“Romney Dog Whistle”: Obama’s Philosophy Is “Foreign To The American Experience”
Mitt Romney doubled down on his characterization of President Obama as a “foreigner” during an interviewwith CNBC’s Larry Kudlow Monday afternoon, insisting that the president believes that the government is responsible for the success of entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Romney’s comments continue to misrepresent Obama’s remarks at a July 17th event, during which Obama suggested that society as a whole contributes to the economic accomplishments of the individual. Republicans have seized on the remarks to advance the myth that the president espouses an “un American” governing philosophy:
KUDLOW: Why do you think President Obama, what did he mean, if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build it, someone else made that happen? He claims it’s being taken out of context. What do you think it means? Do you think this is Obama anti-business, anti-entrepreneur? Or do you think maybe he has been treated unfairly? […]
ROMNEY: This is an ideology which says hey, we’re all the same here, we ought to take from all and give to one another and that achievement, individual initiative and risk-taking and success are not to be rewarded as they have in the past. It’s a very strange and in some respects foreign to the American experience type of philosophy. We have always been a nation that has celebrated success of various kinds. The kid that gets the honor roll, the individual worker that gets a promotion, the person that gets a better job. And in fact, the person that builds a business. And by the way, if you have a business and you started it, you did build it. And you deserve credit for that. It was not built for you by government…. So his whole philosophy is an upside-down philosophy that does not comport with the American experience.
In reality, Obama’s contention that — “when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together” — is something Romney himself has agreed with. For instance, during his speech at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics, Romney said, “You Olympians, however, know you didn’t get here solely on your own power. For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers, encouraged your hopes, coaches guided, communities built venues in order to organize competitions.”
He echoed the same sentiment last week, saying, “I know that you recognize a lot of people help you in a business. Perhaps the bank, the investors. There is no question your mom and dad, your school teachers. The people who provide roads, the fire, the police. A lot of people help.”
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, July 23, 2012
“A Dominionist Worldview”: Michele Bachmann’s Teacher In Hate
Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was placed under police protection this weekend in response to a threat made against her. This came in the wake of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s insinuation that Abedin may be a Muslim Brotherhood spy. Bachmann targeted Abedin by name in a letter sent last month to the inspector general of the State Department, and despite widespread condemnation from Republicans and Democrats alike, Bachmann doubled down on her Muslim witch hunt last week. On Friday, she accused Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, a fellow Minnesota lawmaker, of himself being tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Even her boss on the intelligence committee, Chairman Mike Rogers, who had initially praised Bachmann, said her “assertion certainly doesn’t comport with the Intelligence Committee.”
We know one of Bachmann’s inspirations for her Muslim witch hunt is Frank Gaffney, the former Reagan defense official who has made a second career out of finding terrorists hiding in every closet. Bachmann cites him prominently and often. But another inspiration may be John Eidsmoe, a law professor who taught Bachmann at Oral Roberts University and became something of a mentor to her. As the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza reported last year, Bachmann worked for Eidsmoe on several projects and internalized his Christian-Dominionist worldviews. If biblical law conflicts with civil law, Eidsmoe teaches that “the first thing you should try to do is work through legal means and political means to get it changed.” He told Lizza that Bachmann’s views are entirely consistent with his own.
In August of last year, Bachmann told the Rediscover God in America conference in Iowa that Eidsmoe is “absolutely brilliant.” He “had a great influence on me … He taught me about so many aspects of our Godly heritage,” she said.
Eidsmoe isn’t so popular with everyone, however. Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center explains Eidsmoe this way: “He was a member for a while of the League of the South, which is a neo-Confederate hate group, which has said things like slavery is God-ordained and is explicitly racialist. He also spoke to the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is a flat-out white supremacist group. They’re against interracial marriage, they’ve said things like — direct quote from them — ‘blacks are a retrograde species of humanity,’ so you get the idea. So, he’s hung out with hate groups, he’s been a member of hate groups, and his views are just so far outside of the mainstream that it’s amazing. I mean, really, it’s a little shocking to think that the congresswoman would be openly willing to admit that she’s influenced by him,” Beirich told Salon. (Eidsmoe did not respond to requests for comment.)
