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Obama’s Scandal Fest

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, National Affairs with tags current-events, libya, politics, special prosecutor, tax exempt status, whirling dervish on May 15, 2013 by thomassobottke

Three scandals in as many days erupt to engulf the Obama Administration and President Barack Obama is now being compared unfavorably to Richard Nixon. Is this the end? Is Obama the most corrupt President ever? Is he a radical Muslim Socialist Kenya- born Mau-Mau revolutionary bent on destroying America? Nah.

Benghazi

President Obama should admit the infamous talking points were changed to protect the integrity of the CIA’s ongoing hunt for the terrorists who made the attack on the consulate and that his campaign of course put a bit of spin on the news of the event during the height of a presidential campaign. Romney had been spinning it so much in the fall of 2012 that he was going harder and faster than a whirling Dervish. As to the rest, the 29 Recommendations of the Accountability Board Report are being implemented by the State Department. And now it is most important to catch and destroy the people who killed those four Americans at the consulate—it is as simple as that.

IRS Scandal

First of all, the acting head of the IRS should be fired along with the woman who was the immediate supervisor to the people who used Tea Party and Patriot to find organizations as a shortcut to find the slew of organizations attempting to get tax exempt status as 501-C4’s. The people in the Washington office should be asked to tender their resignations and the President should accept them. The President should do two things: one, ask for a special prosecutor in the case himself—don’t wait for members of Congress. Two: President Obama and the Democrats in Congress should introduce legislation further clarifying that 501-C4 organizations are truly those that aid the welfare of society and are NOT organizations that spend millions to lobby Congress or the public for or against candidates for public office or toward any specific public issue, political party, or legislation. If you want to do that you will have to pay taxes and report your donors. That should reduce the overwhelming workload of processing so many applications for 501-C4 status from both political parties and their surrogates that flooded the IRS in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and that produced the attempt to make a shortcut in processing them that both disrespected the public taxpayer and citizen organizations in the first place. The President is NOT involved in this scandal at all.

Associated Press – DOJ

Attorney General Eric Holder properly recused himself from the investigation into the leak about the person who has been used to penetrate El Qaeda in Yemen and foil a huge terrorist plot that could have brought down one or more airliners. It is a proper criminal investigation. But the subpoenas calling for the phone records of hundreds of journalists at the AP or with AP affiliations were much too broad and wide ranging. It is a serious violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Secretary Holder’s inability to take charge and act to deal with this and his lame excuses in two press conferences now require that President Obama ask for and receive Secretary Holder’s resignation. The Deputy Attorney General should be fired outright and another put in his place who understands how to more selectively use this power to investigate via subpoena and how important it is not to restrict freedom of the press.

There you have it. President Obama and the White House Staff subscribe to this blog’s posts so it is hoped they are paying attention to this very solid advice. Here the President should have a brief press conference where he announces personally the actions he has already taken and then he ought to get right on the road to hammer away at the need for job creation and immigration reform as Congress gets set to make a second vote in the Senate on gun background checks.

End of Scandal Fest. Will the Administration do these things? If not, they can forget about anything meaningful in the entire second term and perhaps look forward to the impeachment of the President at the very least.

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Anne Coulter–House Republicans’ Path to Nowhere on Immigration Reform by Thomas Martin Sobottke

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, Essays, National Affairs, Race, The Faith Community with tags current-events, government, human-rights, politics on February 23, 2013 by thomassobottke

Anne Coulter in a recent piece on immigration reform and the GOP has chucked any interest in bringing in the some 10 to 12 million undocumented long-term Latino immigrants into the American family at any time in the future.

“Why do Republicans want to create up to 20 million more Democratic voters, especially if it involves flouting the law?” writes Coulter.

Virginia Representative Rob Goodlatte the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee has come out against any immigration reform bill that would provide any kind of path to citizenship for the undocumented.

“People have a pathway to citizenship right now: It’s to abide by the immigration laws, and if they have a family relationship, if they have a job skill that allows them to do that, they can obtain citizenship,” Goodlatte told National Public Radio (NPR). “But simply someone who broke the law, came here, [to] say,’ I’ll give you citizenship now,’ that is not going to happen.

Idaho Representative Raul Labrador, another Republican in the House told NPR “the people that came here illegally knowingly—I don’t think they should have a path to citizenship. “ Labrador added, “if you knowingly violated our law, you violated our sovereignty, I think we should normalize your status but we should not give you a pathway to citizenship.”

The basic Republican objection to comprehensive immigration reform that gives a path to citizenship to the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants—not every one of them Latino–is based on the deep objection to the breaking of U.S. immigration law with foreknowledge and premeditation.

If this is such a deep and abiding violation of the law then the punishment must be banishment from the United States or long-term imprisonment. These people then would have to be located and deported and imprisoned in a manner that makes the U.S. commitment to human rights and democracy a standing joke and repudiation of what we profess to believe as Americans. It is the very antithesis of what it is to be an American.

There are two legal measures taken against those who have entered the United States illegally. First, it is a civil and not a criminal violation when those caught violating immigration law are not themselves possessing a criminal record. This civil violation is acknowledged in front of a Federal judge and then the violator is deported to their country of origin. Second, a fine may also be levied against undocumented persons.

But if we are going to reform our immigration law in a way that respects these long-time residents of the United States doing that or placing them in a second-class, non-citizen status on a permanent basis will shackle them and prevent the full exercise of the rights all people need to realize their dreams and fully contribute to the United States and its future strength and prosperity. It is also doubtful most of the undocumented would come forward and identify themselves, making some kind of police-state racially profiled hunt for undocumented Latinos, violating the rights of millions of documented American citizens among the Latino population here more likely.

Why come forward and receive a status that is little better than you have staying underground?

Almost no one even knows that aliens who illegally enter the United States or violate provisions of their Visas without any prior criminal record either here or in their country of origin are given punishment that does not involve criminal prosecution. A civil violation cannot be a permanent bar to improving their status in the United States. We reserve life without parole and the death penalty and outright deportation for people who are not those that immigration reform would touch.

What President Obama and the Democrats have suggested allows for the undocumented to come forward and admit before a court of law that they violated our immigration law at some point in the past and to pay a suitable fine for what is at present and ought remain a civil violation. It is not a death sentence. By admitting before our courts that they violated the law and paying a civil fine the law breaking is on their record and they have made restitution to all American citizens and the United States Government and they show respect for the rule of law.

Thus the undocumented would have paid their full debt to our society and ought to be welcomed in as full citizens subject to the prescribed immigration and naturalization process as prescribed in our Supreme Law the Constitution of the United States. How can Republicans fail to grasp this? Well let’s see.

Everybody agrees that any path to citizenship must place the undocumented who would come forward under a new immigration law at the back of the line for citizenship—behind all those who up to that moment have come to the United States legally.

Oddly, the President’s own plan has them wait for eight years before even beginning to get to the back of the line. Why not put them there as soon as their case is adjudicated in a court of law? The record would not bar them from employment or be a stain on their citizen status and full restitution is their admission to breaking the law and the fine they pay, which would be according to their ability to pay.

President Obama has correctly pointed out, most recently in his State of the Union message earlier this month that our five-year immigration path to American citizenship as spelled out in the United States Constitution does not provide it to legal immigrants within five years due to the back up in the system as it is: it is broken here too.

Republicans often characterize Latinos or Hispanics as “lazy and dependent” people who overuse Federal welfare, Food stamps, and both Federal and State services such as police, fire, healthcare, and especially the public education of their children.

The truth is just the opposite. Republicans, outside of President George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign and previously as Governor of Texas, don’t know that Latinos are extremely hard-working and often do work the rest of us would never consider and certainly not at the below minimum wage people who are undocumented and off the charts are forced to accept. Those millions of Latinos who are citizens are like the newcomers– extremely entrepreneurial and overwhelmingly Catholic and conservative on at least some social questions—presumably a pro-life anti-abortion stance of their church.

