort to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning voters. Other parts of that effort include voter ID bils, intimidation of voter registration groups and the purges of voter rolls.
In Ohio and Florida, two of the most critical swing states in this year's presidential election, the GOP early voting rollback specifically included a ban on voting on the Sunday before Election Day.
Early voting started off a wildly popular, bipartisan element of voting reform. Indeed, of all the voting reforms this country has seen over the last decades, early voting is easily the most unassailable. It makes voting more convenient for the public and makes Election Day easier for election officials. Because it generally happens at board of elections offices, it takes notoriously unreliable volunteer poll workers out of the picture.
But Republican leaders cooled on the idea after 2008. "It just so happened that this was the first time that early voting had been used in large numbers to mobilize African American and Latino voters," said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
After the GOP won control of many statehouses in 2010, rolling back early voting became a top legislative priority. That meant reducing the period for early in-person voting in Florida from 14 to 8 days, and in Ohio, from 35 to 11. And no voting on Sunday before the election.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/18/republican-voter-suppression-early-voting_n_1766172.html
15. Ohio GOP Election Board Member: Our Voting Process Shouldn’t Accommodate Black Voters
August 19, 2012
by Aviva Shen
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s recent decision to prohibit early voting on nights and weekends in all districts has many concerned about the effect on voter turnout in the state, particularly among low-income and minority communities. But one Republican Party chairman is content to suppress votes among this vulnerable demographic. Doug Preisse, chairman of the Republican Party in Franklin County, which contains the city of Columbus, admitted in an email to the Columbus Dispatch that black voters would now have a more difficult time voting:
I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine. Let’s be fair and reasonable.
Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/08/19/711551/gop-election-board-member-admits-he-canceled-weekend-voting-in-ohio-to-suppress-the-black-vote/?mobile=nc
16. The Party of No: New Details on the GOP Plot to Obstruct Obama
August 23, 2012
by Michael Grunwald
TIME just published “The Party of No,” an article adapted from my new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. It reveals some of my reporting on the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.” The excerpt includes a special bonus nugget of Mitt Romney dissing the Tea Party.
But as we say in the sales world: There’s more! I’m going to be blogging some of the news and larger themes from the book here at TIME.com, and I’ll kick it off with more scenes from the early days of the Republican strategy of No. Read on to hear what Joe Biden’s sources in the Senate GOP were telling him, some candid pillow talk between a Republican staffer and an Obama aide, and a top Republican admitting his party didn’t want to “play.” I’ll start with a scene I consider a turning point in the Obama era, when the new President went to the Hill to extend his hand and the GOP spurned it.
On Jan. 27, 2009, House Republican leader John Boehner opened his weekly conference meeting with an announcement: Obama would make his first visit to the Capitol around noon, to meet exclusively with Republicans about his economic-recovery plan. “We’re looking forward to the President’s visit,” Boehner said.
The niceties ended there, as Boehner turned to the $815 billion stimulus bill that House Democrats had just unveiled. Boehner complained that it would spend too much, too late, on too many Democratic goodies. He urged his members to trash it on cable, on YouTube, on the House floor: “It’s another run-of-the-mill, undisciplined, cumbersome, wasteful Washington spending bill … I hope everyone here will join me in voting no!”
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/23/the-party-of-no-new-details-on-the-gop-plot-to-obstruct-obama/#ixzz24R8XIAET
17. If It Walks Like a Duck and Talks Like a Duck: Racism, Bigotry and the Death of Respectable Conservatism
August 25, 2012
by Molefi Kete Asante
For the most part, I’ve tried to be restrained.
Although conservatives accuse those of us on the left of thinking that all critiques of President Obama are rooted in racism, this has certainly never been my argument. Indeed, I’ve written two books highly critical of Obama’s positions on a number of issues (from a place well to his left), and am fully aware that decent, honest people can disagree with Barack Obama from the right, too, without their disagreements serving as proof of some latent, let alone blatant, bigotry or anti-black bias.
