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Banned
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
Please, when host starts to attack the democrats let me know. I do recall him saying someone like John Edwards could save me from the American version of Chavez.
Just because you and host are communists or close enough, it doesn't mean you don't have an obvious bias against republicans in favor of the democrats. Since there is no point in discussing communist party politics in the US, they are a non-issue, its obvious someone would show how the 'other side' (the far far left isn't a side worth speaking of, no one takes them seriously) is guilty of the same type of crime host is trying to pin on republicans.
host obviously has 'issues' with the republicans, so there is nothing odd about throwing back the history he chooses to forget. You would think someone with so much google power, wouldn't need to be reminded.
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Ustwo, does "WHAT ENDS UP HAPPENING, AS A RESULT, the effect, OF YOUR POLITICS", your advocacy, get a good, hard, look from you, now and then?
Here's some of it, for you to consider, it's a link to a current thread authored by half of a young disabled couple, living in two of the poorest states, who can't consider marriage because US medicare and SS disability regs would cut off their benefits....lifeline...safety net.....wipe them out...if they exhibited how healthy they actually are, by the act of getting married:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...re#post2367691
Meanwhile, the fiscal "pitbulls" you love to see winning elections, piss away all the "savings" from screwing the unfortunates described above,by these decisions:
Quote:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/...24military.php
Billions in aid to Pakistan was wasted, officials assert
By DAVID ROHDE, CARLOTTA GALL, ERIC SCHMITT AND DAVID E. SANGER
The money the U.S. spent to bolster the Pakistani military effort against militants has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, officials said....
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004964.php
State Dept Document from 2005 Shows Fraud in Blackwater's Iraq Contract
By Spencer Ackerman - December 21, 2007, 11:40AM
....Yet despite its own internal watchdog's finding of fraudulence in Blackwater's Iraq contract, months later, the State Department re-signed a deal with the company to provide security for U.S. diplomats.
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I object to the political-economic system you fully support because of what is described in the preceding examples of contradictions and because:
Quote:
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...lism_wages.htm
....There is absolutely nothing in capitalist (neoclassical) economic theory that even attempts to compensate employees by the "real" contribution made. Capitalist economic theory dictates that wages are determined by labor markets, so how much each employee gets paid is not determined by their contribution, but rather by the market value of their labor. There is no way to determine who is really responsible for the value created. The market value of each employee's labor is determined basically by how much other people in the market are willing to sell their labor for....
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...ww#post2146562
In 1916, a labor organizer named Jane Street developed a system in Denver that attempted to raise the wages and working conditions of domestic help. It seems that she recognized the validity of the ideas in [the text above the preceding link]
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If you want to label me with something that will allow you to marginalize or dismiss what is in my posts (you're proabaly at that point, already), read the examples that I've assembled to represent "my politics", and decide, if you haven't already, whether I'm a "commie", or an "extreme left" looney, and decide if that allows total, or only partial dismissal of my POV.
My politics are counter to yours. I show you why, in nearly every post. When do you show me, or anyone else, anything? You've offrered a few "minority reports" from scientists with opinions related to climate change, but beyond that???????
host's political sampler:
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http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=128489
In the Climate of the Bush "Politics of Fear", Democrat Leaders Our Eyes & Ears?
Ranking Democratic Senate Intel Committee member Sen. Jay Rockefeller
"knew something about this", but he said nothing....he should have been our "eyes and ears". Now he is chairman of that Senate Committee. Where are the unreleased parts of the 2004 Intel commitee report on the ways the white house handled Iraq pre-invasion intelligence he had promised to make public?
Ranking Democrat on the house intel. committee until Jan., 2007, Jane Harman, says she vaguely "Knew about it", and "wrote a letter".
Was this enough to meet her obligation to be "our eyers and ears"?
A main white house effort the last four years was <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5411688">to militarize the management of formerly civilian headed intelligence agencies</a>. In addition to key democrats on the two intel committees turing "a blind eye", wasn't it a good idea, in terms of serving the interests of "the people", to appoint civilians to head these agencies? Aren't the largest intel. agencies, DIA, etc., already managed by the military?
Why did democrats vote to approve these appointments by the president of military officers to head key intelligence agencies?
