Clay Burell's Bookmarks tagged elections08 →  View Popular

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it.

But they need those votes!

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So it has been for the Grand Old Party since the 1980s or so, as it has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners.

Short break as writer ties blindfold and smokes her last cigarette.

Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.

It isn't that culture doesn't matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party -- and conservatism with it -- eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one's heart where it belongs.

Religious conservatives become defensive at any suggestion that they've had something to do with the GOP's erosion. And, though the recent Democratic sweep can be attributed in large part to a referendum on Bush and the failing economy, three long-term trends identified by Emory University's Alan Abramowitz have been devastating to the Republican Party: increasing racial diversity, declining marriage rates and changes in religious beliefs.

like it or not, we are a diverse nation, no longer predominantly white and Christian. The change Barack Obama promised has already occurred, which is why he won.

Among Jewish voters, 78 percent went for Obama. Sixty-six percent of under-30 voters did likewise. Forty-five percent of voters ages 18-29 are Democrats compared to just 26 percent Republican; in 2000, party affiliation was split almost evenly.

The young will get older, of course. Most eventually will marry, and some will become their parents. But nonwhites won't get whiter. And the nonreligious won't get religion through external conversion. It doesn't work that way.

Given those facts, the future of the GOP looks dim and dimmer if it stays the present course. Either the Republican Party needs a new base -- or the nation may need a new party.

I probably didn't get started getting active in church activities until I moved to Chicago.

The way I came to Chicago in 1985 was that I was interested in community organizing and I was inspired by the Civil Rights movement. And the idea that ordinary people could do extraordinary things. And there was a group of churches out on the South Side of Chicago that had come together to form an organization to try to deal with the devastation of steel plants that had closed. And didn't have much money, but felt that if they formed an organization and hired somebody to organize them to work on issues that affected their community, that it would strengthen the church and also strengthen the community.

So they hired me, for $13,000 a year. The princely sum. And I drove out here and I didn't know anybody and started working with both the ministers and the lay people in these churches on issues like creating job training programs, or afterschool programs for youth, or making sure that city services were fairly allocated to underserved communites.

This would be in Roseland, West Pullman, Altgeld Gardens, far South Side working class and lower income communities.

Over at slate.com, conservatives were more critical.

Tucker Carlson apparently wasn't impressed with Palin's - um - verbal skills. On Slate's forum, The Conservative Crackup, he wrote:

After the (Republican) party has settled on what it believes, it ought to go shopping for a leader. I recommend someone who speaks fluent English. This matters, it turns out, and not just for aesthetic reasons. In a democracy, eloquence is a basic condition of leadership. A president has a moral as well as a political obligation to explain his program. His constitutional powers are limited to just a few (war, the veto). His real authority comes from persuasion.

It helps if you can talk.

Kathleen Parker didn't succumb to Palin's "folksy charm":

Palin whipped up crowds, winking her way through attacks against Obama that telegraphed, "He's not one of us." We saw the cackling white man toting an Obama monkey to a rally and listened slack-jawed as country singer Gretchen Wilson belted out "Redneck Woman" while Palin clapped and lip-synched her favorite song.

They saw in Palin a kindred spirit who was fearless in defending bedrock values of family, country, and, yes, belief in a higher authority. What they failed to acknowledge was that Obama and family-churchgoing, well-educated exemplars of community service-were the embodiment of those same values, a Rockwellian portrait rendered with the brushstrokes of our professed core beliefs that all men are created equal-and that through hard work, anyone can become anything in the United States of America.

The Republican base is fast becoming a racial and cultural minority. . . .. Her supporters were willingly blind to her weaknesses. . .

What a great many others saw was someone out of her depth, whose lack of knowledge-and apparent lack of intellectual curiosity was a bonding agent with the Republican base.

Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party's own educated members.

Which seemed more unlikely a few decades ago: that you would be the most famous graduate of 1960s radicalism in America or that you would appear on "Good Morning America" along with a segment about a pregnant man?

I really wanted a segment about the two-headed monkey to follow. That's exactly how I think of most of the mainstream media. It's amazing when you think about that this broad and amazingly diverse and committed and passionate antiwar movement of 40 years ago gets reduced in the narrative put up by the Republican campaign to a single organization which was tiny and on the margins [the Weather Underground] and a single individual who was co-founder of that and a single sentence that individual said. The parallel to that is that the powerful black freedom movement gets reduced to a single preacher in a single church and a single phrase.

Martin Luther King?

No, I'm talking about the reduction of the civil rights movement to Jeremiah Wright. So the civil rights movement becomes Jeremiah Wright and the antiwar movement becomes me. It all seems entirely preposterous to me -- and I think that we should reject that.

The New York Times headline on the morning of Sept. 11 was "No Regrets for a Love of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen."

That headline "No Regrets" was also the headline of the Chicago magazine article a week earlier and it was the headline of several articles. And remember all these interviews were done before 9/11. What I have said continually, and I still say, that while I regret many things (you can't be 63 years old and not have many, many regrets), what I don't regret is opposing the war in Vietnam. A murderous, violent, terrorist war against an entire population. I don't regret resisting that war with every ounce of my being.

