Obama’s Secret Weapon – The Latino Vote

The one demographic which hasn’t traditionally turned out in large numbers is Hispanic voters. 2008 was an exception with Hispanic voters helping power Obama’s win. As such, looking at hstorical data – most of the national polls like Gallup undercount the number of Hispanic voters utilizing the “likely voter” model. Creating the situation – should there be a major turnout of Hispanic voters – most of the national polls will be wrong by 4 to possibly 12% if Pollster Nate Silver  of Five-Thirty-Eight is right.

Recent polling of Hispanic voters indicates that this may just be the case…

Even more interesting may be what this means in the down-ticket races. There is a possibility of some unexpected upsets of Republicans.

If you are Hispanic, and thinking about voting Republican…I have one word for you – Arizona. A vote for Romney empowers the Republicans in places like Arizona to take their campaign of ethnic hatred and domestic terrorism nationwide.  It is your children who are the losers in that.

Latino Excitement at Record Levels in US Election

Just over a week before the United States votes in a highly anticipated and historically tight presidential election, a new poll released Monday finds that interest by Latino voters has strengthened significantly over the past two months, and that turnout among Hispanics could be higher than the records set in 2008.

According to the latest impreMedia-Latino Decisions poll of registered Hispanic voters, 45 percent say they are more excited about the current election than they were for the 2008 election, when Barack Obama was elected. That number has gone up by eight percent over the past 10 weeks, when the poll was first taken.

Further, a full 87 percent of respondents say they would most likely be voting when national polling sites open on Nov. 6, with eight percent having already taken advantage of the early voting options made available in certain states. During the last presidential election, 84 percent of registered Latino voters cast ballots – far higher than the U.S. national turnout, of 57 percent, that same year.

The high levels of interest mean that Latinos will further cement the community’s importance in the current and, particularly, future election. Hispanics make up one of the single fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. population, with around 50,000 Latino youths currently becoming eligible to vote every month.

To date, they have tended to vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. The prospect has reportedly led to existential debates within the Republican Party, which has seen its voter base – which skews older and whiter than the Democratic base – continue to shrink as a percentage of the overall voting public.

“The polls show that this year we can anticipate record participation among Latino voters,” Monica Lozano, the head of impreMedia, said Monday in a statement. “It looks like the ‘sleeping giant’ has woken up.”

The new numbers will receive particular scrutiny given the general lack of Spanish-language polling that has taken place during the campaign season, despite a massive amount of polling figures coming out on a daily basis.

In mid-October, the widely watched pollster Nate Silver suggested that the relative lack of Spanish-language respondents could increase Barack Obama’s figures by around a dozen percentage points, including in some of the most strongly contested “swing” states, such as Florida and Colorado, that will eventually decide the election.

Indeed, the strong new numbers will be particularly welcomed by Obama’s campaign, which has made the Latino vote a central pillar of its strategy. In an initially off-the-record interview released last week, Obama stated, “Since this is off the record, I will just be very blunt. Should I win a second term, a big reason … is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.”

The president also noted that this “alienation” of Latinos by Republicans is a “relatively new phenomenon”. This is seen as referring to a host of new and pending laws enforcing voter identification requirements that many have suggested would impact particularly on Latino and other minority voters – typically strongholds for the Democratic Party.

According to a new report released last week by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), “More than 100 years of virtually unchecked discrimination at the polls against Latino U.S. citizens” is now being compounded by a “significant added obstruction in the form of restrictive state voting laws … (that) will have a worse effect on the Latino electorate than on all voters.”

NALEO suggests that these new policies could negatively impact on around 219,000 Latino voters across the country this election, a number it calls a “conservative estimate”. Indeed, after the U.S. courts recently halted proceedings in several states planning to institute new voter ID laws, the report suggests that number would have been closer to 835,000.

Notably, a Republican state official has been caught on tape stating that such legislation was being enacted specifically in order to help the Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s chances of election.

 

The Second American Civil War

Fascinating how the more things change – the more how some things never change.

If Mitt Romney gets elected President this election, and the Republican Party makes inroads into the Congress it will be almost all due to the politics of polarization of race in America by the Republican Party.

“Polarization”?

 “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to.”

