Good Omen For Obama: Dick Morris Predicts Romney Landslide

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

If there's anything we've learned over the years of watching Fox News, it's that Dick Morris is the perfect reverse barometer: Anything he predicts will turn out to be not just wrong, but laughably, head-shakingly so, whether it's his advice on handling the democracy uprising in Egypt, his prediction of impeachment hearings for Obama, his claims Obamacare would bring about "euthanasia," or whether Bill Clinton should have negotiated the release of two hostages in North Korea, or his forecast of sweeping Republican wins in 2010 far beyond anyone's predictions (not to mention eventual reality).

If Dick Morris says it, you can count on it being wrong.

Which is why his recent prediction of a Mitt Romney landslide -- which he explained for Bill O'Reilly last night -- has largely been greeted with broad smiles from the Democratic camp. As Zandar at Balloon Juice put it, "So yes, now that Toesucker here has called it for Romney, President Obama is spiking that there football."

Ed Kilgore observes:

You might wonder if this sort of crap might run the risk of convincing some happy conservatives that they need not bother to vote, or can afford to indulge their resentment of Romney’s refusal (on occasion, at least) to back a Personhood Amendment or spend the remaining days of the campaign “vetting” the president’s background. But just as they did with the Iraq War, a lot of Republicans seem to think it is psychologically critical to protect Total Success in all their endeavors.

And just to underscore how wrong Morris is about everything he touches, Markos points out (via a commenter):

Morris says Michigan has 15 electoral votes. It has 16

He says Minnesota has 16 electoral votes. It has 10.

He says Colorado has 10 electoral votes. It has 9.

He says Nevada has nine electoral votes. It has 6.

Obama, Romney, And The Electoral College: The Beltway's One-Sided Hand-Wringing, Just Like 2000

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t Heather]

It's deja vu all over again.

Thanks to a spate of polls indicating that the presidential race is tightening, the prospect of a repeat of the results of the 2000 election -- with one candidate winning the Electoral College and the other one the popular vote -- has the folks inside the Beltway all in a tizzy of speculation. And wouldn't you know it, the shape of that speculation is just as absurdly biased as it was in 2000.

Karen Tumulty at the Washington Post is the classic Beltway poobah, and her piece this weekend was a classic of Beltway poobahism:

That kind of split decision between the electorate and the electoral college would mark the fifth time in American history — and the second time in a dozen years — that the person who occupies the White House was not the one who got the most votes on Election Day.

No incumbent president seeking a second term has ever won the electoral college and lost the popular vote.

Every modern president to be reelected — Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush — has gotten a bigger share of the vote in their second bid for office than their first, and with it, a chance to claim a mandate. (Though Clinton got more votes than his first race and won in the electoral college, he was re-elected in 1996 without winning a majority in a three-way race against Republican Bob Dole and independent Ross Perot.)

A win in the electoral college that is not accompanied by one in the popular vote casts a shadow over the president and his ability to govern.

Even more absurdly, Tumulty then goes on to cite the Bush administration that followed in the wake of the 2000 travesty as somehow laboring under this "shadow" -- even though, in real time, the WaPo and every other outlet of Beltway punditry studiously ignored that "shadow" for the entirety of Bush's tenure, beginning with the outrageous failure to cover the massive protests that accompanied his inauguration.

Perhaps more importantly, the Bush administration did not even bother to appear constrained by this "shadow" for the entirety of its tenure. As a skeptical Josh Marshall observed:

This happened no more than twelve years ago for the first time in a century. Democrats were crushed and outraged. And in response to various suggestions that newly-inaugurated President George W. Bush would need to govern in a form of national unity government Bush responded by pursuing one of the most maximalist and aggressive agendas in recent American history.


The difference between a non-incumbent and an incumbent winning this way is no more than some sort of pseudo-fact. It quite simply is what it is. And having been perfectly happy with it twelve years ago Republicans would have no grounds for complaining now.

Now, would they have grounds to be upset? Sure. Would this lead to “more hyperpartisanship”? Please. No greater ‘hyperpartisanship’ is possible than the scorched earth, 100% ‘No’ policy we’ve seen over the last four years, which frankly is little different from the scorched earth, 100% ‘No’ policy of 1993-2001. Remember, Bill Clinton was illegitimate because he was a plurality not a majority president.

Nonetheless, we can rest assured that should there be a electoral-popular vote split favoring Obama, as Cenk Uygur says, Republican heads will be exploding all over the place. Or at least they'll be twisting themselves into knots trying to figure out how to attack the president as illegitimate.

This is especially so if you recall the shape of the pre-electoral speculation in 2000, when it appeared, in the days leading up to the election, possible that Al Gore would win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote. This set off howls of outrage from right-wing media folk such as Fox News and the Washington Times, which were then dutifully reflected in the hand-wringing from the Beltway pundits.

Recall, for instance, the Moonie Times report on the subject:

Vice President Al Gore's strategy to go after states rich with electoral votes raises a remote possibility that has not occurred in presidential politics since 1888.

There is a chance he could capture 270 electoral votes and win the presidency even if he loses the popular vote to Texas Gov. George W. Bush....

Mrs. Jeffe, the analyst from California...says a split decision between the popular vote and the electoral vote would make it hard for the next president to lead.

A presidential election "is about credibility — it's about legitimacy," she said. "It's not about words on paper."

Of course, these concerns vanished from the pages of the Times once the results came in.

Likewise, the New York Daily News reported that the Bush team was planning to hit the ground running with attacks on Al Gore as an illegitimate president if he won the EC but not the popular vote:

They're not only thinking the unthinkable, they're planning for it.

Quietly, some of George W. Bush's advisers are preparing for the ultimate "what if" scenario: What happens if Bush wins the popular vote for President, but loses the White House because Al Gore's won the majority of electoral votes?...

"The one thing we don't do is roll over," says a Bush aide. "We fight."

How? The core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the Bushies themselves, of course.

In league with the campaign — which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College's essential unfairness — a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged.

"We'd have ads, too," says a Bush aide, "and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted."

Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team Bush will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can. "You think 'Democrats for Democracy' would be a catchy term for them?" asks a Bush adviser....

And what would happen if the "what if" scenario came out the other way? "Then we'd be doing the same thing Bush is apparently getting ready for," says a Gore campaign official. "They're just further along in their contingency thinking than we are. But we wouldn't lie down without a fight, either."

And then there was Chris Matthews. This was his column the day before the election:

Al Gore, knowing him as we do, may have no problem taking the presidential oath after losing the popular vote to George W. Bush. He's lost popularity contests before. But how will the country take it?

How will a populace already turned off to politics react to the news that the guy who's gotten the most votes isn't getting the job?

Matthews, of course, voiced no such concerns after the election. Because that would have entailed greater self-examination than is ever permitted inside the Beltway.

These people are never, ever, ever right. Considering their record, it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that Obama wins the popular vote but not the EC. But then, no one from inside the Beltway will bother -- or dare -- suggesting to Mitt Romney that he's not a legitimate president.

As Steve Kornacki at Salon puts it:

Of course, that obstruction will probably persist even if Obama wins the popular vote. If modern political history has taught us anything, it’s that the Republican base doesn’t believe any Democratic victory is legitimate, and always finds a way to treat a Democratic president as a usurper. A favorite GOP talking point during Bill Clinton’s first term was that he’d only been elected by 43 percent of the country. The implication was that Clinton wouldn’t have won in 1992 without the presence of independent Ross Perot – a complete and total misreading of the ’92 election. In his first two years as president, Clinton faced the same unanimous opposition that Obama has dealt with. And even when Clinton was reelected in 1996, Republicans delighted in pointing out that he’d done so without breaking 50 percent of the national popular vote (even though their own candidate barely cracked 40). Or consider Obama’s ’08 victory, won with a higher share of the popular vote by any Democrat since LBJ. It meant little to the right, which fixated on trumped-up claims of mass voter fraud.

