Can't find an average putting Romney at less than +6% over Gingrich, some have him at +12% so it looks like this one is down to how big/little the lead. Big lead, Romney might have leverage to at least get the headlines about him more than his oppenents with nothing to lose, at least ask nicely for them to step aside. Smaller lead, we still have a game here at least as far as headline chasers are concerned. Either way Gingrich and Santorum have little reason not to drag this out, but their credibility in doing so may evaporate tonight. What's amazing is how much it's costing "Mr. Most Electable" (?) and SuperPAC friends, how much energy the campaign is having to expend just to stay ahead of Newt Gingrich. Newt. Gingrich. Romney's not connecting.
by theyoungturks, Tue Jan 31, 2012 at 09:24:18 AM EST
Occupy DC was threatened with a shutdown by police. One protester who taking down notices of the camping ban was tased and the incident was caught on tape. The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
by theyoungturks, Mon Jan 30, 2012 at 05:22:34 PM EST
Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman got an angry response from Republican Congressman Ed Whitfield over the idea that the right wing billionaire Koch brothers should be subpoenaed over their financial interest in the Keystone XL Pipeline. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian break it down.
BooMan points to Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, Jim Worth in the Huffington Post and the continued viability of the Newt Gingrich for President train-wreck and concludes Republicans are rethinking their elation over the Citizens United ruling:
Republicans and Democrats hate the Citizens United ruling for different reasons, but it's important that they both hate it. It means there might be some hope of doing something about it. Now, the easiest way to change the law is to replace one of the five conservative Supreme Court Justicies (Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, or Thomas) with a Justice who thinks they ruled incorrectly. If the president gets a second term in office, there is a decent actuarial chance that he'll get that opportunity. However, as long as the ruling remains the law of the land, the only way to change it is to pass a constitutional amendment. Organizations like Public Citizen and Common Cause are already organizing events to build support for an amendment-drive. Democracy for America has collected over 100,000 signatures in support of overturning Citizens United through a constitutional amendment. DFA's members are in the process of delivering these signatures to their U.S Senators in the coming weeks. These efforts paint a clear picture. The ruling is unpopular with the public. It has created a system that the candidates don't like. If, say, Newt Gingrich wins the GOP nomination and then loses the election very badly, the Republican Establishment may become amenable to the idea that Citizens United was wrongly decided.
It's undeniable Gingrich would be out were it not for a single large donor and SuperPAC support, and that has Republicans seeing a problem with SuperPAC money, what with him being Newt and all. But public disapproval or not I don't see Republicans joining in any effort to curtail the speeding train of money the Supremes set in motion with the ruling. The potential payoff for them is just too sweet. Their efforts to avoid a "Newt" problem in the future will be focused on dissolving the already weak divisions between candidates and their SuperPACs. Newbie Utah Senator Mike Lee's request for his own SuperPAC met with hysterical laughter at the FEC hearing, but it's not the last we'll about it. Lee's own lawyer in that FEC case, Dan Backer, seems to be making a career out of similar court challenges. They will exploit every vaguery and loophole before they'll sign onto any amendment or legislative shackle of the ruling.
Countering Citzens United is going to require massive public education, post facto, on the election we're about to see play out. 2012 will be the first highly visible test of SuperPAC influence and money. And public approval/disapproval of the ruling may shift. The money being spent is influencing voters, which might translate into voters feeling more informed (stranger things have happened). More likely, the barrage of SuperPAC messaging will be digested with skepticism, even irritation, giving Democrats enough leverage to move a vote or two in a second attempt at the DISCLOSE Act.
The primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire have recently concluded, with Mitt Romney winning both. It’s quite probable now that Romney will be the person facing Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.
Both Iowa and New Hampshire have provided detailed exit polls of the Republican electorate. These paint a good picture of the coalition that Romney is assembling.
Of course, exit polls are notoriously unreliable. If exit polls were trustworthy, President John Kerry would just be completing his second term right now. Any exit poll thus ought to be taken with an enormous grain of salt.
Nevertheless, there are some patterns that are appearing pretty consistently in the exit polls of the Republican primaries. These are large enough to be of some note.
Romney’s support increases steadily as a voter’s age increases.
Similarly, support for Romney increases steadily as income increases.
Very conservative voters are not fans of Romney.
Neither are born-again Christians. Which is not to say that their support is nonexistent; plenty of born-again Christians are still voting for Romney.
Those with college degrees appear slightly more disposed to voting for Romney.
Similarly, so are Catholics.
There is one final pattern which the exit polls don’t show, but which also appears consistently in the results: rural voters do not like Romney. He has done the worst in the rural parts of Iowa and New Hampshire. It will be of interest to note whether this pattern prevails in South Carolina.
Not all of these patterns occurred in the last 2008 Republican primaries. During 2008, for instance, very conservative voters gradually became the strongest supporters of Romney. In fact, while there are great similarities between the voters Romney is winning now and those he won in 2004, there are also substantial differences. These are fascinating enough to be the subject of another, much more detailed, post.