Richard M. Nixon as recorded in Richard Nixon’s chief-of-staff, Bob Haldeman’s diary

Since Obama won the Presidency in 2008, we have seen a steady drumbeat of racism from the GOP, which apparently, if poll numbers are to believed has borne significant fruit in terms of elevating Mitt Romney. As most minorities in America are well cognizant of – if you can hoist enough racism into the mix, you can convince a significant segment of the white population in America to go so far as to even cheer the sacrifice of their own children, in a war they were lied into, for objectives which, if achieved – will do absolutely nothing to improve their lives or the country they live in. Big difference between Heroes and Cannon Fodder…

They accomplished it during the Civil War where they convinced over a million Southerners to don the Grey and 250,000 to die – despite the fact that the vast majority neither owned slaves or profited directly from slavery. They ass reamed the same group again during and after WWI to disguise the fact of the massive wealth inequality which lead to the Stock Market crash, while hiding the fact by convincing the same victims that black folks were stealing their jobs and livelihoods…

Sound familiar? You bet…Welcome to 2012.

AP poll: U.S. majority have prejudice against blacks

Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.

In all, 51% of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48% in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56%, up from 49% during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.

“As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time … it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago,” said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with AP to develop the survey.

Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52% of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57% in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison…

The result this time around?

The GOP’s Geography And The Confederacy

Current Electoral Projection

 

Map of the Confederacy in 1861

Are you not struck by the similarities? (The yellow states were not part of the Confederacy but backed slavery. Kansas is an exception, and Maryland and Delaware along the border too). I am not saying (and in the conversation it’s a little garbled and I can see why Heroge might have interpreted me as saying) that that the only states that will switch from Obama to Romney this year were Confederate states. Indiana is the exception. I was saying that if Obama loses North Carolina, Virginia and Florida – which I suspect he will – then the 2012 map will more closely resemble the civil war map than 2008, when the same pattern was striking.

I think America is currently in a Cold Civil War. The parties, of course, have switched sides since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The party of the Union and Lincoln is now the Democratic party. The party of the Confederacy is now the GOP. And racial polarization is at record levels, with whites entirely responsible for reversing Obama’s 2008 inroads into the old Confederacy in three Southern states. You only have to look at the electoral map in 1992 and 1996, when Clinton won, to see how the consolidation of a Confederacy-based GOP and a Union-based Democratic party has intensified – and now even more under a black president from, ahem, Illinois.

 

The Second Civil War… Indeed.

Let’s hope this one ends the way the one against the communists did…

 

 

 

 

Conservatives Turn America Into Another Zimbabwe

The United Nations and other international organizations often send poll watchers to third world hellholes like Zimbabwe to try and stop the conservative forces of darkness such as dictator Robert Mugabe from using thug tactics to prevent voters from exercising the franchise…

Not much different from the jack-boot Rethughy bigots in this country…

Which is why the United States now needs international poll watchers to defend the once shining beacon of Democracy’s citizens and their right to vote.

More of that conservatism turning America into a third-world has been.

International monitors at US polling spots draw criticism from voter fraud groups

United Nations-affiliated election monitors from Europe and central Asia will be at polling places around the U.S. looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups, a concern raised by civil rights groups during a meeting this week. The intervention has drawn criticism from a prominent conservative-leaning group combating election fraud.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations partner on democratization and human rights projects, will deploy 44 observers around the county on Election Day to monitor an array of activities, including potential disputes at polling places.

Liberal-leaning civil rights groups met with representatives from the OSCE this week to raise their fears about what they say are systematic efforts to suppress minority voters likely to vote for President Obama.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP and the ACLU, among other groups, warned this month in a letter to Daan Everts, a senior official with OSCE, of “a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans — particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities.”

The request for foreign monitoring of election sites drew a strong rebuke from Catherine Engelbrecht, founder and president of True the Vote, a conservative-leaning group seeking to crack down on election fraud.

“These activist groups sought assistance not from American sources, but from the United Nations,” she said in a statement to The Hill. “The United Nations has no jurisdiction over American elections.”

The observers, from countries such as Germany, France, Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, will observe voting at polling places and other political activity.

“They [will] observe the overall election process, not just the ballot casting,” said Giovanna Maiola, spokeswoman for OSCE. “They are focusing on a number of areas on the state level, including the legal system, election administration, the campaign, the campaign financing [and] new voting technologies used in the different states.”

