Category Archives: Elections

March 26, 2011 · 10:00 am

The Biggest Threat Facing the Country Today Is Fast Creeping Ignorance | | AlterNet

More on the theme of glorifying ignorance in America…

This acceptance and glorification of willful ignorance is really the greatest threat to our country…

There was a time we wanted the “best and the brightest” to run things…

Now we glorify mediocrities and dullards…

White people complain so much about Black people glorifying the Ghetto Culture of bling, profanity and baggy pants…

How can they talk when White folks glorify the willful ignorance of Glen Beck, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Ann Coulter?

Both groups are glorifying the lowest common denominators of their culture.

If Whites argue ghetto culture brings down the Black race, they why can’t they accept the argument that willful ignorance does the same for the White race?

Both concepts glorify what used to be “negative” images that have become “positive” images in their societies…

Just my thoughts….

As a story from Alternet put it, “3/4ths of Senate GOP Doesn’t Believe in Science: The Tea Party and its allies had made it unacceptable to the GOP base to be anywhere except pandering to the anti-science crowd.” (Full Story)

The Right, which hated and feared commies and their (largely imaginary) infiltration into government, not only don’t seem to care about creeping ignorance in government, but have come to embrace this new breed of government infiltrators.

The explanation for this embrace is simple as the minds of the infiltrators: science, and for that matter any other factual analysis, tends to flatly contradict many of the Right’s most cherished fictions, such as:

The more you cut taxes the more tax revenue flows into federal coffers.

History proves America is a Christian nation.

Climate change is either not happening at all or, if it is happening, it has nothing to do with our use of fossil fuels. (“I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything that human beings do. …” – Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin)

Slashing regulation of business and high finance is good for business, good for the nation and good for the American public.

If the rich are allowed to keep more of their earnings they will share it with everyone else, (trickle down.)

School science classes should be “fair and balanced,” like Fox News, when teaching the origins of life on earth by teaching the biblically-inspired “creationist” version alongside Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution.

President Obama “may not have been born in America” as he claims.

President Obama is “a secret Muslim.”

And the list of Creeping Ignorance goes on and on, growing longer with each passing month. Michelle Bachmann believes that the founding fathers “didn’t rest until the put an need to slavery.”  She also believes the first shot “heard around the world” that started our war of independence was fired in New Hampshire. It wasn’t. Did she care? Nope. Pointing out that it was fired in Massachusetts was, to her and her kind, just further proof of how the mainstream media picks on conservatives.

via The Biggest Threat Facing the Country Today Is Fast Creeping Ignorance | | AlterNet.

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March 25, 2011 · 10:40 pm

How television created and then killed Sarah Palin’s political prospects – The Globe and Mail

Great Article from the Globe and Mail…

I’ve been saying for weeks, the media is finally tired of Sarah Palin…

Her 15 Minutes of fame are, hopefully, finally over…

God knows, she’s milked it for every dime she could..

Now the media is already foaming at the mouth over Michelle Bachmann as her successor…

And she’ll be twice as crazy and therefore twice as much fun…

It was television that destroyed Sarah Palin, just as it made her. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again – the arrival of Palin as a major political figure in 2008 was an emanation of the reality-TV culture, anchored in the belief that ordinary or “everyday” people, inarticulate though they may be, and with all the baggage of messy personal lives, are truly compelling public figures. Palin was the political equivalent. A figure who refracts national identity as it is shaped by the culture’s most powerful medium. Authentic, populist and dismissive of sophistication in thought and action.

Then, television duly destroyed the Palin authenticity. The arc of her national political career began with a defining speech at the Republican National Convention in September, 2008, and ended in November, 2010, a few episodes into Sarah Palin’s Alaska. The show, a cringingly inevitable reality-TV series, gave her a huge platform and she blew it. If her exposure on TV in 2008 brought out the authenticity, the show brought out Palin’s inner princess. She talked about being a mom 87 times an episode (I’m exaggerating , but only a little) and made dubious attempts to make political parables linking her family, the outdoors and wildlife. It was ego unbounded. And this after quitting her job as governor of Alaska.

The series had many memorable moments and scenes, but what lingered – and obviously had an impact on Republicans – was the unsubtle undermining of Palin’s assertion that she and her family are “normal, average Americans.” A salmon-fishing trip for the kids involved using a private bush plane to fly to a remote wilderness lake. Palin asserted that such a trip is “an everyday thing” in Alaska, yet any fool watching at home knew the cost had to be in the many thousands. A mountain-climbing trip to Mount McKinley was presented as a trip in the family RV, yet viewers were gobsmacked to find that the vehicle was more like those giant, luxury tour buses used by rock bands.