In Alabama last year, Eidsmoe declared that states have a right to secede, explaining, that Confederate president Jefferson Davis “understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln.” He was disinvited from a Tea Party rally in Wisconsin in 2010 after the AP brought his past comments to the attention of organizers.
Eidsmoe, consistent with this Christian-Dominionist worldview, has also spoken often about the dangers of Islam. On his website, he lists several seminars he offers, including “Islam & the Crusades.” In the talk, which can be heard in a 2010 recording from a Presbyterian Church in Tennessee, he pretends to be a Crusader who just escaped after 900 years in a Turkish jail. Indeed, Eidsmoe’s view on the relationship between Muslims and Christians doesn’t seem to have evolved much from the past millennium — essentially, they are still at war with each other.
“I think the correct view of the crusades is to say that they did what was necessary to preserve Western Christianity. And we should be grateful to them for that … There really is a hatred of The West within Islam,” says Eidsmoe, who is a member of the modern day Knights Templar, the Sovereign Military Order of The Temple of Jerusalem. At the beginning of his talk, he warns that the world’s Muslim population is growing quickly and could overtake Christians one day.
“We’re seeing more and more attempts to bring Shariah law, that is, Muslim law, into place in the United States … When we look at the history of Islam, we see not just a striving to find tolerance in other parts of the world, but an attempt to take over and impose their system on everybody else. And coming in and asking for exceptions on Shariah law is just the first step. We’ve seen it over and over again in history. We see that it doesn’t end there,” Eidsmoe said in an Internet radio interview.
It’s easy to see how a Dominionist worldview — that is, one that believes in trying to construct a Christian “God’s kingdom” on earth — would be hostile to Muslims in general, and not just extremists. Bachmann is an adherent to the same kind of ideology. As the Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg wrote during the Republican presidential primary, “If you want to understand Michele Bachmann … understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 23, 2012
“A Whole New Form Of Voter Suppression”: Do We Need A New Voting Rights Act?
Ten states have enacted voter-ID laws that will discriminate against minorities and seniors. But the Department of Justice can do little to stop the discrimination in five of them.
On Friday, two counties in Southern states requested that the Supreme Court reconsider a key element of the Voting Rights Act. Both Kinston, North Carolina and Shelby County, Alabama hope the Court will find that Section 5 of the Act—the one that requires states and counties with a history of voter suppression to get permission from the feds before implementing changes to election law—is unconstitutional. The government has previously justified Section 5 under the Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote and prohibits discrimination based on race. The counties—both in states with new voter-ID laws—argue that the provision violates the Tenth Amendment, which gives states the right to regulate elections. Furthermore, they claim it unfairly gives states different levels of sovereignty by treating some differently than others.
With voter-ID laws proliferating around the country, the Voting Rights Act has been in the national conversation for months now, and Section 5 has played a major role in the debate. Voter-ID laws create barriers to voting, particularly for poor and non-white voters who are more likely to lack the necessary photo ID. The effort to suppress the vote is exactly what the Voting Rights Act sought to prevent, and it’s come in handy. While the Bush administration’s Department of Justice approved Georgia’s strict voter-ID law—which became a national model—under Obama, the DOJ has blocked Texas and South Carolina from implementing theirs, finding them to have a discriminatory effect. (Decisions on Mississippi and Alabama’s laws are still pending.) Thanks to the proceedings, we’ve learned a lot more about the impact of these laws. Documents from Texas revealed that Hispanic registered voters were between 47 and 120 percent more likely to lack the necessary ID, while in South Carolina, minorities were almost 20 percent more likely to have no government-issued identification.