This makes hash of Anne Coulter’s suggestion that a path to citizenship will create twenty million new Democrats. These people are more likely to be most comfortable with the Republican Party and its strong pro-business, hard work get-ahead ideology and respect for human life. All that prevents Republicans from once again getting forty percent of the Latino vote like Bush did in 2000 or that Reagan did when he ran for President (specifically 37%) and even more is to get out in front of the immigration issue and be more liberal in getting the some 11.1 million undocumented Latinos in this nation onto a quick path to citizenship. With that removed, and with a true welcoming stance to these people, the Democratic Party advantage of gaining seventy percent and more of the Latino vote would even up quickly.

But that would be smart and the Republican Party in 2013 is as Republican Governor of Louisiana and 2016 Presidential Hopeful Bobby Jindal remains solidly entrenched as “The Party of Stupid.”

White people accounted for almost 64 percent of the population in 2010 and received 69 percent of entitlement benefits. Latinos are 16 percent of the population yet receive 12 percent of entitlement benefits. This is hardly over dependent. On that basis it raises questions about the dominant white citizen population that should be even more troubling to Republicans but which is not.

Lazy is a characterization that has no scientific measurement index that is reliable. It is a measure of the opinion of those who watch others work and strive to succeed in our nation over their lifetimes.

It has to be said that professional American historians of immigration have long noted the common label of laziness and shiftlessness applied to both new immigrants from the Irish to the Italians and to the people from the Caribbean and most prominantly African-Americans.

Somehow the Germans escaped this label but they were thought to be overly clannish, keeping to themselves, obtaining citizenship and voting rights in the Republican Party during the Civil War Era and Reconstruction much too quickly for Democrats, and drinking entirely too much beer; Scandinavians too.

But Gilded Age immigrants of all backgrounds were routinely exploited for their low-wage labor under horrendous conditions—something the undocumented of our own time are all too well acquainted with.

And it is a commonplace of our history and of white prejudice against African-Americans that they remain lazy and shiftless and awaiting gifts from Obama if re-elected as Mitt Romney has recently charged and that they are all poor, and over dependent on Federal support. That is racial prejudice plainly visible to anyone who cares to look.This view of Latinos is rooted in racial and ethnic prejudice and bigotry too, and it suggests strongly that the Republican Party base has a great hostility for Latinos in general due to this racial and ethnic stereotype so magnified and so out of line with reality.

Republicans view of the undocumented as lawbreakers who have committed such a serious breach of the law to never be given a chance at citizenship is so harsh as to suggest that it too is rooted in the Republican’s own view that these people of color and who speak a different language to start with are the permanent “stranger” “other” and are dangerous to public order.

Anne Coulter’s assumption embedded deeply in what she has just written is that Republicans, overwhelmingly white and older and with a male tilt will never accept Latinos as their full equals. And they will never be comfortable with people of color becoming in aggregate as numerous as white people in the demographic future of America somewhere around 2040 according to the latest projection of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Why not instead make as many of these people full American citizens as soon as possible? That would be five to six years from the moment immigration reform takes effect. Then we would add 11.1 million new payers of Federal Income Taxes and State Income Taxes and not just sales taxes. Paying for what we need and balancing the budget becomes easier. And we unleash the full potential of these people and can better harness them to the full American economy and the civic life of the nation. Their children will fill out the ranks of our military, they will go to college and be some of the people who provide the innovation and edge we always want for the United States.

Dare we say, this is an ass-backward and stupid stance on the part of Republicans on this issue of immigration reform?

Of course any comprehensive immigration reform bill will include penalizing employers that hire undocumented people and mercilessly exploit them in the process and thus spurring more illegal immigration. Many of the undocumented are that desperate to find any kind of employment and freedom to support themselves and their families.
And we will maintain even heavier border patrols using all of the available technology to secure our borders.

Even George W. Bush was wise enough to seek agreement with Mexican and Central-American leaders on economic development that would make the very dangerous migration of desperate people from those countries less likely and less necessary.

So Anne Coulter and so many key leaders in the House of Representatives on the Republican side of the aisle: your immigration reform plans are a path to nowhere. And your sobriquet as “The Party of Stupid” is in no danger of being eclipsed by any more flattering characterization of what it means to be a Republican Conservative in the United States in the Twenty-first century.

Dr. Thomas Martin Sobottke
For Struggles for Justice

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The Problem is Guns by Thomas Martin Sobottke (Writing fiction in the Anglicized Thomas Martin Saturday)

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, Essays, National Affairs with tags politics, videogames on February 10, 2013 by thomassobottke

Listening to a local television station bring community leaders together to talk about the issue of the growing violence and death associated with guns in the United States it became apparent that all concerned were trying to see the problem as everything that surrounds firearms and not guns themselves.

The problem ladies and gentlemen and interested criminals and victims is GUNS. Yes, it is guns. The greatest violence done on our streets and in our public places involve the use of firearms. Take them out of the equation and all or most of the death and destruction disappear as if by magic. The pathogen is not present.

Now let me reassure gun owners I am not about to go after them at all. In the years since what has been termed “Gun Control” has been around, roughly the 1970’s, I’ve come around to seeing that outright gun bans are not the answer. I favor concealed carry for those with a permit that includes training or status as a first responder and a full background check. I see gun owners all over the United States who are law abiding good citizens of long-standing as my allies and friends. I won’t budge from my view that gun safety cannot be achieved and will not be by violating American’s Second Amendment rights.

Yet, the problem is still GUNS. Damnation! I did not want to have to tell you that—to tell myself that and stop continuing to make excuses and be in denial. We are going to have to get significant numbers of guns off the street and we are all going to have to change the gun culture that is the way we view firearms and what they do emotionally and psychologically for and against us.

Every one of us has to think and to do so long, hard, and reflectively about why we have guns, what we like and do not like about them, and how we use them, and how media and the culture in general projects their uses and values to the masses of us.

Then, we are going to have to do what President Obama said at Newtown last month: CHANGE. Not some little tiny action but real, widespread, societal change. Will or should it involve confiscation of guns? NO. Let me say that again: an emphatic NO.

But we must not see TV and movie promos where the heroes jump into the frame pointing a handgun or some larger weapon in answer to a problem. We can’t routinely have video games where people realistically blast each other with realistic weapons on highly virtual landscapes. We all need re-education in conflict resolution without weapons or violence.

If there are people who like guns because it supports their manhood or for women the assertiveness or strength they feel than you people now know you are on the wrong path. Hunting, target shooting, collecting, and self-protection in the most practical sense are legitimate. Beyond that the individual has to do some thinking.

Struggles for Justice has argued for the past couple of years that the problems of gun violence and related safety issues must be approached in a multidimensional manner. I and the Blog still feel that way and argue for it ever more strenuously. Those folks on the TV debate I watched were honest and right in pointing that out too. But too many of them said more guns would help. They are in denial and have not faced the fact that guns are a pathogen like public health threat in our society that cannot allowed to get out of certain boundaries in our culture and in how we live.

So what do I suggest? Well many of the obvious things. A lot of people are going to hang on to their guns and be left alone by the government. Back when I was a little kid a lot of folks had guns and seemed then to be a whole lot more sensible in their use. Here are the good guys again. That’s right, the law abiding citizens we count on to hold our communities and neighborhoods together. Leave them alone except for a very few things: background checks when they buy or sell their guns—they will pass them all with flying colors. Intervention led by family members and close friends if they see a loved one in a mental health crisis of some kind. Almost half of all gun deaths each year are due to suicide. And gun owners will have to bite the bullet (pardon the pun) and realize that there are and must be limits on the power and capabilities of the weapons they hold under the Second Amendment.

A useful upper end limit would be magazines over ten rounds and guns that have equal performance to the main battle guns of the main-line military forces around the world. Below that, leave everything alone. I do imagine there would be a lot of gun owners who could hold out rather nicely with a nice assortment of handguns, shotguns and rifles with ten round magazines.

We have to spend some real money here. Again, conservative folks who tend to support guns and hate gun control want to also cut the budget deeply and take police off the streets, have less money for jails and prison guards, and who have yet to look at who we lock up in prison and why or perhaps why not?

