AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Hows that civil rights thing workin for ya spurt?

What rights are you talking about farmgirl?

I'm posting this piece from Salon because its subject matter has been the source of disagreement here on a2k:

Democrats thought they had solved their Southern problem in 1976, when a peanut farmer-turned-Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter swept through the old Confederacy, winning every state except Virginia en route to a narrow electoral college victory over President Gerald Ford. For the first time in 12 years, the Democrats had won a national election -- and Dixie was the reason why.

This resurgence, though, was little more than a mirage -- a brief interruption in the South's steady march away from the Democratic Party, which in many ways culminated in Carter's defeat four years later at the hands of Ronald Reagan.

The story of why Reagan was in position to run against Carter in 1980 -- and how he managed to turn Carter's prideful home region against its native son -- really begins in 1964, when regional tensions within the Democratic Party finally reached a breaking point. Since Reconstruction, when white Southerners developed a bitter hostility to Reconstruction and its northern Republican liberal architects, Dixie had been the most staunchly Democratic region in the country -- so loyal that FDR actually won over 95 percent of the vote in several Southern states. For decades, the South elected Democrats at every level of the ballot; practically speaking, there was no two-party system in the region.

But as blacks migrated away from Jim Crow and into northern cities, Democratic leaders outside of the South came to see the enactment of civil rights laws as a political imperative. The Republican Party, then the default home of anti-segregation northern liberals, was well-positioned to win the loyalty of the blacks who moved North (where they were suddenly eligible to vote). Thus, the alliance between Northern machine Democrats and Southern conservatives frayed -- until finally Lyndon Johnson put his pen to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The reaction from Southern Democrats was uniformly hostile. '64 was an election year, but Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, Russell Long, among more than a dozen other Southern senators and governors, boycotted the party's national convention in Atlantic City. And many of the Southerners who did show up came looking for trouble. 43 of the 53 members of the Alabama delegation, for instance, refused to pledge their support for the national ticket of Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and were denied seating. And most of the all-white Mississippi delegation walked out when convention organizers demanded that a rival delegation -- the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, a group of civil rights activists who argued that the state's official delegation failed to reflect the diversity of the party -- be seated with them as "honored guests," and that two of the Freedom Democrats serve as at-large delegates. Infuriated by this "humiliation" and "embarrassment," an up-and-coming Mississippi Democrat named Charles Pickering -- who decades later would become the center of a national controversy because of his racial history -- left the party on the spot, joined the GOP and became one of the godfathers of modern Mississippi Republican politics.

None of this caused Johnson too much worry in '64. The nation had rallied around him after John F. Kennedy's assassination the year before and, anyway, civil rights was a popular cause outside the South. That his Republican opponent, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, had actually joined Southern Democrats in their futile filibuster of the Civil Rights Act only made Johnson that much more of a shoo-in. He was elected in a thunderous landslide, racking up more than 60 percent of the popular vote. But the landslide wasn't universal: In the South, Goldwater broke through and won five states -- the best showing in the region for a GOP candidate since Reconstruction. In Mississippi -- where FDR had won nearly 100 percent of the vote just 28 years earlier -- Goldwater claimed a staggering 87 percent. Civil rights had finally come to a head in 1964, and the two parties had made their choice.

The highlight of Goldwater's campaign, to the extent there was one, probably came at the end of October, when the candidate's biggest celebrity supporter -- an actor and one-time Democrat named Ronald Reagan -- delivered a nationally televised address on his behalf. As well-received as it was, the speech did little to help the doomed Goldwater. But the conservative true believers who had had embraced Goldwater and helped him topple the GOP's liberal Rockefeller establishment took note: Reagan was just as conservative as Goldwater, but far more marketable. The television age was dawning, and he was tailor-made for it.