Problems Keep Cropping Up With Maricopa Misinformation

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Remember how, last week, we reported that Maricopa County, Arizona, had handed out voter ID cards in Spanish with the wrong date on them -- but were assured that the problem was limited to only fifty or so people.

Now a second incident makes clear that the problem may be more widespread than at first glance:

Last week, the department made the same mistake on a Spanish-language voter registration card it issued to a Hispanic woman. Yesterday it was on a bookmark the department distributed to Spanish-speaking voters.

Maricopa County’s latest error angered many leaders from various Latino organizations across the state, including members from two large organizations that have registered thousands of Latinos to vote.

As Stephen Lemons notes, the elections office, led by a Republican named Helen Purcell, has come under siege for these and other misinformation problems, which included a false media report by a local CBS station that may well have harmed the work of local GOTV volunteers.

In response, Purcell has promised a public-relations campaign to try to dispel any misinformation that it may have inadvertently issued.

An investigation, frankly, would be more reassuring.

Todd Akin's Militia Past Exposes His Profound Radicalism

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It seems Washington's John Koster isn't the only Republican Tea Party candidate who has ties to old far-right "Patriot"/militia organizations. Thanks to superb reporting by Josh Glastetter at RightWingWatch and Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon, we now know that Rep. Todd Akin, the GOP nominee for the Senate seat in Missouri, also has some old and deep militia connections -- mostly on behalf of some violent anti-abortion radicals with whom he was once arrested.

Akin, you see, was invited to speak at a militia gathering in 1995, and instead sent a laudatory letter that was read at the gathering. When Buzzfeed first reported this in August, Akin claimed he barely knew these people and that it was all a mishap. But Seitz-Wald dug into it further:

The full Post-Dispatch story, which was not included in the BuzzFeed story, also reported that “a flier promoting the 1995 event billed Akin as speaker.” Salon obtained the flier (view it here); it advertises a regional conference to teach participants “how to organize Missouri militias.” Akin is listed among the “special guest speakers.” How did Akin end up on the flier for the event and why did he write a gushing letter to a group he wanted nothing to do with? Further undermining his account: The only contemporaneous news report, a 1995 article not available online from The Springfield News-Leader, reported that Akin canceled because of “scheduling conflicts,” not discomfort with the militia’s leaders.

Akin’s account that he “didn’t know who they were” becomes even harder to believe in light of the news of his arrest. First, the commander of the now-defunct militia, John Moore, told Salon in August that he had known Akin long before the rally. Moore said the two had met to discuss gun-rights legislation Moore was pushing when Akin was a state representative in the later 1980s: “I’ve known Todd a long time,” he said.

Then there’s Tim Dreste, the milita’s chaplain and captain, whom Akin worked with in the pro-life movement and who, as it turns out, may even have been arrested along with him.

As Ed Kilgore says:

Now it’s not like Akin was some “idealistic” college student getting caught up in some ideological hijinks: he was in his late 30s, and was soon (in 1988) to be elected to the Missouri legislature. He was, and is, a stone fanatic on the subject, and his famous views on rape and abortion are entirely within the mainstream of “thinking” among the kind of antichoice activists who represent his political base. I’d even admire him a bit if he just came out loud ‘n’ proud right now and admitted a principal reason he’s in politics is to impose God’s Law on all the slatternly women who keep “killing their babies” by taking The Pill or using an IUD or having clinical abortions.

Truth is, the GOP’s longstanding compact with anti-choice activists and other elements of the Christian Right has politically legitimized folks who are much better suited to be marching in front of abortion clinics waving bloody fetus posters and screaming obscenities at women, than to be strolling the aisles of state legislatures or the U.S. Senate.

Dickhead Willard: Romney's Worst Persona Reveals A Smug, Self-Important Jerk

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

"You'll get your chance in a moment. I'm still speaking."
-- Willard "Mitt" Romney, to President Obama in the Oct. 16 debate

I'm with Charles Pierce on this:

Wow. To me, this was a revelatory, epochal moment. It was a look at the real Willard Romney, the Bain cutthroat who could get rich ruining lives and not lose a moment's sleep. But those people are merely the anonymous Help. The guy he was speaking to on Tuesday night is a man of considerable international influence. Outside of street protestors, and that Iraqi guy who threw a shoe at George W. Bush, I have never seen a more lucid example of manifest public disrespect for a sitting president than the hair-curling contempt with which Romney invested those words. (I've certainly never seen one from another candidate.) He's lucky Barack Obama prizes cool over everything else. LBJ would have taken out his heart with a pair of salad tongs and Harry Truman would have bitten off his nose.

And Romney bitched endlessly — endlessly — about the rules, and why this uppity fellow on the other stool was allowed to speak before he was spoken to, and why he didn't get to speak at length on whatever he wanted to speak on because, after all, he is the CEO of the stage. Jesus Christ, I'd hate to play golf with the man. He's the guy who counts to make sure you don't have too many wedges in your bag. He knows every cheap subsection of every cheap ground rule, and he'll call you on every one of them. You couldn't get a free drop out of him with thumbscrews, and forget about conceding any putt outside two inches. And then, on the 18th hole, with all the money on the line, he kicks his ball out of the rough and denies up and down to the rules committee that he did it. Then he goes into the clubhouse bar and nobody sits with him.

This, as Pierce explains, is the "Dickhead Willard" who periodically pops up among Romney's known public personae -- toppling over from "Snippy Willard", who sometimes is just an exchange away from "Lofty Willard," the schmoozy salesman who has suckered every Republican in the country and a few independents too.

Dickhead Willard has a habit of showing up whenever some plebeian has the audacity to challenge him or put him on the spot. He appeared twice during Tuesday's debate -- first during the whole snide attack by Romney that led up to the "You'll get your chance" moment, then later, when Romney began haranguing Obama about his pension, before the president's snappy retort ("I don't look at my pension. It's not as big as yours") shut him up.

The last was Romney kicking his ball out of the rough: The rules of the debate stipulated that the candidates would not direct questions at each other, and yet there Romney was, haranguing the president of the United States like a petulant child about to roll on the floor in a tantrum. But then, we already know that for guys like Romney, the rules are for everyone else.

I dunno about you, but as bad as Romney's politics and policies are, the worst aspect of his prospective presidency might be having to put up with this guy on my TV for the next four years.

Dickhead Willard has been around a long time. We've seen him many times before: Back when Ted Kennedy dubbed him "Multiple Choice" in 1994; when a reporter in 2008 challenged him on his "lobbyist free" baloney; when audience members in Iowa laughed at his claim that "corporations are people"; when he explained how he liked to fire people.

So I made a mashup of all those great Dickhead Willard moments, punctuated by the now-definitive "You'll get your chance" moment.

And let's hope we see more of Dickhead Willard tonight. Because he makes it obvious that the whole "Lofty Willard" persona is as much a lie as his claim to not want to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Evil Liberals Keep Making Republicans Look Racist

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Those nasty, hate-filled, race-baiting liberals are out there at it again, trying to make Republican Obama-haters looks racist:

For the second time in a week, a Colorado field office for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has been targeted.

KUSA-TV reported Friday that the campaign’s field office in Conifer, Colorado, was found with swastikas spray-painted on it.

According to The Denver Post, a spokesperson for the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department said a deputy answering a vandalism report that morning found three windows and five campaign signs for the president had been vandalized, though he did not know what had been spray-painted on them.

No doubt -- as with the person who opened fire on the Obama office in Denver -- this was actually a false-flag liberal pretending to be a violent right-wing Obama hater, just to make Obama-hating Republicans look bad.

This, at least, is what we hear every time it appears that the right's historical racist element is bubbling back up to the surface of American conservatism thanks to the race-baiting dog-whistle campaigns being conducted by mainstream Republicans -- such as last week's appearance of overtly white-supremacist sentiments at a Mitt Romney rally in Ohio.

