Archive for crashing the white guys’ party

Nearly a Third of Americans Believe Armed Revolution Against Government May Be Necessary: Return of the KKK

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Remember this video  from the Rachel Maddow Show? “Be afraid, white people! The black people are coming for you!” It’s worth another look.

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And with that, here’s your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

Farleigh Dickinson University conducted a poll released on May 1 that implies that much of the pro-gun sentiment has nothing to do with self-defense, but rather with anti-federal government rage:

Overall, the poll finds that 29 percent of Americans think that an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years [...]

But let’s be clear that the willingness to take up firearms allegedly “to protect liberties” is occurring after a long right wing-fomented Tea Party siege against a black president. Furthermore, it is – as BuzzFlash at Truthout has often noted – a rebellion of whites who can’t separate the image of America as a Caucasian-ruled nation from the legal basis of a democracy as enshrined in the US Constitution.  Theirs is a racist fantasy that a democracy should look like the skin color of the “founding fathers,” not about the legal framework of the nation that they created.

As the demographics of the United States have changed, the white Alamo contingency has come more and more to define the empowerment of a multi-cultural society as the alleged “taking away of their liberties.”

What is in their head is a return to guaranteed white sovereignty.  It is the clash of a vision of a white patriarchal society versus the constitutional guarantee of rule by the majority.

It’s starting to feel like the US has a solid 1/3 Afrikaner mentality contingent, and the gun has become the symbol of defiance.  Most of them, according to the poll, are in the Republican Party. [...]

So get ready for more militia, NRA, gun guy and survivalist brandishing of firearms on behalf of white supremacy (because that is what it amounts too, only in coded words).

Please read the entire post here.

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RNC Chair Reince Priebus now wants to play hero with minorities GOP hasn’t wanted to touch with a 10-foot car elevator

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President Obama won 93 percent of the black vote, 71 percent of the Hispanic vote and 73 percent of the Asian vote in the November election. Mitt Romney didn’t do his party any favors with his secretly taped “47 percent” remarks, saying they were “dependent on government” and “victims” who were “entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, you name it.”

As Rick Perry would say:

oops rick perry smaller

Recently the Texas GOP Chairman said his state could become a battleground in 2016. Stories like that one have Republicans spooked.

Now delusional RNC chair Reince Priebus wants to play party hero and win the hearts and minds of the very people he and his fellow Republicans disenfranchised, treated as inferior, disparaged, vastly undervalued, and designated as “the others.”

His new mission is to convince all those formerly icky-poo people– whom his party hasn’t wanted to touch with a ten-foot car elevator– that they’re suddenly worth an abundance of time and effort.

Authentic expressions of right wing appreciation and recognition on the other hand… But let’s not get greedy.

He says it will take years but insists that reaching out to voters whom the GOP regularly alienated “can move the numbers in a significant way for us in the future.”

ding ding ding

There it is, that’s what it’s all about: Moving numbers. It’s not about caring, not about truly changing from within and becoming genuinely inclusive, not about making civil rights, human rights, and equal rights a priority. No. It’s about “moving the numbers.”

Priebus added, “And it’s not just to move the numbers – it’s to do the right thing.” That he had to tack that on, lest anyone misinterpret his motives, speaks volumes. Afterthought much?

This is all about his legacy.

The Hill:

Reince Priebus is staking his legacy as Republican National Committee chairman on improving the party’s performance with minority voters. [...] Priebus says he plans on being remembered as the Republican chairman who changed things for his party. [...]

Speaking to a room full of predominantly black businessmen, community leaders, party activists and dignitaries, Priebus said he was committed to “building long term, lasting, genuine, and authentic relationships” in places where the Republican Party “just hasn’t been.”

[W]e’ve got a lot of ground to make up with the black community.” [...]  On the grassroots side, Priebus acknowledged that “our contacts are lousy” [...]

The RNC’s grassroots overhaul will address everything from “technology, data sharing, demographic issues, voter outreach and inclusion, to our primary system and the debate calendar,” an effort that Priebus said would be “extraordinarily expensive.” [...]

The second initiative is improving the GOP’s message to and image with minority groups.

If I sound a little skeptical, it’s because, well, as President Obama lays out plans for immigration reform and says, “We forget that most of us used to be them,” top Republicans like Karl Rove say to the GOP: Just don’t *sound* intolerant, Bobby Jindal said, “If we want people to like us, we have to like them first,” and Yep, still a pig, Reince Priebus.

Meantime, growing Latino clout forced the GOP hand– including evangelical pastors, US Chamber of Commerce– on immigration reform. A strategy memo released by a GOP pollster revealed that “Republicans have run out of persuadable white voters.”