Because of Section 5, the Department of Justice has been able to stop voter-ID laws from going into effect in four states. The trouble is, Section 5 only applies to nine list states, based largely on what those states were doing 50 years ago. And with the voter ID frenzy that began after Republicans swept into power in 2010, the states working to suppress the vote don’t totally align with those that require preclearance. In recent years, ten states have passed strict voter-ID laws which require a voter to show government-issued identification to vote and will likely prevent hundreds of thousands from voting. But of those ten, only five require preclearance. Indiana, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin all got to enact their versions of these laws without any say from the feds. Across all of them, the impacts are similarly devastating for poor and non-white populations.
As more and more states pass laws that functionally disenfranchise poor and nonwhite voters, it’s increasingly clear that Section 5 is no longer sufficient. The Department of Justice needs a broader ability to be proactive in preventing voter discrimination. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, Congress authorized Section 5 for only five years, with the idea that it might not be necessary after that. Since then, however, the section has been reauthorized several times—most recently in 2006, when Congress renewed it for another 25 years. But the section no longer reflects the voting landscape. It seems logical that the Department of Justice’s role should be expanded, so that states not listed in Section 5 cannot implement laws that infringe on voters’ rights.
The right to vote is integral to our political system, one of the defining acts of citizenship, and we should ensure it’s protected. Furthermore, who votes often determines which candidate wins. In 2012, the stakes could hardly be higher. Not including Alabama, where the law is not scheduled to take effect until 2013, the states with strict voter-ID laws comprise 127 electoral votes—almost half the number needed to win.
A report by the Brennan Center for Justice last week offered a devastating look at just how difficult getting ID actually is, and how many people are impacted. Nationwide, 11 percent of eligible voters lack the required ID; among African Americans, that number skyrockets to one in four eligible voters. Hispanics and seniors also disproportionately lack a government-issued photo ID. The Center’s report focuses on two key factors: the cost of acquiring the necessary documents, and the difficulties of getting to an office that issues IDs. Even in states that offer free IDs for voting, most still charge people to obtain the documents necessary to get that ID—and the costs are not insignificant. Birth certificates can run anywhere from $8 to $25. In Mississippi, there’s a special Catch-22: You need a birth certificate to get a government-issued ID, but you need a government-issued ID to get a birth certificate. Meanwhile, 10 million eligible voters live more than 10 miles away from a government office that can issue an ID—and in Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Wisconsin, those ID issuing offices are closed on weekends.
While many of the most egregious examples are in Section 5 states, many are not. In Wisconsin, which does not have to preclear its election laws, more than 30 percent of the voting-age population lives more than 10 miles from an ID office. In Kansas, which also isn’t listed in Section 5, the voter-ID law shows similar problems with discrimination. Outside of Wichita, there’s one office that issues IDs for every 22,000 eligible voters; in downtown Wichita, there is one office for every 160,000. Twenty-two percent of Kansas’ black population lives in downtown Wichita where, in order to get their free IDs, they must wait much longer than their neighbors outside the city. In Tennessee, another state that doesn’t need preclearance, three rural regions have large populations but no offices that issue IDs.
Perhaps the best argument for expanding the Voting Rights Act is unfolding in Pennsylvania. Only a few months ago, the state legislature passed a strict voter-ID law that required a government-issued ID that included an expiration date. The state’s House majority leader, Republican Mike Turzai, openly touted it as a law that will guarantee that Mitt Romney wins the state. There’s reason for his confidence: A recent study from the Secretary of the Commonwealth in Pennsylvania showed that as many as 9 percent of state voters may lack necessary identification. In Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold with a high number of African-American voters, it could be as high as 18 percent. Yet the DOJ cannot block the law.
