Political News Updates

If you read or watch nothing else today, take the ten minutes needed to watch this shocking video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7-I9Qp3d4Y&feature=player_embedded

My latest column begins, thus: Is Michael Bloomberg to blame for the deaths of the 18 Muslim men in Indian-controlled Kashmir who rioted over reports that someone in America burned the Koran? Let’s think it through. Jonah Goldberg

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Once More On Koran Burning & Park51

Peggy Noonan, with characteristic patriotic grace, writes: there's a sense that dramatic action is needed, and a sense of profound urgency. Add drama to urgency and you get the victory of a Tea Party-backed candidate. That is the context. Local Tea Parties seem—so far—not to be falling in love with the particular talents or background of their candidates. It's more detached than that. They don't say their candidates will be reflective, skilled in negotiations, a great senator, a Paul Douglas or Pat Moynihan or a sturdy Scoop Jackson. These qualities are not what they think are urgently needed. What they want is someone who will walk in, put her foot on the conservative end of the yardstick, and make everything slip down in that direction. Nobody knows how all this will play out, but we are seeing is something big—something homegrown, broad-based and independent. In part it is a rising up of those who truly believe America is imperiled and truly mean to save her. The dangers, both present and potential, are obvious.

What follows — adapted from the conclusion of a longer article,”Waiting for the Preacher: Obama’s America in World Religious Context” — was a part of my attempt this past week to contextualize the past American month for an Australian audience: How on Earth, my new Australian friends have been asking me, can so large a fraction of the American public believe that its President is an illegal Muslim immigrant actively collaborating with Islamic terrorism? Australians tend to ask the question, and it has come several times now, with a smile and a shake of the head. Well, yes, America is a wild and crazy country, no denying that. But let me suggest, if I may, that this particular piece of craziness is not a wildflower in the meadow of American craziness but a genetically engineered plant , in both senses of the word plant — a plant designed for a specific function. To begin with just a bit of recent history, Republican strategists and their allies in the media initially sought during the 2008 Presidential campaign to present Democratic candidate Barack Obama as an angry black racist, patently playing to the still-strong elements of race hatred in the Republican Party’s southern base. That effort failed after Obama gave what many regard as an historic speech. A fallback strategy, aimed at giving race hatred, increasingly a sin that dares not speak its name, a new hook to hang on, mobilized anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment by planting and cultivating the bogus charge that the Democratic candidate was an illegal Muslim immigrant. The Obama campaign buried this charge, rather than dignifying it with a response, by effectively celebrating Michelle Robinson Obama’s picture-perfect black American family rather than the candidate’s own during the Democratic nominating convention. I pause to point out that if Republicans, then or now, actually believed this charge, they would long since have sought to impeach Obama. For that matter, Democrats would have sought to impeach him. That no such attempt has been made or will ever be made ought to tell you that Republican strategists don’t believe their own charge for a minute, and yet Republican office-holders from the top down have meticulously abstained from repudiating it. It may look to you like an urban myth. It may look that way to some Americans, as well. It is, in fact, a classic electoral dirty trick. This summer, thanks to the severe recession that continues in the United States, Republican gains in the mid-term election have seemed certain, yet the possibility of further financial reform still looms, and the George W. Bush Administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy seem in particular danger. Only major Republican gains can preserve these highest-priority Republican agenda items. What might turn a solid gain into a game-changing Democratic rout? The electoral tactic the Republicans seem to have chosen, one familiar from many previous Republican campaigns, has been the elevation of a divisive social issue into a brief national obsession well-calculated to distract the general electorate at the crucial moment from an unpalatable Republican economic agenda. Over the past weeks, with noteworthy abruptness, the existing canard that Obama is an illegal Muslim immigrant has been intensified by its linkage to a previously praised (on FOX News as well as in the mainstream media) Lower Manhattan Islamic center, a kind of Islamic YMCA. The calculated demonization of this project, which is to include a multi-faith prayer space, as a “Ground Zero Mosque” began with Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post . It continued through an abrupt about-face on Murdoch’s FOX News channel. Transparently, the intent has been to provoke Obama into defending the center in the name of American freedom of religion, thus lending credibility to the politically targeted charge that he is collaborating with Islamic terrorists against his own country. The strategy has worked — but perhaps all too well. It has taken on a life of its own and triggered an embarrassing wave of general anti-Muslim prejudice in the United States, stretching noticeably beyond anything felt immediately after the bombings themselves. Among the uglier manifestations: a stabbing, an arson attempt, vandalizations, etc. This sort of thing exceeds anything that could plausibly pay a dividend to Republicans in November. But to stop it, they — and most especially former President George W. Bush, whose silence has become increasingly audible — would have had to do what they have been trying to provoke Obama into doing: they would have had to stand up for American Muslims. That would be good for the country, of course, both at home and abroad, and good for the world, emphatically including Australia. However, it would go exactly counter to the Republican electoral strategy. And in case you haven’t noticed, nothing of the sort has happened. Indeed, the latest baroque wrinkle has been one perennial Republican hopeful’s “discovery” that Obama is comprehensible only in terms of Kenyan postcolonial radicalism. (Tell me another one just like the other one….) In any case, the terminal spinout of the strategy may have come when a Florida pastor announced a public burning of the Quran on September 11. This Quran-burning abomination became a major international scandal, so undermining American security and military strategy in Afghanistan that Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces there, denounced it and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates phoned the pastor personally to persuade him to call it off. The pastor finally did call it off, but the damage had been done. In the pursuit of domestic electoral advantage, the right wing had lent substantial new credibility to the claim that the United States was at war with Islam, undermined the U.S. effort to stabilize Afghanistan, and strengthened the opposition facing the fragile U.S.-backed government in Iraq. President Obama had failed to rise to the occasion with a speech remotely comparable to his 2008 speech on race relations. His modest remarks on the anniversary of September 11 were appropriate but, in context, seemed almost literally the least he could do. Most regrettably, perhaps, the visionary plans he had announced so boldly late in 2007 to lay to rest the damaging belief that the United States was at war with Islam now seemed lost forever. And that loss matters to Australia scarcely less than it does to America. After the 2001 attacks, then-President George W. Bush had declared quite plainly that the United States was not at war with Islam. However, his language thereafter, especially “Global War on Terror,” when clearly only Muslim-sponsored terrorism was in view, had an alienating and offensively incriminating effect on Muslims around the world. After the unwarranted U.S. invasion of Iraq, the notion took hold quite powerfully and widely that the United States was indeed at war with Islam. Approaching the 2008 election, then-Senator Barack Obama’s descent from a Kenyan father of ostensibly Muslim culture and his boyhood in Indonesia with his mother and an Indonesian Muslim stepfather seemed, a priori, unique assets for a historic new departure. Some of you may have dipped into Obama’s The Audacity of Hope , in which so much is said of Indonesia. Imagine the potential benefits for Australia of a significant rapprochement between the United States, the most powerful country in the West, and Indonesia, the largest country in the Muslim world, a functioning democracy, and your largest near neighbor. Sadly, Obama’s opponents have turned his potential diplomatic assets into electoral liabilities and, in the current electoral campaign, have shown themselves willing to undermine their country’s foreign policy and even our armed forces’ battlefield security for short-term political gain. And it may yet be, when all the dust has settled, that they will not have procured even that. The ugly picture of the United States that Americans have been gazing at over the past two weeks or so has had a Republican more than a Democratic frame. American voters, come November, may recoil from it more than the punditry is currently prepared to believe. We’ll find out soon enough, and with the election behind us, the “Ground Zero Mosque” circus will quietly leave media town. The center will be built, but Rupert Murdoch will no longer find it worth demonizing. What will matter for a longer time, alas, will be the unseen collateral damage to a deeply needed detente in the war that never was. Excerpt from: Jack Miles: Quran-Burning and Republican Electoral Strategy: A Postscript from Australia