That said, what I have also long maintained — and what seems increasingly evident as we move into the heart of the 2012 campaign — is that the style of opposition, its specific form, and its particular content are too often embedded in a narrative of white racial resentment, white racial anxiety, and a desire to “other” the president in ways that go well beyond the politically partisan. It is not that criticisms of Obama are quantitatively racist, per se, but rather that they are qualitatively so in too many instances; a distinction, yes, but one that does not alter the underlying reality.
In other words, it is one thing to disagree, even mightily, with a president’s policies.
It is quite another to suggest that that president is really a foreign imposter: over, and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And to accept no proof, no matter how extensive, that he really is an American after all.*
Or to suggest that he is a secret Muslim who wishes to see Sharia Law imposed in the United States, and who is working to usher in just such an outcome, and that he and his wife engage in “terrorist fist jabs” as their preferred form of greeting.
Or a Manchurian Candidate, bent on destroying America, or at least deliberately destroying the economy so as to pay whites back for slavery and racism, and insisting that he only appoints people to his administration if they hate whites, and that he only received the endorsement of Colin Powell because he’s black.
Read more: http://www.timwise.org/2012/08/if-it-walks-like-a-duck-and-talks-like-a-duck-racism-bigotry-and-the-death-of-respectable-conservatism/#more-2027
18. The Republican Strategy: The Niggerization of the Democratic Party:
August 27, 2012
Let's cut through the bullshit here, much like Chris Matthews did on Morning Starbucks with Joe today. The GOP strategy right now is simple: The Democratic Party is a bunch of niggers, with a nigger leading them. Do you want to be a nigger lover or, even worse, a nigger yourself?
See, it's not enough that Mitt Romney and his filthy minions marginalize the President by turning him into an angry black foreigner through idiotic jokes, heh-heh. No, they have to turn one of the coolest, mellowest men of any race and transform him into the vicious, rage-filled child of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon. They have to go after his likability, his perceived strength, as Rove would want, and make us look at Barack Obama and only see the seething native, waiting to spear the poor, misunderstood colonizers and take their money to give to the rest of the Hottentots.
But they need to go further. It's not enough to make it seem like Democrats follow a cannibal bastard. Instead, the strategy has become to make simply being a Democrat associated with the dirty, poverty, hands-out part of humanity. The niggers, if you will. Romney told USA Today (motto: "Every once in a while, news gets in here"
, regarding the waivers on welfare reform, that the President was just trying to "shore up his base" by, in essence, sending the word that the niggers won't have to work for that welfare check and can keep stealing from the rest of us. Even if the truth is the exact opposite, Romney keeps repeating it and flogging that lie like it's a ... well, you know.
With recent polls showing that the GOP couldn't get a black vote even if Romney took Rihanna as a sister-wife and the Hispanic vote limited mostly to a few Cuban-Americans, apparently they've more or less said, "Oh, fuck it" and not only played the race card but an entire race hand. That's the game now. How many whites, especially white males, feel so uncomfortable in a room with non-whites that they would vote for whatever white guys are running against Obama?
Read more: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-republican-strategy-niggerization.html
19. Making the Election About Race
August 27, 2012
by THOMAS B. EDSALL
The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.
Ads that accuse President Obama of gutting the work requirements enacted in the 1996 welfare reform legislation present the first theme. Ads alleging that Obama has taken $716 billion from Medicare — a program serving an overwhelmingly white constituency — in order to provide health coverage to the heavily black and Hispanic poor deliver the second. The ads are meant to work together, to mutually reinforce each other’s claims.
The announcer in one of the Romney campaign’s TV ads focusing on welfare tells viewers:
In 1996, President Clinton and a bipartisan Congress helped end welfare as we know it by requiring work for welfare. But on July 12, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping the work requirement. Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you a welfare check. And welfare-to-work goes back to being plain old welfare. Mitt Romney will restore the work requirement because it works.