There has to be Federal money in large amounts sent to the States earmarked for nothing other than to let local and regional law enforcement expand their current task forces that track gun traffickers, drug dealers, street gangs, and any other groups who use firearms to kill rivals, and just the regular criminals we always will have. Let’s give law enforcement the resources for once to track the bad guys more easily—hunt them down, get them off the streets and make sure we lock them away in prison for a very long time. That means we need to elect judges who can see the criminal, see the nexus of the gun and the crime and lock the sons of bitches away and do so with integrity. Those that do not and have had the opportunity to do that should be rejected by the law-abiding citizenry.

Those people who are first-time non-violent offenders can receive treatment for mental illness, and drug-addiction or small offenses where restitution would be more effective. They should make restitution to society and to the ones they’ve betrayed or hurt, outside of jail and prison. We need those spaces for the people that get guns legally or illegally and then use them to kill the rest of us.

Full background checks for every single purchase will separate out the good guys who will be left alone—perhaps who sometimes might be deputized and even help, from the law-breaking dangerous people who obtain guns in order to kill and wound and maim and terrorize.

And when the criminal is brought into court for prosecution for some offense where a gun was used the fact they obtained it illegally will carry additional weight and be added to their original offense. The background check they failed and that yielded a red flag will be further evidence to obtain a conviction and long prison term to protect the rest of us. It also might alert law enforcement to a problem before such an event as a Columbine, Virginia Tech or Newtown takes place.

In many of the recent mass shootings the perpetrator obtained massive weaponry and sometimes even explosives legally and without any intervention by the authorities. We are going to have to monitor a sudden increase in gun purchases by citizens to make sure it’s not the next mass shooter doing the buying.

We do have to understand that 99 percent of the mentally ill will never harm anybody else. But if we do not treat mental illness with the same zeal we do with physical illness, and respond to the sufferer with greater compassion and sympathy, we are going to fail to identify those who might be a risk to obtain a firearm. That means real money devoted to making sure those adjudicated by a court to be a danger to others are not permitted to obtain weapons. It means identifying and working with those victims of mental illness who do pose a future threat to overcome that illness and return to society if possible.

We’re going to have to turn to our Churches, and the elders in every family and voluntarily launch the greatest effort at family support and development this nation has ever seen. That means private efforts to help maintain strong families where even in one parent homes, the support system from grandparents and uncles and aunts and very close friends is strengthened so that our children grow up in safer, more loving homes. That includes same sex parental homes too. What we want are parents with a strong marital bond to each other in love and a loving home for kids to grow up in.

I envision a society where the flow of guns is made up of guns used or to be used illegally and the offenders being isolated from the rest of society so that we might be safe and live good healthy lives. And where even the individual citizen does not feel pressured to have to buy a gun for self-protection or to show friends how tough they can be. Let gun owners evaluate their level of need and risk and act accordingly. We owe them that respect and autonomy.

This kind of society would mean we would as a nation possess far fewer guns than we do right now. But the greatest number of guns would flow to the law-abiding, those who live in distant places from quick and effective response by law enforcement, or those who are genuine gun lovers from a hobby or historical or collecting and shooting and hunting sense. A whole lot of people who now have guns from fear or some sense of false bravado or machismo, and many more preparing to have and use them for criminal purposes would not have them.

And the guns we would have would be limited as to the upper level of firepower and performance they could have so that some sort of arms race among the populace can stop.

The latest U.S. Army combat weapon, or some kind of hand-held RPG or misslie launcher is just not a Second Amendment protected issue.

When I was a kid a lot of people did not own a single gun; they left their doors unlocked all the time. I’m not naïve enough to envision a return to that idyllic situation but frankly and as candidly as I can I must tell you that having over three hundred and fifty million guns in the United States and escalating is a public safety and health disaster of the first order.

We can get along on far fewer firearms held in the hands of those trained to use them or who as law-abiding citizens have earned the Constitutional right to have them.

Dr. Thomas Martin Sobottke
For Struggles for Justice

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The Book That Created a Liberal by Thomas Martin Sobottke

Posted in Essays with tags human-rights, literature, politics, religion on January 29, 2013 by thomassobottke

Everyone ought to be able to name roughly a dozen books that we enjoyed most, were most inspired by, or which helped to shape the dimensions of our world in ways that are not only profound but that continue to beckon us to draw up by the fire or central heating these days and revisit them yet again.

In the 8th Grade the world of politics and the world that smacked me in the face daily were busy colliding with each other in ways that were often jarringly unpleasant. I’d come to realize that the world as offered me by two of the most protective and guiding, loving parents that ever existed could no longer be hidden from my more complete understanding.

I’d already been saved from the complete scholarly and mental ash heap by a grade school librarian. Librarians or information technology assistants in cyber parlance are the most dangerous individuals in our society. For they can point us to books, essays, magazine articles, and whole other worlds we never dreamed existed. They can open up and stimulate our minds in ways that are too multitudinous to even calculate. I had read, and re-read and oh my Lord, re-read a children’s book on Lincoln by the Sterling North Company. I’d then gone and voraciously devoured an entire set of historical biographies of famous Americans with just enough of a sprinkling of women and people of color to be of value five books at a time.

Then there came into my sad excuse for a pimply-faced pubescent male life, one of the most amazing educators to ever walk the Earth since Socrates. The elderly Miss Marple-like Miss Lass was humble and self-deprecatory but her manner of opening up our minds to learning in English and Social Studies in the 8th Grade was something for the ages.
We had to do a “Future Me” report. Little did I know that I was embarking upon a transcendent and life affirming enterprise that year. I don’t think my wonderful parents knew I had a usable thought flowing through my brain. Neither did I.

The book and person I selected to be my model was the plain-dressed, zigging when all others comfortably were zagging, contemptible to the rich and comfortable, defender of the damned: Clarence Darrow. It was a book published in 1941. The man Irving Stone is still the only author who has captured what must have captivated courtroom audiences who heard and saw the famous defense lawyer.

I liked the fact that the guy challenged accepted dogma. I liked his zagging just as soon as a whole bunch of the others folks in the world began to zig as he had done so alone before.

But I especially loved the way he defended the weak. Spoke for the oppressed; challenged the haughty and arrogant and prideful. Darrow doubted his own assertions about life as much as any, and yet brought humanity, decency, and dignity out from under his rather Bohemian and Free Love style of living so that I might be edified and learn how to do the same in my life. How much were this Irving Stone and his words bringing Darrow to life or the other way around I cannot tell.

I’d already sensed I’d joined the working class and not the employing class a couple of years earlier and the revelation was disturbing. It’s much easier to have power over others, have great material wealth, and know that society supports your every whim. But philosophically, and in the spiritual self here is an unimpeachable integrity and personal satisfaction that doing and feeling what Darrow did can bring.

Just as I had walked the community thinking I was Lincoln for a year in 5th Grade now I was Clarence Darrow ready to defend the defenseless and to stand with the humble and the weak and know it was good, right, and necessary in this life to do so. That’s what both Stone and Darrow have brought me.

It was one of a number of influences that made me a liberal, working class Union man seeking social justice in our world and trying to in some small measure justify the faith in Christ through the Holy Spirit that is in me. It matters not that Darrow was a confirmed agnostic, gravitating back and forth between Atheism and a love for the Holy Bible as literature and wisdom. If an atheist at a debate or lecture zigged he stood up right there and zagged and defended the faithful; or vice versa as the situation presented itself to him.

I read something that deeply moved me yet again in Stone’s biography of Clarence Darrow. It was this in trying to defend Union leaders charged with conspiracy against a private business during a long and harrowing strike in Oshkosh, Wisconsin at the end of the Nineteenth century.
Darrow had risen and for hours kept all spellbound. He said to the jury in part:

. . . “I appeal to you not for Thomas Kidd, (the defendant, mine) but I appeal to you for the long line—the long, long line reaching back through the ages and forward to the years to come—the long line of despoiled and downtrodden people of the Earth. I appeal to you for those men who rise in the morning before daylight comes and who go home at night when the light has faded from the sky and give their life, their strength, their toil to make others rich and great. I appeal to you in the name of those women who are offering up their lives to this modern god of gold, and I appeal to you in the name of those little children, the living and the unborn . . . “

Thomas Kidd and the other two defendants got an acquittal. As Irving Stone remarks “The jury brought in a verdict of “not guilty”: with the weight of the centuries on their shoulders they could do no less.”