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Jack Miles: Quran-Burning and Republican Electoral Strategy: A Postscript from Australia

By Elizabeth Tenety The Washington Post A majority of Americans now “consider same-sex couples with children” to be a family, according to a study released Wednesday. Originally posted here: WaPo ‘On Faith’: Defining Family In A Religiously Diverse America

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WaPo ‘On Faith’: Defining Family In A Religiously Diverse America

Paul Ryan has responded to a David Brooks column that had in turn took issue with an op-ed co-written by Ryan and AEI president Arthur Brooks on the decision facing America “between an opportunity society, where the government promotes a vibrant free enterprise system and sturdy safety net v. an expanding social welfare state – one where the government assumes greater control of more sectors of the economy and more aspects of our lives.” (You can get a flavor of the exchange, with expert color commentary from our very own Reihan Salam, here ). Ryan's response — a concise defense of his Roadmap for America's Future — is excellent, as you'd expect. Here's a taste: The challenge goes beyond “the current concentration of power in Washington,” which Brooks rightly opposes. For the record, I first introduced A Roadmap for America’s Future when President George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office. The explosion in government spending and overreach has been a bipartisan failure, not for years but for decades. Politicians continued to make promises that simply cannot be kept. But reaping comes after sowing – and we now face a debt so massive that it will cause, sooner than we think, the collapse of our social safety net. Contrary to David Brooks’ assertion, “simply getting government out of the way” is not our prescription to meet our pressing fiscal and economic challenges. This is certainly not the case made by Arthur Brooks in his book The Battle . Nor is it the case I make in A Roadmap for America’s Future . In fact, our aim is the same one David Brooks says is the aim of millions of voters who are alarmed by the Democrats’ lavish spending: for government to play some positive role in their lives. That is actually what we are after – government playing a positive role, respecting its proper limits. Let me be specific: I propose to modernize Medicare , Medicaid and Social Security so these critical programs can meet their mission in the 21st century; secure access to universal health coverage where patients and doctors – not government or insurance company bureaucrats – are the nucleus of the system; restructure Federal job training programs of the past century to better prepare our workforce for the challenges in today’s global economy. There are dozens of additional policy reforms in the Roadmap consistent with the mutually reinforcing goals of individual opportunity and income security. The Roadmap’s reforms are – contrary to the frantic attacks made on it by some of its more partisan critics – fair, gradual, sensible, and aimed specifically to avoid the harsh austerity that will result from maintaining the status quo. You can read the whole thing here . Daniel Foster

