Whether any of the Republican candidates for president will be perceived as having “won” the first prime time debate of this year’s primary season is unclear. In the initial coverage of the debate, however, one winner has emerged: Fox News. Many observers praised the tough questioning of the candidates. A particular target for rave reviews was news anchor Megyn Kelly. “She may not be in the presidential race, but it looks like Megyn Kelly earned at least the popular vote on Thursday,” wrote Elle’s Mattie Kahn. Her hometown newspaper beamed with pride about the debate’s “star.” And there’s plenty more where that came from.
I agree that at least some of this praise was justified—it may not be hard to get Donald Trump to whine, but Kelly was really onto something. Early on in the debate, I was struck by questions that were indeed tougher and more substantive than one would be likely to see from less consciously ideological media outlets. And I agree that Kelly deserves credit for addressing Donald Trump’s history of egregiously sexist comments (“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”)
Even better was the question Kelly asked Walker about his abortion policies. You might expect Fox News moderators to allow Republican candidates to sidestep their least popular views on the subject. To her credit, Kelly asked Walker to defend his position that bans on abortion should not even contain exemptions for the life of the mother—making the laws even more restrictive than they were in most states before Roe v. Wade—observing that Walker’s position was opposed by 83 percent of the public.
Given that the abortion debate is so often conducted on terrain Republicans would prefer, and not just on Fox News, this question was a welcome surprise and yielded important information about one of the Republican frontrunners, who confirmed his radical views.
But before we get carried away praising Kelly and the other moderators, we should keep a couple of things in mind. First of all, even if Kelly is a good journalist and asked some good questions last night, she has some views that are nutty enough that Trump would sign for them. In particular, she has expressed consistently bizarre and retrograde views on race: obsessing over the utterly irrelevant New Black Panthers as if Richard Nixon was still in the White House, defending the racist emails sent by police officers in Ferguson as normal, and insisting that the fictional Santa Claus “just is” white. Not to mention her willfully misleading attacks on Black Lives Matter.
Granted, the personal politics of the moderators don’t matter if the questions are fair. But even on this score Fox News has been overpraised. It’s certainly true that some of the candidates were asked tough questions—Trump, most notably, but also other candidates like Walker and Ben Carson. But consider the kind of questions that were given to Florida senator Marco Rubio:
WALLACE: All right, well, Senator Rubio, let me see if I can do better with you. Is it as simple as our leaders are stupid, their leaders are smart, and all of these illegals coming over are criminals?
WALLACE: Senator Rubio, when Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for presidency, he said this: “There’s no passing off responsibility when you’re a governor, no blending into the legislative crowd.”
Could you please address Governor Bush across the stage here, and explain to him why you, someone who has never held executive office, are better prepared to be president than he is, a man who you say did a great job running your state of Florida for eight years.
BAIER: Senator Rubio, why is Governor Bush wrong on Common Core?
WALLACE: Senator Rubio, more than 3,000 people sent us questions about the economy and jobs on Facebook. And here is a video question from Tania Cioloko from Philadelphia. Here she is. (begins video clip) “Please describe one action you would do to make the economic environment more favorable for small businesses and entrepreneurs and anyone dreaming of opening their own business.”
KELLY: Senator Rubio, I want to ask you the same question. But I do want to mention, a woman just came here to the stage and asked, what about the veterans? I want to hear more about what these candidates are going to do for our nation’s veterans. So I put the question to you about God and the veterans, which you may find to be related.
Rubio wasn’t so much thrown softballs as he was given softballs set up on a tee with 10 strikes and the defensive team told to leave the field. (When Kelly asked the last question, I expected her to ask Rubio his position on motherhood and apple pie too.)
The questioning, in other words, was much less fair than it might have seemed on the surface. Donald Trump, who isn’t going to win the nomination but has a toxic effect on the party as long as he’s in the race, was treated to a brutal inquisition. Rubio, who is arguably the most appealing general election candidate in the field but whose campaign is floundering, was thrown one life preserver after another. John Kasich and Jeb Bush were also treated more gently than the other candidates.