Now having said that, that's not a tactical statement. That's a sense of both hope and despair and rethinking. In 1965, I was first arrested in Ann Arbor for opposing the war in Vietnam. And at that time, something like 60 to 75 percent of Americans supported the war in Vietnam. Three years later, in 1968, something like 65 percent of Americans opposed the war. A lot of things happened in those three years. But by 1968, when we really had won the argument about Vietnam, we thought that the war would really come to an end. Especially when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would step down.

This is where we probably part company. One of the reasons, in my view, that Nixon got away with pursuing the war was that, in part, the violence of the Weather Underground -- and some of the other extreme parts of the antiwar movement -- discredited the overall antiwar movement. And that led to a further polarization of American life, which led to the first round of demonology involving yourself.

I don't see it that way. You could be partly right. I don't know how to make those cause-and-effect relationships. I would posit a different explanation. I think what happened was cynical and thought through and it was deliberate. And I think what happened was that the Nixon administration determined that they could keep the war going without a domestic upheaval that they couldn't handle. So they stopped bringing dead soldiers home. So they made it an air war and a sea war that was no longer a ground war. So they withdrew troops and they punished Vietnam and pounded it into the ground. When I say it was a war of terror, that is not idle talk. There were entire areas of Vietnam that were designated free fire zones. If you were a pilot and had leftover ordinance, you could just drop it in those villages and they did. So a couple of thousand people every month were dying, innocent people ...

It was a crime against humanity on an enormous scale. We were trying to end it. In the six years that the Weather Underground existed, we did everything we could to end it. We never hurt or killed anyone -- by design. We didn't want to. Was it risky, were we a little nuts, were we a little off the track? Yes. Did we cross lines of legality and propriety and common sense? I think we did. On the other hand, I don't think we were the cause of any kind of reaction. I think we were a small part of an upheaval against war and against killing.

What's your biggest hope for an Obama presidency?

Most of all, what I really hope is that we put an end to the era of 9/11, the era of fear and war -- and that's what I think most people hope. That spirit in Grant Park was that spirit of hope and that spirit of "yes, we can." "Yes, we can put an end to this." "Yes, we can reimagine the future." I think it's a time when we could redefine what are we basing our foreign policy on, what are we basing our education policy on. I think this election is automatically a historic moment. It automatically restores a certain amount of goodwill in the world. I hope he uses it. I hope he closes Guantánamo immediately. I hope he withdraws from Iraq immediately. But those hopes aren't idle. They are built on building an irresistible social movement to see that those things happen...

One of the delicious ironies of being in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, was that I was weeping for a lot of reasons. But one of them was that I couldn't help remembering 40 years earlier I was beaten bloody in that same park. And there's something sweet about 40 years later, something unimaginable happening...

We [Ayers and Dohrn] got there around 10:00. We were so glad that we had because it was a moment that we wanted to share. We didn't want to be by ourselves. It was just too sweet. It felt like a page of history was being turned. And, of course, there are going to be challenges, obstacles, setbacks, disappointments, reversals up ahead. But who doesn't want to savor that? Who doesn't want to wish this young man and his beautiful young family all the best in the world because it's their moment. We invest a lot of hope in them. Let's not lose hope in ourselves. But let's wish them all the best.

Analysis of the election results by the New York Times produced a
revealing map, which showed that across large areas of the south,
particularly in Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, the national
swing to the Democrats was actually reversed.

In contrast to the rest of the US, Republicans made big gains in counties that
were disproportionately white and poor. Fewer than one in three southern
whites voted for Mr Obama, compared with 43 per cent of whites nationwide.

Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors racial
violence, said: "I think the very idea of a black man being elected to
the White House is shocking to some subset of the American white population."

The Colleague is: John McCain?

John Mc Cain attended private school and graduated from Annapolis is 1958 with a Bachelor’s degree. He ranked 894 in a class of 899 almost flunking out before graduation. That bit of information should not bother teachers, especially in public education; these professionals love a challenge with a low achiever.

What should bother teaching professionals is that because McCain’s children attended parochial schools, he is a strong advocate of school “Choice” i.e. school vouchers. According to his chief education advisor, Lisa Graham Keegan, McCain believes that parents should not limit themselves to school districts or even their own pocketbooks when it comes to their children’s education. McCain believes that all Americans have a right to taxpayer-subsidized religious education.

On October 14, 2008, a Florida judge ruled that the state's Constitution barred students from using taxpayer money for private school tuition. Yet McCain is willing to reinstate the recently proclaimed unconstitutional voucher tug of war to prove his point..

McCain also believe’s that President Bush’s controversial No Child Left Behind Act has, according to a quote in education.com by domestic policy advisor, Holtz-Eakin, “focused our attention on the realities of how students perform against a common standard. “ Holtz-Eakin and Keegan have provided no information, thus far, as to how McCain’s policy differs in any fundamental way from President Bush.