To me such a verdict from an author was sublime. And it helped me get though what my parents may never have known or even my siblings, one of the very worst springs and summers I’ve lived yet. For that was 1968, when first they took Dr. King away from me and all those who so admired and were inspired by his words and example. Then just as I discovered a new champion of the people who himself may have been marveling at the transformation—Bobby Kennedy, they took him away too. And I heard of his death one morning during homeroom in that very same classroom.

Being able to lean on Clarence Darrow’s story, I knew that the weak and those who stand with them, no doubt with many weaknesses themselves, must face deep sorrow. History provides this example to us again and again. But it also does not take away all our hope. My faith and what I learned from such an amazing book had created a liberal who wanted to fight whatever power on Earth or in Hell might stand in the way of justice; real justice as blessed as that done in Heaven to Lazarus who had sat in rags outside the front gate of a wealthy man for his whole life on Earth eating what was left after the dogs ate their fill.

Books are amazing things. Why not try Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense or some other work that inspires you and sit in a comfortable chair some rainy day near a window for natural light. Coffee, some nice tea or a healthy juice drink and a couple cookies and your full use of an entire afternoon could not hurt you in the least.

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Gun Rights Advocates Mistake Acting to Protect Public Safety as Tyranny Warranting Impeachment, Nullification and Armed Insurrection

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, Education, Essays, National Affairs, Race with tags brown bess musket, gun rights advocates, high crimes and misdemeanors, politics, second amendment rights on January 19, 2013 by thomassobottke

Twenty-six Americans gunned down in a Public Elementary School, many of them so torn apart by the hail of bullets that they were almost unrecognizable. A military assault weapon with several hundred round drums of ammunition, containing special bullets that are more highly destructive as they hit human flesh did that. Yes, the young man pulled the trigger but had he been armed with a black powder muzzle-loading, smooth bore Brown Bess Musket with a flintlock to honor the state of the Second Amendment at the time the Founders creating that portion of the Constitution most if not all of those people would be alive and well tonight.

But Gun Rights advocates see any attempt to regulate firearms as an unwarranted intrusion by the Federal Government in violation of their Second Amendment Rights. They view the Obama Administration as tyrannical, warranting full-fledged armed insurrection, with the President guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors requiring his impeachment, conviction in the Senate, and removal from office.

Six States, all of them Red States and almost entirely in the old Confederacy are acting to enact legislation that would make it illegal to enforce Federal gun laws in those states.

Republican Senator Rand Paul has indicated he will join with other members of Congress to challenge the 23 Executive Orders signed by the President this week and to oppose any proposed legislation that might alter the situation as it was prior to the Newtown Shooting.

What this is really all about is that Gun Rights, right-wing insurrectionist, nullification and impeachment of the President mania has replaced Birtherism as the means to express the continuing racially based hatred for President Barrack Obama and the failed attempt to defeat him in a Constitutionally sound and fair, free, democratic election last November 6th.

It should be pointedly noted that not one of the President’s executive orders or proposed legislation would confiscate a single firearm or detain or imprison a single law-abiding citizen who possesses firearms and wishes to stand on their Second Amendment rights. A full range of hand guns, shotguns, and rifles are fully legal and remain so even with everything the President has proposed this week. Concealed carry laws in force in any state where they exist are unaffected.

What is are full and universal background checks to make sure every single gun purchase or exchange are between law-abiding citizens of sound mind. The guns the United States armed forces and our principal enemies over the globe employ to kill people would be banned along with the large magazines of thirty or even a hundred rounds of ammunition of a highly destructive character.

After all, military assault rifles are designed for war zones where the object is to kill as many of the enemy in large numbers and quickly. General Stanley McCrystal, our former commander in Afghanistan told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this past week that these weapons are not needed and are in fact dangerous for private citizens who are civilians to possess and carry. Other military veterans have pointed out that such weapons are typically stored locked in armories and not carried routinely everywhere soldiers go.

The calls for armed insurrection are particularly alarmist and irresponsible. Calling for the impeachment of President Obama even if all 23 of his recent Executive Orders are unconstitutional acts by a sitting Chief Magistrate of the United States ignores the obvious and proper first recourse to take the Executive Branch to the Federal courts where challenges to the new orders can be quickly mounted just as those opposing Obama care were. It should be noted we have just passed the 150th Anniversary of one of President Lincoln’s Executive Orders—the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Federal District, Appellate, and in the case of urgency the United States Supreme Court can hear these cases rapidly and directly on a writ of certiorari. Senator Paul and his allies in Congress can rightly oppose the Executive Branch by enacting legislation contrary to what the President is doing and passing that legislation over a likely Presidential Veto.

Meanwhile, a good number of Americans might like to see thirty round magazines for hand guns and hundred round drums of ammunition for semi-automatic rapid firing rifles of tremendous hitting power banned. These silly thoughts come to us when we drop off our children at school now, or when we attend a movie at a theater, or perhaps simply stop by the local mall to shop. It even must be contemplated when we attend our houses of worship.

This country already has more guns per person than any nation on the face of the Earth. We have the most liberal gun laws in the world. And the nation is less safe from gun violence now than it ever has been.

No one is contemplating banning all guns or harming one single law-abiding gun owner. But the deadly nexus of criminals, mentally deranged individuals, and terrorists with the weaponry used by armies in the field make our streets and public places frightening and distinctly dangerous today.

The President of the United States is in part charged with protecting the public safety and defending the United States of America from armed assault. The Preamble to the Supreme Law of the United States says that the Constitution has as one of its primary purposes to “insure domestic tranquility.”

Right-wing Gun nut male Phallus symbol deficient temper tantrums, the continued hatred for, vilification of, and disrespect for the office of the President and the person holding that office are not appropriate in the present circumstances. Were the Federal government to confiscate guns from people who have not broken the law and are of sound mind then we could and all would contemplate more drastic action. But that is not happening and will not happen.

Perhaps the most silly conversation yet was between MSNBC’s Al Sharpton Friday evening and a Tennessee legislator proposing one of the laws to make it a crime in his state to enforce Federal gun laws. He asserted State Sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution as the basis for the lawfulness of such legislation at the state level.

Let’s look at the Tenth Amendment: “The powers NOT (emphasis and italics mine) delegated to the United States, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The law here is clear enough. If the Federal government does not have the power granted to it in the Constitution of the United States then it is as the so-called Gentleman argued to Al Sharpton a matter of State’s Rights and State Sovereignty. Even the people of his state on their own might retain this authority.

But wait. We have to look over the Constitution of the United States to see what powers ARE (emphasis and italics mine) granted to the Federal Government in the document.

Article VI, Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States says this: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof, and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, SHALL BE THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND: and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

And, the Supremacy Clause remains part of the Constitution this very night. It has not been repealed. And as early as 1832, President Andrew Jackson warned the State of South Carolina that it could not nullify Federal tariff law. We fought a terrible Civil War in the mid nineteenth-century partly over secession and State’s rights where nullification and State interposition were ranged against the Federal government and Union led by Abraham Lincoln.

In case you missed it, the insurgents who had formed a confederacy were completely defeated and were legally and under the U.S. Constitution guilty of treason against the United States. Further, the Texas vs. White Supreme Court decision of 1875 declared secession in that form of State Sovereignty to be unconstitutional and void.

Any citizen or group of citizens always retain the right of outright revolution against the government as an appeal to God in the last resort against a tyranny that takes away their liberties and property. But they must carefully weigh when that desperate action mentioned in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, is truly justified. For if armed revolution is undertaken, it is serious business as the American Civil War shows us. If you lose the revolution, you stand to lose all and violence is a distinct possibility if not a certainty.

Struggles for Justice believes there is absolutely no justification for resorting to revolution at this time. Nor do we see it likely in the foreseeable future.

Students of law, political science or simply civic minded knowledgeable citizens will recognize this portion of the Constitution as the Supremacy Clause. A simple way of understanding this long taught in both public and private school civics classes as early as the 9th Grade tell us that when a State law conflicts with Federal law, the national or Federal law is Supreme.