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Paul Ryan vs. David Brooks

A sinister group of “special interests” and “third-party organizations” has been funneling millions of dollars into “nasty TV ads and shadowy robo-calls” all to one purpose: to elevate John Boehner to a menacing position of power. If Organizing for America’s latest fundraising appeal is any indication, Democratic strategists continue to believe that the harrowing prospect of John Boehner as speaker of the House will be enough to turn the electoral tide in their direction this fall: Subj: John Boehner The special interests in Washington are not happy, and it's because of something you did. Since President Obama moved into the White House, this movement has stripped them of their influence, proving we could take on the lobbyists and corporate cash with good, old-fashioned organizing. Now these groups are vowing to get payback in the fall elections — and they have put all their chips on one man: Congressman John Boehner…. It's easy to see why these special interests picked John Boehner. This is a guy who first made national news 14 years ago when he was caught handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists on the House floor. John Boehner said he did nothing wrong — he was simply helping out his lobbyist friends. And, in all of the fights we've waged together these past 20 months, he's been these special interests' right-hand man. He teamed up with financial lobbyists to do everything he could to stall Wall Street reform and even took time before the vote on health reform to scream “Hell no!” over and over again from the podium. If John Boehner is handed the Speaker's gavel, all that is wrong with Washington is back in business. Their plans are simple — unravel what this movement has done and stand in the way of the rest of President Obama's agenda…. With just 48 days to go until the election, this movement is the only thing standing in John Boehner's way…. Thanks, Mitch

Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) is now one of the most powerful forces in the Republican party, whether his colleagues in the Senate Republican leadership like it or not. And based on quotes like this, I'm going to guess the answer is “not.” To ABC's Jonathan Karl : I asked Senator DeMint if he’ll have any regrets if come November 3rd he realizes Republicans blew their chance at winning a majority because some of the candidates he supported lost. “No. I’ve been in the majority with Republicans who didn’t have principles and we embarrassed ourselves and lost credibility in front of the country. Frankly, I’m at a point where I’d rather lose fighting for the right cause then win fighting for the wrong cause,” he told me. And to Alex Leary at the St. Petersburg Times : “The GOP would not have a chance to take the majority in the House or the Senate if it weren’t for the tea party. To think that we could be where we are if we had Arlen Specter and Charlie Crist leading our ticket is just foolishness.” That's proved out by the fact that DeMint has picked primary winners with far greater success than the NRSC — which may explain why after an initial chill, Cornyn and co. have decided that they'd rather eat the resources spent on an O'Donnell loss than sit on the sidelines and watch DeMint and his PAC guide her to another upset. UPDATE : Later on in the Karl interview, DeMint answers the 40/60 question: “I’ve said I’d rather have 40 Marco Rubios than 60 Arlen Specters and the reason for that is if you want 60 Republicans, you’ve got to have at least 40 to start with who stand on principle. And if we can show America this election the clear contrast between the Pelosi-Reid-Obama agenda and more of a constitutionally limited government, if our candidates have that clear contrast, I think they’re going to win in every state. “We’re going to have an earthquake election if we put the right candidates and I think that’s what we saw in Delaware last night. Christine O’Donnell has been maligned by everyone from the right to the left but people in Delaware love our country and they don’t want it to go bankrupt. They’re going see this contrast because now republicans are offering a contrast with the democrats who are going to continue this radical agenda with the President. I think the people in Delaware are smart and you’re going to see Christine O’Donnell win that election.” Daniel Foster

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DeMint: ‘I’d Rather Lose Fighting for the Right Cause’