Should defendants in criminal cases in the US receive new trials now that Mike Hayden admits that "evidence" uised against them was "coerced" from third parties by CIA personnel using "techniques" that made them fearful enough to destroy videotaped evidence of?,,,
<h3>....I think that democrats who enabled the crimes of the Bush administration to be obstructed or covered up, should be prosecuted</h3> along with those who ordered and obeyed orders to commit crimes....abuse of prisoners, withholding of evidence from defense lawyers, and destruction of evidence are a few.
Do you think that the CIA videotapes could have been destroyed if Rockefeller and Harman were adequately representing "the rest of us"? Do you think that they have committed crimes by not objecting to a coverup and destruction of evidence? Weren't they aware that Moussaui was on trial and evidence used against him came from coerced interrogations?
Do "the politics of fear", created as a smokescreen and an excuse by the Bush/Cheney for their abuses of human rights, in any way exonerate Rockefeller and Harman?
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Quote:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=113564
"Reds" on DVD after 25 years....and what about those "centrist" politics of yours ???
My questions and supporting research here are aimed at folks who think of themselves as in "the middle" politically. If you really are a "centrist", why do you think that Harvard educated journalist John Reed, labor organizer and union founder William Haywood, and later, local NAACP leader Robert Franklin Williams, were hounded out of the US by government authorities, while folks who thought of themselves as "centrists", looked on in silence, or simply ignored the government oppression, and voted for Hoover, Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes? Do you see our political history of the last 100 years, or your own political POV, for that matter.....more "off center", after reading some or all of this OP?
It has been 25 years since the release of Warren Beatty's film, a 3 hour, "epic" motion picture; titled "Reds", the story of American journalist, John Reed, author of the book "Ten Days that Shook the World", was released in 1981. The "Reds" DVD was not released until late last year. John Reed died in Moscow from a typhoid epidemic in 1920. His body is interred near Lenin's, in a Kremlin wall....
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Originally Posted by host
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...67#post2345131
Comparing Ron Paul to the "Serious" Candidates
A while back, I did a thread here about the career and political views of Huey P. Long. No one responded. History says that Roosevelt was the prime populist mover of the 30's. The SSA.gov history pages say otherwise.
What is it that makes a politician "mainstream"? What is it that makes people view themselves as "centrists", middle of the road? Is it necessary for a "serious" candidate for US president to have been right, on major issues on his resume, much of the time, once in a while, or doesn't matter?...
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Originally Posted by host
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...8&postcount=14
How many congressional investigations, and the information that has come to us, as a result of them, has voting "Green", brought us?
IMO, politics is the art of the possible, and unlike voting republican, voting democrat is, at least, a compromise. I see no democrats, even under investigation in any significant degree, especially for selling out their constituents, or...in the cases of Cunningham, Foggo, Wade, Wilkes, and in the associated investigation of Jerry Lewis....our military spending potential.
The democrats are not perfect....far from it....but their "big" '90's "scandals"...the last time that they held real congressional power, resulted in Dan Rostenkowski's convictions for abusing the postal funds at his office's disposal, and Speaker Jim Wright's "crimes":....
...The only hope to level the wealth disparity we are experiencing is to tax more like Sweden and France do....the alternative is the disappearance of the middle class, and a higher concentration of wealth in possession of the top ten percent than the current 70 percent of total US wealth that the 2004 Fed report says that they control.
pan comments on the elderly losing their homes to property taxes. Since 2001, the political majority in DC declared a tax holiday on the wealthiest, resulting in less domestic spending that shifts the tax burden to local entities that raise money, in lieu of federal revenue sharing that was no longer collected....to local property taxes.
My concern is about a coming wave of impoverished elderly baby boomers vs. 75 percent of total wealth in the hands of the top ten percent, and then, by 2030..... eighty percent of all wealth in the hands of the top ten percent.
I don't have much sympathy for elderly folks who have experienced home value appreciation that they could have cashed out in the last few years, at two to ten times what they originally paid for their homes. They still can lock in the profit, via reverse mortgage arrangements.
The real estate price run up shifted the wealth, not away from those approaching their elder years....who already owned homes that then rose dramatically in value in many areas since the late '90's.....but away from younger people...young families entering the home market for the first time...paying the high prices to those who already owned at a much lower basis.