And we have to say that in addition to that, all of the legal jurisprudence and additional amendments to the grand old document laying out a plan for our form of republican democratic government over the past two hundred and twenty-five plus years must be considered.

The Fourteenth Amendment makes it abundantly clear that State laws must give way to Federal laws concerning the civil rights of black Americans which were a prominent feature in defeating the attempts of Southern States to continue Jim Crow Segregation laws which were highly discriminatory.

The National Rifle Association has now even put the President’s family in its gun sights, vowing the “fight of the century.” Shame be upon them for threatening the President’s family and daughters in a cheap ad.

Tea Party Republicans and foaming at the mouth Obama Haters nationwide have gone on the offensive and behaved abominably.

The very worst thing about this behavior and these actions by so many Gun Rights advocates is that they fail to see reality in terms of protecting our very children. And they display a glaring lack of faith in our Constitutional system of government in place since 1789.

The United States Constitution has survived a number of wars, legal challenges, periods of great social tensions and economic distress with only Twenty-seven Amendments. It has been the envy of the world. And that world knows that we Americans have the most freedom and liberty of any people anywhere despite all the dangers we face in that world today.

Struggles for Justice condemns the opposition to sensible gun safety legislation for the benefit of our children. And we stand aghast at the incredible lack of faith in the peaceful and lawful working out of democracy shown by these horrid people who deign to call themselves Americans.

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Colin Powell’s Meet the Press Warning about Dark Vein of Racism in the Republican Party Reflected in Composition of Congress

Posted in National Affairs, Race with tags national republican congressional committee, politics, republican state legislators on January 15, 2013 by thomassobottke

Four out of five Republican members of the House of Representatives serve districts where whites exceed the national average says an analysis from the National Journal. The analysis is based on 2010 Census Data profiling the 435 House Congressional Districts.

Between 2010 and 2012 Republicans held 187 of the 259 districts or 72 percent of House Districts are “safe” white districts. Conversely, that means that Democrats held 129 of 176 seats or did so in the last Congress 73 percent of Districts being “safe” Democratic seats.

Why? Well, Republicans have done a very good job of winning State Legislatures in the 2010 off-year elections. That meant that Republican State legislators could redraw Congressional districts to gather together white voters who vote most often for Republicans and to rope off minority populations that vote Democratic in slightly fewer Congressional districts. This classic Gerrymandering has produced unintentionally a Congress that is much more polarized and racially divided. The original intent was simply to hold on to a majority of seats in the House.

“It’s a problem for the country,” says Tom Davis, the former Republican representative from Virginia and chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “You hate to have any society ethnically divided. But that’s what we are becoming.”

What this all means is that it is more likely that if you are a Democrat you represent much more liberal than average Americans who are between African-Americans, Asians, people from the Middle East and Latinos a majority in your district with a white minority. For Democrats it diminishes the Blue Dog element of largely more independent middle of the road Democrats who are so important in crafting compromise in the process of legislating which is THE job of Congress.

If you are a Republican the people you represent are so overwhelmingly white and conservative that they and you are just not sensitized to problems that disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities. It makes the job of the Republican Party to redefine itself and really appeal to the growing number of people of color an impossibility or at least a highly improbable event.

It is a twin set of hammer blows. First the Republican Party has more trouble even knowing how to appeal to people of color and ethnic minorities. And second, the problems of a growing number of Americans are given short shrift because a majority of Congressional seats are held by people who do not need minority support whatsoever to get re-elected. Instead, the worry is getting what is now known as “primaried” by increasingly conservative right-wing Tea Party extremists if that is possible.

Colin Powell bluntly told the nation on Meet the Press last Sunday that there is a “dark vein of Racism” that runs through certain elements of his party. He is right about that. There are a large number of white Americans who either directly or viscerally are uncomfortable with the changing demographics of the nation referred to by Secretary Powell. It shows up in voter ID laws, the very Gerrymandering of Redistricting each ten years which is nationally dominated by Republicans, and it further polarizes the nation making political compromise and real understanding and collegiality in Congress next to impossible.

Today, somebody like a Tom Coburn of Oklahoma though very conservative, is a rarity. He can be worked with. He will talk and work across the aisle when he can. Most Tea Party members of the Congressional class of 2010 are there first and foremost to destroy effective governance of the nation in Congress. If we did not know they were Americans with their own set of beliefs and loyalty to the nation we would assume they were committing high treason against the United States and were opponents of our nation and its very system of democratic government.

The interests of the United States require a Republican Party that truly knows how and really does appeal to racial and ethnic minorities who may favor the Party’s fiscal conservatism and celebration of the free market. But the Party is so mired in divisive social issues that run exactly counter to what Latinos, blacks and Asians and Middle Eastern immigrants and religious minorities and people with a minority sexual orientation truly need their government to respond to that the polarization of the nation is promoted on a myriad of levels both intentionally within the “dark vein of Racism” that exists in the Republican Party using racially coded rhetoric and unintentionally as the Party pursues electoral success by clinging to a strategy of maximizing white voters and ignoring the rest.

“Luke, Luke, you must persuade the Republican Party to abandon the Dark Side and come over to the Light,” some movie character may have intoned. Politically that is just what is needed. Like Colin Powell, Struggles for Justice is deeply concerned about this trend and less than optimistic of its resolution by the Republican Party.

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Liberal is a Lovely Word and the Federal Government Benefits More Human Beings Than Small Government, Small-minded Politics

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, National Affairs with tags politics, romney campaign, security standpoint on September 8, 2012 by thomassobottke

It’s long past time to reclaim what is the birthright of millions upon millions of decent, compassionate, progressive, big-minded and hard-working liberals who know that in such an interdependent world, where each of us depends so much on each other, a robust and active national government that brings people together and that is liberal in character is not a pejorative statement or idea.

The Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina last week was a stiletto- like strike in correcting the factual record of the Obama Administration for voters with the exposure of the thin veneer of lies that permeates everything the Romney campaign and the Republican Party does these days. It’s not that the Democrats are perfect, or have the best policies on everything. They don’t. But they do have a vastly superior record and policy agenda for this nation and they tell the truth where their opponents lie about the facts and who they are. The Democrats offer factually what Obama has done, what he wants to do, and what the facts are about the Republican policy agenda and its severe deficiencies already given wide-coverage in Struggles for Justice.

Americans should embrace the progressive label of Liberal and wear it proudly. Let’s all say Liberal. Now let’s say Liberal is good and right. Conservative is narrow-minded and wrong. That felt soooo good didn’t it?

Liberal: progressive, large-minded, creative, truthful, compassionate, decent, hard-working citizen.

Government is not always the answer. But small government that cannot do what has to be done to stimulate economic prosperity and aid those who are unable to help themselves, to reward the middle class for a long life of work with a retirement package that allows them to retire with dignity is never the answer.

To make the United States safe from a national security standpoint requires both a strong national defense but also a creative, responsive, and smart foreign policy. This is precisely what we have gotten with the exception of the speed with which we are disengaging from Afghanistan. We must avoid a “I’ll bomb Iran the day I take office” kind of presidential mentality worn by Mitt Romney and his party. One would think they have confused political party with just plain party and are drunk and simply lusting for power.

We have to spend and invest in the United States by requiring that our infrastructure in all its forms is equal if not better than any nation on earth. Republicans are blocking the efforts of Democrats to get at even a small part of this job. The same is true for putting more people through college and matching them with the jobs that need filling right now and will need filling in the years ahead. Getting to and through college implies a stronger and more effective education policy and education system coordinated in part by the national government.

The Democrats had by far the best of it when comparing the two national conventions. There ought to be two competing, relatively moderate, parties with various third parties pressing them for better policy. The Republican Party should and ought to be essentially conservative and on the conservative part of the political spectrum. But that implies a moderate approach.