The ad includes the following text and photograph:
Read more: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/making-the-election-about-race/?hp
20. Race Takes Over the Race
August 27, 2012
by Elspeth Reeve
Mitt Romney says that Obama allowed a waiver for the work requirement for welfare -- if states have a better way of getting recipients into jobs -- so that the President could "shore up his base." Romney probably didn't mean the Republican governors who asked for the waivers but, fitting with his campaign's recent message, poor black people who take white people's money.
On MSNBC's Morning Joe Monday, Chris Matthews tore into Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus about the welfare attacks and Romney's birther jokes, saying Republicans were playing the race card. Priebus seemed slightly taken aback by the angry Matthews, and the show's hosts tried awkwardly to calm him down. They failed. Priebus said Romney was just talking about his Michigan roots, and accused Matthews of being unable to take a joke. Matthews yelled that "The first joke he ever told in his life is about Obama's birth certificate."
Romney's advisers believe Romney "needs a more combative footing against President Obama in order to appeal to white, working-class voters and to persuade them that he is the best answer to their economic frustrations," The New York Times' Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg reported. And as we pointed out on Friday, if Romney gets 61 percent of the white vote, he wins. If you have any doubt that Romney is playing the race card, check out his YouTube page. There are five ads falsely accusing Obama of gutting welfare reform. The Republican National Committee has put out its own welfare ad. And another three Romney ads say Obama is raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare. The latter ads show white faces and say "you paid in" but now health care is going to somebody else.
Let's look at some of the visuals in these ads. I've turned them into GIF form to show the most race-y parts so you don't have to sit through a whole video. This is from the RNC's ad "Never Happened":
Read more: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/08/race-takes-over-race/56223/#1
21. Will Republicans succeed with Jim Crow lite laws?
September 3, 2012
by Mary Sanchez
Old Southern political bosses of the Jim Crow era would have winked with delight at the ingenious ploys of their latter-day successors in the art of voter suppression.
Republican legislators in dozens of states have devised a number of schemes to deny the rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans to vote.
Many have succeeded, passing laws that would compel voters to present new forms of identification that many will find difficult to obtain, new fees, and confusing new rules that voters must navigate or risk having their vote disqualified.
A July report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that nearly 500,000 voters in 10 states with such ramped-up voter identification laws will struggle to meet the new standards.
Most of the disenfranchised will be African American, Hispanic, poor, rural or elderly.
Read more:
http://www.kansascity.com/2012/09/03/3790385/voter-id-laws.html
22. Barbour: ‘I Would Love For Christie To Put A Hot Poker To Obama’s Butt’
September 4, 2012
by Pema Levy
Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said that he wished New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had "put a hot poker to Obama's butt" in his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention," according to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek.
Barbour spoke at a fundraiser and briefing in Tampa last Thursday put on by Karl Rove, who co-founded the American Crossroads super PAC and its sister non-profit. Barbour is a former adviser to the groups.
“While I would love for [Chris] Christie to put a hot poker to Obama’s butt,” Haley said of his reaction to Christie's address. “I thought he did what he was supposed to do.”
Read more: http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/barbour-i-would-love-for-christie-to-put
23. Voting Rights Under Attack as GOP Seeks to Overturn Historic Civil Rights Law
September 7, 2012
by Common Dreams staff
Civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) told the audience at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night, “we have come too far together to ever turn back,” warning that Republican-led voter suppression laws are taking America back to the days when states had the right to deny voting capabilities to minority voters. Voting rights for minority voters continue to come under attack as Republican leaders are now turning to the Supreme Court to overturn historic civil rights legislation.
Several federal judges recently struck down voter suppression laws in multiple states, introduced by Republican legislators and governors, such as voter identification laws, provisional voting restrictions, limits on voter registration drives, and reduced availability for early voting.
The court rulings in Florida, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin, marked a widespread rejection of so called 'voter fraud' legislation, which seeks to greatly limit who can and cannot vote.
However, as Chris McGreal at the Guardian reports today, "Several state governments are (now) looking to the conservative-leaning supreme court, which has already expressed its doubts about racially-based policy," in order to overturn these rulings. This step would seek to challenge the historic Voter Rights Act of 1965, which gave the federal government some control over voting rules in states with a history of blocking African Americans from voting.
