All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[aja_christopher]

"New Memo Reveals the Census Question Was Added to Boost White Voting Power"

"If we had a fair Supreme Court not driven by partisanship in its most political cases, Thursday’s blockbuster revelation in the census case would lead the court to unanimously rule in Department of Commerce v. New York to exclude the controversial citizenship question from the decennial survey. Those newly revealed documents show that the Trump administration’s purpose in putting the citizenship question on the upcoming census was not its stated one to help Hispanic voters under the Voting Rights Act, but rather to create policy that would be “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites.”

It’s difficult to produce a greater smoking gun than explicitly saying you are hoping to help the GOP by increasing white voting power. But this revelation, coming from the hard drive of a deceased Republican political operative and made available to Common Cause by his estranged daughter, is ironically more likely to lead the Republican-appointed conservative justices on the Supreme Court to allow the administration to include the question that would help states dilute the power of Hispanic voters.

But this revelation, coming from the hard drive of a deceased Republican political operative and made available to Common Cause by his estranged daughter, is ironically more likely to lead the Republican-appointed conservative justices on the Supreme Court to allow the administration to include the question that would help states dilute the power of Hispanic voters.

The New York Times reported that the hard drive of the late Republican redistricting guru Thomas B. Hofeller contained documents indicating that the real purpose of including the citizenship question was to allow Republicans to draw new congressional, state, and local legislative districts using equal numbers of eligible voters in each district, not equal numbers of persons, a standard that would greatly reduce the power of Hispanics and Democrats in places like Texas.

According to the Times, files on Hofeller’s hard drives, subpoenaed in litigation concerning North Carolina redistricting, show that Hofeller “wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act—the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...ers-alito.html

[Jack Dracula]

It's pretty obvious why. Small town America, to these Republicans, is small town White Consrvative America.

Once you start moving immigrants in, to them, it's like transforming "Leave it to Beaver" into "Good Times". It's like, this patient needs a blood transfusion, but only blood from WASPS will do. Let the patient die if we don't have the right kind of blood.

I have some bad news for Republicans, it's happening anyway. Most of the smaller cities with manufacturing and meat-packing industries are growing due to minorities moving up from southern states to work those jobs that children of established, middle-class white families don't want. We have a large Hispanic and Somali immigrant population in my area. As their families grow, they're moving to smaller towns to work agricultural jobs. The rural, white, Midwestern stereotype is changing and I think it had a lot to do with Trump gaining so much traction with white voters out here.

[ed2962]

Frankly, the notion of being assimilated by white America should be abhorrent to any right thinking person, though there are a baffling number of people all too willing to forsake their heritage for sweater vests, smooth jazz, and Cheesecake Factories.

Don't let cable TV fool you...in real life minorities consume all those things.

[ed2962]

I have some bad news for Republicans, it's happening anyway. Most of the smaller cities with manufacturing and meat-packing industries are growing due to minorities moving up from southern states to work those jobs that children of established, middle-class white families don't want. We have a large Hispanic and Somali immigrant population in my area. As their families grow, they're moving to smaller towns to work agricultural jobs. The rural, white, Midwestern stereotype is changing and I think it had a lot to do with Trump gaining so much traction with white voters out here.

I was going to make a similar point. Over the last several years, small towns and cities have been taking in refugees and immigrants and were happy to do so. They need people to work certain jobs and contribute to the local economy. It's really just Trump and certain other folks that have hyped up the anti-immigrant thing.

[Kirby101]

Trump is 66 points ahead of Weld in a Republican primary poll.

They love their guy.

Because GOP voters are racist Trumpsters.

[Tami]

Because GOP voters are racist Trumpsters.

I predict that Trump will refuse to debate ANYONE. Republicans or Democrats. He knows he can't get away with what he did in 2015/2016 this time.

[Gray Lensman]

Trump is 66 points ahead of Weld in a Republican primary poll.

They love their guy.

The Republicans who would have voted against Trump have either fallen in line, or have changed party affiliation like I did.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Michael Peroutka, a former member of the Constitution Party who ran for president on that ticket back in 2004, and in 2014, shifted his party to Republican to run for a seat on the Maryland Arundel County Council. While his current political rank might seem pretty low compared to being a one-time presidential candidate, Peroutka is a worthy enough person to profile for his influence, as he has long been a financial supporter of dim-witted Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, in his quest to violate the separation of church and state that our Constitution guarantees by putting Ten Commandments monuments up in courthouses. But that’s not where Peroutka’s extremism stops… he’s also a long time member of the NeoConfederate group, the League of the South, and when called out on that fact, once responded, “I’m not a Neo-Confederate, if anything I want to be just a True Confederate.” We covered an extensive list of racist and homophobic comments from Peroutka, as well as his calls to arrest all women who get abortions, and using his media profile to claim that Planned Parenthood stalks children and hopes they get pregnant so they can abort their own unborn children. He’s also disgustingly anti-science, to boot, having donated an allosaurus skeleton to a Creationalist museum that teaches children the Earth is only 4,300 years old, and that the Columbine shooting massacre happened because evolution was being taught in public schools. We cannot describe him as terrifyingly bigoted and insane… but at least he doesn’t hold a higher office than he does, currently.