Two years later, amidst a voter backlash against Johnson and his Great Society, Reagan handily defeated Pat Brown to become California's governor. With the 1968 Republican nomination wide open, he was immediately touted as a contender, with Goldwater conservatives begging with him to run. Well into '68, though, Reagan remained ambivalent, a posture that ended up costing him. By the time he threw his hat into the ring, Richard Nixon had already made serious inroads with the Goldwater crowd -- particularly in the South, where Senator Strom Thurmond, one of the first segregationist Democrats to flip to the GOP, served as his chief supporter. Reagan made a play, but Nixon held him off, then went on to defeat Hubert Humphrey in the fall.

It was under Nixon that the "Southern Strategy" was born. The idea was simple: Millions of white Southern voters who had been raised to vote straight Democratic tickets were feeling more and more alienated from the national Democratic Party. They were up for grabs -- Goldwater had proven it. But Goldwater had also gone too far: His explicit rejection of the Civil Rights Act played well in Dixie, but made him a monster to the rest of the country. The trick, then, was to wink and nod at white Southerners with signals that were simultaneously nebulous and unmistakable. Instead of arguing against civil rights, Nixon talked about "law and order" and, later, busing. In the fall of '68 his task was complicated by the presence of Wallace, who ran a baldly racist third party campaign and won five Southern states. But Nixon managed to peel off Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina. He ended up with 301 electoral votes, but without those 43 from the South, he would have fallen short of the magic 270 mark.

As president, Nixon continued to court Southerners aggressively. Slowly, Republican candidates began winning races for the U.S. House and Senate in Southern states. Nixon swept the region in his 1972 reelection campaign -- although he swept the rest of the country too, winning 49 states over George McGovern. It was against this backdrop that Democrats were so elated by Carter's victory in 1976. Given the chance to vote for one of its own, the South had returned to the Democratic fold. Maybe Dixie could be saved after all.

But the Republican Carter had beaten, Gerald Ford, in many ways represented the Republican Party Southerners had rejected before Goldwater came along. A moderate Michigan congressman who was appointed vice president by Nixon in 1973, Ford had little natural kinship with Dixie, and he lacked Nixon's cunning in exploiting the region's racial sensitivities. In the '76 GOP primaries, Ford was challenged by Reagan. In the early-going, with most of the primary and caucus action in the North, Ford ran up six straight victories over Reagan. With his campaign on the ropes, Reagan then prevailed in North Carolina -- thanks to a huge assist from Jesse Helms, another former segregationist Democrat-turned-Republican. Reagan was a far better fit for Dixie than Ford, and his Carolina triumph set off a wave of late primary wins. The delegate race was virtually tied by the convention, though Reagan ended up falling just short.

As soon as Ford lost to Carter, Reagan became the overwhelming favorite for the 1980 GOP nomination. The man Goldwater conservatives had first sized up as presidential timber 16 years before was finally in position to lead the party. After an early hiccup in Iowa, Reagan crushed his main primary competitor, George H.W. Bush and sealed the nomination. Unemployment, inflation and interest rates were all high, and American confidence was sagging, thanks mainly to the economy, but also the the protracted hostage crisis in Iran. After accepting the GOP nomination in mid-July in Detroit, Reagan found himself running more than 20 points ahead of Carter (who had still not officially fended off Ted Kennedy's intraparty challenge). It was at that point that Reagan, his voice hoarse from an infection, took a few weeks off for a working vacation.

At the end of July, Reagan's campaign announced that he would resume campaigning on August 3. The first event on his calendar seemed innocuous enough: a county fair in rural south-central Mississippi. But the Neshoba County and its annual fair enjoyed a racially fraught history. 16 years earlier, at the height of "Freedom Summer," three civil rights workers from the North -- Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner -- had been abducted and murdered by the Klan in Philadelphia, Miss., Neshoba's county seat. Local and state politicians, like many local residents, had reacted by playing dumb "Maybe they went to Cuba," Mississippi's governor, Paul Johnson, said when news first broke that the trio had gone missing. The Neshoba fair had been around since the late 19th Century, and it had become a popular campaign stop for segregationist candidates in Mississippi -- the notorious Ross Barnett was a regular. But no presidential candidate had ever before showed up. Until Ronald Reagan.