Read more: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/09/07-4
January 19, 2012
by Seth Freed Wessler
Newt Gingrich looks to be winning the race-baiting competition this Republican primary season. Fueled by a new version of his well honed attacks on the safety net, Gingrich celebrated Martin Luther King Day on Monday by restating what has become a staple of his stump speeches, calling President Obama the “best food stamp president in American history.”
The remark came, this time, after debate moderator Juan Williams asked if Gingrich’s campaign-trail suggestion that poor students be given jobs as janitors might me “viewed at a minimum insulting to all Americans, but as particularly to African Americans?” “The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barrack Obama than any president in American history,” Gingrich said before an audience that erupted into vociferous applause.
Gingrich argues that the reason so many people are on food stamps is not that the economy has thrown millions into poverty, but rather that lazy black families are getting on the dole and don’t want to work. Earlier this month, Gingrich told an audience in New Hampshire, “If the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”
Gingrich’s attack on the food stamp program is not surprising; it’s the kind of politics that he’s been helping to perfect for over 30 years. He’s been waging the conservative counterrevolution against economic justice for a generation, using whatever Southern Strategy relics he can get his hands on.
Read more: http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/01/newt_gingrich_racist_food_stamps_attack.html
10. Newt Gingrich: Food Stamp President Dog Whistle Racism
January 20, 2012
11. Study: Hate of Obama fuels 755% growth in extremist groups
March 9, 2012
by David Edwards
Fears that the nation’s first black president will be re-elected has fueled the dramatic growth extremists groups in the U.S. over the past year, according to a report from a civil rights organization that tracks these groups.
The number of groups in the anti-government “Patriot” movement have sky rocketed 755 percent since President Barack Obama has been elected, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) yearly report found.
“These groups are becoming more and more aware as they watch the primary season unfold that Obama is fairly likely to win and some of them are having meltdowns over this,” Southern Poverty Law Center senior fellow Mark Potok told Raw Story. “They’re looking at four more years under a very hated black president — hated by them. So, we’re seeing signs of real anger over that. People saying we’re at war already, saying go out and buy AK-47s and hollow-point bullets, get tools to derail trains.”
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/09/study-hate-of-obama-fuels-755-growth-in-extremist-groups/
12. Michigan City Councilman in hot water as video of Obama's head on a spike emerges
August 9, 2012
via The Detroit News
Sterling Heights— The City Council called for Councilman Paul Smith to resign over a video that shows him holding inflammatory signs depicting violence against President Barack Obama and others during a tea party rally in 2009.
Read more: http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/scarce/michigan-city-councilman-and-tea-partier-ge
13. Ohio senator: ‘Jim Crow has been resurrected’
August 14, 2012
by Arturo Garcia
An Ohio Democratic senator slammed her state’s Republican party and accused them of racially-motivated voter-suppresion tactics during an interview with CNN’s Deborah Feyerick Tuesday.
“It’s tragic that in the 21st century, 2012, we have voter suppression going on,” Sen. Nina Turner (D-OH) said. “Jim Crow has been resurrected, making repeat performances in the south and has packed his bags and moved north, in Ohio, in particular.”
A past analysis of voter tendencies in 2008 by the Dayton Daily News indicated that Democratic voters voted earlier than Republicans. While not citing that study, Turner did point at what she called efforts to stifle voting hours in urban and Democratic-leaning areas while extending them for Republican-dominated precincts, echoing a report by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week.
“Even Ray Charles could see what is going on here: flat-out voter suppression in democratic areas and also areas that are predominantly African-American,” Turner said.
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/14/ohio-senator-jim-crow-has-been-resurrected/
14. Republican Voter Suppression Campaign Rolls Back Early Voting
August 18, 2012
by Dan Froomkin
But early voting was apparently too much of a success for some people. In Ohio and four other states -- Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and West Virginia -- Republican-led legislatures have dramatically reduced early voting in 2012 as part of what can only be explained as a concerted effort to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning voters. Other parts of that effort include voter ID bils, intimidation of voter registration groups and the purges of voter rolls.
