Makes 'em see red, it does!
"In black vote, Democrats see lifeline for midterms" by Sheryl Gay Stolberg | New York Times October 19, 2014
WASHINGTON — The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats.
Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.
“African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”
Belcher’s assessment points to an urgent imperative for Democrats: To keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate, as many are predicting, they need black voters in at least four key states. Yet the one politician guaranteed to generate enthusiasm among African-Americans is the same man many Democratic candidates want to avoid: Obama.
I'm sorry I no longer give a damn about the political fooleys and game of musical chairs when the $ame intere$ts are served after the vote -- until the next elections season when we get the same arguments all over again to make us feel like we had a choice.
Now, Democrats are deploying other prominent black elected officials and other surrogates, buttressed by sophisticated voter targeting efforts, to stoke black turnout.
Is this how they plan to rig certain races to minimize losses? Claim the black vote turned out?
At the White House, the president is waging an under-the-radar campaign, recording video advertisements, radio interviews, and telephone calls specifically targeting his loyal African-American base.
“Anybody who looks at the data realizes that if the black vote, and the brown vote, doesn’t turn out, we can’t win. It’s just that simple,” said Representative Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, referring to African-American and Latino voters. “If we don’t turn out, we cannot hold the Senate.”
Shouldn't anyway given the narrow sliver of choice within the AmeriKan $y$tem. We rejected Bush after six years and gave Democrats the House. Now it's Obummer's turn with the Senate. That's what the electorate sees, if they care to look at all.
African-Americans could help swing elections in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and possibly Arkansas, a New York Times analysis of voter data shows, but only if they turn out at higher-than-forecast rates. They will also be important in Kentucky, where Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic Senate candidate, refuses to say whether she voted for Obama — a stance that black leaders including Fudge fear will depress turnout.
That's the big issue in Kentucky, 'eh?
McConnell as Senate majority leader, ugh!
Related: Kentucky Senate race showcases the worst of politics
Also see: What Co$t Politics?
At what cost?
Republicans, who are expanding outreach to African-Americans in states like North Carolina and Georgia, have their own aggressive get-out-the-vote effort, mindful of the success of the Obama campaign, which turned out voters in record numbers.
Black voters made history in 2012, exit polling and census data show, when they turned out at a rate higher than whites to help reelect Obama. But fewer voters go to polls in midterm elections. In 2010, a disastrous year for Democrats, blacks voted at a rate lower than whites, creating a “turnout gap.”
Happens every four years after the two years of disillusionment before the cycle repeats.
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Belcher declined to discuss whom he wrote the memo for, saying it was private, but the document was circulated by the Democratic National Committee. In the memo, he also asserted that the turnout gap, more than any Tea Party wave, was responsible for Democrats’ 2010 defeats. So the challenge for Democrats is to get midterm voters to the polls at presidential election-year rates....
It “is doable,” but alas, the cost. Republicans are skeptical, Democrats are still trying in North Carolina, Georgia. I smell a rigging.
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"Back on campaign trail, Obama hits at GOP" by Josh Lederman | Associated Press October 20, 2014
UPPER MARLBORO, Md. — Marching onto the campaign trail for the first time this year, President Obama accused Republicans of peddling fear and cynicism on Sunday as he rallied voters for Democrat Anthony Brown’s campaign for governor in a heavily black corner of Maryland.
It's the only place he has support, and he's one to talk about peddling fear.
In front of a rowdy crowd of about 8,000 people — plus an overflow crowd in a gym next-door — Obama painted Brown as a champion for the American dream during a rally that echoed many of the same themes as Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
No wonder we are bored with the empty rhetoric of a failed president.
Echoing an argument that has become his party’s mantra this election season, Obama said the midterms would come down to one thing: ‘‘Who is going to fight for you?,’’ Obama said, riffing off a long list: affordable health care, immigration reform, action on climate change, to name a few.
Neither one of you is fighting for me/us. You are fighting for your corporate and banking masters, that's it.
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At a rally that had the feeling of a gospel service, a local pastor opened his prayer of thanks by noting that the slaves who helped build the White House could have never anticipated that one of their own would one day occupy the home, evoking chants of ‘‘amen’’ from the audience.
Now I'm going to need Obummercare.
One speaker suggested that Brown, if elected, would be a leader in the model of Obama himself, while others denounced Republican moves to tighten voting restrictions as an attempt to stifle the black vote.
That's the last thing we need, more of him.
Obama’s rally in Upper Marlboro just east of Washington marked his first major foray into the 2014 midterm elections. Obama was supposed to rally last week in Connecticut for Governor Dannel Malloy, but postponed that visit to focus on Ebola.
OMG, it is the end of the world.
Although Obama has raised money for Democrats this year at a feverish pace, he has stayed away from appearing in public with candidates — due in large part to his sagging approval ratings in key states.
Thus he is playing in front of the extreme home crowd that he has abandoned. What has he done for black people other than say I'm one who made president?
Obama will rally in the coming weeks for another half-dozen Democratic candidates for governor, but is not venturing into the conservative-leaning states where Democrats are fighting their toughest Senate races.