Read the Huey P. Long thread that I posted several months ago. The solution now is the same as it ever was...... a wealth tax. Voting "green", and bashing
democrats who are saints, compared to republicans, is not "an art of the possible", strategy.
We need to address the wealth distribution problem....it is not going away....and it will, if the trend continue....make the US look and feel more like
Mexico looks and feels today, than like Canada.....
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Quote:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...ww#post2279440
.....In 1916. the IWW, aka "Wobblies", successfully increased the day wage for housemaids by organizing the maids, to a degree, coordinating responses to ads for employment placed by wealthy matrons....scripting the applicants to ask for a uniform amount of pay....significantly higher than the existing rate....and providing a comfortable HQ for maids to meet and share their experiences in gaining hire wages with stricter parameters of what they would or would not do, related to their job descriptions....(see "Jane Street" Denver housemaids....)
My point is that our economic "system" would be "pecked" apart, either by the holders if capital buying the political influence and organization to keep those who sell their labor, or their independently produced products from organizing to a degree that they are able to present uniform price and other conditions on the capitalists, in exchange for their product or service (labor).
The "system" broke down in the late 1920's, unitl 1939, when the solution, as always....was war.......
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Ottopilot, <h3>Which political act in our timeline was grossly out of synch, against the 30 year progression?:</h3>
My objection to your argument is that it ignores progression in race relations:
1948: Truman desegregates military
1957: Eisenhower orders federal troops to use armed force to integrate school
1964: Civil Rights legislation passed
1965: Voting Rights legisaltion passed
1980: Regan wins nomination at republican convention, next stop, Neshoba Cty fair to stress commitment to "States Rights" to all white audience in state with higest per capita black population....
<h3>Ottopilot, this is the apologist, David Brooks at work, doing Reagan image repair, 27 years later.....why?</h3>
I reacted to the ridiculous "anit states rights, Bush EPA decsion in California, but the following is the poster for the hypocrisy that contradicts the "states rights", republican mantra:
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/op...=1&oref=slogin
November 9, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
<h3>History and Calumny</h3>
By DAVID BROOKS
Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.
The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.
The truth is more complicated.
In reality, Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes. Reagan delivered a major address at the Urban League, visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, toured the South Bronx and traveled to Chicago to meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines.
Lou Cannon of The Washington Post reported at the time that this schedule reflected a shift in Republican strategy. Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters.
But there was another event going on that week, the Neshoba County Fair, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia. The Neshoba County Fair was a major political rallying spot in Mississippi (Michael Dukakis would campaign there in 1988). Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up. They’d recently done well in the upper South, but they still lagged in the Deep South, where racial tensions had been strongest. Jimmy Carter had carried Mississippi in 1976 by 14,000 votes.
So the decision was made to go to Neshoba. Exactly who made the decision is unclear. The campaign was famously disorganized, and Cannon reported: “The Reagan campaign’s hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to the fair.” Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out.
The Reaganites then had an internal debate over whether to do the Urban League speech and then go to the fair, or to do the fair first. They decided to do the fair first, believing it would send the wrong message to go straight from the Urban League to Philadelphia, Miss.
Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful, and can be heard at: http://www.onlinemadison.com/ftp/rea...ganneshoba.mp3. He told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.”
He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”
The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.
Reagan flew to New York and delivered his address to the Urban League, in which he unveiled an urban agenda, including enterprise zones and an increase in the minimum wage. He was received warmly, but not effusively. Much of the commentary that week was about whether Reagan’s outreach to black voters would work.
You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.
Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.
But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.
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<h3>Ottopilot, did Brooks explain it all away? Read on:</h3>
Quote:
http://www.slate.com/id/2177252/fr/flyout
chatterbox
Decoding David Brooks
Psst! His latest column is an attack on Times colleague Paul Krugman.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Nov. 9, 2007, at 7:29 PM ET
There is an unwritten rule at the New York Times that forbids its op-ed columnists to attack one another in print. It's a holdover from a much stuffier era in the paper's history, and one can appreciate the sentiment behind it. An op-ed page whose columnists routinely denounced one another would create the impression of a newspaper more interested in arguing with itself than in engaging the world outside its walls. The example most frequently cited is the Village Voice of the 1960s and 1970s. A more contemporary example would be the blogosphere.