In Ohio and Florida, two of the most critical swing states in this year's presidential election, the GOP early voting rollback specifically included a ban on voting on the Sunday before Election Day.
Early voting started off a wildly popular, bipartisan element of voting reform. Indeed, of all the voting reforms this country has seen over the last decades, early voting is easily the most unassailable. It makes voting more convenient for the public and makes Election Day easier for election officials. Because it generally happens at board of elections offices, it takes notoriously unreliable volunteer poll workers out of the picture.
But Republican leaders cooled on the idea after 2008. "It just so happened that this was the first time that early voting had been used in large numbers to mobilize African American and Latino voters," said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
After the GOP won control of many statehouses in 2010, rolling back early voting became a top legislative priority. That meant reducing the period for early in-person voting in Florida from 14 to 8 days, and in Ohio, from 35 to 11. And no voting on Sunday before the election.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/18/republican-voter-suppression-early-voting_n_1766172.html
15. Ohio GOP Election Board Member: Our Voting Process Shouldn’t Accommodate Black Voters
August 19, 2012
by Aviva Shen
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s recent decision to prohibit early voting on nights and weekends in all districts has many concerned about the effect on voter turnout in the state, particularly among low-income and minority communities. But one Republican Party chairman is content to suppress votes among this vulnerable demographic. Doug Preisse, chairman of the Republican Party in Franklin County, which contains the city of Columbus, admitted in an email to the Columbus Dispatch that black voters would now have a more difficult time voting:
I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine. Let’s be fair and reasonable.
Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/08/19/711551/gop-election-board-member-admits-he-canceled-weekend-voting-in-ohio-to-suppress-the-black-vote/?mobile=nc
16. The Party of No: New Details on the GOP Plot to Obstruct Obama
August 23, 2012
by Michael Grunwald
TIME just published “The Party of No,” an article adapted from my new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. It reveals some of my reporting on the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.” The excerpt includes a special bonus nugget of Mitt Romney dissing the Tea Party.
But as we say in the sales world: There’s more! I’m going to be blogging some of the news and larger themes from the book here at TIME.com, and I’ll kick it off with more scenes from the early days of the Republican strategy of No. Read on to hear what Joe Biden’s sources in the Senate GOP were telling him, some candid pillow talk between a Republican staffer and an Obama aide, and a top Republican admitting his party didn’t want to “play.” I’ll start with a scene I consider a turning point in the Obama era, when the new President went to the Hill to extend his hand and the GOP spurned it.
On Jan. 27, 2009, House Republican leader John Boehner opened his weekly conference meeting with an announcement: Obama would make his first visit to the Capitol around noon, to meet exclusively with Republicans about his economic-recovery plan. “We’re looking forward to the President’s visit,” Boehner said.
The niceties ended there, as Boehner turned to the $815 billion stimulus bill that House Democrats had just unveiled. Boehner complained that it would spend too much, too late, on too many Democratic goodies. He urged his members to trash it on cable, on YouTube, on the House floor: “It’s another run-of-the-mill, undisciplined, cumbersome, wasteful Washington spending bill … I hope everyone here will join me in voting no!”
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/23/the-party-of-no-new-details-on-the-gop-plot-to-obstruct-obama/#ixzz24R8XIAET
17. If It Walks Like a Duck and Talks Like a Duck: Racism, Bigotry and the Death of Respectable Conservatism
August 25, 2012
by Molefi Kete Asante
For the most part, I’ve tried to be restrained.
Although conservatives accuse those of us on the left of thinking that all critiques of President Obama are rooted in racism, this has certainly never been my argument. Indeed, I’ve written two books highly critical of Obama’s positions on a number of issues (from a place well to his left), and am fully aware that decent, honest people can disagree with Barack Obama from the right, too, without their disagreements serving as proof of some latent, let alone blatant, bigotry or anti-black bias.