Today, District of Columbia residents voted in the Democratic Primary. In a city where 75 per cent of the voters are Democrats, the election will determine the city’s next Mayor. It is no secret that the election reflects the city’s complicated race and class divisions. These divisions seem poised to decide a primary in which the incumbent candidate, Mayor Adrian Fenty, swept all 142 District precincts in the 2006 election, receiving an overwhelming amount of support from the Black community. Now, the candidate projected to win, Vincent Gray, hopes to claim the city’s majority Black vote, in part by framing Fenty’s as the incumbent Mayor that has neglected the city’s poorest Black citizens. We grew up in the DC area, Alexandra in the privileged and predominantly white neighborhood of Georgetown, and Dwayne in the overwhelmingly Black suburb of Suitland, Maryland. We have inherited an awareness of the ways that the race and class divides have colored our experiences, perceptions and life trajectories and those of our friends and families. During our teenage years, DC was known as the ‘Murder Capital of the World.’ At the time, we were two promising young students interested in politics and on a path to college. And here is where our lives present the question that troubles this election. Instead of college, in 1997 Dwayne completed high school in a jail cell on his way to a nine-year prison sentence for carjacking and armed robbery, and Alexandra began her Freshman year at Yale University. It is true our lives were determined in large part by decisions we made, but it is also true that a child’s fate is often inexplicably tied to his surroundings. This campaign has revolved around the failure to change this fact. Many citizens in the most affluent neighborhoods are pleased by Mayor Fenty’s work, while citizens in chronically underfunded and impoverished areas feel that little has changed. For the ten-year period after 1997, the city – like many other places across America – faced unprecedented economic growth. By 2004, income inequality in the city was greater than in any other city in the country. On the surface, the DC we left is unrecognizable to us today, with areas like the 14th Street corridor transformed from a zone of prostitution to an alley of luxury condominiums. Yet, much has remained the same: the politics of race, class and crime continue to intersect, and the city’s poorest residents continue to bear the burdens of these politics. The two mayoral candidates, wise to the dominance of these issues, have made the reduction of crime central to their election platforms. Crime disproportionately impacts the poor African-American citizens of the city. From September 2009 to September 2010, there were over 1,300 violent crimes that took place in the city’s impoverished Southeast quadrant. In the city’s wealthiest area, there were approximately 500 violent crimes during the same period . The seventh district had one of the city’s highest violent death rates in 2007, at 48.6 per 100,000 . This astonishingly high rate of victimhood amongst young African-Americans is an issue that Vincent Gray and Mayor Fenty have thoughtfully looked to address in the past; however, politics threaten to roll back meaningful reform. In 2000, a Blue Ribbon Commission on Youth Safety and Juvenile Justice reform published a comprehensive report . One of its primary recommendations was to expand community-based alternatives to incarceration in the city. In supporting these alternatives, the Commission perhaps also recognized – like the electorate today – that all young people in the city need access to meaningful resources that support public safety and their transition into adulthood. Mayor Fenty championed the reform and was at the forefront of the effort to introduce legislation that would support reform efforts. Now, it appears that Mayor Fenty has shifted his approach in the aftermath of several high profile crimes involving young people. And of course the irony is that in the brief posted on the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) website that announces the firing of Interim Director Mark Schindler, it is announced that Harvard’s Kennedy School has praised DYRS as one of the 50 most innovative government programs. Ultimately, amidst a number of high profile crimes, public officials have failed to fully articulate what a successful DYRS looks like. For politicians and pundits alike it is much easier to describe failure. Councilman Gray embraces reform, but his future choices are impossible to predict. How will he react if another high profile crime involving a juvenile occurs? And to what degree does his public rhetoric match what he will do once in office, or even what is stated in his campaign? Today’s election will not settle the issue of youth crime. It will not change the call to rollback gains achieved through reform when violent crime occurs. Between us, we have over a decade working with young people affected by these issues and working to change ineffective policies. What worries us is not the rhetoric of political campaigns. The rhetoric has not changed – there will always be candidates and supporters of candidates calling for harsher penalties for a larger range of crimes, just as there will always be those who support effective reform efforts. What worries us is the real risk that steps toward progress initiated by Mayor Fenty and supported by Councilman Gray will be rejected due to the whimsy of political expedience. Will New Beginnings , the new secure residential facility for youth in the District, return to the gladiator school once known as Oak Hill ? Will the prison to college pipeline that has led some troubled youth to become striving college students? There are never easy answers. And as the ballots come in we wonder if this is the moment that juvenile justice reform becomes the Mayor’s cause. We hope that the voters and politicians will recognize that violence by young people is borne out of the very vicious forces of segregation, inequality, and indifference. The next mayor needs to continue reforms that are so badly needed, especially investing in more community based alternatives to incarceration. The reforms were broadly supported by the community, recommended by the Blue Ribbon Commission, and unanimously approved by the DC Council. Read the rest here: Alexandra Cox: The Mayor’s Cause?

Originally posted here:
Alexandra Cox: The Mayor’s Cause?

A year ago, the idea of a persuasive and left-leaning president speaking directly to America’s schoolchildren stirred strong passions among conservatives. But those fears do not appear to have returned for Obama’s back-to-school speech this year.

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Unlike last year, Obama’s back-to-school speech avoids raucous flap