OUR NEXT FOUR YEARS! Be Afraid,,,Very Afraid

I began warning about Barack Obama’s ambitions right after he won the 2008 presidential election. Now, finally, more people are beginning to take this possibility as a serious threat.

Rather than lashing out with absurd statements like this, the Marxmeister does much better when he follows the far-left playbook and innocently feigns indignation over anything that isn’t to his liking. Or when he vilifies his natural enemies – primarily Republicans, the “rich” and tea partiers and Israel.

Targeting the 1% showed a lack of business savvy in adhering to his well-planned stealth-Marxism strategy. His angry, careless remark must have given chest pains to cheerleading, brainless Obamaviks everywhere.

                    WAS ROD SERLING A PROPHET?.

I will say yet again what I have been saying for more than three years: But since Obama has won the 2012 election, My message fell upon death ears. After January 20, 2013, he’ll move swiftly to unleash a dictatorial full monty – consisting of more regulations, higher taxes and less freedom – that will make even his staunchest Marxist allies say "DAMN Barack!, that's mean".

Nothing will be off limits; just think of it: a national police force, instant citizenship for all Third World people who want to come to America, forced equalization of income (except for Obama’s wealthy supporters, who'll be getting kickbacks), widespread use of tax audits to carry out vendettas against enemies of his administration, a virtual end to oil drilling, coal mining and gas exploration, suspension of habeas corpus, a new sedition act that will make it a crime to speak out against the government, the police, or the military … and much, much more.

During a speech in Las Vegas, Obama, railing on about the woefull economy he inherited, said that “we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will.” It was a clear message about his dictatorial intentions in his second term.

Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.

Likewise, notwithstanding his cunning and cleverness, "Ceasar" Obama didn’t walk into a finely tuned republic and reduce it to a redistribution-of-wealth democracy overnight. The reason he and his left-wing cronies have been able to violate the Constitution as though it didn’t exist is that they are merely taking advantage of the decay of our republic into a democracy – and the subsequent decay of our democracy – that was already present when they came to power.

The Founding Fathers realized that a democracy is but a pretense for tyranny of the majority. Like all democracies before it, our democracy has destroyed itself through an excess of democracy. Majority rule has evolved into a free-for-all stampede of citizens appealing to politicians to give them more and more of the plunder. And there is never a shortage of vile human beings who are willing to resort to meaningless slogans like “hope and change” to win over the mindless masses, or in other words,, that 47% so famously spoken about here-of-late.

Lt. Col. Terry Lakin

Dictatorship and total collapse is in the air. Can't you feel it to? That’s why it was encouraging when Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, a decorated Army doctor, refused to go to Afghanistan unless Barack Obama would make his birth certificate public, which resulted in his serving six months in prison and being dishonorably discharged. But it’s far more discouraging that no other high-ranking officer has had the courage to join him.

This is an important issue, because I continue to believe that if a dictatorship starts to emerge (many would argue that it already has), it may ultimately get down to a question of whether, at the moment of truth, the military will take orders from Barack Obama or, instead, side with American citizens.

Civilian Drone

Those who chuckle at all this would do well to bone up on their history. But in the event you have no idea where to begin, then I'll suggest we start looking at "Drone" flights over US cities.

So not only can Obama now imprison us with no charges, he can spy on us and if need be fire a missile at us from one of the predator drones that will now be roaming the skies above America. Why the fuck would predator drones be needed in America? The weight of evidence grows by the day. Our government is preparing for an epic collapse and will do everything in their power to retain control over the ignorant masses. Will the ignorant masses ever wake up? 

The rise of a Totalitarian Dictatorship in America and the world has been in the making for many years. The bills and legislation that have been passed that are taking away our freedoms and giving more power to President. The signing of the NDAA gives the power to the military the power to detain Americans or anyone of suspected ties to terrorism without charges or jury trial. This establishes Martial Law in America.



Obama passed other legislation that gives him the power to shut down the internet. There is a bill called the sopa act that can give the government power to censor the internet. That bill hasn’t passed yet but they are in the works. New laws are being passed that takes away more freedoms and gives more power to the President. These warning are foretold in Prophecy.

If it wasn't before, the ultimate purpose of Dictator Barack Hussein Obama should now be clear to even his most die-hard fans.

With Obama's planned and now-revised "Cyber-security Act of 2009, his inordinately broad and sweeping powers to take control of the Internet AND private networks is making its way through the Senate.

The bill gives Obama's Executive Branch the power to shut down the Internet for any reason he considers to be a "Cyber-security emergency." That, of course, is anything Obama decides to declare an emergency.

Those who have been living in a cave for the last several years might ask "What's the reason for this suspension if not dissolution of liberty?"

The answers are:

1. because Obama can.

2. To shut down ALL opposition to his totalitarian programs and regime.

3. To stop any and all warnings going out en masse when Obama's initial troops begin arriving in our towns and cities. Don't think so? Nothing else makes any sense either folks.