For those states not listed in Section 5, challenges must be fought in the courts, where the bar is much higher. The DOJ or others can claim that voter-ID laws violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination either in practice or procedure. But Section 2 cases are difficult. “In order to bring a Section 2 case, you’d have to show two things. One, that there’s a significant racial disparity and two, that the burden of getting an ID is significant enough for us to care about,” Samuel Bagenstos, former deputy assistant attorney general, told Talking Points Memo. That means the DOJ will have a harder time winning a case against a voter-ID state before the November elections. Instead, the department may have to wait until the election is over and voters can testify to the discrimination. The DOJ may have to spend the 2012 election collecting evidence of discrimination—cold comfort for those whose votes are suppressed, particularly when their votes could change the outcome of a close presidential election.
Civic groups can also sue states for violating their constitutions. The ACLU has already brought suit against the Pennsylvania law on those grounds. In Wisconsin, a court found the voter-ID law violated the state constitution, and has granted a permanent injunction, though that decision is being appealed. These lawsuits require funding from civic groups that can afford and endure lengthy legal fights, of course, and the constitutional protections vary state to state.
The Voting Rights Act was passed at a time when certain states adamantly and openly refused non-white citizens the right to vote. These new laws are less obvious and more insidious, and have been implemented in states without voter-supression histories of Texas, South Carolina, and Georgia. But regardless of a state’s history, the result of voter-ID laws is still the same: Many, particularly those who are poor and not white, will lose their right to vote.
With a whole new form of voter supression spreading, it’s imperative that we look at new ways to safeguard that right. Norman Ornstein, among others, has called for an expanded Voting Rights Act. At the very least, the Department of Justice should have broader authority to examine discriminatory laws and at least hold up implementation as officials examine the potential impact. States like Pennsylvania should not be able to take away minority rights so easily, and with so little scrutiny. Unfortunately, as so many states move to make it harder for poor and nonwhite citizens to vote, the momentum is on the other side, with states and counties pushing to knock down Section 5 entirely and take away the procedural protections we do have in place, incomplete though they are.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 23, 2012
“From Silly Season To Plain Crazy”: Mitt Romney’s Encouragement Of Anti-Obama Nuttiness
On an official Mitt Romney campaign conference call this week, former New Hampshire governor John Sununu tested the latest effort to paint the commander in chief as disloyal to his country.
“I wish this president would learn how to be an American,” the Romney surrogate said.
Sununu, challenged, later apologized for the words — but not the sentiment. And that’s not good enough.
It’s not good enough because Sununu, like other prominent Republicans, is winking at those conservatives who continue to make the claim, often race-based, that President Obama is something un-American, something “other” than the rest of us. On Thursday, two days after Sununu’s attack, Romney himself said that Obama lacks “an understanding of what it is that makes America such a unique nation.”
Sununu and Romney are legitimizing people such as Cliff Kincaid. Also on Thursday, Kincaid convened his annual conference at the National Press Club for conspiracy-minded conservatives, this one about Obama and “Radical Islam.”
On the program, Obama’s photo was alongside Vladimir Lenin’s and those of radical Muslim clerics. Kincaid got right to the point: Obama was actually sired by the late author Frank Marshall Davis, identified by Kincaid as a communist pornographer.
There is, Kincaid said, a “distinct possibility that Davis was Obama’s real father.” The host further informed the assembly that Davis was “Obama’s sex teacher” and that “Obama was under the tutelage of a pedophile.” Kincaid asked “what Frank Marshall Davis may have done to a young Barack Obama” and “what other terrible secrets are out there.” For more on this, Kincaid brought in a filmmaker to discuss his work on Obama and Davis, “Dreams from My Real Father.”
The next speaker, blogger Trevor Loudon, provided the additional information that Davis was a “possible Soviet spy” and that there are “a whole host of other communists and Marxists around Obama,” including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, with “a communist-front record as long as your arm.” Loudon figures that Obama is making it possible for Russia and China to attack the United States and that “Latin American states would be invited in for looting rights.”
“You’ve got to ask,” Loudon said, “how involved were the Soviets in promoting the career of Barack Obama, and are they getting a payoff today?” (The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the year Obama graduated from law school.)