Reagan and his campaign sensed political opportunity, both in Mississippi and across the South. The state had voted for Carter in '76, but only by two points. Reagan's Mississippi state chairman, a young congressman named Trent Lott, was adamant that it could be flipped. So it was that a cheery Reagan took the stage that August afternoon and issued one of the most thinly veiled appeals to racial resentment in modern American politics. ""I believe in states' rights," he told the uniformly white crowd of 30,000 Mississippians, "and I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level." Technically, he was talking about welfare policy, his aim in using the term "states' rights" -- the rallying cry for every politician who'd fought civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s -- was unmistakable. The crowd responded with delirious cheers.

That fall, Reagan carried Mississippi -- and every other state in the South, except Carter's native Georgia. The Neshoba moment did not, by itself, bring this outcome about (although his margins in Mississippi and other southern states were exceedingly narrow). Nor did the South, by itself, account for Reagan's victory over Carter. (It was, after all, a 44-state landslide.) But the 1980 election established that the South's break with the Democratic Party wouldn't be a short-term phenomenon. And if there's one moment that captured the spirit that animated this realignment, it was Reagan's proud invocation of "states' rights" -- and his audience's gleeful response. It was the fulfillment of the Southern Strategy.



Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.

Our resident egotist and shallow thinker, okie, continually asks why African-Americans do not en masse migrate to the Republican PArty.

It will probably take a generation or two or three for a switch of the kind that caused the Republican party to change from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Goldwater-Reagan.

*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*
February 7, 2011
11:02 AM

*CONTACT: Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) <http://www.ccrjustice.org/>*
[email protected]

CCR Announces Bush Indictment for Convention Against Torture Signatory States

No Immunity for Former Presidents Under Law

GENEVA and NEW YORK - February 7 - Today, two torture victims were to have filed
criminal complaints, with more than 2,500-pages of supporting material, in
Geneva against former U.S. President George W. Bush, who was due to speak at an
event there on 12 February. Swiss law requires the presence of the torturer on
Swiss soil before a preliminary investigation can be opened. When Bush cancelled
his trip to avoid prosecution, the human rights groups who prepared the
complaints made it public and announced that the Bush Torture Indictment would
be waiting wherever he travels next. The Indictment serves as the basis on which
to prepare country-specific, plaintiff-specific indictments, with additional
evidence and updated information. According to international law experts at the
New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Berlin-based
European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), former presidents
do not enjoy special immunity under the Convention Against Torture (CAT).

"Waterboarding is torture, and Bush has admitted, without any sign of remorse,
that he approved its use," said *Katherine Gallagher, Senior Staff Attorney at
CCR and Vice President of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)*.

"The reach of the Convention Against Torture is wide - this case is prepared and
will be waiting for him wherever he travels next. Torturers - even if they are
former presidents of the United States - must be held to account and prosecuted.
Impunity for Bush must end."

While the U.S. has thus far failed to comply with its obligations under the
Convention Against Torture to prosecute and punish those who commit torture, all
other signatories, too, are obligated to prosecute or extradite for prosecution
anyone present in their territory they have a reasonable basis for believing has
committed torture. If the evidence warrants, as the Bush Torture Indictment
contends it does, and the U.S. fails to request the extradition of Bush and
others to face charges of torture there, CAT signatories must, under law,
prosecute them for torture.

In a statement this weekend, the groups who organized the complaints said,
"Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he cancelled his trip to avoid
our case. The message from civil society is clear - If you're a torturer, be
careful in your travel plans."

The complaints that had been scheduled to be filed on Monday asked that the
General Prosecutor of the Canton of Geneva investigate allegations that men were
tortured as part of the Bush administration's well-documented torture program.
Bush proudly recounted in his recently published memoir that when asked in 2002
to if it was permissible to waterboard a detainee - a recognized act of torture
- he replied "damn right."

Monday, February 7, is the ninth anniversary of the day Bush decided the Geneva
Conventions did not apply to ‘enemy combatants.'