Note:

The only good news is that many former Obama supporters are now - finally - beginning to see and feel the dictator's relentlessly encroaching darkness. Even they don't like it and are beginning to feel the fear move up their reinserted spines. Obama is also now actively working to demoralize - if not completely shut down - the CIA. Does anyone else think it was even mildly coincidental that Obama already has his personal 'replacement' interrogation team in place? Will Obama's new and personal "security team" soon replace the entire CIA or will there still be a skeleton crew left for show purposes? Placing the now former USA in jeopardy of another major attack doesn't bother Obama in the least. Does anyone else wonder whose side Obama is on? Bye-bye CIA.

The tyrant is already going against the will of the American people with both his ObamaCare and Cap and Trade. Both of these bills are designed to further gut the country of its wealth and liberties and its ability to survive. And in order to partially fund the ObamaCare multi-Trillion-dollar package (per the Congressional Budget Office), Obama plans to further raze Medicare. Bye-bye seniors.

Note:

In his column "The Ugly Truth of Obamacare" budget becomes strained, as it must - and, as Obama admits, already is under Medicare - the government will have to cut back on what it lets people have." But, after admitting that he will cut back on Medicare benefits(called 'rationing"), Obama continues to say he won't ration health care to Seniors.

Suffice it to say, Obama has become a Master of speaking out of both sides of his mouth - and remarkably at the same time! Obama is a classic example of the "double-minded man; Bye-bye common or any other kind of sense.

Since his usurping of the US presidency (have you heard the latest Obama birth certificate rumor that it was burned up in a fire?), Obama has instituted one assault after another against the American people.

Note: No one in his or her sane mind would be doing these things except out of hatred for the victims. Even before his "election" he spoke about his disdain for the US Constitution. Yet, more and more people are asking "With everything going to Hell in a hand basket, why is Obama still smiling broadly?"

There are actually at least two answers:

1. Because he's setting up a White House Emporium - with all necessary private police and enhanced voter fraud units - so that he will never be forced, let alone voted, out of office.

2. Because the destruction of the USA and its "transformation" into ObamaLand was his plan all along.

Despite his promises to end the war, President Obama has continued to expand his presidential powers in the War on Terror, which are legal executive privileges that began in the Bush administration. The key difference is that Obama's authority seems to be more ambiguous, more powerful, and less defined than in the previous administrations. When Obama was accused of violating the Constitution with the passage of his Affordable Care Act, at least the Supreme Court could justify the legitimacy of the legislation by invoking the Constitution's Taxing and Spending Clause. However, with the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, he is vested with extrajudicial powers that at times contradict the very principles codified by the Founding Fathers.

One such power is granted under the NDAA's section 1021 and 1022, which contain the provisions that allow the president to indefinitely detain a terrorist suspect without a trial. In an interview with John Cusack on Truthout.com, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley observes that this effectively undermines the due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution that could be detrimental to our civil liberties if the power is used irresponsibly.

This violation of the due process of law is viewed by Turley as a dangerous concession by U.S. citizens that could lead to greater encroachment on our liberties in the future. According to Turley, it is "meaningless" that Obama has pledged to not use his powers against U.S. citizens because he still possesses the legal authority to do so. It is uncertain whether future administrations will be so "disciplined" in its refrain from indefinitely detaining or killing U.S. citizens (on home soil) who speak out against the government, tasks that can be legally accomplished by labeling them terrorists and subsequently circumventing the mechanisms of the judicial process guaranteed by the Constitution.

In response to such concerns, President Obama issued a policy directive in February that narrows the coverage of indefinite detention to non-U.S. citizens and does not allow those under his administration to detain citizens or legal permanent residents captured on U.S. soil.

However, legal columnist Joanne Mariner still finds the issue unresolved because the directive could just as easily be rescinded by future presidents. She suggests that American citizens on U.S. soil have not ensured that their constitutional liberties are protected as long as section 1021 and section 1022 of the NDAA remain as they are now because we are subjected to the executive branch's "discretion" unless there are changes to the statute itself. Currently, a bill called the Due Process Guarantee Act that would make it illegal to detain a citizen or lawful permanent resident has been in review by the Senate Judiciary Committee since last year.

Another controversial position taken by President Obama is the expansion of federal authority beyond Afghanistan in the war against terrorism. In a secret interagency memorandum issued by the administration's legal counsel in 2010, wherever someone who is a threat to the security of the United States is located, even outside of war zones such as Afghanistan, it is lawful to kill him "if it is not feasible to take him alive." This expanded geographic jurisdiction was demonstrated in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, an alleged leader of al Qaeda who was killed in 2011 by an American drone in Yemen with secret consent from the Yemeni president. Thus the war is not simply restricted to terrorist activities in Afghanistan anymore; it can be anywhere. The case was also unprecedented in that it marked the federal government's targeted killing of a U.S. citizen without a trial.

It would be difficult to find a more insightful source into the Obama administration concerning these legal issues than Attorney General Eric Holder. In a speech to students at Northwestern University School of Law this past March, he reveals the administration's position as one whose actions "must always be grounded on the bedrock of the Constitution – and must always be consistent with statutes, court precedent, the rule of law and our founding ideals."