Nor should one expect all these patterns to hold throughout the primary season. This is particularly true with respect to religion. In 2008 Catholics were more likely than Protestants to vote for Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire. In later states such as California and Florida, however, Protestants were more favorable to Romney than Catholics (this was true even counting only white Catholics and white Protestants). Why this is so is somewhat of a mystery.
There is one very important consideration which has not appeared yet: race. So far, the voters in the 2012 Republican primary have been overwhelmingly white. Asians and blacks do not vote in Republican primaries in numbers large enough to be counted by exit polls. Hispanics, however, do. In 2008 Romney won 14% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, compared to the 31% he took statewide; he failed to break single digits amongst Cubans. It will be very revealing to see whether Romney can do better than that this year.
Implications for the General Election
Romney appears to do best in the more traditional wing of the Republican Party. His support is concentrated amongst the wealthier, more urbane voters in the party – the part of the party that is commonly represented by the sophisticated businessman. This, I know, will come as a shock to everybody who has been following politics these past few years.
During the general election, Romney will probably do well in places filled with people of the above description. These include areas such as suburban Philadelphia and the northern exurbs of Atlanta. He may struggle to raise much excitement amongst the rural evangelical crowd, the red-hot conservatives who in bygone days voted loyally Democratic. Unfortunately for the president, these voters probably loathe Obama more than any other segment of the electorate.
Probably most useful for a political analyst is the fact that Romney’s support increases in proportion to a voter’s wealth, age, and closeness to a major urban center. These are things about Romney’s coalition which political analysts haven’t known about before (especially the facts about voter income and age).
It will be interesting to see if Romney’s coalition remains the same throughout the next few primaries, or whether it changes. Indeed, Romney’s coalition is actually somewhat different from the one he assembled in the 2008 Republican primaries. The next few posts will compare the exit polls from those primaries and those from the current primaries.
About midway through the 2012 Sundance Film Festival here in Park City, UT, and I wanted to highlight a few panels and documentary films showcased for those interested in the point where independent film and political activism meet. Many of the documentaries selected to screen this year and related panel discussions coalesce around a common theme of activism and change. Links to specific films to watch for below, but first video of two panels streamed live at Sundance.org this week:
Prof. Drew Westen, Sen. Barbara Boxer, and author Magaret Atwood discuss the importance of activists telling a story in the fight against income inequality (highlights only), and The Power of Story: How Docs Changed Change (full session) moderated by CNN's Soledad O’Brien with panelists Robert Redford (Sundance Founder); Sheila Nevins (HBO Documentary Films); and Nick Fraser, (editor of BBC’s Storyville) comparing the art of doc filmmaking with the strategy of successful political activism. Watch:
- 1/2 Revolution (activist footage from Cairo, January 2011) (Raw video I uploaded from the filmmaker Q&A on this one in three parts here. Amazing story.).
Just a handful of the films and discussions taking place I wanted to share (see the full line up here). I have been seeing docs at the festival for the past 17 years, and this is the most concentrated and cogent I've seen the category and panel discussions get in relation to not just the stories the filmmakers are trying to tell, but the relationship between those stories and grassroots activism. To say the overall themes of Occupy Wall Street, revolution, reclamation, and income disparity are present at the 2012 festival would be both obvious and an understatement.
Watch for them to see a larger theatrical or cable tv release later this year.
Newt Gingrich trounced Mitt Romney in South Carolina, ensuring that the race for the GOP nomination will likely continue for weeks to come. The Republican establishment may have settled on Romney, but voters keep throwing their support behind the anti-Romney -- whichever candidate of the moment sounds as different from the supposedly “moderate” Massachusetts governor as possible.
Right now, Gingrich is the one generating all the passion. But if one goes by their campaign statements, Gingrich differs from Romney more in style (and personal life) than in substance. Gingrich has more spit and fire in him, but he and Romney share many views, including their similarly outdated approach to energy development.
We’ve heard the same tired ideas during the primaries, and we will hear them again in the Republican response to the State of the Union Address on Tuesday night: candidates offer plenty of attacks on Obama, but no new vision for America’s energy future.
Gingrich may be the man who wrote the book, Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less: A Handbook for Solving Our Energy Crisis, but Romney is just as eager to rely on the same fossil fuels we’ve been using for the past 100 years. Romney’s energy blueprint, included in his “Believe in America” economic plan, calls for flinging open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy companies, sinking wells into the deepwater, and expanding fracking in the Marcellus Shale, despite a long list of environmental and public health concerns (not to mention small earthquakes).
Neither Romney nor Gingrich has a fresh plan for an energy future built on innovation and cutting-edge technology. Neither one talks about how better-performing cars are putting 150,000 Americans to work right now and helping slash our oil addiction at the same time. Neither one trumpets the fact that American engineers are already making breakthroughs in the next generation of solar technology. And neither one of them urges America to lead what has been estimated as the $243 billion global clean energy market.