It was what we immediately heard from the usual predictable quarters -- not concern about how best to drive out the racist element cropping up on the right, but rather, blame for any liberals who dared point this out. Over at Althouse's place, this was the response:

Shame on you and everyone else who slavered at the opportunity to serve up this racial obscenity.

Ah yes, the old "bloody shirt" diversion: The problem isn't the racism on display, it's those evil demagoging liberals pointing it out who are the real issue.

Best of all, Althouse then cites a renowned white nationalist to prove her point.

In the event, applying the same logic, we must reach the conclusion that this shop owner in New Jersey with an overtly racist anti-Obama window display must also be a Romney opponent out to make Republicans look bad, eh?

The picture shows Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, naked except for a primitive loincloth, with a bone through his nose, witch-doctor style. Underneath the image, a caption is written in black and white: 'ObamaCare - coming soon to a clinic near you.' The 'C' is depicted as a classic Communist hammer and sickle, a symbol not as regularly seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.

"That's not right. It's racist," said Brinson, a 46-year-old African-American, pointing with a visible wince on his face to the doctored image of Obama as witch-doctor. "I understand that this is America, but the president doesn't deserve this. This is wrong."
But Skuby, 66, a Spring Lake resident, saw nothing wrong with displaying his anti-Obama visual, which has been up since last week, for the world to see.

"A lot of people feel the way I feel, but are just afraid to say it," said Skuby, who said that public response on the street in front of his store ran "70 percent positive" in favor of the display's anti-Obama sentiments. "It always comes down to the race card."

Now, I'm not sure how to explain this guy's rabid recitation of every anti-Obama meme on the planet in his window display, notably those favored by the Fox News bloc, but he simply cannot be an actual conservative, because that would make them look bad, and this simply is an impossibility on Planet Wingnut.

He even pulls out every right-winger's favorite "race card" -- his grandkid is mixed race, so he can't possibly be a racist:

Skuby felt that the proverbial "race card" was one that he could flip over in his favor because of his particular family circumstances.

"The middle one is my granddaughter," said Skuby, holding up a photo of his now 17-year old biracial grandchild Brett, flanked by two other grandchildren who are white.

"My son married a girl that had a biracial kid. She is every bit a part of our family as the other two in this picture. I'm not racist. And as long as my grandchild doesn't think I'm a racist, I'm perfectly fine with all of this."

Sure. Just like those lynched empty chairs didn't really mean anything:

Empty Chair 'Lynching' Protests Spark Controversy

Whatever the case, the obvious conclusion -- that the American Right has always contained, and continues to contain, both racist and extremist elements that act out in violent and repugnant ways, and that the current campaign is bringing them back into the mainstream of politics -- simply can't be true. Because otherwise, all of their mainstream enablers on the right would be forced to recognize that their refusal to admit their existence and their resurgence is in fact empowering these racists by providing them with endless wink-and-nudge cover.

Cold reality: Conservatives are not even remotely serious about confronting or dealing with racism in America, no matter how they protest that they "oppose" "racist material". And they prove it to us every day.

Will A Surging Latino Vote Turn Arizona Blue This Election?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Many of you may recall that back in 2010, we predicted that the backlash created by the politics of anti-Latino bigotry practiced by Sharron Angle and her fellow Republicans was going to create a tsunami of Latino voters who would sweep Sen. Harry Reid to re-election in Nevada. And then it happened exactly that way.

Now, according to Latino Decisions, a similar scenario is cropping up in Arizona, where the nativist politics of Jan "Headless Corpses in the Desert" Brewer, Russell "SB1070" Pearce, and Crazy Joe "Who? Me? Racially Profile?" Arpaio have turned the state into a political cesspool of bigotry. The backlash, it appears, is coming this fall:

In 2010, the average of 16 polls of likely voters in Nevada suggested Sharon Angle had a firm 3 point lead, and 538′s Nate Silver gave her an 83.4% chance of winning. On election night, the results showed Harry Reid with a 5 point win — an 8 point difference from the poll averages. Why the error? Almost every statewide poll in Nevada badly missed the Latino vote. In the final analysis, Reid won close to 90% of the Latino vote, and Latino turnout was much higher than anticipated.

New polling data out of Arizona released by America’s Voice and Latino Decisions suggests Arizona may be much closer than the polling averages indicate. A full 80% of Latinos say they plan to vote for Obama, compared to just 14% for Romney, and Latino enthusiasm is much, much higher in Arizona than the national average. In Latino Decisions national tracking poll 34% of Latinos say they are more excited about voting in 2012 while 36% say they were more excited back in 2008. In Arizona 60% are more enthusiastic in 2012 compared to just 16% who were more enthused in 2008. In October and November 2010 Latino Decisions polling in Nevada was picking up similar trends in Nevada, leading then Washington Post columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos to note on Election Day before the polls closed: “As the Western returns come in tonight, look out for the possibility of a Latino surprise. For the Democrats, a high Latino turnout could possibly save Harry Reid in Nevada.”

If Latino turnout is high in Arizona this year, it will be the Nevada of 2012 that takes the mainstream media by surprise.

David Pinar at Tucson Citizen notes that the problem may well lie in the techniques used by polling companies:

Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions suggested to Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog at the NY Times how the polls all missed the impact of the Latino vote in Nevada in 2010: All the major polling firms conduct their polls in English only, while Latino Decisions conducts their polls in both English and Spanish, with the respondent selecting the language in which they prefer the poll to be conducted. The major polling firms missed the Latino voters who prefer to speak Spanish. About 40 percent of Latino voters in California meet this description, with likely similar numbers in Nevada and Arizona. Mr. Silver compiled results from the eight states with the largest share of Latinos in their population: these are Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, New York and Texas. He found that in 10 of the 15 races, the polling average underestimated the Democrat’s margin by at least 2.5 points. He concluded that there was the beginnings of a pattern — and considering how rapidly the Latino population is growing, it’s one that pollsters are going to need to address. That was right after the November 2010 election. And less than a month away from the 2012 election, the major polling firms still haven’t addressed that, still conduct their polls in English only, and are likely under representing Latino voters in places like Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and elsewhere.

There may be an even simpler dynamic at work: Many polling firms still do not call people's cell phones (though some firms, notably Gallup, are changing that), and Latinos (especially young ones) are more prone than other ethnic groups to use only cell phones, not land lines. (See Mark Blumenthal for more on this.)

This has produced some strange poll results in Arizona that are only now starting to emerge:

Arizona is home to one of the nation's hottest Senate races. Arizonans are also significantly more cell-only than the overall population, with 38.2 percent of those over 18 living in wireless-only households during 2011, according to CDC estimates. That was a sharp increase from 2010, when 33.2 percent of the adult population was wireless-only -- suggesting that the 2012 cell-only share of the population likely exceeds 40 percent.

For most of the year, it was thought that Republican Rep. Jeff Flake would defeat the Democratic nominee, former Solicitor General Richard Carmona, but the Senate race has closed over the past few months. Both sides released internal polls earlier this week, ranging from a 4-point Carmona lead in polling for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, to a 6-point lead for Flake in polls for his campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee's independent-expenditure arm. (Pollsters for the DSCC and NRSC polls contacted some respondents via cell phone, Hotline On Call confirmed, though these percentages fell short of the cell-only adult population estimate. A pollster for the Flake campaign did not return a phone message on Friday afternoon.)

TThe Morrison Institute at ASU recently produced a fascinating report about "Arizona's Emerging Latino Vote" [PDF file] that observed that, while some of the factors that have long suppressed Latino voting power remain in place there, many of them are crumbling under the weight and energy of young Latino voters in the coming election:

Some political observers — and many activists — believe that 2012 will see a significant turnout among Hispanics in Arizona. For example, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) predicts that Arizona Latino turnout this year will reach 359,000, an increase of 23% over the 2008 presidential election, and will constitute 12% of the total turnout.