In other words, as Ed Kilgore noticed last night, the candidates who Republican elites would most like to see get traction were given much easier questions than the candidates Republican elites would prefer pack up and go away. Ultimately, Fox News gotta be Fox News.
By: Scott Lemieux, U. S. Contributing Opinion Writer, The Guardian; Talking Points Memo, August 7, 2015
August 9, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Fox News, GOP Primary Debates | Abortion, Black Lives Matter, Chris Wallace, Ferguson, Marco Rubio, Megyn Kelly, Racism, Scott Walker, Sexism |
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It should be easy for Bernie Sanders to get to the left of Hillary Clinton. The Clintons have long dabbled in centrist Democratic Leadership Council politics, while Sanders is an avowed socialist, albeit a small-d democratic one.
As such, it’s no surprise that Friends of the Earth, a major environmental group, has endorsed Sanders for president in response to Clinton’s dithering over the Keystone XL pipeline. Leaders of large labor unions like the AFL-CIO admit that Sanders is generating more enthusiasm from the rank and file. Sanders is polling competitively in New Hampshire and drawing huge crowds elsewhere, all while raising $15 million from small donors.
Yet it was Sanders the socialist who was effectively heckled by Black Lives Matter activists at the Netroots Nation conference last month. Clinton didn’t attend the progressive confab, but she picked up on Sanders’ unease, and has since incorporated the racial-justice phrase into her speeches.
After Netroots, Sanders again faced a great deal of pushback from the left when he told Ezra Klein that he wasn’t a fan of open borders. “You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today?” Sanders asked incredulously. “If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?”
There was a time when this wouldn’t have been such a heretical viewpoint on the left. But that time has come and gone. These days, it’s hard to find a liberal this side of Mickey Kaus who thinks restricting immigration for the benefit of American workers is something progressives should contemplate. Some went so far as to argue Sanders’ opposition to open borders was “ugly” and “wrongheaded,” since “no single policy the United States could adopt” would “do more good for more people.” It didn’t take long for Sanders to backtrack slightly, telling Univison’s Jorge Ramos he’d consider opening borders between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Kaus, our lonely liberal immigration skeptic, asked what happened to Sanders’ concern about American wages: “Do unskilled Mexicans have some magical properties that suspend supply and demand that unskilled immigrants from other countries lack?”
Sanders defended his immigration views when speaking to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He acknowledged that his history representing a 95 percent white state may make minorities worry he is out of touch with their concerns. But that’s only part of Sanders’ problem.
Bernie Sanders is an old-school progressive who believes most of the country’s problems can be traced to class and economics. Meanwhile, contemporary progressivism is more committed to multiculturalism and the idea that America’s biggest injustices remain inextricably tied to race.
On a lot of substantive policy issues, this is a distinction without a difference. Most liberals recognize there is a strong relationship between economics and structural racism. Sanders favors most of the same policies his multicultural critics do and is even, on balance, pretty supportive of high levels of immigration.
But there are important differences rhetorically and in terms of how you conceptualize the government’s obligations. You don’t have to believe Sanders has anything in common with Joseph Stalin’s politics to recognize that he is also talking about “socialism in one country.”
Sanders favors a robust welfare state and wants the government to mandate generous wages and working conditions. But he wants those things for Americans, not necessarily all the people living all across the globe whose standard of living could theoretically be improved by residing in America instead. (Rand Paul gets similar grief when he occasionally advocates libertarianism in one country.)
This puts Sanders out of step with much of his party. It also gives Clinton an opening to Sanders’ left, at least rhetorically, on some racial issues, which could limit his following to college-educated liberal whites. This is crucial, because the ability to reach beyond these voters and win over minorities was the difference between Barack Obama and Howard Dean.
Unless Sanders can, at 73, update his socialism to fit in with the priorities and demands of today’s left, Clinton can keep him contained — and Joe Biden can keep his faint presidential hopes alive.
