But…But…But…it’s a LIBERAL media!

Blue Girl
Brilliant at Breakfast
Monday, June 29, 2009

Rudy Giuliani was on Morning Joe this morning to talk about Marc Sanford’s affair. It is safe to say that no journalism took place on that set this morning, because from the get-go Rudy turned the topic to another famous politician who was caught in an affair. “Let’s look at Bill Clinton,” said Rudy.

And Mika, seeming slightly more over-medicated than usual responded brilliantly…She said “yeah.”

Had it been me, I would have said “All due respect, but lets look at you, Mr. Mayor.”

But it was Mika. So she just said “Yeah.”

All through the interview Giuliani kept holding the door open, inviting them to raise the issue of his own infidelity – an affair that led him to put New York City’s terrorist response center in the World Trade Center – the site of a previous attack by international terrorists – because that location facilitated him sneaking off for nooners with his mistress – who by the way got a security detail on the city’s dime.

This conveniently never came up when they were talking a bout the important issue being whether or nor public money was used by Marc Sanford in conducting his affair.

And yes, this would be the same Mika Brzezinski who claims that there is a double standard when politicians have affairs…and it favors Democrats. Because in her world, apparently, Bill Clinton and Elliot Spitzer paid no penalty for their indiscretions while David Vitter and John Ensign have been forced to resign from office. Or something.

http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/

Copyright 2009 Brilliant at Breakfast

Remind me: Which political party is “decadent” and “sick”?

Mark Sanford’s zipper problem is yet more proof that Republican conservatives are just liberals in right-wing drag

Joe Conason
salon.com
June 26, 2009

Whenever the latest Republican politician is caught with his zipper undone, a predictable moment of introspection on the right inevitably ensues. Pundits, bloggers and perplexed citizens ruminate over the lessons they have learned, again and again, about human frailty, false piety and the temptations of flesh and power. They express concern for the damaged family and lament the fall of yet another promising young hypocrite. They resolve to restore the purity of their movement and always remember to remind us that this is all Bill Clinton’s fault. What they never do is face up to an increasingly embarrassing fact about themselves and their leaders.

They’re really just liberals in right-wing drag.

The proof is in the penance, or lack thereof, inflicted on the likes of Mark Sanford, John Ensign and David Vitter, to cite a few names from the top of a long, long list. For ideologues who value biblical morality and believe in the efficacy of punishment, modern conservatives are as tolerant of their famous sinners as the jaded libertines of the left. Even after confessing to the most flagrant and colorful fornication, the worst that a conservative must anticipate is a stern scolding, followed by warm assurances of God’s forgiveness and a swift return to business as usual.

Mark Sanford may have forfeited his presidential ambitions, but the South Carolina governor seems determined to hold onto his office despite his escapade in Argentina — and if he is thrown out, the reason will be his offenses against good government rather than his betrayal of his marriage vows. John Ensign isn’t expected to step down from the Senate, despite the mounting evidence that he concealed his extramarital affair through the misuse of public funds; even now he remains more popular than fellow Nevadan Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader. And then there is David Vitter, the Louisiana bon vivant whose evangelical constituents seem inclined to reward him for consorting with prostitutes by giving him another Senate term. The safest prediction is that these pharisaical pols will continue their careers without suffering the retribution they have earned.

According to the Old Testament — a text regularly cited by these worthies as the highest authority in denouncing reproductive freedom and gay rights — the proper penalty for adultery is death by stoning. Leviticus is quite clear on this point (as any truly strict originalist could hardly deny). Fortunately for all of us, biblical law doesn’t rule this country, despite the zealots on the religious right who disdain separation of church and state. Very few Americans believe that we should impose state sanctions, let alone the death penalty, on private peccadilloes. But civic tolerance doesn’t excuse the limp, smiling attitude of the Republican right toward the infidelity of its leaders.

That flabby acceptance contrasts sharply with right-wing screaming about the iniquity of the opposition. As understood by conservative commentators, this is not mere rhetoric but a theory of civilization’s rise and fall. Ann Coulter believes that liberals actively “seek to destroy morality” by “refusing to condemn what societies have condemned for thousands of years,” including “promiscuity” and “divorce.” Dinesh D’Souza once recommended sarcastically that the Democrats adopt the mantle of “moral degeneracy” by forthrightly advocating “divorce, illegitimacy, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality and pornography.”