According to the Bush Indictment, which was written on behalf of torture victims
by CCR and ECCHR, former President Bush bears individual and command
responsibility for the acts of his subordinates which he ordered, authorized,
condoned or otherwise aided and abetted, as well as for the violations committed
by his subordinates which he failed to prevent or punish.

"Bush is a torturer and deserves to be remembered as such," said *Gavin
Sullivan, Solicitor and Counterterrorism Program Manager, ECCHR*. "He bears
ultimate responsibility for authorizing the torture of thousands of individuals
at places like Guantánamo and secret CIA ‘black sites' around the world. As all
states are obliged to prosecute such torturers, Bush has good reason to be very
worried."

CCR, ECCHR and FIDH were joined by more than 60 human rights organizations and
prominent individuals who signed on to support the call for George W. Bush's
prosecution, including former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Theo van Boven,
former UN Special Rapporteur on Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Leandro
Despouy, and Nobel Peace Prize recipients Shirin Ebadi and Pérez Esquivel. A
number of the human rights organizations which signed on are facing the on-going
harms of the "counterterrorism" policies advanced under the Bush administration
and then adopted or employed in their own countries.. The complaint included
2500 pages of supporting materials.

Manfred Nowak, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (2004-2010), was to
submit an expert opinion on the complaints concluding that the conduct to which
both plaintiffs were subjected constitutes torture, that Switzerland had an
obligation to open a preliminary investigation, and that George W. Bush enjoys
no immunity.

The Bush Torture Indictment, the official "letter of denunciation" summarizing
the case and other materials are available here:
http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/bush-torture-indictment.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, in addition to filing the first cases
representing men detained at Guantánamo, has filed universal jurisdiction cases
seeking accountability for torture by Bush administration officials in Germany,
France and submitted expert opinions and other documentation to ongoing cases in
Spain in collaboration with ECCHR. The Center for Constitutional Rights is
dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States
Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by
attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a
non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of
law as a positive force for social change. Visit _www.ccrjustice.org
<http://www.ccrjustice.org/>_. Follow @theCCR.

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) is an
independent, non-profit legal organization that enforces human rights by holding
state and non-state actors to account for egregious abuses through innovative
strategic litigation. For more information visit www.ecchr.eu
<http://www.ecchr.eu/>

pom, Their intentions are good, but I doubt anything will come out of this. The question becomes, how far are they willing to go with this?

The European countries in total will not support this.

The president needed correction from a group of congressmen in their letter to the president. This is sad when a president is that ignorant of our American principles and heritage.

http://library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1103350875636-80/National_Motto_Letter_to_President%5b1%5d%5b1%5d.pdf

That's funny okie.
I wonder if you can point out in the declaration of Independence where it states God created our inalienable rights. Or do the Congress idiots that sent that letter need a correction because they are ignorant of the Declaration?

Apparently, you are the one ignorant of the Declaration of Independence.

For your education, I suggest you read this...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence

And from that link, we see this...




"Their creator" is a reference to God.

So, as you can see, it DOES say that God gave us our rights.

And just so you cant quibble, here is the definition of endowed, according to dictionary.com



So, God has given us our rights.

ROFLMAO

Reagan: Morning After in America

Why the Gipper's tax-cut guru is aghast at today's GOP.

— By David Corn

Fri Feb. 4, 2011 3:00 AM PST
Moments before the new Republican House was to be sworn in, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), the head of the House Republican Policy Committee and the chamber's fifth-ranking GOPer, was standing in the ornate Speaker's Lobby of the Capitol, near a roaring fire. In the celebratory hustle and bustle—new members rushing to pick up lapel pins and license plates, their kids noisily exploring the building—a reporter approached Price with a question: How could he reconcile the GOP's pledge to tame the deficit with its decision to dodge budget calculations about the costs of tax cuts and repealing health care reform? Without missing a beat, Price replied, "It doesn't cost the government money to decrease taxes. When you decrease taxes, as President Kennedy proved, as Reagan proved, you increase revenue to the federal government."