By: W. James Antle, III, The Week, August 4, 2015
August 5, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Immigration | Black Lives Matter, Border Control, Friends of The Earth, Mickey Kaus, Netroots Nation, Progressives, Racial Injustice, Socialism, Wages |
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A new report finds more U.S. children living in poverty than before the Great Recession. According to the report, released Tuesday from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 22 percent of American children are living in poverty (as of 2013, the latest data available) compared with 18 percent in 2008.
Poverty rates are nearly double among African-Americans and American Indians. Problems are most severe in South and Southwest. Particularly troubling is a large increase in the share of children living in poor communities marked by poor schools and a lack of a safe place to play.
Which brings me to politics, power, and the progressive movement.
The main event at the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, Arizona last weekend was a “Presidential Town Hall” featuring one-on-one discussions between journalist and undocumented American Jose Antonio Vargas and presidential candidates Governor Martin O’Malley and Senator Bernie Sanders.
It was upstaged by #BlackLivesMatter activists who demanded to be heard.
It’s impossible to overcome widening economic inequality in America without also dealing with the legacy of racial inequality.
And it is impossible to overcome racial inequality without also reversing widening economic inequality.
They are not the same but they are intimately related.
Racial inequalities are baked into our political and economic system. Police brutality against black men and women, mass incarceration disproportionately of blacks and Latinos, housing discrimination that has resulted in racial apartheid across the nation, and voter suppression in the forms of gerrymandered districts, voter identification requirements, purges of names from voter registration lists, and understaffed voting stations in black neighborhoods – all reveal deep structures of discrimination that undermine economic inequality.
Black lives matter.
But it would be a terrible mistake for the progressive movement to split into a “Black lives matter” movement and an “economic justice” movement.
This would only play into the hands of the right.
For decades Republicans have exploited the economic frustrations of the white working and middle class to drive a wedge between races, channeling those frustrations into bigotry and resentment.
The Republican strategy has been to divide-and-conquer. They want to prevent the majority of Americans – poor, working class, and middle-class, blacks, Latinos, and whites – from uniting in common cause against the moneyed interests.
We must not let them.
Our only hope for genuine change is if poor, working class, middle class, black, Latino, and white come together in a powerful movement to take back our economy and democracy from the moneyed interests that now control both.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, July 22, 2015
July 30, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Economic Inequality, Progressives, Racial Inequality | African Americans, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Discrimination, Latinos, Martin O'Malley, Netroots Nation, Republicans, Working Class |
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On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that same-sex couples had a right to marry anywhere in the country.
The African American church and its leadership have often been at the forefront of movements for equality. But the recent Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage has shed light on the resistance to social change among some black church leaders —and has left them sounding more like white conservative leaders.
On June 26, the Court ruled that two consenting adults have the right to get married—even if they are the same gender. As conservatives lamented the loss of morality and warned of the hellfire that would soon rain down upon us, President Barack Obama and the White House celebrated the decision.
Just a few hours later, Obama delivered a eulogy for Clementa Pinckney. Pinckney was a South Carolina state senator and a pastor at the historically black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church before he was shot and killed, along with eight other members, by white supremacist Dylann Roof during a Bible study on Wednesday, June 17. The juxtaposition was quite remarkable. It was a day marked by joyous celebration and indescribable pain: the first black president at the funeral of a black man killed by a white supremacist, on the same day same-sex marriage became the law of the land.
In May 2015, the Pew Research Center found that support for same-sex marriage among all Americans increased drastically from 39 percent in 2009 to a whopping 57 percent. Opinions on same-sex marriage vary by race, with 59 percent of whites, 56 percent of Hispanics, and just 41 percent of blacks in support.
One of the biggest indicators in whether a group is in favor of same-sex marriage is religion. Of those unaffiliated with religion, 85 percent support marriage equality. In contrast, 70 percent of white evangelical Protestants oppose gay marriage, as do 57 percent of black Protestants.