Television is not kind to blatant hubris and hypocrisy and the series amounted to an epic failure to enhance Palin’s status as the genuine voice of authentic America. Television is flow, not content, and in politics, TV is not a problem to be managed but an instrument to be played. (Marshall McLuhan told us so and it is true.) The flow of Sarah Palin’s Alaska amounted to a river of platitudes and patently insincere assertions. Palin failed to play television as an instrument.

The medium that gave her exposure and heft as a figure representing everyday reality, and ordinary people’s views, finally diminished her fatally. After succumbing to the temptations of a reality-TV series, Palin was exposed as overexposed. The other week, while on Fox News attacking Kathy Griffin, she had all the political heft of some batty lady calling into the phone-in radio show from remote Alaska and braying about things that made sense only in her own head. The presence, the charisma were gone.

Palin arrived as a creature of TV and the medium has eaten her up. Never mind the primaries and U.S. presidential election in 2012. The political obituary can be written now.

via How television created and then killed Sarah Palin’s political prospects – The Globe and Mail.

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March 25, 2011 · 6:49 pm

The Lessons of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire May Be Lost 100 Years Later

I posted about this tragedy earlier this week…

There is a lot of focus on the advances in work place safety since that tragic fire, but there is little awareness of all the current attempts to undo them…

The short American memory and attention span strikes again…

It always seems to take a tragedy to drive reform, then the reforms are quickly undone…

It’s a vicious cycle….

From Andrew Schneider at AOL News:

Worker safety advocates cite the painful irony that, precisely 100 years to the month after the fire, the House of Representatives has passed a budget bill that would slash nearly $100 million — about 20 percent — from OSHA’s current budget. About 40 percent of those cuts will be to the agency’s enforcement and safety inspectors — those on the front line of protecting workers.

“Lives will be lost because of these proposed cuts. They’re devastating,” Joel Shufro, executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, told AOL News on Thursday.

“Since its founding, OSHA has been underfunded and understaffed. They currently have enough inspectors to inspect every workplace just once every 143 years. The proposed cuts will cut OSHA’s effectiveness even more,” he added.

OSHA administrator David Michaels says the House’s cutback “would really have a devastating effect on all of our activities.”

David Von Drehle wrote what many consider the definitive book on the tragedy in 1911, “Triangle: The Fire that Changed America.” He said in the book that history can run backward, and that even much-needed reforms like worker safety gains can be lost again.

“Many of the initial post-Triangle reforms were strenuously opposed by conservative businessmen … who were soon back in the saddle and able to halt, hamstring or reverse liberal initiatives,” he wrote.

The recent GOP sweep has many believing the same thing is happening again.

via The Lessons of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire May Be Lost 100 Years Later.

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March 25, 2011 · 5:59 pm

How Ignorant Are Americans? – Newsweek

This helps explain how the GOP keeps winning elections in spite of their screw ups….

I am very much aware of this difference when I travel internationally.  Americans seem to be proud of their ignorance, but knowledge and sophistication still matter in other places…

They’re the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

Don’t get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they’ve existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators. And they’ve been lamenting the philistinism of their peers ever since pollsters started publishing these dispiriting surveys back in Harry Truman’s day. (He was a president, by the way.) According to a study by Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, the yearly shifts in civic knowledge since World War II have averaged out to “slightly under 1 percent.”

But the world has changed. And unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us.

To appreciate the risks involved, it’s important to understand where American ignorance comes from. In March 2009, the European Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs. The Europeans clobbered us. Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76 percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58 percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we’ve led the charge in Afghanistan. It was only the latest in a series of polls that have shown us lagging behind our First World peers.

via How Ignorant Are Americans? – Newsweek.

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March 25, 2011 · 3:55 pm

Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend

Fascinating article on the front page of today’s New York Times…

It will be interesting to see the political implications of this new migration…

Hopefully, this will help reduce the GOP’s hold on the South….

The percentage of the nation’s black population living in the South has hit its highest point in half a century, according to census data released Thursday, as younger and more educated black residents move out of declining cities in the Northeast and Midwest in search of better opportunities.

The Rev. Ronald Peters, above, who moved last year from Pittsburgh to Atlanta, said the black middle class was more hopeful in the South than in the Northeast.

The share of black population growth that has occurred in the South over the past decade — the highest since 1910, before the Great Migration of blacks to the North — has upended some long-held assumptions.

Both Michigan and Illinois, whose cities have rich black cultural traditions, showed an overall loss of blacks for the first time, said William Frey, the chief demographer at the Brookings Institution.

And Atlanta, for the first time, has replaced Chicago as the metro area with the largest number of African-Americans after New York. About 17 percent of blacks who moved to the South in the past decade left New York State, far more than from any other state, the census data show.

At the same time, blacks have begun leaving cities for more affluent suburbs in large numbers, much like generations of whites before them.

“The notion of the North and its cities as the promised land has been a powerful part of African-American life, culture and history, and now it all seems to be passing by,” said Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark. “The black urban experience has essentially lost its appeal with blacks in America.”

via Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend – NYTimes.com.