It was in 2016, 2017, and 2018, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented its original profile of the four term U.S. House Representative for Illinois’ 16th Congressional District, Adam Kinzinger, who not only bought into the Center for Medical Progress’ bogus “sting” video that illegally taped a Planned Parenthood executive, comparing the fraudulent footage to concentration Camp experiments on conservative talk radio. And it’s part of that sort of reaction that the GOP had that served as a stochastic terror trigger to send a man named Robert Lewis Dear over the edge, and to shoot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. But Kinzinger wasn’t satisfied with the violence his party incited, not at all. During the five hour siege that left three people dead, and many others hospitalized or pinned inside the building, Adam Kinzinger was live on CNN, and said he expected an apology from Planned Parenthood if it turned out they were not the intended target of the shooter. We’ll repeat that… Kinzinger demanded an apology from the organization attacked while there was still gunfire being heard, and an active shooter was still attacking them. Kinzinger has never apologized for his remarks. His voting record also is highly conservative across the board, and not surprisingly, very much so on abortion rights.

And now, the brutally depressing part… in spite of all members of Congress having a pathetically low approval rating, Adam Kinzinger’s heartless comments about victims of a mass shooting while they were still laid up in a hospital, or that Kinzinger that he decided to send out a mailer of him taking a photo with some of his constituents which he used to make an ad mailer touting his pro-life record without their consent… his district only has a +4 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index... Kinzinger still won re-election in 2018 with 59% of the vote. Thus, his constituents have had to put up with representation like this during his current term:

• February 28th, 2019: Adam Kinzinger votes against HR 1112, a bill which would have required universal background checks on all firearm purchases, and close the gun show loophole.
• March 14th, 2019: Rep. Kinzinger votes against HJR 46, which sane members of Congress voted for to reject Donald Trump’s “national emergency” regarding the U.S. border and his attempts to reallocate funds for a border wall without Congressional approval.

Adam Kinzinger has also ended up in a controversy because he criticized Democratic Gov. Tony Evers for removing National Guard troops from the U.S./Mexico border that were requested to be sent there by Donald Trump. Kinzinger is a reservist, and could face discipline for publicly criticizing his own orders to stand down. Of course, he probably only made the statement in the first place to win the approval of Trump, and hope it would allow him to be named Air Force Secretary. Since Donald Trump already nominates the most unqualified people to postiions of power. So we’ll have to watch and see if Trump looks up from Twitter to do something that foolish.

[ZombieHavoc]

It's cool. If I supported trump I'd be too ashamed to admitted to.

I'm curious what I've said that implies that?

Every post I've ever made in this version of the thread, plus the 1000-page previous thread has been firmly and unequivocally anti-Trump.

I'm pretty sure even the one you quoted for your original thing referring to me as a Trump supporter didn't come across as a Trump supporting comment...because it was regarding how tyring to impeach the dude will help him win and that's something we need to avoid.

So...?

I did see a bumper sticker once that said "Vote Trump. No One Has To Know."

[ZombieHavoc]

That isn't exactly disproving my take on the liberal view.

Ha, sick burn.

[ZombieHavoc]

Technically, the point on American privilege isn't a white supremacist one, since it doesn't suggest there should be efforts to keep minorities down.

Technically, I don't think I said the "American provilege" thing was a white supremacist take. I said it was an assinine thing my Shapiro-cultist ex-friend used to say.

[SquirrelMan]

Technically, I don't think I said the "American provilege" thing was a white supremacist take. I said it was an assinine thing my Shapiro-cultist ex-friend used to say.

Und it is.

[JCAll]

BINGO!! You hit the nail dead on the head! This is all about preserving white conservatism while keeping minorities out at any cost, even if it means a slow and painful death of communities throughout small town America. The notion of assimilating cultures of other races into that dynamic is flat out abhorrent to right wingers, they'd literally rather die than have that happen. And, chances are they probably will.

I remember as a kid my town rejected any attempt by Mexican immigrants to settle here when a nearby factory was opened, I tie that directly to why the town is now an abandoned ruin.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I predict that Trump will refuse to debate ANYONE. Republicans or Democrats. He knows he can't get away with what he did in 2015/2016 this time.

I believe he would do debates. With his monstrous ego, Trump thinks he’s untouchable and can simply shout over and/or insult opponents like the schoolyard bully he is.

[ZombieHavoc]

It also doesn't matter if he does debates because no matter what, as long as he calls his opponent whatever nickname he has for them, his supporters will deem him victorious in that debate and that he desroyed a lib for the sake of America.

We are in mighty fine shape indeed, with a well educated electorate.