The supposed depravity of the Democratic Party has long been a favorite theme of conservatives, dating back to the rise of Newt Gingrich, who distributed an official campaign lexicon to Republican congressional candidates that featured such defining insults as “decadent,” “permissive,” “sick,” “selfish” and, of course, “liberal.” Back then the Georgia Republican was on his second marriage and carrying on a clandestine affair with the young Capitol Hill clerk who would eventually become his third wife (after he converted to Catholicism and had his union with wife No. 2 annulled). In 2007, he admitted on James Dobson’s radio show that he was cheating on wife No. 2 with future wife No. 3 while he was publicly chastising President Clinton for consorting with Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich has remained a consistent favorite among his pious comrades.

Today, in fact, Gingrich is fully rehabilitated as a party spokesman, still nurturing presidential ambitions. So why should any other Republican fear the wrath of the righteous? The disappointment in Sanford and Ensign among the devout must be particularly keen, since they have so rigorously aligned themselves with the most fervent elements of the religious right.

For more than a decade, Ensign lent his name to Promise Keepers, the all-male Christian prayer movement run by a former Colorado football coach, whose mass rallies highlighted men’s integrity, purity and uncompromising domination of family life. Both he and Sanford have worked closely with the Family, a secretive Christian fellowship on Capitol Hill that maintains a brick townhouse where Ensign and other members of Congress have resided. Over the years both men have won the highest marks from the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition and the American Family Association — and until the other day, Sanford was featured as an invited speaker at the Family Research Council’s upcoming Values Voters Summit 2009. (As Pam Spaulding and Think Progress noted, however, the FRC removed his photo from the summit Web site immediately following his confessional press conference.)

Certainly there is considerable pressure for Sanford to resign in South Carolina, and perhaps he will surrender. But he might well ask whether that is fair when Ensign is hanging on and Vitter appears to be in the clear. For a while, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins had threatened to challenge Vitter in the Republican primary next year, but last March he announced that he won’t run after all — and instead endorsed Vitter for reelection. Amazingly, Perkins then hosted a radio broadcast with Vitter as his guest, where they tut-tutted over the alleged ethical problems of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Nobody had the poor taste to mention the infamous black books in which Vitter’s friendly madams in Washington and New Orleans had inscribed his name and phone number.

By the way, while Vitter, Ensign, Gingrich and perhaps Sanford have been able to retain their positions and political viability, the same cannot be said for the most recent offenders on the progressive side. Neither Eliot Spitzer nor John Edwards, each among the most promising figures in the Democratic Party, will ever be a candidate for public office again, although their misbehavior was no worse than what their Republican counterparts did.

If they looked honestly at themselves, religious conservatives might notice that they are morally lax, socially permissive and casually tolerant of moral deviancy — just like the liberals they despise. So as they wonder aloud why the same salacious nightmare haunts them, year after year, the best advice they can get happens to come from that old sinner Clinton. As he so often says, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/06/26/sanford/
Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

HIM AGAIN?…

Steve Benen
The Washington Monthly
June 25, 2009

Some people run for president, come up short, but nevertheless see their stature enhanced by the process. For Rudy Giuliani, it was the opposite — his fairly ridiculous and spectacularly unsuccessful presidential campaign diminished his reputation and turned him into something of a joke. Indeed, Giuliani entered the 2008 presidential campaign with a 9/11 halo and widespread admiration, and quickly found he had nowhere to go but down. The more Americans saw of Giuliani, the less they liked him.

But, for whatever reason, Giuliani not only finds himself credible, but is apparently eyeing a gubernatorial campaign.

As part of the effort, the former NYC mayor is putting himself back into the spotlight, talking up Fox News, and writing pieces for the New York Times about how the state government should run.