Since at least 1992, blacks have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, the reason being that the modern-day Democratic Party champions causes that appeal to the black community: economic inequality, fair housing, taxing the rich, welfare, and public education. Meanwhile, the modern-day Republican Party consistently stands for causes that disproportionately hurt blacks. And much to the chagrin of conservative black pastors, the Democratic president (and those who hope to succeed him) is publicly in favor of same-sex marriage.
In May 2012, after Vice President Joe Biden came out in support for marriage equality, Obama quickly did as well. “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” he said during an interview with ABC News. And while many across the United States celebrated Obama’s voiced support, he faced backlash from black pastors.
The Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP) is a socially conservative organization made up of black church leaders. After Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality, the president of CAAP, Reverend William Owens, sounded the moral alarm. “We were once proud of President Obama, but our pride has turned to shame,” he said. “The man holding the most powerful position in the world is stooping to lead the country down an immoral path.”
After the Supreme Court ruling last week, CAAP doubled down on Facebook. “Pres. Obama’s legacy: Obamacare and Gay care,” read one post. Another update used the “unelected judges” talking point, widely used by conservative politicians when they don’t agree with a SCOTUS outcome:
Today is a significant setback for all Americans who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, democratic self-government, and marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Court got it wrong: it should not have mandated all 50 states to redefine marriage.
Five unelected judges do not have the power to change the truth about marriage or the truth about the Constitution.
According to The Christian Post, CAAP and other African American Christian leaders threatened mass civil disobedience. “If they rule for same-sex marriage, then we’re going to do the same thing we did for the civil rights movement,” proclaimed Owens. The fact that protesting a law protecting equality is antithetical to the civil rights movement must be lost on Owens and CAAP. Just as notable is the lack of recognition they seem to have for how the black LGBT community has long been at the intersection of racial equality and gay rights.
Two trans women of color were at the forefront of the Stonewall riots, widely considered the beginning of the modern LGBT equality movement. Sylvia Rivera, of Puerto Rican descent, was later one of the founders of both the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance. She and Marsha P. Jackson, who was black, started the Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries, which advocated for homeless LGBT people.
Today’s Black Lives Matter movement, which mirrors so much of the movement of the 1960s, was started when three queer black women created the hashtag—Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—after George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin in 2013. Writing for The Feminist Wire this past October, Garza declared that, “Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.” The Black Lives Matter movement was inclusive and intersectional from the beginning.
The black LGBT community is strong and has been fighting for civil rights for decades. The coalition of black pastors who invoke the civil rights movement when they rail against the rights of gay couples should consider reading some history books.
By: Nathalie Baptiste, The American Prospect, July 3, 2015
July 6, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Black Church Leaders, Civil Rights Movement, Marriage Equality | Black Lives Matter, Black Protestants, Coalition of African American Pastors, Emanuel AME Church, LGBT, Religious Beliefs, White Conservatives, William Owens |
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Minnesotans protesting police violence and institutional racism could face “staggering” fees and criminal charges for a protest at Mall of America, with the City of Bloomington announcing plans to force organizers to pay for the mall’s lost revenue during the exercise of their free speech rights, highlighting important questions about free speech in an era of privatized public spaces.
“Youth leaders of color [are] under attack,” Black Lives Matter-Minnesota said in a statement. “It’s clear that the Bloomington City government, at the behest of one of the largest centers of commerce in the country, hopes to set a precedent that will stifle dissent and instill fear into young people of color and allies who refuse to watch their brothers and sisters get gunned down in the streets with no consequences.”
Around 3,000 people flooded the mall on Saturday, December 20, to sing carols and chants following police killings of unarmed African-American men like Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Dontre Hamilton. The protests were peaceful, and some mall workers stepped outside of their businesses and raised their hands in support. Police closed around 80 stores during the two-and-a-half hour protests, and locked down several mall entrances.