 After praising the Executive Branch's fairness in allowing terrorists to be prosecuted in civilian courts, he goes on to explain the necessity of occasionally bypassing those courts in favor of military tribunals:

"Military commissions are also appropriate in proper circumstances, and we can use them as well to convict terrorists and disrupt their plots. […] Reformed commissions allow for the protection of sensitive sources and methods of intelligence gathering, and for the safety and security of participants. […] A key difference is that, in military commissions, evidentiary rules reflect the realities of the battlefield and of conducting investigations in a war zone. For example, statements may be admissible even in the absence of Miranda warnings, because we cannot expect military personnel to administer warnings to an enemy captured in battle. But instead, a military judge must make other findings – for instance, that the statement is reliable and that it was made voluntarily."

The Military Commissions Act of 2009 redefined who would be eligible for trial before military commissions, stating that an "unprivileged enemy belligerent" is compared to the previous "unlawful enemy combatant."

Critics of the statute contend that the definition of a "belligerent" is too broad because it expands the class of persons who will be tried by a military commission as opposed to a civilian court, and that it limits the judicial review for non-U.S. citizens who are accused of even providing "support" to hostilities, putting them on the same ground as those who "engage" in hostilities.

According to Joanne Mariner, except for these few cosmetic changes to the language of the MCA of 2006, which the then-Senator Obama voted against, the key provisions remain essentially the same. She notes that this discrimination on the basis of U.S. citizenship is a violation of international human rights obligations and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Holder's response to the criticism is, "There is, quite simply, no inherent contradiction between using military commissions in appropriate cases while still prosecuting other terrorists in civilian courts. Without question, there are differences between these systems that must be – and will continue to be – weighed carefully. Such decisions about how to prosecute suspected terrorists are core Executive Branch functions."

Essentially, Holder is saying that the power to determine suspects who will be tried in a normal civilian court or a military tribunal still lies with the president and those under his authority, not Congress or the Supreme Court.

Even with the Obama administration's claim of goodwill in not exercising the power to indefinitely detain or potentially kill a citizen within the United States without a trial, legislation such as the NDAA sets up the mechanisms that allow the president to largely bypass the checks and balances of the other branches of government, a system so vital to the foundation of our civil liberties that potential transgressions by the executive authority should not be ignored.

Holder ends his speech by saying, "Our most sacred principles and values – of security, justice and liberty for all citizens – must continue to unite us, to guide us forward, and to help us build a future that honors our founding documents and advances our ongoing – uniquely American – pursuit of a safer, more just, and more perfect union."
 

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The G.O.P's Dilemma: Why Blacks Think Republicans Are Racist

G.O.P.?    Hey, Aren't You Guys Racist?

A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism and has spread to the 2004 presidential campaign. It goes something like this: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist. Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists. Either way, today's Republican Party—and by extension the conservative movement at its heart—supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself.

Biographer Dan Carter

This myth is not the only viewpoint in scholarly debates on the subject. But it is testimony to its growing influence that it is taken aboard by writers like Dan Carter, a prize-winning biographer of George Wallace, and to a lesser extent by the respected students of the South, Earl and Merle Black. It is so pervasive in mass media reporting on racial issues that an NBC news anchor can casually speak of "a new era for the Republican Party, one in which racial intolerance really won't be tolerated." It has become a staple of Democratic politicians like Howard Dean, who accuses Republicans of "dividing Americans against each other, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people" through the use of so-called racist "codewords." All this matters because people use such putative connections to form judgments, and "racist" is as toxic a reputation as one can have in U.S. politics. Certainly the 2000 Bush campaign went to a lot of trouble to combat the GOP's reputation as racially exclusionary. I even know young Republicans who fear that behind their party's victories lies a dirty, not-so-little Southern secret.

Earl and Merle Black

Now to be sure, the GOP had a Southern strategy. Willing to work with, rather than against, the grain of Southern opinion, local Republicans ran some segregationist candidates in the 1960s. And from the 1950s on, virtually all national and local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. This record is incontestable. It is also not much of a story—that a party acted expediently in an often nasty political context.

The new myth is much bolder than this. It insists that these events should decisively shape our understanding of conservatism and the modern Republican Party. Dan Carter writes that today's conservatism must be traced directly back to the "politics of rage" that George Wallace blended from "racial fear, anticommunism, cultural nostalgia, and traditional right-wing economics." Another scholar, Joseph Aistrup, claims that Reagan's 1980 Southern coalition was "the reincarnation of the Wallace movement of 1968." For the Black brothers, the GOP had once been the "party of Abraham Lincoln," but it became the "party of Barry Goldwater," opposed to civil rights and black interests. It is only a short step to the Democrats' insinuation that the GOP is the latest exploiter of the tragic, race-based thread of U.S. history. In short, the GOP did not merely seek votes expediently; it made a pact with America's devil.

George Wallace

The mythmakers typically draw on two types of evidence. First, they argue that the GOP deliberately crafted its core messages to accommodate Southern racists. Second, they find proof in the electoral pudding: the GOP captured the core of the Southern white backlash vote. But neither type of evidence is very persuasive. It is not at all clear that the GOP's policy positions are sugar-coated racist appeals. And election results show that the GOP became the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history, and got—and stays—that way as the party of the upwardly mobile, more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class, not of white solidarity.