New York state government is not working. This has been true for some time. But the paralysis and confusion that has overtaken the capital demonstrates the need to confront this dysfunction directly and take decisive steps to solve it once and for all. That’s why I’m calling on Albany to convene a state constitutional convention. [...]

Calling another convention would be an extraordinary step, but it is a necessary and effective way to overcome the challenges we face. It would be an opportunity for Republicans, Democrats and independents to come together, take a long hard look at our problems and then propose real, lasting solutions.

As part of his agenda, Giuliani, in an apparent ’90s flashback, proposes that New York impose strict term limits — because if there’s one thing New York doesn’t need, it’s experienced policymakers with institutional knowledge in state government — before demanding mandatory “supermajorities” for all tax increases. “A supermajority,” Giuliani said, “would protect already over-burdened citizens and attract businesses, improving our long-term competitiveness.”

In other words, the former mayor is watching the budgetary catastrophe unfold in California and thinks, “Hey, we should do that, too!”

It’s obviously too soon to know what kind of gubernatorial candidate Giuliani would be, but by all appearances, his time has come and gone. His claim to fame — performance on 9/11 — drew scrutiny, and turned out to be rather humiliating. And don’t even get me started on Bernie Kerik and all the alleged criminals Giuliani hung out with in recent years.

It was no doubt embarrassing for Giuliani to invest millions in a presidential campaign that produced exactly zero delegates, but why keep trying?

Don’t go away mad, Rudy. Just go away.

Copyright © 1969-2009 Washington Monthly

It’s not about us

Mustang Bobby
The Reaction
June 23, 2009

Memo to John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and all the others on the right who are demanding that President Obama “do more” about the turmoil in Iran:

It’s not about you. It’s not about the United States and our role in the world. It’s not about freedom and democracy on our terms, and most assuredly it is not about positioning you and your party for political gain in the 2010 mid-term elections.

The rulers in Iran could not possibly care less about what the President of the United States or members of Congress think about their election process and the state of their nation; that is, until they can use it to their own political advantage and hold up a statement by an outsider as evidence of meddling and puppet-mastery. And the people on the streets who are demonstrating and dying are holding up signs in English because they know that there are other countries in the world besides the U.S. where the language is spoken, and not everyone outside of Iran speaks Farsi. They’re not asking for help from us; they’re saying that their anger is universal and the denial of a free and fair election is something people in other parts of the world should know about.

But this is their struggle. They want us to know about it, but they also know that any sign of interference from us will doom whatever change is coming. And it would provide the Guardian Council with the excuse they need to be even more deadly.

The right-wingers and the neocons are all over the ten-word answer: “The president must do something about the unfair Iranian election.” But, as Jed Bartlet once asked, what are the next ten words? And the ten after that? And what will they do to actually stand behind whatever action they demand the president takes? Not surprisingly, they don’t have an answer to those questions.
http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/

Copyright 2009 The Reaction

Dream big, Obama

The president should be a revolutionary, not just a reformer
David Sirota
salon.com
June 20, 2009

Most of the great advances we remember involve reimagination and dreams, not merely tweaks and tinkers. The Wright Brothers’ plane wasn’t a newfangled horse and buggy, Einstein’s theories weren’t a simple update of old physics, and Edison’s creations didn’t aspire to make a brighter-burning wax candle. It’s been the same thing in politics. The Founding Fathers’ Constitution didn’t replicate monarchy, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal wasn’t just tinkering with Hooverism, and Ronald Reagan’s revolution didn’t merely dismantle the welfare state.

All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.

Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don’t reach for “a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business,” as Paul Krugman said we once had — they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.

On healthcare, even as the Obama administration pushes to create a public option for consumers to buy into, most of the proposals for universal healthcare being debated in Washington still imagine a system integrally involving private insurance companies. In fact, the one proposal that sees a new healthcare system without those companies — a single-payer system — has been shoved to the side by both parties as too radical.

Same thing, again, for efforts to address global warming. Bills compelling companies to cap their carbon pollution and then trade it for credits are positive steps. However, they still embrace an energy system that relies on fossil fuels — and they don’t strive for a day when we power our economy primarily with clean renewable energy.