David Stockman, Reagan's first budget director in the 1980s and the godfather of the Gipper's supply-side tax cuts, was watching the proceedings from his home in Colorado and shaking his head. Republicans like Price were, in Stockman's view, misreading history—even perverting the Reagan message. As he saw it, they were guiding the nation toward financial ruin by pushing for tax cuts without having the guts to seriously slash spending—and dishonestly justifying their "flimflam" by citing his work.


When I spoke to Stockman that day, he was still laughing about a tidbit he had read earlier that morning: The owner of a specialty food store on Manhattan's Upper East Side—Maureen's Passion—was touting the top-income tax cuts the GOP had shoved into Obama's compromise. "It all turned around when the tax bill passed," he'd told a financial news website. "Caviar! It's jumping off the shelf."

"So there you go," Stockman scoffed. "That's a real economic recovery."

Beyond goosing caviar sales, Stockman says, the Republicans are not sincere about boosting the economy. (He also chastises Democrats, but his most trenchant criticism slams the GOP.) He contends that the party of Reagan has spent the last three decades compounding the errors that he had a hand in engineering in the early 1980s—and a reckoning looms.

Here's how Stockman tells the tale. In the '80s, Reagan and his White House crew were eager to cut income taxes across the board. The aim, he asserts, was to fix the slumping economy, not to starve the beast of big government. Republican leaders on the Hill were initially skeptical—they insisted that the White House pass spending cuts before Congress tackled the tax side. "The honest-to-goodness fact," Stockman says, "is that in February 1981, there wasn't close to a Republican majority for tax cuts without any accompanying or coupled spending cuts. The idea of supply-side in its purest form"—that tax cuts fuel economic growth that yields increased tax revenues—"was only embraced by a handful of junior Republicans, plus Jack Kemp."

The Reagan administration hardly minded proposing massive cuts to both taxes and spending. But then things went haywire, Stockman notes. The tax cut ballooned from $500 billion over five years to $1 trillion after lobbyists added special-interest tax breaks for various industries. And on the spending side, the Reagan administration went hog-wild throwing money at the Pentagon. The inevitable happened: The deficit ballooned.

"I was horrified," Stockman recalls. In 1982, 1983, and 1984, Reagan signed a series of tax hikes (PDF) that, according to Stockman, recovered 40 percent of the original 1981 tax cut. Meanwhile, unemployment fell from nearly 11 percent in 1982 to 7.4 percent by Election Day 1984, and inflation slowed.

Republicans took the wrong lesson from that episode, Stockman contends: that big tax cuts are economic magic. For GOPers to argue, as they do nowadays, that only permanent tax cuts spark economic activity is "totally inconsistent with what we used to argue in the 1980s," Stockman notes. "These were two-year tax cuts, and they're praising them as Republican doctrine."

The new doctrine got a boost when it turned out you didn't have to match tax cuts with spending cuts: The Federal Reserve was able to sell the nation's growing debt to China and others. "It totally anesthetized the political system to the costs of deficit spending," Stockman says. "Therefore the simplistic and reckless idea that the way to stimulate the economy is to cut taxes anytime, anywhere, for any reason, became embedded [in the GOP]. It has become a religion, it has become a catechism. It's become a mindless incantation."

Years later, Stockman says, George W. Bush and his crew repeated "in much greater magnitude the errors we made in the early '80s. A massive increase in defense spending, a massive reduction in the revenue base [via long-term tax cuts], and not even an effort at spending cuts. Then the economy finally collapsed as a result of the credit crisis."

So what's an old-school Republican to do? Stockman, who worked as an investment banker after leaving the Reagan administration (and was indicted in 2007 for securities fraud in a case federal prosecutors later dropped), is willing to live by the basic laws of math. He opposed extending the Bush tax cuts for middle- and high-income Americans, and now he has a simple three-part prescription: First, cut military spending by $100 to $150 billion a year. (Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called for just $78 billion in cuts over the next five years.) "Are the Chinese going to come and bomb 33,000 Wal-Marts in the United States and destroy their export economy?" asks Stockman, who considers both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars foolish.