Barry Goldwater

Let's start with policies. Like many others, Carter and the Black brothers argue that the GOP appealed to Southern racism not explicitly but through "coded" racial appeals. Carter is representative of many when he says that Wallace's racialism can be seen, varying in style but not substance, in "Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon's subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan's genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush's use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich's demonization of welfare mothers."

The problem here is that Wallace's segregationism was obviously racist, but these other positions are not obviously racist. This creates an analytic challenge that these authors do not meet. If an illegitimate viewpoint (racism) is hidden inside another viewpoint, that second view—to be a useful hiding place—must be one that can be held for entirely legitimate (non-racist) reasons. Conservative intellectuals might not always linger long enough on the fact that opposition to busing and affirmative action can be disguised racism. On the other hand, these are also positions that principled non-racists can hold. To be persuasive, claims of coding must establish how to tell which is which. Racial coding is often said to occur when voters are highly prone to understanding a non-racist message as a proxy for something else that is racist. This may have happened in 1964, when Goldwater, who neither supported segregation nor called for it, employed the term "states' rights," which to many whites in the Deep South implied the continuation of Jim Crow.

The problem comes when we try to extend this forward. Black and Black try to do this by showing that Nixon and Reagan crafted positions on busing, affirmative action, and welfare reform in a political climate in which many white voters doubted the virtues of preferential hiring, valued individual responsibility, and opposed busing as intrusive. To be condemned as racist "code," the GOP's positions would have to come across as proxies for these views -and in turn these views would have to be racist. The problem is that these views are not self-evidently racist. Many scholars simply treat them as if they were. Adding insult to injury, usually they don't even pause to identify when views like opposition to affirmative action would not be racist.

In effect, these critics want to have it both ways: they acknowledge that these views could in principle be non-racist (otherwise they wouldn't be a "code" for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so can be reliably treated as proxies for racism). The result is that their claims are non-falsifiable because they are tautological: these views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist. This amounts to saying that opposition to the policies favored by today's civil rights establishment is a valid indicator of racism. One suspects these theorists would, quite correctly, insist that people can disagree with the Israeli government without being in any way anti-Semitic. But they do not extend the same distinction to this issue. This is partisanship posturing as social science.

Woodrow Wilson

Franklin Roosevelt

This bias is evident also in how differently they treat the long Democratic dominance of the South. Carter and the Black brothers suggest that the accommodation of white racism penetrates to the very soul of modern conservatism. But earlier generations of openly segregationist Southerners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson's and Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party, which relaxed its civil rights stances accordingly. This coalition passed much of the New Deal legislation that remains the basis of modern liberalism. So what does the segregationist presence imply for the character of liberalism at its electoral and legislative apogee? These scholars sidestep the question by simply not discussing it. This silence implies that racism and liberalism were simply strange political bedfellows, without any common values.

But the commonality, the philosophical link, is swiftly identified once the Democrats leave the stage. In study after study, authors say that "racial and economic conservatism" married white Southerners to the GOP after 1964. So whereas historically accidental events must have led racists to vote for good men like FDR, after 1964 racists voted their conscience. How convenient. And how easy it would be for, say, a libertarian conservative like Walter Williams to generate a counter-narrative that exposes statism as the philosophical link between segregation and liberalism's economic populism.

Yet liberal commentators commit a further, even more obvious, analytic error. They assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond, it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain, rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils, one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968, when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway, without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end, not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain.

Second, this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak, segregationists for their support after 1968, even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.

Why did segregationists settle for these policies rather than continue to vote Democratic? The GOP's appeal was mightily aided by none other than the Democratic Party itself, which was lurching leftward in the 1970s, becoming, as the contemporary phrase had it, the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." Among other things, the Democrats absorbed a civil rights movement that was itself expanding, and thus diluting, its agenda to include economic redistributionism, opposition to the Vietnam War, and Black Power. The many enthusiasms of the new Democratic Party drove away suburban middle-class voters almost everywhere in the country, even in the South.

Given that trend, the GOP did not need to become the party of white solidarity in order to attract more voters. The fact that many former Wallace supporters ended up voting Republican says a lot less about the GOP than it does about segregationists' collapsing political alternatives. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate, given its limited power, and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless.

In all these ways, the gop appears as the national party of the middle-class, not of white solidarity. And it is this interpretation, and not the myth, that is supported by the voting results. The myth's proponents highlight, and distort, a few key electoral facts: Southern white backlash was most heated in the 1960s, especially in the Deep South. It was then and there that the GOP finally broke through in the South, on the strength of Goldwater's appeals to states' rights. Democrats never again won the votes of most Southern whites. So Goldwater is said to have provided the electoral model for the GOP.

Strom Thurmond

But hidden within these aggregate results are patterns that make no sense if white solidarity really was the basis for the GOP's advance. These patterns concern which Southern votes the GOP attracted, and when. How did the GOP's Southern advance actually unfold? We can distinguish between two sub-regions. The Peripheral South—Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas—contained many growing, urbanizing "New South" areas and much smaller black populations. Race loomed less large in its politics. In the more rural, and poorer, Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana —black communities were much larger, and racial conflict was much more acute in the 1950s and '60s. Tellingly, the presidential campaigns of Strom Thurmond, Goldwater, and Wallace all won a majority of white votes in the Deep South but lost the white vote in the Peripheral South.