The trouble with the Times prohibition is that every now and then one op-ed contributor takes a whack at another op-ed contributor without actually spelling things out. I plead guilty, when I was an assistant editor on the page a quarter-century ago, to publishing an unacknowledged but quite deliberate parody of James Reston, then still a Times columnist and long past his prime, by the writer Alex Heard. We headlined the piece, "The Time Is Today," and Alex filled it with hilarious banalities and important-sounding assertions that had no meaning at all. Alex's only precaution was to omit from the piece, at my instruction, any overt references to Reston. Mine was to keep mum within the Times building about what made the piece funny.
The problem, as you can well imagine, was that we couldn't let readers in on the joke. If they got it at all, it was as a generic parody of op-ed pomposity. As a consequence, the fine craftsmanship of Alex's comic achievement went unheralded.
I remembered that hard lesson while reading <h3>David Brooks' column, "History and Calumny,"</h3> in the Nov. 9 New York Times. "Today I'm going to write about a slur," Brooks begins. Although this "distortion" has been around for many years, it has "spread like a weed over the past few months." It is "spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn't even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence."
People? Who are these people? Brooks doesn't say. He scrupulously cites three written sources—a 1980 Washington Post story by Lou Cannon; a June <a href="http://www2.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004116.php">2004 post</a> by Kevin Drum on the Washington Monthly's Web site; and an Oct. 2007 <a href="http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/bookclub/2007/oct/30/reagan_neshoba_and_the_politics_of_race">post</a> by Bruce Bartlett on the Talking Points Memo Web site—but these are all accounts refuting the dastardly smear. These are the good guys. Who are the bad guys? Calumny doesn't spread itself. What wascally wabbit is wesponsible? Brooks won't say.
It's Paul Krugman.
The hideous libel Brooks refers to is an anecdote about the 1980 presidential election. Ronald Reagan, the eventual victor, kicked off his campaign as the Republican presidential nominee in Philadelphia, Miss., where 16 years earlier civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were <a href="http://www.abanet.org/irr/hr/spring00humanrights/chaney.html">murdered</a>. In the speech, candidate Reagan said, "I believe in states' rights," the legal principle on which white segregationists had based their resistance to federal laws and court decisions upholding the civil rights of African Americans.
Brooks says the anecdote is a slur because the decision for Reagan to speak in Philadelphia, Miss., immediately after the convention was made on the fly, and not part of a deliberate plan, and because Reagan mentioned states' rights only fleetingly in a speech that was "mostly about inflation and the economy." (To listen to it, click <a href="http://www.neshobademocrat.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=297&ArticleID=13920&TM=65091.34">here</a>.) Brooks further argues that the campaign was faced with a decision to send Reagan to Philadelphia either before or after sending him to speak to the Urban League, and that it figured sending him after would make it seem as though Reagan were telling white segregationists that no matter what he was compelled to tell a black audience, he was on their side. This last argument strikes me as more an argument for Krugman's position rather than against it, since it demonstrates that the Reagan campaign was fully aware of the ghastly symbolism inherent in the Philadelphia appearance. Indeed, by the time Brooks is done conceding that it was "callous" for Reagan to mention states' rights in that locale, and that Reagan "could have done something wonderful if he'd mentioned civil rights" in the speech, and that "it's obviously true that race played a role in the GOP's ascent," Brooks' "slur" seems no more than extremely mild exaggeration.
Reagan's Philadelphia speech is often cited as evidence that Reagan's electoral success in 1980 was based partly on appeals to Southern white racism. But you'd be hard-pressed to find any prominent national commentator who cites this example as often as Krugman. In his new book, The <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Liberal-Paul-Krugman/dp/0393060691/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8989300-6291135?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194707218&sr=1-1">Conscience of a Liberal</a>, Krugman tells the story on Page 12, retells it on Page 65, tells it a third time on Page 178, refers back to it on Page 183, and alludes more vaguely to it at least a couple of times more. In his column, Krugman has related the incident at least four times, including once this past Aug. 24 (<a href="http://select.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/opinion/24krugman.html?n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/Paul%20Krugman">"Seeking Willie Horton"</a>) and once this past Sept. 24 (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/opinion/24krugman.html?n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/Paul%20Krugman">"Politics in Black and White"</a>). "This is a guy," Krugman was quoted telling the Portland Oregonian on Oct. 28, "who launched a presidential campaign from Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil-rights workers were killed."