His second point is classic deficit-hawkery: Apply a means test to Medicare and Social Security. His third: "Massively raise taxes." His favorite device: a Tobin tax, named after Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin, which would be levied on financial transactions. "We have a massive casino that is doing nothing but churning transactions by the millisecond, robots trading with each other, as a result of the Fed juicing the system continuously with overnight money that's free," Stockman says. "There's no productive value for Main Street or the real US economy." Such a tax could generate $100 billion annually (PDF). Stockman also fancies a version of Europe's value-added tax on consumption. "High taxes aren't good," he says. "But at the end of the day, you have to pay your bills as a government."

Stockman has not suddenly turned into a Democrat: He didn't support Obama's stimulus (because he didn't think it addressed the fundamental problems of the economy), and he remains a small-government conservative who would slash all sorts of federal programs if he could. But he has no patience with today's Republicans: On The Colbert Report, he recently dismissed the Laffer curve—the holy graphic of the supply-side crowd—as "the laugher curve." On MSNBC's Countdown, he called the GOP "the free-lunch party of tax cuts."

GOP leaders, naturally, are not impressed with Stockman's take. Grover Norquist, a top conservative strategist and tax-cut champion, all but dismisses him as a has-been: "Sometimes, folks just want back in the limelight." If Republicans let tax cuts be held "hostage to Democrats cutting spending," he says, "you'll never get spending restraint or tax rate reduction. [Stockman] never understood supply-side economics."

Stockman counters that Republicans' taxes bad/tax cuts good mantra is disingenuous. "I don't think those kinds of propositions are appropriate, and you could call them a lie if you really wanted to use rhetoric," he says. "They can't say government is too big if they're saying hands off defense. It's not responsible to say government is the problem when you've embraced 95 percent of the dollars.

"It's very dismaying," he adds, "to see that 30-year descent into the kind of nihilism, know-nothingism that is represented by the Republican Party today." It's not the Gipper's GOP anymore.

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief.

But that isn't stated in the Declaration. It could be inferred that the creator is god but it is never said. If you read the entire document it refers to nature and God as 2 separate things so one could assume nature or God could be the creator and they purposely didn't pick one or the other.

The argument by those idiots was that E Pluribus Unum isn't the motto of the US simply because it was never officially declared as such.
E Pluribus Unum is a motto of the United States and is on the Presidential Seal and has appeared on US currency. It just isn't declared a motto by the US Congress.

If you want to argue that something that isn't officially stated can exist then you can't argue that E Pluribus Unum is not a motto.

What I find so funny is that mm still thinks "god gave us our rights." Which god is he talking about? There are thousands of gods - all created by men.

I never said that.
I simply replied to parados about where the Declaration of Independence mantions God and our rights.

Dont read into what I wrote.

What did you mean by posting such b.s.?

Except it doesn't mention God. It mentions "creator". Don't read into what they actually wrote unless you want to be hoisted on your own petard.

Excellent point, and thank you.

House Representative Chris Lee (R-NY) has abruptly resigned after sending a
photo of himself "shirtless" to a female constituent.
The photo is available if you want to find it. His right hand is, um, never mind.

Sadly, this is what liberalism gives us in today's America, mysteryman. I will have to admit that I do not see a rosy future for our country, if more and more people think as parados and other of his fellow liberals do.

I have posted this before, but I am increasingly believing that the primary difference between political parties and the increasing political polarization in this country, and the world for that matter, are spiritual at their basic foundation. Confidence in man or government, versus confidence in God, form the two polar opposites in the political world. I believe this distinction is evident in almost all political issues and agendas, and the distinction helps define liberalism versus conservatism.

Where do these losers come from, rjb? But this all reminds me, why didn't Clinton abruptly resign? And why did Gerry Studds get a standing "O"? More examples could be mentioned. We still have a double standard, depending upon political party.