The myth that links the GOP with racism leads us to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most strongly where and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense. The GOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites and only later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least as much, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-class whites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but who were George Wallace's base. The GOP should have received more support from native white Southerners raised on the region's traditional racism than from white immigrants to the region from the Midwest and elsewhere. And as the Southern electorate aged over the ensuing decades, older voters should have identified as Republicans at higher rates than younger ones raised in a less racist era.

Each prediction is wrong. The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.

Take presidential voting. Under FDR, the Democrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalition of presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broader national outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy to its arsenal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Ike won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting. From 1952 to the Clinton years, Virginia reverted to the Democrats only once, Florida and Tennessee twice, and Texas—except when native-son LBJ was on the ballot—only twice, narrowly. Additionally, since 1952, North Carolina has consistently either gone Republican or come within a few percentage points of doing so.

In other words, states representing over half the South's electoral votes at the time have been consistently in play from 1952 on—since before Brown v. Board of Education, before Goldwater, before busing, and when the Republicans were the mainstay of civil rights bills. It was this which dramatically changed the GOP's presidential prospects. The GOP's breakthrough came in the least racially polarized part of the South. And its strongest supporters most years were "New South" urban and suburban middle- and upper-income voters. In 1964, as we've seen, Goldwater did the opposite: winning in the Deep South but losing the Peripheral South. But the pre-Goldwater pattern re-emerged soon afterward. When given the option in 1968, Deep South whites strongly preferred Wallace, and Nixon became president by winning most of the Peripheral South instead. From 1972 on, GOP presidential candidates won white voters at roughly even rates in the two sub-regions, sometimes slightly more in the Deep South, sometimes not. But by then, the Deep South had only about one-third of the South's total electoral votes; so it has been the Periphery, throughout, that provided the bulk of the GOP's Southern presidential support.

The GOP's congressional gains followed the same pattern. Of course, it was harder for Republicans to win in Deep South states where Democratic-leaning black electorates were larger. But even when we account for that, the GOP became the dominant party of white voters much earlier in the Periphery than it did in the Deep South. Before Goldwater, the GOP's few Southern House seats were almost all in the Periphery (as was its sole Senator—John Tower of Texas). Several Deep South House members were elected with Goldwater but proved ephemeral, as Black and Black note: "Republicans lost ground and stalled in the Deep South for the rest of the decade," while in the Periphery they "continued to make incremental gains." In the 1960s and '70s, nearly three-quarters of GOP House victories were in the Peripheral rather than the Deep South, with the GOP winning twice as often in urban as rural districts. And six of the eight different Southern Republican Senators elected from 1961 to 1980 were from the Peripheral South. GOP candidates tended consistently to draw their strongest support from the more educated, middle- and upper-income white voters in small cities and suburbs. In fact, Goldwater in 1964—at least his Deep South performance, which is all that was controversial in this regard—was an aberration, not a model for the GOP.

Writers who vilify the GOP's Southern strategy might be surprised to find that all of this was evident, at least in broad brush-strokes, to the strategy's early proponents. In his well-known book, Kevin Phillips drew the lesson that a strong appeal in the Deep South, on the model of 1964, had already entailed and would entail defeat for the GOP everywhere else, including in what he termed the Outer South. He therefore rejected such an approach. He emphasized that Ike and Nixon did far better in the Peripheral South. He saw huge opportunities in the "youthful middle-class" of Texas, Florida, and other rapidly growing and changing Sun Belt states, where what he called "acutely Negrophobe politics" was weakest, not strongest. He thus endorsed "evolutionary success in the Outer South" as the basis of the GOP's "principal party strategy" for the region, concluding that this would bring the Deep South along in time, but emphatically on the national GOP's terms, not the segregationists'.

The tension between the myth and voting data escalates if we consider change across time. Starting in the 1950s, the South attracted millions of Midwesterners, Northeasterners, and other transplants. These "immigrants" identified themselves as Republicans at higher rates than native whites. In the 1980s, up to a quarter of self-declared Republicans in Texas appear to have been such immigrants. Furthermore, research consistently shows that identification with the GOP is stronger among the South's younger rather than older white voters, and that each cohort has also became more Republican with time. Do we really believe immigrants (like George H.W. Bush, who moved with his family to Texas) were more racist than native Southerners, and that younger Southerners identified more with white solidarity than did their elders, and that all cohorts did so more by the 1980s and '90s than they had earlier?

In sum, the GOP's Southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentrated in the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-native-Southern, and concentrated in the growth-points that were, so to speak, the least "Southern" parts of the South. This is a very strange way to reincarnate George Wallace's movement.