These arguments for the sudden increase:

• Many Arizona Latinos have been energized by Senate Bill 1070 and related antiimmigrant measures and rhetoric of the past several years. June’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling on SB1070, this view holds, will not blunt those concerns because it upheld the requirement that police officers inquire about individuals’ immigration status under certain circumstances.

• The growing impact of the Latino vote has been demonstrated in the recent electoral victories of President Obama, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, and Phoenix Councilmember Daniel Valenzuela.

• Latino registration rates, while still below that of non-Hispanic Whites, have been increasing. In addition, a coalition of 12 Latino organizations in Arizona has been pursuing what it claims is an unprecedented voter registration drive this year, primarily in Maricopa, Pima, Pinal, Yuma and Santa Cruz counties.

• The reluctance or inability of Latinos (and others) to vote during the workday may diminish as more sign on to receive their ballots in the mail — a major objective of current registration drives for greater Latino participation.

• The Obama campaign and national Democrats argue that Arizona is in play in the presidential race, and promise to mount a strong effort to win the state; drawing out the largest possible Hispanic vote is a component of that strategy.

• Arizona Democrats believe they have a strong Latino candidate for the U.S. senate seat being vacated by the retiring Jon Kyl, a Republican. If so, the candidacy of Richard Carmona, a former U.S. Surgeon General, may bolster registration and voting by Latinos.

The study concludes:

Data and demographics tell us a change in the political face of Arizona is on the horizon with the emerging Latino voter. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

Of course, Jan Brewer blames the Latino wave favoring Democrats on "race baiting" by Democrats -- which reveals, really, their underlying confusion and denalism: It has been real race-baiting by a horde of Republicans, including the current GOP standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, that has driven Latinos into the arms of Democrats.

Evidently, Brewer and Co. are confused by their attempt to redefine "race baiting" to include the act of standing up to bigoted politics. Nice try, wingnuts, but people just aren't that stupid.

Romney's Dog-Whistle Campaign Bears Predictable Fruit

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I'm sure you're about as shocked as I am that this shirt showed up at a Romney campaign event in Ohio. Which is to say, not even remotely.

Via Andrew Kaczynski at Buzzfeed:

The Getty Images photo was taken at a Romney/Ryan campaign event in Lancaster, Ohio on Friday. A Romney spokesperson commented that the shirt was “reprehensible and has no place in this election.”

Now, candidates can't really be blamed for all the nutcases they attract. But what exactly did Republicans think was going to be the outcome when Romney and Co. began indulging in a campaign employing barely-disguised racial dog whistles anyway?

Wisconsin Republican (and Ryan Endorsee): 'Some Girls Rape Easy'

Rep. Paul Ryan and State Rep. Roger Rivard in August at a Rivard fundraiser

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Ah, there's nothing like that ongoing Republican outreach to "minorities" who vote against them en masse, such as Latinos and LGBT folk. And women. Especially women.

Like this Republican legislator from Wisconsin:

Freshman Rep. Roger Rivard (R-Rice Lake) in December discussed a case with the Chetek Alert newspaper in which a 17-year-old high school senior was charged with sexual assault for having sex with an underage girl in the school's band room.

The newspaper quoted him as saying his father warned him, "Some girls rape easy" - meaning that after the fact they can change what they say about whether sex was consensual. On Wednesday, Rivard told the Journal Sentinel that the article did not provide full context of his comments and that his father's exact words had been slightly different from how they appeared in the Chetek Alert.

He told the Journal Sentinel that his father had advised him not to have premarital sex, and he took that seriously.

"He also told me one thing, 'If you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry,' " Rivard said. "Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she's not going to say, 'Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.' All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she's underage. And he just said, 'Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,' he said, 'they rape so easy.'

"What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me, telling me, 'If you're going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.' So the way he said it was, 'Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning.'

"So it's been kind of taken out of context."

About three hours after speaking to the Journal Sentinel, Rivard issued a written statement that he said was meant to further clarify his points.

"Sexual assault is a crime that unfortunately is misunderstood and my comments have the potential to be misunderstood as well," his statement said. "Rape is a horrible act of violence. Sexual assault unfortunately often goes unreported to police. I have four daughters and three granddaughters and I understand the importance of making sure that awareness of this crime is taken very seriously."

Oh yes, he takes it very seriously. And when a woman reports a rape, no doubt his first question is: "Was it legitimate rape?"

And boy howdy, what do you know? This same Roger Rivard was the beneficiary of a public endorsement and fundraising visit by none other than Rep. Paul Ryan, at the very time that Ryan was waiting around to hear whether or not he was going to be Mitt Romney's running mate.

And boy howdy, was it a warm endorsement:

U.S. Congressman and vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan endorsed the candidacy of State Rep. Roger Rivard during a breakfast buffet held at The Shinako Lodge & Event Center in Turtle Lake on August 9. Ryan introduced Assemblyman Rivard to the citizens of his newly defined 75th Assembly District which now includes the town of Clear Lake in Polk County, the town of Forest in St. Croix County, and New Haven in Dunn County.

Congressman Ryan stated, “Roger needs to be reaffirmed to get this job done and fix the state of Wisconsin.” The Congressman emphasized the support Rivard provided Gov. Scott Walker who took Wisconsin from a $3.6 billion deficit into a $300 million surplus, kept Wisconsin’s unemployment rate around 6.7 percent, and prevented WEA Trust from pilfering millions of tax dollars by over-charging for healthcare benefits, Ryan said.

I'm sure we'll get a statement from Ryan later today expressing his "disappointment" with Rivard's remarks and completely disavowing him now. You know, the usual kabuki. Something to give the shrinking ranks of Republican women a fig leaf.

Why Did The Seattle Times Endorse A Right-Wing Extremist?

A 1995 militia meeting in Maltby, Wash., organized by the SnoCoPRA.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Our "liberal media" here in Seattle is something else -- particularly the Republican-owned Seattle Times, which is astute enough to include a few liberal voices on its editorial page and among its columnists. Our TV stations are pure mush. And don't get me started on the subject of local talk radio.

The worst, though, has to be the Times. Because, those handful of liberals notwithstanding, its editorial content (especially its editorials) is relentlessly right-wing. This was embodied in their endorsement yesterday of Republican John Koster in Washington's new 1st Congressional District.
Indeed, their rationale was enough to make you laugh out loud:

We disagree with Koster on social issues, but in Congress right now, his fiscal viewpoint and elected experience are what’s needed.

Koster’s reputation and performance as the practical conservative who can articulate and act on those views and find common ground is needed and welcome.

Actually, Koster's "reputation and performance" make irrevocably clear that he is a Tea Party fanatic, a fiscal extremist who, in his six years in the state's Legislature, voted against five of six budgets. It's entirely predictable what he'll do if elected to the House: Sign up with the Tea Party caucus and immediately link arms with the bloc that has refused to pass any kind of jobs bill or face up to the problem of unemployment, simply because doing so would ensure a difficult re-election for President Obama, and who already tried to drive the American economy over the cliff with their brinkmanship on the debt ceiling.

And that's just on the fiscal side of things. Koster is so extreme on so many other issues -- particularly on abortion and education -- that the notion of him "finding common ground" with Democrats on anything is endlessly risible.

What the Times didn't tell its readers, though, is that Koster has a long history of far-right extremism -- not merely with the Tea Party, but back in the 1990s, with the far-right Patriot/militia movement.

The Times' softball profile of Koster made an oblique mention of this fact -- so we know that they have to be perfectly aware of all this:

His record also shows a steady streak of conservatism: He voted against five of six budgets and introduced legislation to allow a group of people in northern Snohomish County to secede and form a new county, "Freedom County."

Actually, it runs much, much deeper than that.