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March 24, 2011 · 8:35 pm

Race and the 2012 election – Ezra Klein – The Washington Post

Glad to see the re-elect numbers so high…

And the race issue with White People doesn’t surprise me.  The whole Tea Party thing is really just a cover for racism.

There are a lot of White People who just can’t deal with the fact that we have a Black/African American President.  And they have a lot of trouble admitting it-even to themselves.

The good news is that we are well on our way to being a multi-racial society and in less than 50 years, White People will be a minority.  Hispanics are the fastest growing demographic group.  That’s something else that scares them…

Demographics and trends continue to support a growing Democratic Party and a dying Republican Party in the long run…

If we can just survive the short run without the GOP destroying everything…

Dave Weigel notes that Barack Obama’s poll numbers are higher than George W. Bush’s or Bill Clinton’s were at this point in the political cycle. You can come up with a lot of reasons for that, but the big one seems to be “ninety-two percent of black voters want to re-elect Obama, as do 66 percent of Hispanics. Only one percent of blacks (!) and 16 percent of Hispanics want to vote against Obama. That’s the source of the positive re-elect number — break it down to white voters, and only 36 percent of them want to re-elect him.”

In “Obama’s Race,” Michael Tesler and David Sears mount a strong case: Far from ushering in a “post-racial period” in American politics, Obama’s election “was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election on record and, perhaps more significantly, that there were two sides to this racialization: resentful opposition to to and racially liberal support for Obama.”

Another way to say this is that far from marking the end of us-vs.-them elections associated with Richard Nixon’s infamous Southern strategy, the 2008 election was arguably the beginning of its inverse: an electoral campaign where race, because of the skin color of the Democratic nominee, was a central issue, but this time, the “racially progressive” coalition proved larger than the racially conservative coalition. Call it the Northern strategy.

What’s interesting, though, is that the racial polarization has continued into Obama’s presidency.

via Race and the 2012 election – Ezra Klein – The Washington Post.

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March 24, 2011 · 8:09 pm

Big Ag Wants To Make It a Crime to Expose Animal Abuse at Factory Farms | | AlterNet

This is almost unbelievable…

But not much is really unbelievable when Big Business controls the government…

And one thing politicians and corporate executives both fear is being exposed on the internet by regular people with cell phone cameras, etc…

Their best defense is to operate in secrecy.  They’ll do anything they can to keep out of the limelight-except when the Corporate owned politicians are  running their their talking points in front of patriotic backgrounds trying to get re-elected.

Reagan proved “image is everything” and they are still trying to get by with style- and media control- over substance and a free press.

The last thing they want is an empowered electorate or average people having the tools to blow their image….

In Florida, the Humane Society of the United States and other groups pushed for the adoption of the first statewide law in the country to restrict the extreme confinement of animals on factory farms. In 2002, voters there passed Amendment 10, to phase out the caging of breeding sows in gestation crates. In Iowa, HSUS and other animal welfare groups have conducted a series of undercover investigations (see the video) to expose cruelty in the nation’s biggest factory farming state.

Now, these two states have something else in common. They are trying to make it a crime to photograph or videotape farm animals. They don’t want to criminalize animal cruelty, but they do want to make criminals of people trying to document abuse and to put an end to the cruelty. Lawmakers have introduced bills in both states to establish criminal penalties for going undercover at agricultural facilities and simply taking pictures.

Mind you, if this legislation is enacted, it won’t just be a setback for animal welfare. Shabby, squalid, overcrowded conditions for animals on factory farms are also a food-safety threat for Americans, with millions of Americans sickened every year by contaminated food. It was, of course, an Iowa egg factory farm that was forced to recall half a billion eggs last year because of a Salmonella outbreak, creating one of the biggest food product recalls in American history.

With a potentially dramatic pare-back of funding for federal inspections of animal-agriculture operations looming, at production and slaughter facilities, these new proposed policies to bar the exposure of unhealthy and unsafe practices could not come at a more inopportune time. The industry has long argued for self-regulation, and with government inspection programs stretched so thin, they now want no meddling animal advocacy groups looking either.

via Big Ag Wants To Make It a Crime to Expose Animal Abuse at Factory Farms | | AlterNet.

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March 24, 2011 · 8:02 pm

Congress Making Themselves and Friends Richer, While Everyone Else Struggles to Make Ends Meet | | AlterNet

This is a glaring truth that too many people still are ignoring…

The sad thing is, campaigns are so expensive now you almost have to be a millionaire to run for office.

And this crowd currently in DC is not about to change campaign finance laws to correct the situation…

While the great majority of workaday Americans are struggling to make it on about $30,000 a year — and having, at best, puny pensions and iffy health coverage — these incoming lawmakers tend to be sitting pretty on hundreds of thousands of dollars each in accumulated wealth. Their financial reports show them holding extensive personal investments in such outfits as Wall Street banks, oil giants and drug makers.