I could go on, but you get the point. We are suffering from a lack of imagination — a failure of “the vision thing,” as George H.W. Bush once called it.

Part of that is a product of a money-dominated political system whose most powerful forces don’t want anything reimagined because they have a vested interest in the no-imagination status quo.

Another part of that shortsightedness, however, stems from our president’s natural disposition. When I interviewed him in 2006, he acknowledged that the difference between reimagining institutions and aiming only to tinker with them is always the question that determines a political era. “Are you a revolutionary or are you a reformist?” as he put it before firmly stating which one he is.

“I think within the institutional structures we have, we can significantly improve the life chances of ordinary Americans,” he said.

There’s certainly merit to that line of thinking. We can, in fact, improve things for a lot of people by simply making many existing institutions work better. Patch a few banks, revamp the private insurance system, and fiddle with our existing energy policies and we can prevent hundreds of financial industry bankruptcies, thousands of unnecessary deaths, and millions of tons of carbon emissions. Those would be no small achievements.

However, if that’s all we aim for, then we will have passed up this historic opportunity to structurally transform the country for the long haul. In short, we will have missed the chance not just to tweak, but to dream again.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/20/dream/

© 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Obama Has It Right On Iran — and The Right Doesn’t

Jacob Heilbrunn
Huffington Post
June 19, 2009

Over the past few days, President Obama has been pummeled by the right for supposedly appeasing the regime in Iran. Robert Kagan has accused Obama of being “objectively” on the side of the mullahs, while Charles Krauthammer detects a president “afraid to take sides between the head-breaking, women-shackling exporters of terror–and the people in the street yearning to breathe free.”

Don’t believe a word of it. The truth is that Obama has correctly followed a prudent course of allowing the protests to build in Iran, while scrupulously refraining from giving the mullahs a convenient fig-leaf for the crackdown that may well be coming. There is a fine line between supporting and inciting the demonstrators, and Obama has not overstepped it. What’s more, America doesn’t have a history in Iran. It has a rap sheet, dating back to the CIA’s engineering of the 1953 coup that established a pro-American government led by the Shah.

So Obama’s statement today warning the Iranian leadership that the “world is watching” hit the appropriate note. Not intervening. But watching. Should the Iranian authorities resort to force, they could trigger upheaval that might bring themselves down in the chaos. At a minimum, they will permanently discredit themselves.

What no one knows, however, is the extent to which the regime will go to try and defend its power and privileges, but it could be very, very far. The analogy with Eastern Europe in 1989 doesn’t quite work. The Warsaw pact countries were led by old, doddering leaders who had relied upon the Soviet Union to prop them up. Iran is different. It has been seeking to expand its influence in the Arab world, much to the fear of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries.

For now, power is in the streets with the courageous demonstrators who are demonstrating that the regime has lost what legitimacy it ever commanded. Contrary to the dreams of Krauthammer and Co., however, America does not have the ability to determine events in Iran. More important than what America does is what it does not do. Iran is too important to posture for cheap political gain. Obama understands that. His critics don’t.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-heilbrunn/obama-has-it-right-on-ira_b_218232.html

Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc

With Saviors Like This

How lost are the Republicans? They’re looking to Newt for answers.

Howard Fineman
Newsweek
Published Jun 13, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jun 22, 2009

Sure, F. Scott Fitzgerald, our patron saint of self-pitying oblivion, declared, “There are no second acts in American lives.” But only because he didn’t live long enough to study the modern Republican Party. Unlike the Democrats, who promptly banish their own former presidents (Bill Who? Jimmy Who?), Republicans have a long history of summoning disgraced or discarded leaders back from their Elbas. Richard Nixon was supposedly finished after losing in California in 1962; Ronald Reagan was written off as an old has-been after 1976. Maybe it’s the men’s-club mentality of the GOP: once you’re in, you’re never, ever out.

Can Newt be next? A decade ago he all but disappeared, stepping down from the House Speaker’s job in the wake of political humiliation on the Hill and stories of sordidness in his personal life. He laid low, but he never quite left town. He wrote -historical-fantasy books. He started a think tank and a lobbying business. He married for a third time and converted to Roman Catholicism. Now almost 66, he is no longer an enfant terrible, but he is still formidable.