 

The First Native American Saint

The Catholic Church is reaching out to previously unrecognized groups…

 

Pope names ‘Lily of the Mohawks’ first Native American saint

Pope Benedict created seven new saints on Sunday including the first Native American to be canonised, as the Roman Catholic Church reaches out to its global flock to rebuff encroaching secularism…

Thousands of pilgrims from around the world converged on St. Peter’s Square to witness the ceremony recognising the saints, who included Kateri Tekakwitha, a sixteenth-century convert known as “Lily of the Mohawks.”…

The crowd included hundreds of pilgrims from theUnited States‘ 2.5 million-strong Native American population, of whom 680,000 are estimated to be Catholic, a legacy of the success of early missionaries in converting indigenous people in America.

Portraits of the new saints, including French Jesuit Jacques Berthieu, Italian priest Giovanni Battista Piamarta, the Spanish nun Carmen Salles y Barangueras, and German laywoman Anna Schaffer hung from the marble facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, and the crowds cheered as each name was called.

“Saint Kateri, Protectress of Canada and the first Native American saint, we entrust to you the renewal of the faith in the first nations and in North America! May God bless the first nations!” Pope Benedict said in his homily, in which he alternated between French, English, German and Italian.

Saint Kateri, born in 1656 in what is now New York to a Mohawk father and an Algonquin mother, impressed missionaries with her devotion, taking a lifetime vow of chastity and punishing herself by placing hot coals between her toes and sleeping on a bed of thorns.

When she died at the age of 24, witnesses said smallpox scars on her face disappeared, and people reported seeing visions of her.

This began a centuries-old tradition of veneration culminating with her canonisation, bolstered by the survival of the Native American boy in 2006…

Dressed in fringed and beaded regalia with an arctic fox fur collar, Judy Arnouts of the Odawa tribe, whose native name is Bedaben, meaning Blessing of New Day, said the canonisation of Saint Kateri was a boost to the Native American community.

“Our cultural and spiritual history needs to be upheld, celebrated and taught to our younger generation,” said Arnouts, 68, who had travelled from Michigan to present Pope Benedict with a wood-burned cedar log she had made, a traditional craft…

 

The Boss fo Obama

 

‘Nuf Said.

 

D’Souza Exposed By Christian Magazine

It would seem that it’s not only “evil” liberals seeing through conservative pundit and trash writer Dinesh D’Souza’s act. It appears Dinesh is dumping his wife of 20 years for a Trophy Girlfriend half her age…

Dinesh D’Souza Fiancée Scandal Rocks The King’s College

Conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, riding a wave of attention for his successful anti-Obama documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, suddenly finds himself swamped by a different sort of attention, this time over his alleged relationship with a 29-year-old woman with whom he shared a hotel room and described as his “fiancée” despite still being married to his wife of 20 years.

The evangelical magazine World reported Tuesdaythat D’Souza, who is also the president of The King’s College in Manhattan, shared a hotel room with Denise Odie Joseph at a conference in South Carolina in September and introduced her to at least three people as his fiancée. A conference organizer confirmed to World that D’Souza and Joseph had both checked in to the hotel and left together, and D’Souza confirmed to the magazine that he and Joseph were engaged. But California court records show that he only filed for divorce from his wife on Oct. 4, which means he will be married for at least another six months. D’Souza later sent a text message to World’s reporter saying that he had decided to “suspend” the engagement.

Joseph graduated from high school in 2002, according to her Facebook page, and attended Georgetown University’s law school. Her website, I Denise Lust After, appeared to be taken offline, but a blog she authors on the site Smart Girl Politics remains active.

D’Souza moved from California to New York in 2010 to become the president of The King’s College, a small evangelical school with headquarters in Manhattan’s financial district, leaving his wife behind in California. According to former staffers who worked closely with D’Souza, his wife didn’t want to move, and the distance put a strain on their marriage. In early 2012, Joseph began showing up at the college, which was then headquartered in the Empire State Building, where students and staff eventually noticed her inexplicable presence. A former student said people would ask about Joseph, whom he described as “pushy,” but would be met with “weird smiles” and evasive answers. That student said one of his friends, a staffer who worked closely with D’Souza, was tasked with creating an official response to the speculation, which was that she was “a good friend of Dinesh.” The student said staffers he knew believed Joseph made her presence known at the college because she wanted to be more than D’Souza’s “road tail.”

 

Melissa Harris-Perry Calls Out Clarence Thomas

This is a good one. One of the reasons it is critical that Obama win this next election is the opportunity to replace at least 2 justices on the Supreme Court and clean up the cesspool the Rethugs made of that institution.