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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (37405)	9/25/2009 8:09:51 PM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Obama is an outstanding teleprompter reader. Apparently that is the most valuable skill to people who are not informed but feel like voting anyway.

To: KLP who wrote (37405)	11/13/2009 12:10:33 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

What White Women Want, Surprisingly the GOP By David Paul Kuhn November 13, 2009 This week, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, told reporters the GOP offers a "back-of-the-hand treatment to women." Later she said two conservative female representatives only serve to further "repulse women." You see, Schultz said on MSNBC, Republicans "don't really get very many women when it comes to elections." The week before, in Virginia, the Republican gubernatorial candidate won women. And in blue New Jersey, the Republican lost women but won white women by 18 percentage points. Last year, John McCain won a majority of the white female vote. They sum to more than 25 million women. Democrats, so many forget, have not won a majority of white women since 1964. Few subjects evoke more wrongheaded conventional wisdom than the gender gap. Consider a more common expression of the same factoid. In Democratic commenter Steve McMahon's words, "the Republican party is becoming, regressing to become, a white male southern party." NPR's Juan Williams said the GOP was a "regional southern party of white men." Even Republican strategist Mike Murphy called his GOP "the party of white males." Or as BBC's Katty Kay framed the danger, Republicans "don't want to end up being the party of white men." The white part is correct. It goes without saying that Republicans must, foremost, win new minority voters. And Republicans do fare significantly better with white men than women. But take BBC's Kay. She's a fair-minded pundit and has written a book about women. But even Kay overlooks that the GOP consistently wins white women. Republicans do, to be certain, have women troubles. Democrats have won a majority of women in every presidential election since 1996. The women most behind Democrats—women of color, college educated women, single and young women—are all a growing share of the electorate. But Republicans' ranks are hardly without women. Republicans have won roughly a third of Hispanic women in the last three presidential races -- worth noting, though nothing to brag about. GOP women are indeed, even more than men, overwhelmingly white. Republican women are also more likely to be married, more likely to not work outside the home and more likely to not live in an urban area. It is a bloc of voters that is literally furthest from the political class -- meaning not highly represented in the DC-NYC corridor (unless Staten Island is included). But Democrats cannot afford to ignore these women. More white women currently disapprove of Obama's job performance than approve, 48 to 45 percent respectively, according to Gallup polling. Last year, Obama made gains with white men compared to Al Gore. But Obama fared worse than Gore with white women. As for the much-discussed white suburban women's vote, they went to McCain. The gender gap joined the popular lexicon in the early 1980s. Democrats had lost millions of white men. That trend enhanced the difference in male and female voting patterns. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan won roughly the same share of white women as Gerald Ford four years earlier. But in 1980, women became a larger share of the electorate. The successes of feminism also brought a wave of women into the professional world. Many of the reporters and Democratic strategists who were following the gender gap were also women breaking professional barriers themselves. They presumed the feminist platform would woo large swaths of women to vote blue. Yet it was not that simple. Even among white women, where feminist identity is the strongest, only 6 percent said in 1980 that the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion were the issues that mattered most to them. Reagan narrowly won women that year. Four years later, Reagan won women by a 12-point margin. It took another decade for Democrats to win women's strong loyalty. By 1996, Bill Clinton won a majority of women -- but still not a majority of white women. Clinton's reelection marks the only year Democrats have won a plurality of the white female vote since 1980. In 1992 and 2000, white women broke evenly between the two major parties. This was the gender backdrop that Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepped before this week. She was speaking up for, as is her job, many liberal women who felt stepped on. There was the recent ugly episode on the House floor. Some male GOP representatives had repeatedly interrupted, and shouted down, a group of Democratic female lawmakers. Then there was the provision restricting abortion coverage. It was added at the eleventh hour to the House health care bill. The provision was meant to please Democratic moderates. It angered many more liberal women. The bulk of Schultz's broadsides were focused on Republicans, however. She told reporters that there was a "clear sense that Republicans were opposed to our efforts at advancing women's health interests." Schultz, and many liberal women alike, forget the tens of millions of women who view women's interests differently. White women are the largest bloc of social conservatives. And that indeed has regional implications. Half of all social conservatives live in the South. But it would be a mistake, as is true of men as well, to limit the GOP's white female appeal to the South. Consider that McCain won a majority of working class white women in the Midwest and West. That bloc was roughly the size of the entire Hispanic vote in 2008. And no political observer would dare say that the Democrats "don't really get very many" Hispanics. After all, that would be ridiculous. David Paul Kuhn is the Chief Political Correspondent for RealClearPolitics and the author of The Neglected Voter. He can be reached at david@realclearpolitics.com and his writing followed via RSS realclearpolitics.com