John Koster played a significant role in helping promote far-right "Patriot" movement property-rights organizing in the Puget Sound region in the 1990s – organizing that in many cases involved recruiting militias, extremist "sovereign citizen" schemes, and efforts at secession. Koster's role was important: As a state legislator, he introduced bills that promoted and legitimized the far-right agenda of these groups, particularly their efforts at forming new counties, carved out by "secession" from larger urban counties in western Washington.

Beginning in 1990, the Puget Sound region saw the sudden creation of a well-organized network of Wise Use "property rights" front groups. The majority of this activity revolved around opposition to the Growth Management Act, passed by the Washington Legislature that year. Accordingly, many of the groups behind this network were business interests opposed to the act, but who were willing to have their money help fund far-right organizing.

A classic front group in this case was the Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance (SNOCO PRA). Like all front groups, it faced both ways: on one side, it was funded by the Building Industry Association of Washington (in Whatcom County, the Chamber of Commerce joined in, too) and a collection of timber and developer interests. On the other side were the far-right Christian Patriots, conspiracy-prone extremists, often with John Birch Society backgrounds, who rapidly infiltrated the key groups in Snohomish and Whatcom counties, including the SNOCO PRA. In the middle were mostly retired property owners with "nest-egg" investments.

In 1991, the key regional "property rights" organizer and BIAW official, Jim Klauser, discovered previous abortive attempts by far-right/JBS "property rights" activists ("Liberty County") in Pierce County to exploit a technicality in the Washington Constitution: the formation of new counties is sketched out, but the Legislature has never passed clarifying laws spelling out the procedures. Klauser, with the help of Wise Use guru Ron Arnold, began helping organize localized secession efforts.

By 1992, numerous property rights front groups had set up county secession front groups and were using the secession petitions for illegally pre-qualifying new voter registrations and collecting voter lists, which were used by property-rights candidates in local elections. In 1993, they were able to influence county government elections in King, Snohomish, Thurston, and Whatcom counties. (More here and .)

In King, Ted Cowan was a leading spokesman for the Cedar County Committee. Up in Snohomish, two proposed counties were being formed. The Skykomish County Committee was represented by Arne Hansen, while the north half of the county was rallying around the flamboyant John Stokes and his Freedom County Committee.

The Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance (SNOCO PRA) began running a savage campaign against the critical areas ordinance, the county and particularly two county councilmen, Peter Hurley and Ross Kane. Their referendum on the land use ordinance had been the object of lengthy litigation and still hadn't made it to the polls. Using colorful single sheet tabloids, SNOCO PRA warned "NOW URBAN AND SUBURBAN DWELLERS ARE UNDER ATTACK!", "TAXPAYER RAPE!" and "YOUR PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES."

By 1994, SNOCO PRA organizers like Ben Sams were holding Christian Patriot meetings in places like Maltby and Snohomish, all of which were focused on organizing militias. Militia-movement leaders like John Trochmann and Bob Fletcher appeared at these meetings and ran through their lengthy conspiracy theories, including the claim that environmentalists' efforts to create a North Cascades Biosystem was actually part of a covert United Nations plot to round up gun owners and place them in concentration camps.

In the intervening time, many of the developers who originally financed these groups peeled away,
and the remaining Christian Patriot elements took them over wholly, notably in Snohomish/"Freedom
County" and Clark/"River County". They continued to focus their efforts on forming militias and creating new counties by secession; all of these new counties, in the organizers' plans, were predicated around far-right "Posse Comitatus" principles in which the county sheriff becomes the law of the land and the federal and state governments are powerless entities.

By 1996, the leaders of the would-be counties of Cedar, Skykomish, Freedom and Pioneer together had collected 44,650 valid signatures. At that time, they thought the state constitution required the Legislature to create a new county if petitions were signed by half the number of voters who went to the polls the previous November. All four groups achieved that goal. When nothing happened, Cedar County proponents headed to the Supreme Court.

This is where John Koster came in. As a Republican state representative from the Sultan/Monroe area, Koster in 1997 introduced bills to create Skykomish, Freedom and Pioneer counties. The Freedom and Pioneer County bills died in committee.

Koster was more successful with his Skykomish County bill, House Bill 1660. It provided for the process to create Skykomish County pending a ballot question for the affected area. The proposal set forth that the existing superior court of Snohomish County would also serve Skykomish County. Opponents of the bill (and the new county) attempted to amend the bill to require a vote from the entirety of the counties affected (Snohomish and King Counties). The bill passed the House, but failed to emerge from committee in the state Senate.

The Freedom County secessionists were led primarily by three people: David Guadalupe, who had previously been involved with the far-right American Land Rights Association; Thom Satterlee, a "sovereign citizen" and Christian Patriot whose writings at times indicated he subscribed to racist "Christian Identity" beliefs; and John Stokes of Camano Island, a onetime real-estate agent who had run afoul of state wetlands laws.

Satterlee and Stokes in April 1997 filed a complaint with the United Nations against Washington for violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights because the state would not create Freedom County: "the right of self-determination and self-government ... are being denied by the state of Washington," the complaint alleged. However, the U.N. informed them that it could not help.

Stokes later moved to Montana and began making problems there, again of the far-right-wing variety, much of it militia-oriented. (See here for more on this.)

A Superior Court decision ruled that Freedom County did not exist. When Guadalupe and Satterlee appealed to the State Supreme Court, the court commissoner wrote: "Having studied the pleadings filed by Mr. Guadualupe and Mr. Satterlee, which are in the main legally incoherent despite a heavy
larding of pseudo-legal rhetoric, I find no basis to grant a stay."

In February 1998, the state Supreme Court ruled that signatures from half the registered voters of the affected area are required to propose a new county, shelving many county secession movements in the state. Prior to the ruling, Washington county secession movements had interpreted the law to require signatures from only half of those who voted in the most recent election. Arguing that voter registration rolls are always out of date, Skykomish County movement leaders attacked the court's ruling as creating an "unreachable standard".

Koster was quoted in the press expressing his disappointment with the ruling, adding that it was time for the Legislature to step in and clarify exactly how new counties can form. "It isn't going to happen this year, not in a short session, but it needs to happen,'' he said.

By the fall of 1998, Freedom County seemed to be the only secession movement county to still be active. Satterlee told a reporter that he didn't want to be portrayed as "whacked out, anti-govenment extremists. We could make a mistake and try to create anarchy, and throw the Sheriff's Office out. But that's not going to benefit the residents of Freedom County, or Snohomish County."

Many of the county-secession organizers had Patriot movement backgrounds. Thom Satterlee is a "common law" proponent who tries to give "legal advice" to similarly ideologically inclined people. For instance, he repeatedly tried to give advice to a tax protester named Floyd Ryan at a hearing in July 1997, prompting the judge to order him to sit down. In a 1995 election he was involved in, he identified himself as 46 years of age, but gave his only occupation as "consultant." Satterlee at one point tried to pay his taxes with checks backed by pseudo-legal "liens" filed against a federal judge in Seattle over his handling of a conspiracy and weapons case against a group of western Washington militiamen.

Sharon Pietila, a general promoter of "county secession," spoke at a Washington State Militia meeting in 1995; coincidentally, she was a neighbor of since-jailed militiaman John I. Pitner, involved in various bombmaking activities.

Other attempts at forming counties during the period 1993-98 in Washington state include "Cedar County" from King County (Ted Cowan, a longtime Wise Use advocate and leader of the Washington Property Rights Alliance; Lois Gustafson, Gordon Cox, Warren Iverson, Ted Callas); "River County" from Clark County (David Darby, former head of the Clark County chapter of the United States Militia Association, Joe Ahrend, head of the Clark County Militia [who blamed the OK city bombing on the US govt], Ed Uselmann, a tree farmer, Robert Skip Leuschner, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, Rudy Ebert, Peter Brennan, Richard Van Lieu, Marshall Adams); Pioneer County from Whatcom County; Skykomish County from Snohomish County (Arnie Hansen, a real estate broker); "Pioneer County" from Skagit County; "Independence County" from Whatcom County (Doug Howard, Sharon Pietala); and "Liberty County" from Grant County (also, reportedly, "Puget Sound," "West Seattle," and "Vashon" for Vashon Island).