Their wealth and financial ties might help explain the rush by the new Republican House majority to coddle these very same corporate powers. From gutting EPA’s anti-pollution restrictions on Big Oil to undoing the restraints on Wall Street greed, they’re pushing for a return to the same laissez-fairyland ideology of the past 20 years that got our country in massive messes.

At the same time, they’re out to kill a green-jobs program, bust unions, cut Social Security, defund Head Start and generally stomp on the fingers of working families trying to hold onto the middle class rungs of the economic ladder.

The change in Congress is taking America backward, not forward, for the new majority literally is the voice of millionaires. That’s not progress.

via Congress Making Themselves and Friends Richer, While Everyone Else Struggles to Make Ends Meet | | AlterNet.

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March 24, 2011 · 8:02 am

Warren Buffet: There is Class Warfare and the Rich Are Winning – MarketWatch

Per my previous column about the Rich being different…

Buffet is Wealthy, one of the good guys, not one of the Evil Rich…

Yes, “there’s class warfare, all right,” warns Warren Buffett. “But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Yes, the rich are making war against us. And yes, they are winning. Why? Because so many are fighting this new American Civil War between the rich and the rest.

Not just the 16 new GOP governors in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and across America fighting for new powers. Others include: Chamber of Commerce billionaires, Koch brothers, Forbes 400, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform — which now has 97% of House Republicans and 85% of the GOP Senators signed on his “no new taxes” pledge — the Tea Party and Reaganomics ideologues.

Buffett: Deals wanted

Warren Buffett said he is ready to make more acquisitions in Korea, the U.S. or the UK, and he said “the bigger the better”. Shira Ovide talks with Kelsey Hubbard about Berkshire Hathaway’s next move, plus Buffet’s positive outlook on Japan.

Wake up America. You are under attack. Stop kidding yourself. We are at war. In fact, we have been fighting this Civil War for a generation, since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981. Recently Buffett renewed the battle cry: The “rich class” is winning this war. Except most Americans still don’t realize they’re losing, don’t see the prize at stake.

via New Civil War erupts, led by super rich, GOP Paul B. Farrell – MarketWatch.

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March 23, 2011 · 9:42 pm

Democracy Corps » Congressional Battleground 2012

More and more Buyer’s Remorse as the GOP reminds people how incompetent they are….

These are the guys who caused the economic collapse and were supposedly elected to create jobs…

So far, the Republican Congress has voted to defund NPR and Planned Parenthood, declared war on women’s health in general, had a vote on putting “In God We Trust” on buildings, tried to repeal Health Care reform, and fawned at the feet of the Rich.

No signs of job creation whatsoever….

This poll shows there is hope emerging we can through the rascals out and retake the House in 2012…

A new survey by Democracy Corps in 50 of the most competitive battleground Congressional districts – nearly all of which gave a majority to Obama in the last presidential election – shows the new Republican majority very much in play in 2012. *

The Republican incumbents in these districts, 35 of them freshmen, remain largely unknown and appear very vulnerable in 2012 (depending on redistricting).  In fact, these incumbents are in a weaker position than Democratic incumbents were even in late 2009, or Republican incumbents were in 2007 in comparable surveys conducted by Democracy Corps.

These incumbents, identified by name, have an average approval rating of 35 percent across the 50 districts, with 25 percent disapproving.  Another 38 percent were not able to give the candidates a rating, suggesting lack of visibility.  This is about 10 points lower than the approval rating Democratic incumbents held in July of 2009 (with comparable disapproval rating).

More importantly at this early point, just 40 percent of voters in these districts say that they will vote to reelect their incumbent (asked by name in each district), while 45 percent say that they “can’t vote to reelect” the incumbent.

This leads to a congressional race that is dead-even in the battleground.  After winning these seats by a collective 14 points in 2010, these Republicans now lead generic Democratic challengers by just 2 points, 44 to 46 percent, and stand well below the critical 50 percent mark.  The race is dead even in the top tier of the 25 most competitive seats—46 percent for the Democrats versus 45 percent for the Republicans.  In the next 25 seats, the Republicans have a slight 42 to 47 percent advantage.

For comparison, in July 2009, after the luster of President Obama’s inauguration had already begun to fade, the Democratic incumbents in our battleground of 40 districts had a 6-point advantage over a generic Republican challenger.  36 of these 40 Democrats went on to lose their seats.  And in June of 2007, in the top 35 most competitive Republican-held districts, the incumbents also held a 6-point lead.  19 of those 35 Republicans went on to lose their seats.

And of course, we know that in 2010, two-thirds of Democrats in McCain seats could not hold on.  The Republicans in Obama seats are already at risk.

via Democracy Corps » Congressional Battleground 2012.

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