That said, what I have also long maintained — and what seems increasingly evident as we move into the heart of the 2012 campaign — is that the style of opposition, its specific form, and its particular content are too often embedded in a narrative of white racial resentment, white racial anxiety, and a desire to “other” the president in ways that go well beyond the politically partisan. It is not that criticisms of Obama are quantitatively racist, per se, but rather that they are qualitatively so in too many instances; a distinction, yes, but one that does not alter the underlying reality.
In other words, it is one thing to disagree, even mightily, with a president’s policies.
It is quite another to suggest that that president is really a foreign imposter: over, and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And to accept no proof, no matter how extensive, that he really is an American after all.*
Or to suggest that he is a secret Muslim who wishes to see Sharia Law imposed in the United States, and who is working to usher in just such an outcome, and that he and his wife engage in “terrorist fist jabs” as their preferred form of greeting.
Or a Manchurian Candidate, bent on destroying America, or at least deliberately destroying the economy so as to pay whites back for slavery and racism, and insisting that he only appoints people to his administration if they hate whites, and that he only received the endorsement of Colin Powell because he’s black.
Read more: http://www.timwise.org/2012/08/if-it-walks-like-a-duck-and-talks-like-a-duck-racism-bigotry-and-the-death-of-respectable-conservatism/#more-2027
18. The Republican Strategy: The Niggerization of the Democratic Party:
August 27, 2012
Let's cut through the bullshit here, much like Chris Matthews did on Morning Starbucks with Joe today. The GOP strategy right now is simple: The Democratic Party is a bunch of niggers, with a nigger leading them. Do you want to be a nigger lover or, even worse, a nigger yourself?
See, it's not enough that Mitt Romney and his filthy minions marginalize the President by turning him into an angry black foreigner through idiotic jokes, heh-heh. No, they have to turn one of the coolest, mellowest men of any race and transform him into the vicious, rage-filled child of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon. They have to go after his likability, his perceived strength, as Rove would want, and make us look at Barack Obama and only see the seething native, waiting to spear the poor, misunderstood colonizers and take their money to give to the rest of the Hottentots.
But they need to go further. It's not enough to make it seem like Democrats follow a cannibal bastard. Instead, the strategy has become to make simply being a Democrat associated with the dirty, poverty, hands-out part of humanity. The niggers, if you will. Romney told USA Today (motto: "Every once in a while, news gets in here"
, regarding the waivers on welfare reform, that the President was just trying to "shore up his base" by, in essence, sending the word that the niggers won't have to work for that welfare check and can keep stealing from the rest of us. Even if the truth is the exact opposite, Romney keeps repeating it and flogging that lie like it's a ... well, you know.
With recent polls showing that the GOP couldn't get a black vote even if Romney took Rihanna as a sister-wife and the Hispanic vote limited mostly to a few Cuban-Americans, apparently they've more or less said, "Oh, fuck it" and not only played the race card but an entire race hand. That's the game now. How many whites, especially white males, feel so uncomfortable in a room with non-whites that they would vote for whatever white guys are running against Obama?
Read more: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-republican-strategy-niggerization.html
19. Making the Election About Race
August 27, 2012
by THOMAS B. EDSALL
The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.
Ads that accuse President Obama of gutting the work requirements enacted in the 1996 welfare reform legislation present the first theme. Ads alleging that Obama has taken $716 billion from Medicare — a program serving an overwhelmingly white constituency — in order to provide health coverage to the heavily black and Hispanic poor deliver the second. The ads are meant to work together, to mutually reinforce each other’s claims.
The announcer in one of the Romney campaign’s TV ads focusing on welfare tells viewers:
In 1996, President Clinton and a bipartisan Congress helped end welfare as we know it by requiring work for welfare. But on July 12, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping the work requirement. Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you a welfare check. And welfare-to-work goes back to being plain old welfare. Mitt Romney will restore the work requirement because it works.
The ad includes the following text and photograph:
Read more: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/making-the-election-about-race/?hp
20. Race Takes Over the Race
August 27, 2012
by Elspeth Reeve
Mitt Romney says that Obama allowed a waiver for the work requirement for welfare -- if states have a better way of getting recipients into jobs -- so that the President could "shore up his base." Romney probably didn't mean the Republican governors who asked for the waivers but, fitting with his campaign's recent message, poor black people who take white people's money.