Typical ideas of the groups may be seen from the proposal for River County, which claimed that no outside law enforcement would be allowed to talk to a county citizen without the sheriff's permission and similar Posse Comitatus/militia/common law court ideas.

The secessionists continued to lose their fights in court as well. On Jan. 28, 2000, Supreme Court Commissioner Geoff Crooks tossed out their last effort: "Once again, David Peter Guadalupe and Thom Satterlee invite this court to step through the looking glass into the strange world of Freedom County. On behalf of the court, I decline," Crooks wrote.

In 2000, the secessionists had their last gasp. On Oct. 23, Satterlee and Guadalupe gathered a group of followers and announced they were swearing in a new sheriff, a coroner, and an auditor for Freedom County, claiming that the signatures they had gathered were enough to create the county.

The sheriff gave his name as "Fnu Lnu," which is law-enforcement lingo for "first name unknown, last name unknown." His real name was Robert Victor Bender, a 57-year-old former FBI agent from the Seattle area who was hired by organizers to provide law enforcement for the would-be county, such as it is. When he tried to introduce himself to then-Snohomish County Sheriff Rick Bart, he was tossed out of the sheriff's office.

"Without a doubt, most of the people in this county think Mr. Satterlee and his group are a bunch of
wackos," says Sheriff Bart. "They have no credibility."

Afterward, the secessionists faded away due to a lack of interest and the fact that their neighbors had largely grown to fear them. There were no further activities in Snohomish County of any note.

However, Koster remained active. He was elected a commissioner to the very Snohomish County he had worked to help his constituents secede from in 2001. But he evidently remained fond of the Patriot movement, which by 2009 re-emerged, particularly in rural areas where it had flourished in the 1990s, as the Tea Party movement. He told a group of Tea Partiers: "The Tea Party Movement, the Patriot Movement to me is one of the most exciting things to happen to this country for a long time."

__

Here is a useful timeline of the secession movement, compiled by the Everett Herald staff.

History of 'Freedom County'

Here are some of the significant events in the history of the proposed Freedom County:
1993 -- Backers begin circulating petitions to carve out a new county from most of north Snohomish County.
1994 -- Supporters announce in January that they have collected more than 12,000 signatures, sufficient, they claim, to form Freedom County.
1995 -- Freedom County presents the signatures to the Legislature in April. Thom Satterlee and David Guadalupe later claim they were "elected" Freedom County commissioners on the bus trip to Olympia .
September 1995 -- Thom Satterlee runs for the Snohomish County charter review commission. He also mounts a referendum challenge to a newly enacted county ethics ordinance, an action that goes nowhere but puts the law on hold during much of the election season.
December 1995 -- Satterlee loses his charter commission bid. He joins other disgruntled candidates in a lawsuit alleging that Snohomish County elections officials used computers to manipulate vote results. A Snohomish County judge tosses out the complaint.
January 1996 -- Satterlee claims the Snohomish County auditor mishandled petitions from Freedom County after being asked by the state to check the validity of the signatures. The auditor found more than 2,400 signatures were from people who weren't registered to vote, or had signed twice, or did not live within the boundaries of the proposed new county.
May 1996 -- David Guadalupe writes Snohomish County officials, challenging the display of gold-fringed U.S. flags in county courtrooms. Guadalupe says he believes the country is under martial law and that fringe flags are symbols of tyranny. Guadalupe's letter to county officials warns they must address him as "David Peter, Guadalupe," because to do otherwise is to use his "nom de guerre (war name)" and "that is grounds for an action for slander."
June 1996 -- State officials and Satterlee spar over whether the people who signed the Freedom County petitions should be counted even if they are not registered to vote. Satterlee maintains the state Constitution places no voter registration requirement on "electors." Auditors admit they overlooked about 900 signatures that should have been counted, but not for the reason raised by Satterlee.
April 1997 -- Satterlee and another Freedom County backer asks the United Nations to launch an investigation, alleging backers of the proposed new county have had their rights trampled upon by state and federal officials who refuse to assist them in creating their secessionist county. They allege violation of international treaties, and want the U.N. to impose sanctions, including a possible economic boycott.
June 1997 -- U.S. Secret Service agents confiscate "public wealth rebate notes" that Satterlee attempted to redeem at a local bank, in part to fund Freedom County. The notes, which have a purported face value of $38 million, supposedly get their value from liens filed by anti-government activists against federal officials.
July 1997 -- Satterlee comes to the aid of a critic of the Internal Revenue Service who has barraged Sheriff Rick Bart and others with self-generated criminal complaints and arrest warrants. He joins the man in court hearings, and also affixes his personal seal on documents the man has filed, calling for a grand jury investigation. Satterlee's seal features his name under the words "Bishop of the Way" And "Yoshua's Talmadin." Satterlee declines to explain the seal, except to say that he is a bishop in a Judeo-Christian religion, which he wouldn't further identify.
November 1997 -- A Snohomish County judge dismisses a lawsuit brought on behalf of Freedom County by Satterlee and Guadalupe. The pair claimed Snohomish County owed them $125,000 for work they'd done representing constituents in their breakaway group. They also sought a legal claim to all public and private property in Snohomish County. The judge rules that Freedom County does not exist.
December 1997 -- The state Supreme Court refuses to hear a lawsuit brought by Satterlee and Guadalupe attempting to overturn the Snohomish County judge's ruling. "Having studied the pleadings field by Mr. Guadalupe and Mr. Satterlee, which are in the main legally incoherent despite a heavy larding of pseudo-legal rhetoric, I find no basis to grant a stay," a Supreme Court commissioner wrote. A federal case brought by the pair also is tossed out.
February 1998 -- The state Supreme Court rules in the case of Cedar County, a secessionist government proposed for King County. The state's highest court holds that simply gathering signatures and presenting them to legislators does not bring a county into existence. The court also finds that only the signatures of registered voters can be counted when reviewing petitions to form a new county. The ruling means that Freedom County not only doesn't exist, but backers were roughly 5,700 signatures short of the required number when they presented them to lawmakers in 1995.
April 1999 -- The state Court of Appeals rules that Freedom County does not exist.
September 1999 -- Satterlee sends warning notices to Gov. Gary Locke, Snohomish County Executive Bob Drewel and others, threatening a forceful attempt to seize their homes if they don't recognize Freedom County. The state attorney general warns him in writing that threats against public officials could result in felony charges.
January 2000 -- The state Supreme Court dismisses another case brought by Satterlee and Guadalupe. "Once again, David Peter Guadalupe and Thom Satterlee invite this court to step through the looking glass into the strange world of Freedom County. On behalf of the court, I decline," a commissioner writes. Justice Richard Sanders, however, files a dissenting opinion saying that the case should be heard because legal questions remain to be resolved in creating new counties.
August 2000 -- Freedom County backers begin holding public meetings, asserting that the time has come for them to begin taking action as a government. Satterlee sends letters to Snohomish County, claiming that it no longer has authority over land-use, planning and building issues in much of its north end. Satterlee says Freedom County is taking applications to fill the offices of sheriff, auditor, etc.
Oct. 23, 2000 -- A King County man who calls himself Fnu Lnu takes an oath to serve as Freedom County sheriff. Two other Snohomish County men take similar oaths to serve as coroner and auditor.
Oct. 24, 2000 -- Fnu Lnu meets with Sheriff Rick Bart and presents him with a notice asserting his authority. He says federal agents are no longer allowed to seize property for back taxes within Freedom County's alleged boundaries. Bart tells Lnu that Freedom County doesn't exist, Lnu has no authority, and that he will arrest him if he attempts to act as a law officer.