Days after the action, Bloomington City Attorney Sandra Johnson announced that she will not only seek criminal trespass and unlawful assembly charges against the protesters, but will also seek to have them pay for the mall’s lost revenue and overtime for police officers–a cost that she says will be “staggering.”
Can the Mall of America prohibit the exercise of free speech and assembly on its premises? And can it pick-and-choose who it allows to assemble? Last year, for example, the Mall allowed around 7,000 people to gather in the same rotunda to honor a young white man who died of cancer.
The First Amendment protects against government suppression of speech, but not private responses to the exercise of free speech and expression. And the Mall of America is considered private property, despite receiving hundreds of millions in public subsidies since it was built, including an additional $250 million approved last year.
For decades, courts have struggled with how to protect free speech in public forums that have grown increasingly privatized.
Mall “Born of a Union with Government,” but Not a Public Space
In many communities, town squares and downtown business districts have largely been replaced by privately-owned shopping malls, particularly in suburban areas. In Bloomington, Minnesota, for example, there is no public space that offers the same level of visibility as a protest at the Mall of America–which is why protesters chose the location on December 20.
Even traditional public spaces like parks are increasingly owned by private entities, most famously in New York’s Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street was born, and where Occupiers faced eviction after the park’s owners changed the rules.
Mall of America’s status as a public space under the Minnesota state constitution was challenged in the 1990s by anti-fur activists who wanted to protest outside Macy’s. A Minnesota trial court initially found that, thanks to the Mall’s substantial public subsidies, the Mall of America was “born of a union with government” and could only impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on protest.
The Minnesota Supreme Court, though, reversed the lower court in 1998 and declared that the state constitution’s protection of free speech “does not apply to a privately owned shopping center such as the Mall of America, although developed in part with public financing.”
Suburban Malls as Public Spaces?
Initially, however, the U.S. Supreme Court viewed privately-owned suburban shopping malls through the same lens as the public town squares they were replacing.
In 1968, in an opinion authored by Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Court held that suburban shopping malls were serving the same public function as a town square, and therefore should be subject to similar constitutional constraints.
“The shopping center premises are open to the public to the same extent that as the commercial center of a normal town,” Marshall wrote in the case, which involved the Logan Valley Mall in Pennsylvania. “So far as can be determined, the main distinction in practice between use by the public of the Logan Valley Mall and of any other business district … would be that those members of the general public who sought to use the mall premises in a manner contrary to the wishes of the [owners] could be prevented from so doing.”
Subsequent decisions, however, chipped away at that “public function” doctrine, most notably in a 1972 decision authored by Justice Louis Powell.
Powell, a former corporate lawyer who had authored the Powell Memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the previous year, declared in the Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner decision that a mall does not “lose its private character merely because the public is generally invited to use it for designated purposes.”
A new opening for states to protect free speech in shopping malls emerged in the 1980 Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robbins decision. In that case, the Court opened the door to states finding that their own constitutions protect free speech in shopping malls or other privately-owned public spaces. The California constitution’s broader free speech protections, for example, allow for protests and leafletting in that state’s malls.
Minnesota’s Supreme Court, though, came to a different outcome in that 1998 case involving the fur protesters. The state constitution, the justices declared, does not bar Mall of America’s owners from limiting the exercise of free speech on mall property, or choosing to allow some forms of speech but not others.
“The Poorly Financed Causes of Little People” Yield to Corporate Rights
In recent years, the First Amendment has undergone a revolution in the U.S. Supreme Court–in cases like Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, and McCutcheon–but largely in favor of expanding the “free speech rights” of corporations and the wealthy few, rather than protecting what Justice Hugo Black described in 1945 as “the poorly financed causes of little people.” When average Americans raise their voices in protest, they can still be muffled by corporate interests.
By: Brendan Fischer, The Center For Media And Democracy, December 26, 2014
December 29, 2014
Posted by raemd95 |
Corporations, Free Speech, Mall of America | 1st Amendment, Black Lives Matter, Bloomington MN, Police Brutality, Protesters, Racism, Sandra Johnson, SCOTUS |
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