Barack Obama attended primarily a parochial and a prep school before college. Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where his high academic record enabled him to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review, He also taught at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.

Although the Obamas talk about strengthening public schools, Michelle and Barack send their two daughters to private schools. Public media sources indicate, however, that Obama opposes school vouchers, reasoning that such “independent scholarships” take taxpayer money away from public schools. He believes in increased funding and reforming of No Child Left Behind, and he is an advocate of increased teacher pay( albeit through the unpopular “merit” program). He promotes public pre-school programs, and grants for educational innovation.

American Teachers

In July, Obama was endorsed by The National Education Association (NEA). In October 2008, American Teacher, a publication of The American Federation of Teachers, endorsed Barack Obama. Randi Weingarten, the AFT president, said of the endorsement, “Barack Obama has walked the walk with people we represent his entire adult life.”

Neither candidate’s views dovetail exactly with the perfect educational presidential candidate. Educator’s, however, should have no difficulty choosing “the best answer” when they mark their polls on November 4, 2008.

An American Moment: Your Story

Start right now. Tell us your story in your own words about what this campaign and this election means to you. Share your hopes for an Obama Administration and a government for the people.

Obama's innovative use of the Web during his campaign, for everything from encouraging supporters to vote to raising funds, marks a turning point in how politicians use the Internet and in how citizens can participate for social change, Gore said.

"What happened in the election opens up a whole new range of possibilities," he said. "Now's the time to really move swiftly to exploit these new possibilities."

Gore also talked about how his company Current TV, of which he is chairman and cofounder, is attempting to use the Internet to break television's decades-old monopolization of information, which he said has had negative consequences.

"A reason why the political system hasn't been operating very well until this election is the deadening influence of the TV medium as it has been operating," he said.

Asked by conference chair John Battelle if he is worried that this Web-powered social involvement among citizens will lose steam, Gore said: "No, I'm not. It's very much in its infancy, barely beginning. We aren't many years away from TV sinking into the digital world and becoming a part of it."

"The social activism that's made possible by these new tools is just beginning to take off," he added.

Gore, who has become a leading voice in recent years for the protection of the environment, said President-elect Obama should be bold in his goals to address climate change. For example, he should set a national goal for the U.S. to get all its electricity from renewable and non-carbon sources within 10 years.

"We can do it," he said, amidst heavy applause from the audience.

He cited various imminent dangers for the environment, including the 75 percent to 80 percent chance that in the next 5 years, the North Pole ice cap, which has been around for about 3 million years and is almost the size of the continental U.S., will disappear.

"This is an apocalyptic signal from the planet itself," Gore said.

When Barack Obama becomes president in January, he'll confront the controversial legal legacy of the Bush administration.




From expansive executive privilege to hard-line tactics in the war on terrorism, Obama must decide what he'll undo and what he'll embrace.




The stakes couldn't be higher.




On one hand, civil libertarians and other critics of the Bush administration may feel betrayed if Obama doesn't move aggressively to reverse legal policies that they believe have violated the Constitution and international law.




On the other hand, Obama risks alienating some conservative Americans and some — but by no means all — military and intelligence officials if he seeks to hold officials accountable for those expansive policies.




These are some of the legal issues confronting him:




• How does he close the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba? He's pledged to shutter it, but how quickly can he do so when it holds some detainees whom no administration would want to release?


• Obama has declared coercive interrogation methods such as waterboarding unconstitutional and illegal, but will his Justice Department investigate or prosecute Bush administration officials who ordered or condoned such techniques?


• Will the new administration press to learn the full extent of the Bush administration's electronic eavesdropping and data-mining activities, and will it curtail or halt some of them?


• The Bush administration exerted tight control over the Justice Department by hiring more Republican-leaning political appointees and ousting those who were viewed as disloyal. Will Obama give the department more ideological independence?





Undoing some policies will take time.

Bush Sin 1: Blew hot air on global warming

By refusing to agree to mandatory greenhouse gas emission reductions, the Bush administration gave major developing nations, such as China and India, carte blanche to do the same. After all, why should these growing economies do anything about global warming when the one of the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluters and richest nations couldn't be bothered?

"The most shameful thing we've done of all is to walk away from the international debate on climate, which has crippled the debate and caused everyone else in the world to think that we're hypocritical and deluded," says Bill McKibben, author and climate activist. "The Chinese have all the coal they need to destroy the atmosphere by themselves to get rich, and we have no moral objection as to why they shouldn't just go ahead and burn it, because that's precisely what we did."

They don't call it global warming for nothing. The result: eight precious years wasted in the fight against global warming as we watched carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere shoot up, while scientists' predictions about the speed and severity of global warming became increasingly dire.

Obama mission

Signal that the United States will change its shameful record on global warming -- even before taking office. Attend the international climate talks in Poznan, Poland, this December, and electrify the rest of the world with a promise that the U.S. is serious about reducing greenhouse gases. That could set the stage for the major climate negotiations to come in Copenhagen, Demark, in December 2009, when a climate treaty to succeed Kyoto needs to be hammered out.