At the dawn of the Obama era, Gingrich has remade himself as the anti-Obama. He is arguably the GOP’s most influential strategist and cheerleader, and a provocative scold of the administration. Where Obama exudes the new Washington equanimity, Gingrich exalts in the old-school insult. He is ruthless in caricaturing anyone who gets in his way as a “pagan” or “statist” or “socialist” or “racist”—all words Newt has hurled in recent days. And so, wounded, rudderless and leaderless, GOP members of Congress and others on his voluminous e-mail list have returned to hear the gospel according to Newt. They speak of him with the awe of disciples. In a party without a frontrunner for 2012, admirers talk about him as a presidential candidate. “I do wish that he would run,” says Joe McQuaid, publisher of the Union-Leader in Manchester, N.H., still a beacon for the right. “He has a lot to offer conservatives.” Yet it is hard to shake the feeling that Gingrich’s new prominence is more a sign of the GOP’s desperation than faith in its future, and that his reemergence is more likely to hurt the party than help it.

What Newt brings now is what he’s always brought: a savagely acute sense of how to attack The Powers That Be (as long as they are Democrats); a history professor’s sweeping feel for societal trends; and a grifter’s gift for claiming expertise about certain things he doesn’t really know at all. (That would probably include my book, which he was kind enough to blurb; I admit to a sneaking suspicion that he never read a word of it.) No one can match Newt’s talent for advancing the conservative credo of individualism and faith in markets. At times his certitude takes on a cartoonish quality. Last week he unleashed a too-clever critique of the president’s goal of a government-backed health plan, saying health care is a human right that cannot be rationed by Washington. He assailed Barack Obama’s anodyne declaration that we are all global citizens as a dangerous threat to national security.

It is impossible to take him seriously when he says things like this. That is unfortunate, because Gingrich is capable of seriousness. His thinking and research on health care—he was among the first to grasp its importance in the early 1990s—is respected, even by the White House. The odd-couple arrangement he formed with Bill Clinton when Gingrich was House Speaker deserves to be held in higher regard. Welfare reform was one result. It is still reviled on the left, but it freed the Democrats of a stigma (the party of giveaways) that had hampered them for decades.

Yet there is no getting this Newt without the other. His weakness for combat may be fueling his popularity on the right at the moment, but it’s a poor substitute for a strategy to rebuild the party—and would likely spell his doom in a contest against Obama. There are, after all, reasons why he was banished years ago. GOP stalwarts remember that his imperiousness as House Speaker and his sometimes juvenile public behavior led friends to plot against him. Insiders doubt that he will ever learn to control his acid tongue. “Newt is our great idea factory, but he’d be a disaster as a candidate,” a prominent Republican fundraiser told me, staying in the shadows to avoid angering a man he has known for many years. “We need his thinking, but not the man himself.”

Of course, in America there is always hope of reinvention and redemption. Even Nixon learned to mellow as he struggled to resurrect himself, doing a memorable drop-by on a comedy show of his day called Laugh-In. Come to think of it: Gingrich recently did The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and the audience didn’t boo him off the stage. That’s a second act if there ever was one.

F ineman is author of The Thirteen American Arguments
http://www.newsweek.com/id/201945

© 2009 Newsweek

Leno Told Similar Joke About Palin’s Daughter

The Huffington Post
06-13-09

Alan Colmes (former co-host of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes) makes a great a catch regarding the current feud between David Letterman and Governor Sarah Palin. While Palin has been blasting Letterman all over the airwaves for joking about Yankees star Alex Rodriguez “knocking up” her daughter, Jay Leno told an extremely similar joke during the presidential campaign that resulted in no such uproar:

Gov. Palin announced over the weekend that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. And you thought John Edwards was in trouble before! Now he has really done it. — “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” 9/2/08

Is there a double standard being applied to Letterman?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/leno-told-similar-joke-ab_n_215261.html

Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

GOP-Leaning Majority Seen Fading in U.S.

Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post
June 14, 2009

There has been much chatter about who now speaks for the Republican Party and whether the GOP has a message or agenda to combat President Obama’s popularity. Those questions are important to the party’s future, but the most serious problem remains the deeper demographic and political forces at work in the country.

For the past few months, political analysts and demographers have been poring over the results of the 2008 election and comparing them with presidential results from the last two decades. From whatever angle of their approach — age, race, economic status, geography — they have come to a remarkably similar conclusion. Almost all indicators are pressing the Republicans into minority status.

Republicans are still capable of winning individual elections, but until they find a way to reverse or at least minimize these broader changes in the country, their chances of returning to majority status will be severely reduced.

The American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institute convened a stellar cast on Friday to review what has been learned since last November. The panel included Robert Lang of Virginia Tech, Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress, William Frey of the Brookings Institution, Bill Bishop, a Texas writer and author of “The Big Sort,” Scott Keeter of the Pew Research, and Ronald Brownstein of Atlantic Media. They presented a wealth of data about what happened in 2008 and offered a series of conclusions that would alarm any Republican hopeful of a quick turnaround in the party’s fortunes.

Democrats have now won the popular vote in four of the last five elections, though in one case (2000) they did not end up in the White House. In years when they have also won the electoral vote, Democrats have wracked up sizeable margins. Obama bested John McCain 365-173 and Bill Clinton’s two victories were in the same range. George W. Bush’s two electoral college victories were narrow; he won just 271 votes in the disputed election of 2000 and 286 in his 2004 reelection.

What has brought this about? It’s not just one thing, it’s everything. Start with the Democrats success in the suburbs. Lang’s formula is that demography and density have combined to help the Democrats. The Democrats now dominate not just the cities but the urbanized suburbs that contained the largest share of the suburban population in America.

Democratic strength in the counties around Philadelphia, around Detroit and in Northern Virginia have squeezed Republicans dramatically. Increasingly, Republican strength outside the urban areas counts for less. “There’s just not enough rural folks and small city people left in America in the key states that determine the electoral college to offset that difference,” Lang said. “You’re out of people.”

That’s one geographical reality. The other, which became acute after 2008, is that outside the South, Republicans are in trouble. John McCain won the South last November, but Obama swept the rest of the country by an even bigger margin. The same pattern holds now for House and Senate seats. Republicans may win governorships in Democratic-leaning states, as they have continued to do, but in congressional and presidential elections, the geographic divides are sizeable.

Brownstein reeled off list of statistics that all arrived at the same place: the South now accounts for a greater share of Republican strength than at virtually any time since its founding. That base is too narrow, as even Republicans know.

Demographically, the forces at work have chipped away at what was once a GOP-leaning majority in the country. The most important is the rising share of the vote accounted for by minorities. Whites accounted for just 76 percent of the overall electorate last November, down from 85 percent in 1988.

The last election saw more than two million additional African American voters, about two million more Hispanic voters and about one million more Asian American voters. All are groups where Obama increased the Democratic share of the vote over 2004. Frey estimated that there were nine states where minority voters made the difference in Obama’s victory margin.

Republicans can’t reverse the demographic trends; their only solution is to increase their share of the minority vote. Opposing Judge Sonya Sotomayor, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, because of her pride in being a Latina, won’t help solve that problem.

There was much attention paid to Obama’s trouble winning the votes of white working class voters. The bad news for Republicans is that these voters represent a declining share of the electorate. Since 1988, the white working class proportion of the national electorate has dropped by 15 percentage points. In Pennsylvania, Teixeira reported, it’s declined by 25 percentage points. Teixeira reported that Obama actually won the votes of working class whites between ages 25 and 29, who at this point appear more culturally liberal than their elders.

As the working class vote shrinks, the college-educated vote increase, and Democrats are gaining a greater and greater share of these voters. Democrats lose white college graduates by 20 points in 1988 but by just four points last November. That is another big reason Democrats have gained strength in the suburbs.

Obama’s strength among young voters was a staple of coverage throughout his bid for the White House, though as Keeter pointed out, he could have won last November without the votes of anyone under age 30. But his margin was the biggest in several decades and that alone should worry Republicans.