Newt's Dog Whistle: Obama Is 'Not A Real President'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Look, we knew even before he won election in 2008 that Republicans were going to spend the next four years delegitimizing Barack Obama. After all, that was what the whole Birther thing was about, right?

Since then, of course, we've had a steady drumbeat of extremists parading various anti-Obama theories as a way to inject memes that further delegitimize Obama into the public bloodstream.

One of the points of this behavior is to assure "patriotic" right-wingers that they really aren't disrespecting the office of the presidency, and by extension the American people, in the process, because, you see, Obama isn't a "real" president. He's another fake president. You don't have to respect him. You can hate him all you like.

Of course, you would not be wrong to suspect that, for these folks, the only "legitimate" president is a Republican president. That's part of the game.

These sentiments are particularly pronounced in the South, and what you'll notice is that the memes delegitimizing Obama have a distinctly Southern flavor to them, especially when they come out of the mouths of Southerners like Newt Gingrich.

That is, they are rich with dog whistles, and they're all tailored to support a caricature of Obama as the reincarnation of the caricatures of black Southern politicians that was fabricated during the Reconstruction period and afterwards by apologists for the Klan and white supremacy: namely that of a cartoonishly lazy, grinning, chicken-eating, quarrelsome pack of crass opportunists.

Recall that Gingrich has a long record of this kind of garbage, including his suggestion that Obama is an "uppity" guy.

He built further on that suggestion the other night on Greta Van Susteren's Fox News show:

GINGRICH: [Obama] really is like the substitute [National Football League] referees in the sense that he’s not a real president. He doesn’t do anything that presidents do, he doesn’t worry about any of the things the presidents do, but he has the White House, he has enormous power, and he’ll go down in history as the president, and I suspect that he’s pretty contemptuous of the rest of us.

... You have to wonder what he’s doing. I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while or watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythm is, but this is a guy that is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may very well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, he happens to be a partial, part-time president.

... This is a man who in an age of false celebrity-hood is sort of the perfect president, because he’s a false president. He’s a guy that doesn’t do the president’s job.

Gingrich makes all the haters feel better. It's what good Southern propagandists do: Provide a nice soothing false patina for their seething racism.

I'm reminded of the scene depicting black legislators playing with the seat of power in South Carolina after the Civil War that appeared in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation:




This scene has been effectively endorsed by high-school history courses ever since, and to this day it remains widely believed -- thanks also to descendants of Birth of a Nation such as Gone With the Wind -- that white Southerners overthrew the "black rule" imposed by Reconstruction due to its self-evident malfeasance and incompetence.

It's also a lie. As Stephen Budiansky once explained:

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”

“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the “domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous. “This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being subjected.

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.

So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers, happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution, that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.

Lose, the nation undeniably did. In 1879, an exhausted Albion Tourgée, an Ohio-born man who as a state judge in North Carolina had fearlessly defended the rights of the common man, colored and white; who had defied Ku Klux threats and the sneers of the conservative bar when he empanelled African Americans on juries and fined lawyers for saying “nigger” in his courtroom, gave a rueful and weary interview to the New York Tribune:

In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war. I am filled with admiration and amazement at the masterly way in which they have brought about these results. The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.

Amazement: because such an outcome was not inevitable or foreordained; because, in the end, Reconstruction did not fail, but was overthrown, with impunity and audacity, in one of the bloodiest, darkest, and still least known chapters of American history.

Guys like Gingrich love to feed these old racist myths with dog whistles like this, cloaking it all in language seemingly devoid of racism -- but soaked throughout with exactly the kind of code words that old racists lap right up like PBR in a trough.

Eastern Washington's Republican Voters Reveal Their Racism

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
Most folks think of Washington as a solidly "blue" state full of Seattle-esque progressives, but unfortunately, that's really not the case. It's largely (though not entirely) true of the western side of the state, which is geographically and culturally divided by the Cascade Range. On the eastern side of the divide, as we saw during the outbreak of right-wing ugliness during the 2010 elections, things are decidedly very different.

The Tea Party rules there. Most of the radios, it seems, are tuned to Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News plays in all the public spaces.

And it's white. Very, very white. It's that way throughout the interior Northwest. This whiteness was one of the reasons the Aryan Nations chose northern Idaho -- and by extension, eastern Washington -- for relocation from southern California in the 1970s.

Of course, eastern Washingtonians heatedly deny that there is any racism inherent in their cultural conservatism, that the violent activities and the ongoing presence of white racists in the region is purely accidental.

Now, the evidence provided by the results from the August 7 primary election in Washington have established, definitively, that anti-Latino racism is rampant in central and eastern Washington.

The evidence is apparent in a single peculiar race, that for the state's Supreme Court, Position 8. The only serious candidate, a fellow named Steve Gonzalez, wound up winning because he easily took the massive vote of western Washingtonians. His opponent, a fellow named Bruce Danielson, had not campaigned at all, had raised exactly $0 for his election, and was described as having "zero
qualifications to be on the bench" by the head of his local bar association.

But in eastern Washington, Danielson won handily in every county, taking 29 in all. The obvious answer lay in the two men's names.

And it wasn't an ideological, Republican thing, either. A couple of University of Washington researchers delved the actual numbers from the election and reached the clear conclusion that race played a significant role in the voting patterns.

Paul Wissell at KPLU reports:

Racial bias did play a role in the primary election battle between Washington State Supreme Court Justice Steve Gonzalez and his challenger Bruce Danielson.

That’s the conclusion of research conducted by Matt Barreto, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington.

In the August primary, Justice Gonzalez was re-elected to the court by an overwhelming margin. But in some areas of the state, Danielson, who didn’t even campaign, drew a surprisingly high number of votes.

The suspicion has been that race played a factor, that many voters passed over the Hispanic name of Gonzalez to choose Danielson because he was white.

Barreto, who reviewed voting patterns in every precinct in the state, says the evidence proves that was true.

“What we found was that in central and eastern Washington, in particularly in Yakima and Grant counties, that there was a very high degree of racial bloc voting. That meant that in very heavily white precincts Danielson did exceptionally well winning as much as 75 percent of the vote," Barreto said.

And Barreto says it wasn’t just whites who voted in a bloc. In heavily Hispanic precincts in Yakima, Gonzalez garnered as much as 70 percent of the vote.

Eli Sanders at The Stranger has more:

Barreto's findings show, for example, that in Eastern Washington's Yakima County, Danielson drew a full 75 percent of the non-Latino vote (helping Danielson receive 64 percent of the vote overall in that county to Gonzalez's 36 percent). In fact, non-Latino voters flocked so decisively to Danielson in Yakima County that he outperformed fellow conservative Rob McKenna there by 14 points. "Danielson should not have outperformed anyone," Barreto says, "because he had no name recognition and no money."

Same story in neighboring Grant County: Danielson won the county 67 percent to 33 percent, outperformed McKenna by 7 points, and pulled in 70 percent of the non-Latino vote.

Contrast those results with the results in Western Washington's Snohomish County, where Gonzalez won. In Snohomish, Danielson polled roughly even with McKenna, which makes sense, and is a sign that voters there were making choices based on ideology rather than on a candidate's last name. This allowed the non-Latino vote in Snohomish to be more evenly distributed: 44 percent of non-Latino voters there went for Danielson, while 56 percent went for Gonzalez.

Baretto and David Perez published an op-ed this morning explaining why these results underscore the need for the state to pass its own voting rights law:

Our data proves what many have suspected for a long time: Race still matters. That’s why we need the Washington Voting Rights Act to provide an equal opportunity for minority candidates. Equality has eluded Latino candidates for too long in Washington. It’s time to pass the Washington Voting Rights Act.

Perez wrote a piece for The Stranger last month with an explanation of the law:

After encountering similar problems in their state, California legislators adopted the California Voting Rights Act of 2002. The Washington Voting Rights Act is modeled after the California version.