The Reagan story forms the centerpiece of Krugman's argument in The Conscience of a Liberal that race, far more than economics or foreign policy or "values," is what gave Republicans an electoral majority for most of the past 40 years. At the end of his calumny column, when Brooks elaborates on the "slur," it sounds an awful lot as though he's really talking about Krugman's book: "It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy."
I asked Brooks: Have you read The Conscience of a Liberal? "I can't confirm or deny it," he answered.
Possibly Brooks had payback in mind. In a July 20 column (<a href="http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/opinion/20krugman.html?n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/Paul%20Krugman">"All the President's Enablers"</a>), Krugman referred to a "coordinated public relations offensive" in which the White House was using "reliably friendly pundits—amazingly, they still exist—to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever." Three days earlier, in a column titled <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/opinion/17brooks.html?n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/David%20Brooks">"Heroes and History,"</a> Brooks had written of Bush, "Far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency."
Incidentally, my quick Nexis search turned up one other prominent columnist who writes frequently about Reagan's 1980 speech in Philadelphia, Miss.: Bob Herbert, yet another colleague of Brooks' on the Times op-ed page. (See <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/opinion/06herbert.html">here</a>, <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/opinion/28herbert.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/opinion/25herbert.html">here</a>.) But I think Brooks mainly had Krugman on the brain.
Update, Nov. 11: Krugman <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistakes/">hits back</a> at Brooks in his New York Times blog, "The Conscience of a Liberal":
So there's a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon's Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that "I believe in states' rights," he didn't mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.
Krugman goes on to cite other, similar "mistakes": Reagan's use of the term "young buck" in 1976 to describe a young male African American on food stamps; Reagan's declaration in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been "humiliating to the south" (his Justice Department would later figure out that it was, more urgently, an electoral boon for congressional Republicans); Reagan's insane (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt in 1982 to preserve the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which banned interracial dating; Reagan's firing of three members of the Civil Rights Commission in 1983; and Reagan's opposition to making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.
I would add to this litany the country-club-Republican moment when Nancy Reagan, during a 1980 speech in Chicago, expressed <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=lbLi0krb7yUC&pg=PA324&lpg=PA324&dq=nancy+reagan+%2522white+faces%2522+looking+out&source=web&ots=7mqnbINrok&sig=lCftocWEpOTM9-reZQzKKdXN568">pleasure</a> at "looking out over all these beautiful white faces." Oops!
Krugman doesn't name Brooks, of course, as the perpetrator of this "campaign to exonerate Ronald Reagan." But I'm pretty sure he isn't talking about L. Brent Bozell III, whose <a href="http://www.mediaresearch.org/BozellColumns/newscolumn/2004/col20040616.asp">fulimination</a> over the alleged injustice to the Gipper went ignored at the time of Reagan's death.
Update, Nov. 13: Today Bob Herbert <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin">entered the fray</a> on Krugman's side. He began by writing, "Let's set the record straight on Ronald Reagan's kickoff in 1980." Like Brooks, Herbert didn't say who created this faulty record, but of course he meant Brooks:
Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.
That won't wash.
Brooks is in desperate need of reinforcements, but he won't have much luck recruiting Gail Collins, Nicholas Kristof, Tom Friedman, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, or Roger Cohen. Maybe William Safire can be lured back from retirement? Though, even Safire might consider Brooks' case too weak to defend. Just as Kaiser Wilhelm II at the start of the Great War abruptly shifted the field of battle from Serbia to Belgium, Gen. Brooks might find it necessary to invade the Weekly Standard, which under ordinary circumstances probably would prefer to remain neutral. War is hell!
Update, Nov. 19: The skirmishing continues. On Nov. 18 Lou Cannon, who covered Reagan for the Washington Post and subsequently authored multiple Reagan biographies, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18cannon.html">weighs in</a> on Brooks' side. Cannon writes that it's a "myth" that Reagan "defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a coded appeal to white-supremacist voters." The "core of this myth" is that Reagan pandered to white racists in his Philadelphia, Miss., speech. True, he used the expression "states' rights," but Reagan "had been talking this way for two decades as part of his pitch that the federal government had become too powerful."