Obama may have special appeal to younger voters, but their shift toward the Democrats pre-dates his candidacy. “This really is not Obama,” Keeter said. “Young voters were John Kerry’s best age group. They were the Democratic candidates’ best age group in the 2006 elections and they were the best age group for other Democratic candidates in 2008.”

Younger voters are more diverse demographically than older voters. Only 62 percent in 2008 were white, compared to 74 percent eight years earlier. Projections show young voters will become increasingly diverse. They are also less religious and more culturally liberal, two indicators of Democratic support.

GOP strategist Mike Murphy described this in Time magazine as a coming Republican ice age. Republicans will need a major shift to begin to reverse these trends. That could start if there is a backlash against Obama’s governance — and the president’s agenda certainly will test the country’s tolerance for a big dose of government. But Republicans will need to retool in other ways to make themselves more appealing to a changing population. That debate has barely begun.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/13/AR2009061301209.html?hpid=topnews
© Copyright 1996-2009 The Washington Post Company

Terrorism Is a Crime

Sheldon Richman
Commentaries
The Future of Freedom Foundation
June 2, 2009

Contrary to the U.S. government’s position, acts of terrorism are crimes that have little in common with acts of war. The terrorists whom Americans worry about are not trying to overthrow the U.S. government or conquer and occupy the United States. Instead, they are trying to obtain vengeance for U.S. government intervention in the Middle East. Historically, terrorism has been the tactic of the weak against the strong.

A military response is both disproportionate and unnecessary — and it inflicts suffering on innocents. Occupying and bombing a country because a group of terrorists might have plotted there is itself terrorism. Moreover, when the government assumes a war footing, it flings the doors open to violations of domestic liberty. “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” James Madison said.

The Obama administration’s early signals on these matters have not been encouraging. The president is escalating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his intention to close Guantanamo is undercut by his plans to continue military commissions for terrorist suspects in lieu of real criminal trials and to seek authority for indefinite preventive detention of suspects whom the government fears could not be convicted.

However, the administration has now indicated that the normal criminal justice system may play more of a role in investigations of terrorism. A report in the Los Angeles Times states, “The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.

“Under the ‘global justice’ initiative, … FBI agents will … expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.”

It’s too soon to know how much of an improvement this policy will be over the Bush administration’s war policy, but if the government is thinking more in terms of traditional criminal trials, with the presumption of innocence and the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, that is indeed an improvement.

Of course former Vice President Dick Cheney wouldn’t approve. He recently said the Clinton administration wrongly treated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a crime. The government tried some of the suspected bombers, won convictions, and imprisoned the offenders for life. Cheney pointed out, however, that since the Twin Towers were brought down some eight years later, the criminal-justice approach to terrorism was an obvious failure. As he put it in a recent speech,

“The first attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a law enforcement problem, with everything handled after the fact — crime scene, arrests, indictments, convictions, prison sentences, case closed.

“That’s how it seemed from a law enforcement perspective, at least — but for the terrorists the case was not closed. For them, it was another offensive strike in their ongoing war against the United States.”

But Cheney left out an important part of the story. One of the planners of the 1993 bombing, Ramzi Yousef, explained that the 1993 bombing was a response to the decades-long U.S. interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East. While that policy cannot justify attacks on innocents, Yousef was right to object to the intervention. For decades the U.S. government has supported Middle East despotisms (sometimes instigating coups) and unconditionally supported Israel against legitimate Palestinian grievances. In the 1990s the U.S. embargo on Iraq took the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, while American bombings terrorized the Iraqis. And the U.S. military kept troops near holy Islamic sites in Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. government acknowledges that such conduct created Muslim resentment. Yet that aggressive policy did not change after the 1993 bombing — quite the contrary. So Cheney cannot reasonably conclude that it was the criminal-justice approach to terrorism that failed. Rather, continued intervention produced “blowback” on 9/11.

Sooner or later, all empires are targets of terrorism. If Americans are really serious about keeping safe, the first step must be to renounce interventionism and adopt a foreign policy of peace and free trade. Treating terrorism as a crime is consistent with that policy.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0906b.asp

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