This isn’t to dignify the nuttiness. But it’s worth noting this latest symptom of Obama Derangement Syndrome, because some of these same people birthed the birther movement nearly five years ago and because this is the sort of craziness that Romney and prominent Republicans are furthering.
Romney has often shared the stage with Donald Trump, the most visible birther. And Romney’s surrogate Sununu followed his original allegation with the charge that Obama “has no idea how the American system functions” in part because he spent “years in Indonesia.”
At lower levels, Republicans are even more brazen. Rep. Allen West (Fla.) alleges that, in the House, “there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party.” Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) and four other House Republicans accused Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, of being part of a Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy. Not to be outdone, Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., just came out with the fresh allegation that Obama’s long-form birth certificate is a forgery.
Such disloyalty allegations aren’t likely to stick to the man who vanquished Osama bin Laden and escalated drone strikes on terrorists. More likely, the charges will discredit the complaints from Romney that Obama is being unfair to him with his far tamer line of attack on Romney’s finances. Of greater concern, the disloyalty allegations from Republican officials will legitimize the sort of people who converged on the press club.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Kincaid declared, “what we have today in the White House is somebody who could not survive any reasonable background check but is president, with access to America’s secrets.”
Loudon alleged that Alice Palmer, an early Chicago mentor of Obama, was a “high-level Soviet operative.” He added that if Obama loses in November, “he would just lay waste to everything he can. . . . You could see some serious violence in the streets of America.”
There was little time to fret about this, because the next speaker, Larry Grathwohl, began his presentation, on “reds exploiting blacks,” about how Obama is a “revolutionary mole” and part of a communist-Muslim plot with ties to Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and the Weather Underground.
Surely Sununu and Romney don’t believe this. So why do they encourage it?
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 20, 2012
“A Hidden Man”: Mitt Romney’s Tax Returns Don’t Look Like “You People’s” Tax Returns
John McCain’s former top presidential campaign strategist said Sunday that Mitt Romney’s tax returns had nothing to do with the campaign’s pick of Sarah Palin as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2008.
“Mitt Romney went through this process and what I can tell you is that he’s a person of decency with the highest ethical character and background,” Steve Schmidt said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “There was nothing that was disqualifying. That pick in 2008 was not about any deficiency with Mitt Romney. It was a political decision that we made in a very bad political circumstance.”
Schmidt, who said he did not personally view Romney’s tax returns, said Romney is an “extremely wealthy man” and his tax returns “do not look anything like the average American.”
As a chorus of voices have called on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to release more of his tax returns, Romney has held firm. He told National Review in an interview that the Obama campaign’s hammering him on his taxes to distract voters from the tepid economic recovery and the president’s failure to put more Americans back to work.
However, New York Times columnist David Brooks told NBC’s David Gregory that Romney is a “hidden man” and that releasing his taxes won’t help that perception.
“I don’t care about the issue. Can you think about a president who was qualified or disqualified about taxes? What’s relevant is who the guy is,” Brooks said. “His family had gone across the west, poverty, building an empire, poverty, building an empire. He can’t talk about it because it involves Mormonism. He is a decent guy but he is not willing to talk about it. He’s a hidden man, so one of the turning points in this campaign is when he comes out and if he can come out. and I don’t know why they’re waiting so long.”
Democratic presidential strategist Bob Shrum agreed, saying Romney’s failure to release his tax returns makes him a “punching bag.”
“It does make him a hidden figure and a punching bag,” Shrum said. “…I tell you on this tax issue, Steve [Schmidt] and I have both been there. You sit down with the candidate and you say, ‘Look, we should release these tax returns.’ And either Romney or people in his campaign who have seen it said we’ll take worse damage if we release these returns than if we hold on to them. So I think he’s going to live with this issue all the way through.”
By: Juana Summers, Politico, July 22, 2012
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