Think about that for a minute; not only is the House gone, but Obummer has given up on the Senate and is now campaigning for governors in mostly blue states.
Support for Obama still runs high in Democratic-leaning Maryland — and especially here in Prince George’s County, Brown’s home base. Roughly 65 percent of the county’s population is African-American, and roughly 9 in 10 voters here backed Obama in 2008. Just next to the public high school gymnasium where Obama held his rally sits Barack Obama Elementary School.
I think naming a school after this war criminal is gross.
Do we have Richard M. Nixon schools?
Currently Maryland’s lieutenant governor, Brown would become Maryland’s first black governor if elected. ‘‘This will be a done deal — if you vote,’’ Obama said.
Voting machine software already in place?
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As if it mattered:
"Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.; The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon" by Jordan Michael Smith | October 19, 2014
As if we didn't already know that. At least the Globe finally admits it. Casts a different light on all the prolific political coverage that is nothing more than garbage.
The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated.
Like I constantly bemoan here, things have gotten worse.
Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.
That never appeared in print in my Globe until now.
Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same?
Well, certain $elect and cho$en intere$ts control this country and the man in the office is a frontman figurehead for public consumption.
Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.
Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
Some have also called it the $hadow government, and the premise is true. The NSA (and by extension Israel, which gets all the raw data) is blackmailing politicians to stick with the program or else. If we could clean out the viper's nest, there might be a chance of saving this country. Otherwise, it's let them implode.
Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.
Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.
In other words, he's a limited hangout man and his book is being promoted as the outrage rises against our feckless political front men (and women) and the evil bureaucracy (another faceless force, right?).
It's time to grow some balls, guys. They can't kill all of you (well, I suppose they can, but.... ). Is it because the same slavish political cla$$ is benefiting that nothing really gets done?
How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.
GLENNON: .... There is not only one explanation or one cause for the amazing continuity of American national security policy. But obviously there is something else going on when policy after policy after policy all continue virtually the same way that they were in the George W. Bush administration.
IDEAS: This isn’t how we’re taught to think of the American political system.
I've been brianwashed?
GLENNON: I think the American people are deluded, as Bagehot explained about the British population, that the institutions that provide the public face actually set American national security policy. They believe that when they vote for a president or member of Congress or succeed in bringing a case before the courts, that policy is going to change, but the larger picture is still true—policy by and large in the national security realm is made by the concealed institutions.
Thus relieving elected leaders of responsibility? Nope!
IDEAS: Do we have any hope of fixing the problem?
GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions.
What do you think I've been doing here for eight years, and do you wonder why I'm fed up?
STOP BLAMING US when our "leaders are NOT LISTENING TO US!
That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people.
Occupy Wall Street gave it a go and you saw what happened.
Not from government. Government is very much the problem here.
You know what he is sounding like?
The people have to take the bull by the horns.
Did. Got the billy club.
And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational.
Speak for yourself.
There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.
Yeah, let the going inter$ts and concerns take care of it all. But make sure you get out their and vote!
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At least the Globe is helping him sell his book.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Nothing like a day at home for president" | Associated Press October 21, 2014
CHICAGO — They say you can never truly go home again, but for Barack Obama, perhaps the old adage doesn’t apply.
Across the country, far more Americans say they disapprove of the president than approve. Democratic candidates in tough races are practically begging Obama to stay away.
But this is Chicago, where support for the town’s favorite son still runs high. Throngs of Chicagoans craned their necks and shouted cheers during Obama’s brief trip home.
Obama arrived here late Sunday and headed straight to an evening campaign rally for the state’s Democratic governor, Pat Quinn. After a night’s sleep in his own bed, he hit the town for a day of events aimed at turning out the Democratic vote.
And the carbon footprint on all this?
Obama had the family house to himself, except for Secret Service agents who lock down the streets around the South Side family home whenever he comes to town.
Obama wants Democrats across the country to vote early this year, hoping to boost turnout in a midterm year when Democrats historically tend not to vote. So he strolled into a polling place near his house on the first day of early voting in Illinois.
‘‘Barack Obama?’’ asked the poll worker at the Dr. Martin Luther King Community Service Center.
‘‘That’s me!’’ the president replied.
Volunteers making phone calls for Quinn got a pep talk from Obama and a snack.
Like you are an animal in a circus or show.
Making a surprise appearance at one of Quinn’s campaign field offices, Obama brought three cartons of doughnuts.
But would his wife approve?
‘‘Michelle sent these,’’ he quipped, playing off his wife’s childhood nutrition campaign. ‘‘We got broccoli, carrots.’’
Yeah, the whole world is laughs and giggles, especially meaningless politics. I'll give him credit: ma$$ media makes him out to be one hell of a $howman.
Obama seemed in his element as he worked the room and chatted with volunteers — some of whom had worked on his own 2008 campaign.
No wonder the country is in such sad shape.
Before heading back to the White House Monday night, Obama was to make one last stop at a supporter’s home to raise money for the Democratic National Committee. The price to attend? $10,000 a pop.
Never you mind the monied influence and real rea$on he came to Chicago. That's just an afterthought of a paragraph.
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