Well, yes and no.
It's true that Reagan had long advocated devolving responsibilities of the federal government to the state and local level. But Joseph Crespino, in his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0691122091/ref=sib_dp_srch_pop?v=search-inside&keywords=states%27+rights+and+Reagan&go.x=9&go.y=3">In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution</a>, writes that the speech Reagan gave that day was not his standard stump speech, and that "reporters following Reagan could not remember him using the term ["state's rights"] before...." (Crespino, an assistant professor of history at Emory University, offers his own two cents on the Brooks-Krugman smackdown here.)
Cannon writes that Reagan was no racist, which, as Krugman points out in his <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/opinion/19krugman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin">Nov. 19</a> column, is neither here nor there. (You don't have to be a racist to pander to racist voters.) Cannon also argues that the Philadelphia speech hurt Reagan more than it helped him because it cost him votes from moderates in Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania "without bolstering his standing among conservative Southern whites." If true, that merely demonstrates that Reagan's pander to white racists backfired, not that Reagan never pandered in the first place.
In his <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/opinion/19krugman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin">Nov. 19</a> column, Krugman recycles some of the points he made about Reagan and race last week on his blog. He also restates one of the more provocative points in his book, The Conscience of A Liberal: The defection of white males from the Democratic party in recent decades was not a national phenomenon, but rather a southern one. Krugman cites a <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/kansasqjps06.pdf">study</a> by Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, showing that in 1952 and 2004, the proportion of non-southern white men lacking college degrees who voted Democratic was virtually unchanged (40 percent and 39 percent, respectively). To be fully persuaded on this point, I'd need to see how non-southern white men voted during the years in between.
Unrelated-but-interesting point: Bartels' study would seem to refute Thomas Frank's thesis in What's The Matter With Kansas that the white working class is economically populist but conservative on "values" issues. In fact, writes Bartels, the opposite is true: It is more tolerant on issues like abortion and gay marriage than the Republicans are, but less tolerant on issues like raising taxes on the rich than Democrats are. That might explain why the economic populism favored by Democratic political consultant Bob Shrum failed in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004.]
Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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Quote:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...52C1A9619C8B63
To the Editor:
The racial appeal in Ronald Reagan's visit to the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 is unambiguous. It was part of a Republican strategy to win white Democratic converts. <h3>Consider a letter that Michael Retzer, the Mississippi national committeeman, wrote in December 1979 to the Republican National Committee.</h3>
The national committee was polling state leaders for venues where the Republican nominee might speak, and Mr. Retzer pointed to the Neshoba County Fair as ideal for winning what he called ''George Wallace-inclined voters.''
This was not just a Southern strategy. Throughout his career, Mr. Reagan benefited from divisive appeals to whites who resented efforts to reverse historic patterns of racial discrimination.
He did it in 1966 when he campaigned for the California governorship by denouncing open housing laws. He did it in 1976 by attacking welfare in subtly racist terms. And he clearly did it in Neshoba County in 1980. Joseph Crespino
Atlanta, Nov. 14, 2007
The writer teaches history at Emory University and is the author of ''In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.''
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For the "what's the matter?, It's just politics" republicans, Mike Rezner's popularity with the Bush administration is as it should be:
Quote:
http://www.magnoliareport.com/Report65.htm
Magnolia Political Report #65
August 15, 2005
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Do they sell Big Macs in Tanzania?
Former Mississippi Republican Party Chairman, Mike Retzer, has been appointed ambassador to Tanzania by President George W. Bush. The African nation is a plum appointment. Mount Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti National Wildlife Refuge, Lake Victoria and some great beaches are all located within the east African nation.
Retzer chaired the state GOP in the late 70’s and early 80’s and again from 1996 through 2001. He’s held the post of National Committeeman for the state GOP since 2001. In 2000, Retzer chaired the Bush campaign in five Southern states. He became Treasurer of the Republican National Committee in 2003.
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Last edited by host; 12-23-2007 at 10:51 PM..
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