Today’s Republican Party is distinctly reactionary and not simply conservative. That’s a fact. Any political scientist would have to plot the Republican Party’s position as at the far right of the spectrum almost off the page whether it be paper, spreadsheet, internet, or a great black board or dry-erase board that scholars and researchers employ. The Democrats, in an effort to be at the center of this shifting rightward political scene have not been this conservative in decades. They do yet occupy a position to the left of the center of the political spectrum but it is a distinctly centrist position.

Far-left liberal activists have complained about this for the entire Obama first term. Republicans have failed to get how good they have it—just how moderate the Democrats are now having shifted to the right and center to capture voters who themselves are being pulled to the right by the Republicans rightward march over the abyss like lemmings—whether they win in November or not that is what is going on.

So let’s have three cheers for Liberal. Let us say we are liberal and even far-left liberal and not be defensive about it one bit. Let’s respect and work happily with independents that are at the center of politics today, and those few, oh happy few band of brothers and sisters who are yet moderate in their thinking and actions.

Let’s be clear: there are good, useful, and productive conservative ideas in the moderate part of the political spectrum begging to be employed. But the Republican Party won’t go there.

Liberal has one great implication for the nation and its people. It implies and it cries out for a set of policies that benefit human beings for a common, civic good.

The Republican Party has completely abandoned that.

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Cat Scratch Fever Takes Hold of Ted Nugent and Rocks the Republican Party

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, National Affairs with tags congresswoman debbie wasserman schultz, debbie wasserman schultz, gabby giffords, house minority leader nancy pelosi, libya, politics on April 18, 2012 by thomassobottke

Mitt Romney sought and won the endorsement of 1970’s second-tier Rocker Ted Nugent at the NRA National Convention in St. Louis this week. Think of this again: Mitt Romney sought the support of this guy. It was not the other way around. And he got it, and he still has it and has no problems with it.

In a long rant at convention goers two days ago Nugent said he “either would be dead or in jail at this time next year if Obama is re-elected.” He then directly challenged the manhood of the men in the audience, demanding they step up this fall in the election campaign and “rip the heads off Democrats.”

Romney Campaign Spokeswoman Andrea Saul labeled Nugent’s speech as “offensive” but declined to condemn Nugent himself. Romney has not come forward to publicly denounce the man whose endorsement he sought and got just days ago.

Nugent yesterday did not apologize for his words but reiterated them on Right-wing radio host Dana Loesch’s talk show. He went on to label House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as “a sub-human scoundrel” remarking further that “varmints are sometimes clever.” DNC Chair and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was judged by Nugent a “brain-dead soulless idiot.” So much for civility in political discourse.

Last week, Congressman Allen West charged that up to 81 members of the United States Congress now sitting were not just Democrats but communists. And he meant what he said and has not backtracked on it.

The great contrast that can be drawn here is that the race for the open seat left by Congresswoman Gabby Giffords is heating up and a Tea Party candidate holds the lead. The Democrats do have one candidate who is polling well, Congresswoman Gifford’s most senior aide. We have distressingly returned to the environment of inadvertent targets over Democratic Congressional members on a U.S. map that the Palin Campaign used to employ. Gifford’s office was firebombed before her shooting. No connection to the shooter, who acted out of madness not politics. But the same political witches brew is once again heating up. The climate we have when so many people are inciting others to acts of violence for their political ends and demonizing those they disagree with can lead to people taking them at their word and acting with violence.

The Secret Service did confirm that they were looking into Nugent’s comments as they routinely do. One wonders what they will think about how routine this is now when Nugent repeated all his incendiary remarks on the Loesch radio program and added still more to two sitting members of Congress. Nugent has not qualified his statemenets at all and wants them taken at face value.

Reducing Nancy Pelosi, and by easy extension, Democrats to the “sub-human” level is what nation’s at war do first with their enemies prior to killing them. This nation is at war and it is fast moving away from the simply rhetorical. Even Mitt Romney was unable to be civil this week telling the President of the United States to “start packing.” What might a Romneyu-Obama debate look like?

Is the 2012 election campaign to be the active use of Second Amendment Remedies? Let’s hope not. This piece is not the expression of outrage at Republican political leaders. Yes Nugent is one, having run for Mayor of Detroit.

Instead of outrage, Struggles for Justice must point out that the Republican Party is in serious trouble. We ought to be worried and sad over that. Most Republican voters are wonderful people, and they are as law-abiding as they come. Even they deserve far better than they are getting from their leaders in this campaign.

It is unfortunate, but the Secret Service ought to calmly investigate the Nugent episodes and if they find his speech to be inciting riot or revolution using violence against the President and the rest of the government, his remarks ought to be taken seriously, and he ought to be prosecuted. Nugent had every opportunity to say his vehement opposition to President Obama was not violent and that it was dangerous to speak the way he did at a National Rifle Association Convention where even the NRA deserves better than that and where the context for such speech actually surpasses the old standard once uttered in a supreme court decision limiting our extensive rights of free speech where we are told you “cannot yell fire in a crowded theater.”

We all know how offensive Rush Limbaugh’s speech is. Dana Loesch said she wanted to drop her drawers and pee on the corpses of Afghan Taliban some months ago.

What is happening on the right regarding political speech? In these contexts, and with the actual words used, the misstatements of a Hillary Rosen pale into the insignificance they deserve. She did apologize and not double-down on her statement that Ann Romney had not worked a day in her life. Ann Romney did work hard to raise her sons. But we know what Rosen meant. Ann Romney had a lot of help. She has not had to combine work outside the home and child-raising. Thank God for that. Motherhood is very taxing even when it is not accompanied by another job.

Are we at war? Nugent’s comments would seem to suggest so. But that war would have to be one waged between Americans and not with any foreign power. One pundit commenting on Nugent and his ideas and words asked seriously whether or not the comments were in the context of the pre-Civil War era or afterward. And that they might indicate the re-emergence of the Civil War of 1861-65. Or is it to be a new civil war a la Syria or Libya?

We are a nation obsessed with guns and violence and killing. We love it. We cannot get enough of it. And so we are condemned to acts of shooting violence all over the United States. A post office here, a high school there, a convenience store somewhere else, and a university where thirty died and even a humble parking lot at a supermarket where a mild-mannered but principled woman was trying to meet the people she wanted to help. She was shot down for her trouble like a dog with a nut with a thirty round clip that was employed to good advantage not only to shoot her down and drastically change her life but to end the lives of more than half a dozen others and change other’s lives.

Ted Nugent’s incendiary comments at a gun convention in St. Louis further enflame those who are disposed to act with violence. Yes, the Secret Service ought to arrest and prosecute Nugent to the full extent of the law.

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Where Have All The Racists Gone? by Thomas Martin Sobottke

Posted in Essays, National Affairs, Race with tags current-events, eric alterman, northern europeans, politics, racial bigotry, white supremacists on March 8, 2012 by thomassobottke

“Liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race.”
–Anne Coulter

“It has become a depressing ritual of American politics that when one is confronted with evidence of one’s racism, the proper response is to insist that while old-fashioned bull Connor-style racism has disappeared, liberals and journalists—and rarely is any distinction made here—remain obsessed with this now-imaginary phenomenon as a means of persecuting conservatives for telling it like it is.”
–Eric Alterman, The Nation

Our first reaction to Anne Coulter’s statement might be to nod our heads and with our chests puffed out with pride note how racial bigotry has all but disappeared in America and the harmony between people is so immense that we have a black President, and black people dominate sports and entertainment today in ways they never did before. We could even look at the larger number of black professionals in all the major professions and the fact that people of color generally have their right to vote respected in America in ways that were not the case a half century and more ago. But we’d be dead wrong.

We might ask ourselves: if the millions of undocumented immigrants were white Northern Europeans with advanced educations and professional skills would there be such an outcry at their presence? The anger and hatred of illegal immigration in the United States on the part of white Americans goes beyond the strict respect for legality and rule of law as important as they both are. The resentment so many white Americans feel at the perceived slowness of Latinos to adopt English as their main language and the use of skin color to define what an undocumented immigrant is are firmly rooted over discomfort over race and culture. American citizens of Latino background are often confused with undocumented immigrants and the only thing that marks them out is their racial background.