The Decline of Racism

Timing may provide the greatest gap between the myth and the actual unfolding of events. Only in the 1980s did more white Southerners self-identify as Republicans than as Democrats, and only in the mid-1990s did Republicans win most Southern House seats and become competitive in most state legislatures. So if the GOP's strength in the South only recently reached its zenith, and if its appeal were primarily racial in nature, then the white Southern electorate (or at least most of it) would have to be as racist as ever. But surely one of the most important events in Southern political history is the long-term decline of racism among whites. The fact that these (and many other) books suggest otherwise shows that the myth is ultimately based on a demonization not of the GOP but of Southerners, who are indeed assumed to have Confederate flags in their hearts if not on their pickups. This view lends The Rise of Southern Republicans a schizophrenic nature: it charts numerous changes in the South, but its organizing categories are predicated on the unsustainable assumption that racial views remain intact.

Historian David Chappell  

What's more, the trend away from confident beliefs in white supremacy may have begun earlier than we often think. David Chappell, a historian of religion, argues that during the height of the civil rights struggle, segregationists were denied the crucial prop of religious legitimacy. Large numbers of pastors of diverse denominations concluded that there was no Biblical foundation for either segregation or white superiority. Although many pastors remained segregationist anyway, the official shift was startling: "Before the Supreme Court's [Brown v. Board] decision of 1954, the southern Presbyterians. . . and, shortly after the decision, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) overwhelmingly passed resolutions supporting desegregation and calling on all to comply with it peacefully. . . . By 1958 all SBC seminaries accepted black applicants." With considerable understatement, Chappell notes that "people—even historians—are surprised to hear this." Billy Graham, the most prominent Southern preacher, was openly integrationist.

Richard Nixon

The point of all this is not to deny that Richard Nixon may have invited some nasty fellows into his political bed. The point is that the GOP finally became the region's dominant party in the least racist phase of the South's entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region's growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones. The myth's shrillest proponents are as reluctant to admit this as they are to concede that most Republicans genuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law. The truly tenacious prejudices here are the mythmakers'.

Racial Gerrymandiering: How both parties view Blacks

Racial Gerrymandering

During Reconstruction, Mississippi created a "shoestring" congressional district, sweeping so many blacks into a narrow district along the river that other districts had comfortably large white majorities. This was racial gerrymandering deplored by liberal democrats.

After the 1990 census determined that North Carolina was 22 percent black, the state's redistricting created a black-majority congressional district. President George H.W. Bush's Justice Department deemed this insufficient under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Hence the creation of North Carolina's 12th District, which slithers 160 miles down Interstate 85.

This was racial gerrymandering applauded by liberal democrats. And by cynical Republicans. While preening about their civil rights sensitivity, Republicans could concentrate black voters into electoral ghettos, thereby making contiguous districts more Republican.

Two days after the 44th anniversary of the Selma march that helped pass the 1965 act, the Supreme Court took a timid step toward limiting the perverse use of that act to create political set-asides -- elective offices to which certain preferred minorities are entitled.

This ruling revisits the strange career of racial gerrymandering -- how that practice went from execrable to virtuous to mandatory, and became yet another manifestation of the entitlement mentality.

In 1965, the VRA was enacted to combat racial discrimination that denied equal access to voting. Because of judicial interpretations and legislative amendments, it now requires racial discrimination in the name of guaranteeing effective voting by certain preferred minorities (ie; blacks and Hispanics). Effectiveness is understood as successful racial or ethnic bloc voting, with success understood as electing members of those blocs. Such results -- minorities electing minority candidates -- have come to be regarded as necessary and sufficient proof of real voting rights.

In 1982, the act was amended (Section 2) to say that a violation occurs if nominating and electing processes "are not equally open to participation" by minority voters in that they "have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." Note that there is no mention of "vote dilution."

But the amended VRA has been construed as follows: Equal "participation" of an "opportunity" for minorities means their ability to elect candidates of their choice, and that must mean minority candidates. Otherwise there has been illegal dilution of the minority vote.

Such repellant reasoning expresses two tenets of liberalism's racial fatalism:  (1) Identity politics (your political identity is your race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation) and (2) categorical representation (members of an identity cohort can only be understood, empathized with and represented by members of that cohort).

Racial gerrymandering having thus become a moral imperative, North Carolina's Legislature created a "majority-minority" (a voting-age population 56 percent black) state legislative district after the 1990 census. But the 2000 census revealed that demographic changes had made that district just 35 percent black. So the Legislature tinkered with the district's shape to make it 39 percent minority. But it did so by again dividing two counties, which North Carolina's Constitution forbids.

This time Pender County sued. A state court said the VRA's Section 2 required splitting Pender, but North Carolina's Supreme Court held that Section 2 only protects against vote dilution in drawing district lines when a minority group is a majority.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed -- even though Section 2 says nothing whatever about a bright numerical line like this "50 percent rule."

In an opinion joined only by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito, Justice Anthony Kennedy lamented that "racially polarized voting" is "not ancient history." Well, yes. It is federal policy: By codifying the assumption that people of a particular race will and should think and vote alike, the VRA now encourages such voting by treating it as normal, and hence sort of admirable.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, endorsed only Kennedy's conclusion. Thomas rejected Kennedy's argument, noting the glaring fact that Section 2's text provides no basis -- none -- for "any vote dilution claim, regardless of the size of the minority population in a given district." The VRA, properly read, concerns only "access to the ballot."