To: KLP who wrote (37405)	5/19/2010 1:55:18 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Our Founders' Solutions for Illegal Immigration, Part 1 by Chuck Norris 05/18/2010 With his thick Austrian accent, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger quipped in his commencement address at Emory University this past week: "I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me." It seems that the whole country is taking sides in the battle over the border in Arizona. Yet it truly remains the tip of the iceberg of our immigration troubles. Spurred on by the national debate, at least 10 other states are seeking to enact tougher immigration laws. Now more than ever, we must protect our borders and sovereignty, by providing genuine solutions to the dangers of American boundary fluidity. With estimates showing that by 2060 America will add 167 million people (37 million immigrants today will multiply into 105 million then), it is imperative for us to do more to solve this crisis. Now is the time to beat the doors of change and save the boundaries and future of America. But the federal government has failed miserably to produce a viable solution to the illegal immigration crisis. Amnesty is not the answer. And immigration laws aren't effective if we continue to dodge or ignore them. Furthermore, globalization efforts have only confused security matters, further endangering our borders and national identity -- our sovereignty. And the question that keeps coming to my mind is: How is it that we can secure borders in the Middle East but can't secure our own? From America's birth, our Founders struggled, too, with international enemies and border troubles, from the sea of Tripoli to the western frontier. While welcoming the poor, downtrodden and persecuted from every country, they also had to protect the sacred soil they called home from unwanted intruders. America's Founders also were concerned with properly assimilating immigrants so that their presence would be positive upon the culture. George Washington wrote, "By an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people." Thomas Jefferson, hailed as one of the most inclusive among the Founders, worried that some immigrants would leave more restrictive governments and not be able to handle American freedoms, leading to cultural corruption and "an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass." And Alexander Hamilton insisted that "the safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on the love of country, which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family." According to the Declaration of Independence, "obstructing the Laws for the Naturalization of Foreigners" was one of the objections leveled against Britain that warranted the American colonists' seceding. Yet even the Founders themselves believed that a total open-door policy for immigrants would only lead to complete community and cultural chaos. We are discussing and debating new ways to resolve the social crisis we call illegal immigration, but our Founders pointed the way more than 200 years ago. Like enrolling in an Ivy League school, American citizenship was considered and promoted by them as a high honor. James Madison shared the collective sentiment back then when he stated, "I do not wish that any man should acquire the privilege, but such as would be a real addition to the wealth or strength of the United States." Hence, they processed applicants and selected only the ones who would contribute to the building up and advancement of their grand experiment called America. Therefore, our Founders enforced four basic requirements for "enrollment and acceptance" into American citizenry. We still utilize them (at least in policy) to this day, but we desperately need to enforce them. The Heritage Foundation summarizes: "Key criteria for citizenship of the Naturalization Act of 1795 remain part of American law. These include (1) five years of (lawful) residence within the United States; (2) a 'good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States'; (3) the taking of a formal oath to support the Constitution and to renounce any foreign allegiance; and (4) the renunciation of any hereditary titles." Just think if such immigration tenets were taught in schools such as Live Oak High School, in Northern California, where kids are confused about allegiances to flags and countries. And just think if the federal government actually enforced such tenets! Arizona and the 10 other states following suit wouldn't even need to go out on a limb and create their own immigration laws as states did prior to our Constitution. If we held citizenship in the same high esteem as our Founders and simply enforced the laws we already have, we wouldn't be in this illegal immigration pickle today. Next week, Chuck will lay out his plan, drawing inspiration from our Founders, for dealing with the 12 million-plus illegal immigrants in our country today. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr. Norris is a Martial arts master, actor, and concerned citizen. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- humanevents.com