So yes, Republicans are forced to “move the numbers,” stat!  Sure, they can try to do that while they simultaneously try to suppress the vote, bust unions, and deport and/or exploit undocumented immigrants.

Please proceed.

Here are a few more little issues that Reince thinks the right words and cosmetic fixes will overcome:

VIDEO: Rep. Lewis was “shocked.” He was also there in 1965. “You’re going to suggest that [the right to vote] is some racial entitlement?”

AUDIO– Fox mocks 102-year-old who waited hours to vote: “What’s the big deal? She was happy.”

If new GOP laws pass, it will literally be easier to legally buy a firearm in Virginia than it will be to vote

Graph: How long it took blacks, whites, Hispanics to vote in 2012. One guess who waited in line the least amount of time.

If you can’t win, cheat: Pennsylvania GOP to introduce election-rigging legislation

VIDEO– Andrea Mitchell to Haley Barbour on election-rigging schemes: Are Republicans “trying to game the system?”

At least 201,000 did not vote in Florida because of frustration with long lines

VIDEO– Republican consultant: Voter ID laws, long lines “help our side.”

Former Florida GOP leaders: Voter suppression was reason for new election law

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NRA Responding to Newtown Massacre Is Like Clint Eastwood Talking to an Empty Chair

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Your Daily Dose of Buzzflash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

Eastwood is the iconic image to many gun owners as the man who can “make your day” with the wide barrel of a .357 Magnum cocked to your head. [...]

Nate Silver analyzed figures the other day in the New York Times and discovered that more Republicans than Democrats own guns – and the gap is increasing [...]

Exactly who or what are white males claiming to defend themselves against?

Since Obama was elected, we have heard many extremists on the right shout out slogans such as “to the bullet, if the ballot box fails” – and “if we keep moving toward socialism, I won’t rule out war.”  You recognize the verbal threats and their variations. Given America’s legacy of assassinations and violence – how our dreams and dashed and the course of history changed in the ’60s by gunfire – it would be naïve to regard these as idle carping.

Although the NRA and other gun advocacy organizations most often play upon the emotional need for a gun to use in self-defense against alleged criminal blacks and latinos (although they would never admit to playing the race card – but trust me, it’s a broken record in the coded appeals of the pro-gunners), they combine that with an anti-government agenda.  [...]

But the real fear of the generally aging white males who are the core of the “you’ll have to pry my gun from my cold dead fingers” cult is being psychologically threatened by a multi-cultural, multi-gender society in which the white patriarchal model (that implicitly includes white male privilege) is under siege. [...]

The explosive, vitriolic, sledge hammer opposition to gun control (and we are now, in this day and age, talking about firearms that are hi-tech weapons of war, not revolvers) is due to a fear that the age of white male dominance is in decline. [...]

As time progresses, however, the worship of guns as a religious objects is losing its appeal as the US population becomes more diverse [...]

That is why 82-year-old Clint “Dirty Harry” Eastwood was representative of the revered figure of a “locked and loaded” masculinity so appropriate for a Republican Convention.  That is also why his farcical interrogation of a phantom President Obama was symbolic of a masculine state of mind that may have finally lost its grip.

Please read the whole thing here.

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Ruh roh! “Republicans have run out of persuadable white voters.”

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Let’s recap: If this Democratic source is correct, the GOP is even more tone deaf than we thought:

Mitt Romney famously said, “It would be helpful to be Latino.”

And Bobby Jindal said, “If we want people to like us, we have to like them first.”

Karl Rove’s advice to his fellow Republicans was just don’t *sound* intolerant. It’s the language, see, not the policies. Sounding judgmental will lose you votes.

How will Republicans get out of this pickle? They have no use for anyone who isn’t male and white, they lost badly in the November elections because of their small minds, and now all they can do is tell each other that the Big Solution is to fake it.

So along comes a strategy memo released by GOP pollster Whit Ayres and the Hispanic Leadership Network’s Jennifer Korn. Strange as it seems, the GOP is  — wait for it — running out of white voters. It looks like they’ll have to do a whole lot more than just pretend:

Republicans have run out of persuadable white voters. For the fifth time in the past six presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. Trying to win a national election by gaining a larger and larger share of a smaller and smaller portion of the electorate is a losing political proposition. [...]

Conclusion

Republicans face some major challenges among Hispanic Americans, problems that will not be resolved just by passing immigration reform legislation. Years of harsh rhetoric and punitive policies will not be undone overnight. Fixing a broken immigration system is necessary but not sufficient to make Republicans competitive in the Hispanic community.