But it has been improperly read by result-oriented lawyers skillful at creative construing, and by judges legislating their own notions of racial rectitude. The VRA was written to protect each individual's right to vote. Having been twisted to serve group rights --certain groups' entitlements to win quotas of offices -- the VRA has become emblematic of both the noble flourishing and the ignoble decline of the civil rights movement.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Is She The Next Anthony Weiner?, without the weiner?



Debbie Wasserman Schultz



 Weekly Standard’s John McCormack

The bad news: she didn’t realize that she was calling members of her own party ‘anti-woman’ before she started screaming to The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack about how people who voted to defund Planned Parenthood are anti-woman!

McCormack: But there were nine [correction: ten] Democrats who voted against funding for Planned Parenthood, so are those, now eleven Democrats anti-woman?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No, they’re not, because if you, when I declare someone, when I make a broad statement like that, I look at the balance of somebody’s–where their priorities are, the balance of their record. And so one individual isolated vote here and there does not make you anti-woman.

McCormack: So what are the broader votes that make those Democrats who voted on those same issues–on Planned Parenthood on H.R. 3–what makes them not anti-woman?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: I don’t think there are any Democrats.

McCormack: Eleven.

Note that Debbie Wasserman Schultz happens to be the Deputy Minority Whip; I was unaware that the position was a sinecure.  Or that it causes traumatic memory loss among those who have been burdened by the job.  Or that the Democrats simply pick lying suckweasels for the position… actually, no: I was already aware of that one.

Anyway, the good news: at least Wasserman Schultz’s bright enough* not to try to answer John McCormack by either trying to have him arrested, or by shoving him to the ground.  That never ends well.

Seriously, Debbie?  If you’re going to fulminate about Republican Presidential candidates driving foreign cars, don’t own a Nissan, OK?  Particularly since the only places where they’re made in the USA are in right-to-work states.  Guess union solidarity only goes so far, huh?

Libya vs the Constitution

With military action taking place in Libya right now, the essential question must be asked: Is it even Constitutional? For those of you who don’t want to read more than a sentence or two, here’s the short answer. Absolutely not.


DELEGATED POWERS

The ninth and tenth amendments, while they didn’t add anything new, defined the Constitution. In short, they tell us that the federal government is only authorized to exercise those powers delegated to it in the Constitution…and nothing more. Everything else is either prohibited or retained by the states or people themselves.

What does this have to do with Libya? Well, whenever the federal government does anything, the first question should always be, “where in the Constitution is the authority to do this?” What follows here is an answer regarding American bombs being dropped on Libya.

WHO DECIDES?

Ever since the Korean War, Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution has been regularly cited as justification for the President to act with a seemingly free reign in the realm of foreign policy – including the initiation of foreign wars. But, it is Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution that lists the power to declare war, and this power is placed solely in the hands of Congress.

Article II, Section 2, on the other hand, refers to the President as the “commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States.” What the founders meant by this clause was that once war was declared, it would then be the responsibility of the President, as the commander-in-chief, to direct the war.

Alexander Hamilton clarified this when he said that the President, while lacking the power to declare war, would have “the direction of war when authorized.”

Thomas Jefferson reaffirmed this quite eloquently when, in 1801, he said that, as President, he was “unauthorized by the Constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense.”

In Federalist #69, Alexander Hamilton explained that the President’s authority:

“Would be nominally the same with that of the King of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral of the confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war, and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies; all which by the constitution under consideration would appertain to the legislature.”

James Madison warned us that the power of declaring war must be kept away from the executive branch when he wrote to Thomas Jefferson:

“The constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.”

WORDS HAVE MEANING

If, like any legal document, the words of the Constitution mean today just what they meant the moment it was signed, we must first look for the 18th Century meaning of the words used. Here’s a few common 18th-century definitions of the important words:

--War: The exercise of violence against withstanders under a foreign command.

--Declare: Expressing something before it is promised, decreed, or acted upon.

--Invade: To attack a country; to make a hostile entrance

What does this all mean? Unless the country is being invaded, if congress does not declare war against another country, the president is constitutionally barred from waging it, no matter how much he desires to do so. Pre-emptive strikes and undeclared offensive military expeditions are not powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution, and are, therefore, unlawful.

HOW IT APPLIES TODAY

Here’s the quick overview of how this all plays out:

* In Constitutional terms, the United States is currently at war with Libya.

* Libya is not invading the United States, nor has it threatened to do so.

* Congress has not declared war. Barack Obama did.

Some would claim, and news articles are already reporting on it, that the 1973 war powers resolution authorizes the President to start a war as long as it’s reported to Congress within 48 hours. Then, Congress would have 60 days to authorize the action, or extend it.

The only question you should have to ask for this would be – “where in the Constitution is congress given the authority to change the constitution by resolution?”

It doesn’t. And that resolution, in and of itself, is a Constitutional violation. More on that in a future article, of course.

James Madison had something to say about such a plan when he wrote:

“The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.”

War Powers resolution or no war powers resolution – without a Congressional declaration, the president is not authorized to start an offensive military campaign. Period.