Some say that the legislature ought to leave it to the local governments to decide for themselves how to conduct their elections. But these advocates of “local control” are missing the point. A system that gives 49.2% of one county’s population less than 3% of its elected offices is not local control (see: Franklin County). A system that silences 41% of Yakima City is not local control. Using at-large elections to circumvent our democratic principles is not local control.

True local control would empower the people by making sure local government represents local constituencies. Under the Washington Voting Rights Act, local control would flourish once again.

The González race is a sobering reminder that our country’s first principle—that all persons are created equal—may be self-evident, but it certainly isn’t self-enforcing. We have yet to reconcile the values of the American Republic with the hopes of the American people.

As Arizona's SB1070 Becomes Law, 'Dark Chapter' Of History Looms, Author Warns

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

We knew this was coming, so it didn't raise many heads last week when a federal judge cleared the way for Arizona to begin enforcing its "papers please" provisions in the anti-immigrant law, SB1070, it passed two years ago:

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled Tuesday afternoon that police officers can begin enforcing SB 1070’s provision that mandates officers, while enforcing other laws, to question the immigration status of those they suspect are in the country illegally.

Gov. Jan Brewer has repeatedly said she’s confident SB 1070 will not lead to racial profiling but immigrant rights advocates disagree and are teaching undocumented immigrants how to defend themselves during encounters with police.

“We still see people who think that because they don’t have papers, they don’t have rights, but they do and we’re educating them about those rights,” Dulce Juarez, a member of the civil rights group Respect-Respeto, told VOXXI.

Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, bless her heart, was paying attention, and so on Monday she invited author Jeff Biggers -- whose new book, State Out of the Union, tackles the underlying issues at stake in Arizona -- on to talk about this quiet sea change:

BIGGERS: You know, I think, in effect, Amy, we’re talking about one of the—a new chapter and one of the darkest chapters in civil rights violations that we’re going to be facing in the future, because this goes beyond just looking at immigration policy. This now affects all Americans who are reasonably suspicious. And, of course, I think many think tanks and many investigations have looked at—this is not only going to open up a state of confusion, we’re talking about all levels of local law enforcements who have to make this call as, you know, who is a person who’s reasonably suspicious to be a so-called undocumented alien. I think we’re really looking at potentially some of the worst racial profiling in American history.

This is especially the case, as we've explained previously, for drivers from out of state who do not have Arizona drivers' licenses -- and especially for drivers from states such as Washington that do not require proof of citizenship or residency. That's why the ACLU issued that travel warning about Arizona.

As Biggers explained to Goodman, this fiasco is the kind of thing that always happens when right-wing extremists obtain political power and begin enacting their agendas:

When the former governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, went off to Washington to become head of Homeland Security in 2009, Jan Brewer, our governor, took power. Jan Brewer was someone who was navigating the politics and really was not part of this anti-immigrant fervor. There was this fringe movement, led by this state senator named Russell Pearce, part of this 10th Amendment movement who believe they’re not citizens of the United States but citizens the sovereign states of the United States, that really believes to the core of states’ rights, going all the way back to folks like in the 1950s.

And it’s that small fringe that managed to take power and ram through this very anti-immigrant, extremist agenda that went beyond immigration policy. It went to all levels of government, be in healthcare, in guns, in education and, of course, down to the fact of banning Mexican-American studies.

Goodman also played a lesser-aired segment of the secret Mitt Romney videotapes -- a segment in which Romney muses about his own family history in Mexico, and makes a backhanded reflection on how lousy his Latino outreach program is going:

AMY GOODMAN: Mitt Romney, you mentioned. I want to talk about this notorious video of Mitt Romney telling a crowd of wealthy donors in Florida he doesn’t worry about the 47 percent of Americans who are, quote, "dependent" on government and see themselves as, quote, "victims." In comments that have received less attention, Romney is also heard on the original tape joking to his audience that he would have a better chance this election had he been born a Latino.

MITT ROMNEY: My heritage, my dad, as you probably know, was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company, but he was born in Mexico. And had he been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot at winning this. But he was unfortunately born to Americans living in Mexico. And he lived there for a number of years. And, I mean, I say that jokingly, but it would be helpful to be Latino.

AMY GOODMAN: The significance of this secret tape that was made of Mitt Romney speaking to these wealthy donors in Florida, Jeff Biggers?

JEFF BIGGERS: You know, once again, here’s the true Romney coming out, a man who is open—openly, he was the first presidential candidate in the Republican Party to embrace 1070, the attrition through enforcement policy. His informal adviser was Kris Kobach, of course, the secretary of state from Kansas, who actually shaped the bill with Russell Pearce in Arizona. Romney has been lockstep with Arizona every step of the way from the beginning. At the same time, they do realize that in 15 states of the swing states you have the vote hinging on about 3 percent in these same states where you’re going to have an increase of 6 to 8 percent of Latino voters. And so they know the Latino voter is going to be the most important vote in this election, and they want to try to coddle it sometime, but at the same time they have completely rejected and dismissed the Latinos and their needs and their rights.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, you have Mitt Romney pushing self-deportation.

JEFF BIGGERS: Right, self-deportation. And the irony, of course, is that Romney likes to invoke his family history. And so, as a historian, let’s look at his family history. In a nutshell, Romney’s family did not simply go to Mexico as polygamists, as Mormons. They fled the country on the lam in a perjury charge. They were complete outlaws. And he has completely misrepresented that in his memoir.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain.

JEFF BIGGERS: Well, his great-grandfather—in fact, there were a number of Mormon leaders, like the Udall family and the Flake family, who actually had to go to prison for polygamy charges. But at the same time, there was encroachment in land deals, and the Romney family was being persecuted for perjury over a land deal. They went—he revoked—he gave up his bond. He went on the lam. A community was left in the lurch, according to the historical documents, the diaries of the Udalls. And they actually ran off to Arizona as outlaws. And, of course, a few years later, they come creeping back to America as refugees when the Mexican Revolution—

AMY GOODMAN: When they went to Mexico.

JEFF BIGGERS: Mexico, right. And then, once again, they come creeping back as refugees looking for sanctuary when the Mexican Revolution comes by. There’s all sorts of historical contradictions with Romney’s whole relationship with Arizona.

Right-Wing Obama Lynching Advocates Take Cue From Eastwood

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

You may recall that there were a couple of nooses displayed as protests of Barack Obama in right-wing precincts the night he was elected in 2008, and there have been effigy hangings of the president here and there since. They quickly were swept under the rug, everyone moved along, and that was that. But obviously, those sentiments among racist rednecks have, if anything, intensified in recent years.

And now that it's clear he is about to win re-election, it's coming back out -- with clear references to Clint Eastwood's speech at the GOP convention included.

First there was the cretin who hung an empty chair labeled "Nobama" in close proximity to a George Allen sign at festival in Virginia this weekend. No one evidently was able to track down the culprit.

As we say, effigy hangings aren't particularly new, though they do serve as a nice barometer of the anger levels of the expressly racist faction out there. What made this noteworthy was the clear reference to Eastwood's use of an empty chair as a proxy for President Obama.

Then an angry Republican in Austin, Texas, did it in his front yard:

Today, Burnt Orange Report received the photo at right, taken in front of a home in Northwest Austin. The resident, a Republican, lynched an empty chair from a tree in his yard, which one can easily interpret to represent a racially motivated act of violence against the President.

When confronted, the man doubled down:

I called the homeowner to ask about his display, citing my concerns as a fellow Austinite. He replied, and I quote, "I don't really give a damn whether it disturbs you or not. You can take [your concerns] and go straight to hell and take Obama with you. I don't give a shit. If you don't like it, don't come down my street."

Ironically, the homeowner in question, Bud Johnson, won "Yard of the Month" in August 2010 from his Homeowners Association. I guess his display was a little different that month?

The next day, the man added an American flag and a guard to his display.

I wonder how Clint Eastwood feels about having his piece of impromptu acting serve as grist for a lynch mob.