We might ask ourselves: if white criminal defendants received on average twice the sentences and were incarcerated at much higher rates in proportion to their part of the general population what characteristic but the color of their skin is responsible? A black man has more chance today of being held in a state or federal prison than in graduating from high school. In Wisconsin six percent of the State’s population is black but 51% of those in jail are black. 73% of black school children are taught by teachers working outside their area of professional preparation where a mere fraction of white kids face that. It would seem incarcerated while black must now join driving while black as social phenomena that defy our wish to easily dismiss racism as a force in American life today.

We might ask ourselves: why do white Americans retain racial stereotypes so strongly so far after the day of racial bigotry has passed? Across America sports teams at all levels portray Native-Americans as Indians in buckskins and with tomahawks, war paint and doing war whoops. Presidential candidates use racial shorthand like “Food Stamp President” and where was the Birther Movement for all of our previous white Presidents? And what was a Federal Judge trying to say when he told friends he was deeply touched by an Obama joke that had his mother mating with dogs to produce the President? Who sent the judge that e-mail? Where did the six e-mails go? Why are Muslims are still portrayed as always being terrorists? Towelheads? Where is this fear of Sharia Law emanating from in the American heart?

In an America so free of racial bigotry, why does the color of your skin yet determine so much about your level for opportunity and advancement in the future? Would any white American willingly and enthusiastically become black, or Latino, or an indigenous person (yes they still exist)? While we laud the people of color who have made it in America we don’t stop to consider all those who have not and why. And no, it is not the nature of the character of people who are of color to be more criminal, less natively intelligent or beautiful and human than white people. If we’re not careful we may find evidence that the reverse is true.

So Anne Coulter, if Eric Alterman and liberals like myself, along with the NAACP of which I am proud to be a member in the cause for true racial equality and brotherhood and sisterhood, obsess about racism it is because it still exists and is very real. Why are 79% of Latinos polling as supporting Obama in the coming election in 2012? Why are 92% and perhaps more of blacks in America not jumping on the bandwagon with Herman Cain and Allen West and the few black apologists for racial bigotry Fox News can dig up? Why is Mitt Romney trailing President Obama among women by eighteen points? No, Anne, it’s not because these people are just looking for a shiftless and lazy racially or even sexually stereotyped handout from big government. It’s because they know that the white conservatives are likely to display hostility to them or an indifference to their interests that is remarkable in its breadth and depth. They merely seek to align themselves with those who respect them for who they are and not just look at the pigmentation of skin the Creator has so wonderfully provided them. What has happened since the great gains for Civil Rights of the 1960’s is that those with racial prejudices have learned how to disguise it and encode their bigotry in a host of terms and ideas that allow them to retain these feelings.

It’s not illegal to think the most racist thoughts. And in some circumstances it is not illegal to express them nor should it be under the First Amendment. But any civilized and compassionate human being would reject what has been on display in the United States in our polarized politics. Those of us on the left and who still think of ourselves as liberal simply don’t want an America full of racial bigotry; where we do not pay as close attention to the needs of a host of people with a darker set of skin colors than we do to those who are white. Nor would we stand a moment if the situation were reversed.

Racism has gone into the cracks and crevices and the dark corners of American life where it thrives and strikes out at people of color just like it always did but with a subtlety and craft that is extraordinarily adaptable to its continued survival.

Take the slew of Voter ID bills passed in the United States over the past couple of years. The reason for the legislation is to protect the electoral process from voter fraud. Yet, when we look at the statistics on the prevalence of fraudulent voting we find it is almost non-existent: Fourteen fraudulent votes for every 554 million. This is hardly the stuff to justify restricting the right to vote or suppressing the vote in order to make sure everybody is qualified.

In Wisconsin Scott Walker wrote in an editorial piece today that the issue of Voter ID is settled and it’s time to move on and that we ought not be “rehashing and litigating Voter ID at the taxpayer’s expense.” He also has said his recall election is a waste of time and money. He notes that the injunction to delay implementation of Voter ID in this spring’s election will be overturned.

What he does not tell us is that such a bi-partisan and distinctly moderate organization as the League of Women Voters is one of the major party’s to the lawsuit challenging the new law in Wisconsin.

What is missed is that Wisconsin State Officials have been told to charge $30.00 for the Voter ID. This is plainly a modest but real Poll Tax that has been illegal in Federal law since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

He does not remind people that the progressive and proud Wisconsin tradition of being able to present documentation of your identity and residence on Election Day allowed you to register at the polling place and vote the same day. The new law removes that.

The purpose of the new laws around the nation is not to combat fraud. In Wisconsin in 2010, there was one case. It was an older couple who had voted absentee, canceled their vacation plans, and forgot they had already voted and cast duplicate ballots. That’s it. That is the dimension of the problem Walker is trying to solve. The purpose of the Voter ID laws around the nation are to suppress the votes of people of color who are more often likely not to own a car and not have either a driver’s license or U.S. passport. Even Veterans Department photo ID’s and faculty staff, and student ID’s with photos and accompanying documentation are not seen as valid.

So the Voter ID law inhibits by about six percent, political scientists tell us, the ability of blacks, Latinos, the elderly, and college students from being able to easily vote. Is it a coincidence that these are all liberal, Democrat constituencies? No. It’s not a coincidence. It is by design. And embedded within it is a real as well as visceral expression of the subtle and adaptable racism of Twenty-first century America. Not to mention being the opposite of what we ought to be promoting: higher voter turnout by all citizens no matter what party affiliation or color or sex or loyalty.

Then there is the latest report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that a record number of hate groups are active in the United States. In 2000 there were 602 identified in the Center’s report. In 2011 there were 1,018. Notably, the largest numbers of groups were hate groups premised on race. The Southern Poverty Law Center only counts groups who are by direct evidence active in meeting, lobbying, expressing their views in public or via flyers or newsletters or websites.

While the Ku Klux Klan fell from 221 chapters, or cells, to 152, Neo-Nazi’s clocked in at a healthy 170 groups. White Nationalists accounted for 146. There were 133 Racist Skinhead groups, and 55 Christian Identity hate groups. (none of these are Evangelical Christians or main line denominations but based on bigotry identified with race.) 32 Neo-Confederate groups that were identified as hate groups too. It must be noted that black Separatist hate groups numbered 140. General hate groups numbered 190, many of these white and bigoted.

A record number of Patriot and Militia groups are being documented and followed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as well. They became much more active and numerous with the Presidency of Barack Obama and a perceived tyrannical government they wish to oppose. Strangely, for most Americans they are yet to be put away in concentration camps or have their guns taken away. In point of fact, a record number of States have enacted less stringent gun laws the past two years and the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned a Chicago anti-gun ordinance. President Obama and his Administration have done nothing to reverse any of it. The last time the Militia Movement was this active was in the 1990’s during the Clinton years. It culminated in the 1995 bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma. Here it seems to be a liberal or Democrat or black is a threat to patriotic liberty in the United States.

Even our memory of the American Civil War and 32 active Neo-Confederate groups tells us that the memory of the war Americans have differs widely and there is a big racial divide. CNN did a poll in April of 2011 that discovered that 42 percent of all Americans believe the war was over State’s rights and not Slavery. The poll further delineated that the more white, conservative, and Southern you were, the more likely you were to have this view. Darker, more diverse, more liberal and Northern people were more certainly to see slavery and white supremacy as root causes of the conflict.

There is ample evidence the Civil Rights years in the 1960’s did not erase racial bigotry. For people of color the evidence is real and direct. It smacks them in the face daily; sometimes literally.

Where have all the racists gone? Oh, they’re out there alright. They are anywhere people respond to their fears and anger and prejudices rather than their hopes, dreams and the “better Angels of our nature” spoken of so long ago. The growing diversity of the United States racially and ethnically and the destruction of the Middle Class since the depression of 2008 hit, has strengthened racial prejudice in this country. So Anne Coulter, we remain obsessed with race and racism. And we will fight to end it and have all citizens have real equal opportunity and smash the racial stereotypes that continue to shackle us.