The bottom line? By using US Military to begin hostilities with a foreign nation without a Congressional declaration of war, Barack Obama has committed a serious violation of the Constitution. While he certainly is not the first to do so in regards to war powers, it’s high time that he becomes the last.

Classroom Jihad



Dr. Bassam Franggieh (right)



Controversy has erupted at California’s Claremont McKenna College after a student journalist exposed how the head of the Middle East Studies Department, Dr. Bassam Frangieh, is an open supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah. The college has responded by pretending his record of praising the terrorist groups doesn’t exist and editing Frangieh’s Wikipedia entry.

Charles C. Johnson of The Claremont Independent has done extensive research on Frangieh, including having his Arabic works translated. Johnson tells FrontPage that more incriminating material is on the way, but what has already been discovered is nothing less than shocking.

In May of 2006, Frangieh congratulated Hamas on winning the Palestinian elections, saying, “I wonder what else would the Arabs have without Hamas and Hezbollah? Nothing. Except humiliation.” He said that he “view[s] Hamas with great pleasure” and even went so far as to say, “Hamas might be able to produce the beginning of salvation.” This lavish praise cannot be denied, clarified or downplayed. It is clear that Frangieh is an unabashed supporter of the terrorist group.

He also supports specific acts of terrorism. He signed a petition in 2006 describing Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, which included the firing of rockets on civilians and the kidnapping of soldiers, as a “heroic operation.” The document referred to Israel as a “Zionist killing machine” that is “motivated by historical ambitions… [And] a racist supremacist ideology that denigrates the indigenous population, their culture, and their very existence.”

It describes Hezbollah as the “Lebanese Resistance” and asks the Lebanese government to enlist it as its army. The petition also demands that the international community boycott Israeli products, cut off diplomatic ties and even boycott Israeli academic and scientific institutions that do not condemn the invasion of Lebanon.

Frangieh also wrote an essay in 2000 titled, “Modern Arabic Poetry: Vision and Reality” that praises an extremist poet named Abd al-Rahim Mahmud, whose poetry has made its way into Palestinian and Saudi textbooks designed to indoctrinate the youth into supporting terrorism and hatred. Two of his most popular poems, “The Martyr” and “A Call to Jihad,” are particularly admired by terrorists.

In his essay, he said that even if Arab poets blew themselves up, it would not force the change he feels is necessary in the region. “For real change to come about, thousands of people will have to die; thousands must martyr themselves. It appears that only massive revolution will succeed in overturning the corrupt regimes of the Arab world,” he writes.

Frangieh also espouses wild conspiracy theories. In 2007, he signed a petition condemning a resolution that would divide Iraq into three sectarian-based autonomous regions as a “Zionist plot.” It described the war in Iraq as “barbaric” and hatched by “cowboys” seeking the country’s wealth. Like other anti-American conspiracy theorists and Islamic extremists, he sees U.S. foreign policy as secretly orchestrated by Zionist imperialists with evil motives.

He has also been active in trying to book speakers that share his views, such as Syria’s ambassador. He also worked with the Muslim Students Association to have Zaid Shakir speak, who the New York Times reported in 2006 “said he hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law.” He also espouses 9/11 conspiracy theories and condemns America’s “demonization” of Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Saddam Hussein and others. Shakir even said that he opposes the hijacking of civilian airliners, but “if you hijack an airplane filled with the 82nd Airborne, that’s something else.”

Charles Johnson told FrontPage that he will soon release additional material related to Frangieh and that he is working to get statements from experts on anti-Semitism to join his cause. “I want the school to say if they will defend the academic freedom of someone who supports anti-Semitic terrorist organizations,” he said. Johnson also says that questions are going to be raised about Frangieh’s academic integrity.

Frangieh’s wife, Aleta Wenger, also works at the college as its “executive director for international programs” and other positions that give her influence over the awarding of scholarships and fellowships, including the Fulbright Award. She supported the activists trying to break the Israeli blockade on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and sees Israel as so wicked that it might bomb the American University of Beirut.

Johnson said that he is encouraged thus far by the reaction on campus to his work. “Numerous faculty members in numerous departments are supportive,” he said.

FrontPage was told by Claremont McKenna College that Professor Frangieh was unavailable for an interview because he had to meet a deadline for an article. The college has put out a statement on the matter that says, “The College does not agree with the student’s opinion that Professor Frangieh supports terrorism. In addition, Professor Frangieh has specifically and emphatically denied that he supports terrorism, or any acts of terrorism by any organization.” The college’s vice president of public affairs and communication reacted by deleting information about Frangieh’s support for terrorism from his Wikipedia page.

Claremont McKenna is wrong to assume that a condemnation of the vague term of “terrorism” means he is not an extremist. Frangieh obviously would not include Hamas and Hezbollah under the definition of “terrorist organizations” if he supports them. His denial is unconvincing and meaningless given his record.

Students at Claremont McKenna and their families should be outraged that their tuition is going to fund a Middle East Studies Department led by a supporter of terrorism. It is time for the community to demand that the college explain why it still employs Professor Frangieh even after having Charles C. Johnson do the research it should have done long ago.