On MSNBC's Morning Joe Monday, Chris Matthews tore into Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus about the welfare attacks and Romney's birther jokes, saying Republicans were playing the race card. Priebus seemed slightly taken aback by the angry Matthews, and the show's hosts tried awkwardly to calm him down. They failed. Priebus said Romney was just talking about his Michigan roots, and accused Matthews of being unable to take a joke. Matthews yelled that "The first joke he ever told in his life is about Obama's birth certificate."
Romney's advisers believe Romney "needs a more combative footing against President Obama in order to appeal to white, working-class voters and to persuade them that he is the best answer to their economic frustrations," The New York Times' Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg reported. And as we pointed out on Friday, if Romney gets 61 percent of the white vote, he wins. If you have any doubt that Romney is playing the race card, check out his YouTube page. There are five ads falsely accusing Obama of gutting welfare reform. The Republican National Committee has put out its own welfare ad. And another three Romney ads say Obama is raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare. The latter ads show white faces and say "you paid in" but now health care is going to somebody else.
Let's look at some of the visuals in these ads. I've turned them into GIF form to show the most race-y parts so you don't have to sit through a whole video. This is from the RNC's ad "Never Happened":
Read more: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/08/race-takes-over-race/56223/#1
21. Will Republicans succeed with Jim Crow lite laws?
September 3, 2012
by Mary Sanchez
Old Southern political bosses of the Jim Crow era would have winked with delight at the ingenious ploys of their latter-day successors in the art of voter suppression.
Republican legislators in dozens of states have devised a number of schemes to deny the rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans to vote.
Many have succeeded, passing laws that would compel voters to present new forms of identification that many will find difficult to obtain, new fees, and confusing new rules that voters must navigate or risk having their vote disqualified.
A July report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that nearly 500,000 voters in 10 states with such ramped-up voter identification laws will struggle to meet the new standards.
Most of the disenfranchised will be African American, Hispanic, poor, rural or elderly.
Read more:
http://www.kansascity.com/2012/09/03/3790385/voter-id-laws.html
22. Barbour: ‘I Would Love For Christie To Put A Hot Poker To Obama’s Butt’
September 4, 2012
by Pema Levy
Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said that he wished New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had "put a hot poker to Obama's butt" in his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention," according to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek.
Barbour spoke at a fundraiser and briefing in Tampa last Thursday put on by Karl Rove, who co-founded the American Crossroads super PAC and its sister non-profit. Barbour is a former adviser to the groups.
“While I would love for [Chris] Christie to put a hot poker to Obama’s butt,” Haley said of his reaction to Christie's address. “I thought he did what he was supposed to do.”
Read more: http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/barbour-i-would-love-for-christie-to-put
23. Voting Rights Under Attack as GOP Seeks to Overturn Historic Civil Rights Law
September 7, 2012
by Common Dreams staff
Civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) told the audience at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night, “we have come too far together to ever turn back,” warning that Republican-led voter suppression laws are taking America back to the days when states had the right to deny voting capabilities to minority voters. Voting rights for minority voters continue to come under attack as Republican leaders are now turning to the Supreme Court to overturn historic civil rights legislation.
Several federal judges recently struck down voter suppression laws in multiple states, introduced by Republican legislators and governors, such as voter identification laws, provisional voting restrictions, limits on voter registration drives, and reduced availability for early voting.
The court rulings in Florida, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin, marked a widespread rejection of so called 'voter fraud' legislation, which seeks to greatly limit who can and cannot vote.
However, as Chris McGreal at the Guardian reports today, "Several state governments are (now) looking to the conservative-leaning supreme court, which has already expressed its doubts about racially-based policy," in order to overturn these rulings. This step would seek to challenge the historic Voter Rights Act of 1965, which gave the federal government some control over voting rules in states with a history of blocking African Americans from voting.
Read more: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/09/07-4
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