But resolving those problems is imperative if Republicans hope to remain a competitive force in national politics. Numbers do not lie, and growing Hispanic influence in American life will only continue to grow.

H/t: Taegan

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GOP faces unexpected challenges in South amid shrinking white vote

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President Obama, our first black president, fared better in the South than any other Democratic nominee has in 30 years. So much for those who say he hasn’t accomplished anything. The Southern white Republican base may be in need of a Southern white Republican boost. WaPo:

Obama won Virginia and Florida and narrowly missed victory in North Carolina. But he also polled as well in Georgia as any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, grabbed 44 percent of the vote in deep-red South Carolina and just under that in Mississippidespite doing no substantive campaigning in any of those states.

Much of the post-election analysis has focused on the demographic crisis facing Republicans among Hispanic voters, particularly in Texas. But the results across other parts of the South, where Latinos remain a single-digit minority, point to separate trends among blacks and whites that may also have big implications for the GOP’s future.[...]

[P]owerful forces in the region are clearly eroding GOP dominance. The trends pose difficulties for a Republican Party that has been shifting toward Dixie since the “Southern strategy” of the Nixon era, which sought to encourage white flight from the Democratic Party.

According to one pollster who helped analyze swing states for Team Obama, “They also have a problem with whites, in this election cycle, just showing up.”

Even trying to use President Obama’s support for abortion rights and gay issues against him didn’t work:

Black pastors — some of whom had preached against gay marriage in the past — rallied to the president.

Not to mention African Americans turned out and voted for the president in droves.

So the new line that I keep hearing and reading is how the Republican party will have to force themselves to be more inclusive of minorities and women, because, clearly, they can’t win without them.

But see, Republicans don’t seem to want to truly understand and empathize with the needs and predicaments of these voting groups. It’s all about acquiring the votes, the numbers, the Big Win, not caring for their fellow Americans as, you know, people.

What oh what will they do about the tea party’s (persistent, stubborn) willful blindness? They still “hope to weed out Republicans they consider insufficiently conservative.” Which means, at least to tea baggers, women’s rights and gay rights are still off the table, undocumented immigrants will still be referred to as “illegals,” God’s intentions still include rape births, and African American voters will still have to jump through hoops in order to simply cast a ballot.

Meanwhile, they can fake-like the very people for whom they show such utter disdain, because as Bobby Jindal said, “If we want people to like us, we have to like them first.”

White on, er, right on, GOP!

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Powerful VIDEO: “It’s not a dog whistle. We can HEAR you. And we’re calling you on it.”

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The words “powerful” and “effective” don’t do this short segment by Melissa Harris Perry justice.

“This may be practical political strategy: fear of the ‘dangerous black man,’ resentment for the mythical ‘welfare queen.’ It has worked before, but it will not work much longer, ’cause it’s not a dog whistle. We can hear you. And we’re calling you on it.

Related post here.  And back in 2010, Rachel Maddow covered the fears of the GOP feeling threatened by a white minority here: “Be afraid, white people! The black people are coming for you!”

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African American delegate at GOP convention: “I walked out there, I looked around, and I couldn’t count any black folks.”

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The L.A. Times’ Mitchell Landsberg has a good article about the demographically challenged Republican party, and how their monochrome-itude was painfully obvious at their convention. The country as a whole is changing, and nonwhites will soon be a majority, and whites will be a minority, which clearly drives some people totally crazy.

Back in 2010, Rachel Maddow covered the fears and feelings of being threatened by that shift beautifully here: “Be afraid, white people! The black people are coming for you!”

Meantime, back in Tampa, an African American delegate from North Carolina named Phillip had this to say:

The day he arrived, Phillip said, “I walked out there, I looked around, and I couldn’t count any black folks.” [...]

According to unofficial figures compiled by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, blacks accounted for slightly more than 2% of the delegates at the convention. [...]

By contrast, the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., next week is expected to feature delegates who hew much closer to the demographics of the nation at large. [...]

Prime-time television audiences saw speeches by, among others, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is black, and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, the nation’s first Latina governor. But as the camera panned over the crowd, black and Latino faces were rare.

Yes, the GOP is great at creating illusions, on stage and off, but the “big tent” facade is as empty as so many of their slogans and promises.

Speaking of pandering:

Romney has spoken to minority groups, including the NAACP, and is about to announce formation of an African American support group. Until that happens, black visitors to his campaign website will find links for coalitions of Latino, Asian American and Polish American supporters, among others, but none for African Americans.

Just another empty chair.

Via Mother Jones

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