Dr. Thomas Martin Sobottke
Struggles for Justice

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Republican Party Continues to Self-Destruct as the Party of Angry White Men

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, National Affairs with tags government, mitch mcconnell, politics, private sector companies, racial bigotry, raison d etre on March 7, 2012 by thomassobottke

It seemed improbable in November of 2010 when Mitch McConnell stated flatly that the Republican Party’s raison d’etre was to throw President Barack Hussein Obama out of office and nothing else. And then to do that the Party was required to appeal to Americans worst instincts: our racial bigotry, our fear of the foreigner and of the big bad Federal Government led by a tyrant named Obama. Republicans continue to place all of their hopes and dreams for the nation in this open hatred for one individual and what they think he represents.

It began with a deliberate campaign to oppose literally everything the President or his party proposed, even if it was a Republican policy goal and Democrats were reaching out to compromise and work together. The Debt Ceiling Debate, an issue that had not troubled President Reagan, the icon of Republican Conservatism when he raised the debt ceiling seventeen times in two terms as President.

Then there was the refusal to enact any of the dozens of President Obama’s job creation proposals. These were programs that would put the millions of construction workers connected to roads and bridge projects, and the housing market back to work. The Federal Government would spend money to rebuild the infrastructure of the country to make it more economically competitive. That would go directly to private sector companies and they would need to hire these people to do the work. The President also pressed to have first responders hired who were laid off around the nation. Are these people only of value to us after a disaster or terrorist attack?

And the President pushed to launch a program to help states rehire teachers, experienced and excellent teachers that were forced to retire or who were laid off to educate the next generation to make our nation so that its future may be secured. They said “NO” as they did every single time the President proposed a bill to put people to work and help their families.

But the Republican majority in the House of Representatives became the House of Reprehensibles: John Boehner and Erik Cantor became professional naysayers and refusers of compromise. Boehner turned away twice from a willing President on two large budget deals. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin offered a plan that would gut Medicare and make you pay six thousand dollars more a year out of your pocket for what you already have today.

In Texas, Republican Governor Rick Perry questioned the Stimulus Package and then quietly pocketed tens of billions of dollars from it for his state all the while criticizing it as not being worth anything.

In Wisconsin and Ohio Governors Walker and Kasich launched campaigns to end collective bargaining for public servants who had done nothing wrong and who considered the right to have a voice where they work to be vital to them and something they cherish. In Ohio, the horrid measure was voted down by the people by referendum. In Wisconsin a million signatures say Governor Walker we do not like what you have done and we want you out of the Governor’s office. That awaits the decision of the electorate in an unprecedented recall election after hundreds of thousands gathered on the steps of the Capitol. Meanwhile, Walker’s promise of he being the one to trust to bring jobs to Wisconsin has resulted in the Badger State being 50th out of the fifty states in job creation. It is the only State in this Union that has been losing private sector jobs every month for the past six months.

Public sector jobs have been lost, public sector workers in Wisconsin are taking on average a ten percent pay cut and putting $660 million of their scarce disposable income into balancing the State budget. That money now has been siphoned away from supporting small businesses in Wisconsin that hundreds of thousands of public sector workers patronized.

Walker came into office and refused a Stimulus Package set of projects connected to light rail that amounted to nearly a billion dollars and almost five thousand new jobs. Just this past week Governor Kasich of Ohio refused Federal FEMA disaster aid when his State of Ohio was hit by monster tornadoes and Ohioans killed, and their homes leveled. It was his way of showing how much he and his Ohio constituents hated the Federal Government. But people who have lost their home, a loved one, and everything dear to them suddenly might find FEMA disaster relief and Federal money helpful in rebuilding and going on as Americans bravely do. Kasich is reconsidering his outright refusal of aid of last Friday and reportedly will ask for aid as Governors of both parties did for decades past. But the damage is done in other ways then by severe weather. It shows up the Republican conservative nonsense for what it is.

Then there are eight or ten presidential candidates for the party to pick to take down Obama in 2012 and as Barbara Bush, first lady with the senior and sensible elder George Bush said today in Texas that this current Republican Presidential Campaign “was the worst I have ever seen.” The man who ran the 2008 John McCain Campaign said publicly on MSNBC that while he disagreed with the Democrats position on the contraception issue his Party had not only moved to the right but that it had “gone into outer space.” The Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul Campaigns have provided most voters not blinded by their party loyalty with ample evidence that these people are NOT anywhere near up to the job of running the country in the next four years.

President Obama couldn’t be more delighted. He was asked in a Press Conference today about what he would have to say to Mitt Romney and he smiled and laughed, and just said “”good luck.” And at the very time Americans continue to be concerned with widening and deepening the economic recovery which is now discernible to everybody, and getting all those people who want to work the jobs they need and deserve with the pay and benefits they deserve, the Republican Party focused on women’s reproductive health care and contraception. In Virginia, Governor McDonnell led an effort to force women to have transvaginal ultrasounds that are invasive and uncomfortable and undignified. Women of all political persuasions went literally ape there and forced the Governor to withdraw his support. Meanwhile, Alabama and many other States introduced measures and took action to reduce women’s access to the health care they need: something that seems to have escaped these people and shown they do not know that preventing pregnancy is but a small part of what American women need and are fully entitled to.

And even in foreign policy, they stumble. Mitch McConnell wants to bomb Iran tonight and inaugurate still another war and certainly sends gas prices further upward and kills a lot of people on both sides as the Strait of Hormuz is closed off to oil traffic. John McCain believes it’s time to bomb Syria though just how to sort out those that we want to kill and not kill in the streets of Damascus is not clear. We don’t even know just how reliable allies the opposition there could be. That would be still another war to add to the one ongoing in Afghanistan. And Mitt Romney promises to send warships to the Gulf and put on strict sanctions. But President Obama has made Iranian sanctions quite real for the first time and though he said nothing about it, a news report last month noted still another carrier battle group’s arrival there. President Obama has already met both these contingencies and has done so more diplomatically and with the experience and better judgment of an incumbent president. Obama even met with a sabre rattling Netenyahu of Israel on Monday and the two leaders are now quietly but firmly on the same page with regard to Iran. Israel is reassured the U.S. will act as necessary on Iran and they will stand down any immediate strike in order to see if diplomacy might succeed in the window of time they yet have there.

And then there is the leader of the Republican Party or its center of gravity when it comes to doctrine: Rush Limbaugh. We all know what a success his three day campaign was against Sandra (we had it initially as Susan) Fluke on his radio program. Commercial sponsors in the tens and twenties now are voting with their feet on what they think of a powerful man attacking a quiet but concerned law student who merely wanted to speak with the people who serve her and represent her in Congress about an issue she felt deeply about.

So the Republican Party crashes and burns. If voters wish to pick up pieces of the wreckage and try to fly it like the famous movie Flight of the Phoenix, they have a lot of work to do. But it will also require them to display diplomacy, ability to compromise in the national interest, something so foreign to them now, and to have real ideas that fully engage the broad middle of the American electorate. They’ve struck out so far and Jimmy Stewart both Air Force bomber pilot and Brigadier is not available to settle in at the controls of the aircraft.

The Republican Party base has become like Pavlov’s dogs, trained to salivate and respond to nothing but hatred for people outside their party and especially to attack President Obama. Meanwhile, the rest of us want to build a better America and we have our feet firmly planted on the ground yet our hopes and dreams like Theodore Roosevelt intoned long ago are firmly set upon the stars.

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Struggles For Justice Blog

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The Problem is Guns by Thomas Martin Sobottke (Writing fiction in the Anglicized Thomas Martin Saturday)

The Book That Created a Liberal by Thomas Martin Sobottke

Gun Rights Advocates Mistake Acting to Protect Public Safety as Tyranny Warranting Impeachment, Nullification and Armed Insurrection

Colin Powell’s Meet the Press Warning about Dark Vein of Racism in the Republican Party Reflected in Composition of Congress

Liberal is a Lovely Word and the Federal Government Benefits More Human Beings Than Small Government, Small-minded Politics

Cat Scratch Fever Takes Hold of Ted Nugent and Rocks the Republican Party

Where Have All The Racists Gone? by Thomas Martin Sobottke

Republican Party Continues to Self-Destruct as the Party of Angry White Men

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