Instead, both Romney and Gingrich seem to view renewable technologies as a wasteful distraction. This despite the fact that the Department of Defense—the nation’s largest consumer of energy—has pledged to get 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025 because of national security concerns.
The candidates like to demagogue about energy independence, but they have no plan to achieve it besides doing more of the same—an approach that hasn’t worked so far. We saw it in Gingrich’s acceptance speech in South Carolina. “I want America to become so energy independent that no American president ever again bows to a Saudi king.” That is a fine aspiration, but instead of encouraging Detroit to build more fuel-efficient engines or farmers to grow sustainable biofuels, he called for expanding offshore drilling and approving the Keystone XL pipeline.
When your home has 1.6 percent of the globe’s proven oil reserves and you consume 26 percent of the world’s supply, there is a limit to how much you can influence supply. That's not politics; it's geology.
And building a pipeline from a friendly ally won’t help much when the pipeline operators routinely say in the Canadian press that a primary goal of Keystone XL is to access Asian markets. The same operators have refused in Congressional testimony to commit to selling the majority of their oil to the United States. Instead, they are rerouting it out of the Midwest and into the “Foreign Trade Zone” in Port Arthur, Texas, where companies get incentives to export from of the United States.
Approving a pipeline to help dirty tar sands oil get to Asia is not a long-term plan for America’s energy system. Opening more ocean waters to drilling won’t position us to lead the next generation of energy breakthroughs. But that doesn’t stop Gingrich and Romney from singing the same old song again and again.
President Obama recognizes that America’s energy leadership will be built on clean technologies. Last week he kicked off his presidential campaign advertising with an ad devoted to the economic power of clean energy. I expect he will highlight it again in the State of the Union.
Here is how I expect the GOP candidates to respond: They will criticize Obama’s clean energy programs and sprinkle in fossil fuel buzzwords like Keystone and drilling. But their complaints can’t cover the fact that they have no fresh ideas, no innovation, and no groundbreaking vision for America’s energy future.
Meet Mansimran. He’s an 18 year old all-American guy who likes Starbucks, hoops, and robotics. He’s a student, an older brother, and an active member of his Sikh religious community. Sometimes, when strangers see his turban, and the color of his skin, they lean out their car window and call him a “terrorist.”
He’s not alone: especially since September 11, Sikh Americans and other communities have become targets of discrimination, racial profiling and bullying, and hate crimes. Counterterrorism measures have inflamed fear, fostered an atmosphere of distrust and even violated human rights. Ten years later, members of many immigrant communities continue to be viewed as suspects by law enforcement, to encounter hatred and violence, and be subjected to bias at the workplace and bullying in schools. One survey found that, even 6 years after the events of 2001, 75% of Sikh male schoolchildren in New York had been teased or harassed on the basis of their religious identity.
How does Mansimran respond? “My response is, ‘Come over here, sit down, I’ll tell you about Sikhism, I’ll tell you who I am,” he explains. He says in the video, “If I see somebody being mean to somebody else, I would protect that person. I would go up to the bully and be like, ‘Why are you doing this? What are you doing?’ I’m obliged by my religion..and my family — you know, don’t do the wrong thing, and stand up for the right thing.”
In 2011, Mansimran represented his community at the United Sikhs summit in Washington D.C, where he spoke to members of Congress about supporting Sikh human rights and dignity and respect across cultures.
Mansimran totally takes it in stride — but it shouldn’t be that way in the first place. We are all on the same team, after all — and we should take a page from Mansimran’s playbook by standing up against racial profiling and bullying, reaching out across differences, upholding human rights, and treating everyone around us with the American — and human-rights — values of dignity, equality, and respect.
You can stand with him — and against racist bullying — by getting to know him and sharing his video profile.
How to ACT:
SHARE this video with 10 friends on Facebook and Twitter to speak out for diversity and stand up against bullying. Post on Facebook, Twitter, and your other favorite social networking spaces.
LEARN about racial profiling and racial justice by visiting our ‘about’ section and following the hashtag #rfair.
DOWNLOAD and share the song “turBAN” by G.N.E. (It’s in the video, it’s awesome, and it’s free!).
Why? Because by sharing the video you are speaking out for racial justice and standing up to bullying.
Because we’re all on the same team.
(And because you won’t be able to get the song out of your head.)
by Texas Nate, Sun Jan 15, 2012 at 09:40:58 PM EST
Two kind of totally unrelated stories here but they both illustrate the way corporate power in the U.S. is completely out of hand.
First up, the pox that calls itself "tort reform" but is really a hugely successful attempt to choke off access to the courts for ordinary citizens. Here's an op-ed by filmmaker Susan Saladoff about her new documentary "Hot Coffee":
Taking away people’s rights to access the courts is not that new for corporations. It has been going on for more than 25 years. It has been done through legislation, judicial elections, contractually and supported by a massive, corporate-funded public relations campaign.
Most Americans, however, have no idea – and, again, don’t seem to care — until something bad happens to them personally. Then, people understand, usually for the first time, how their constitutional rights — which stem from the 7th Amendment — have been taken away.
And after the jump is some info on the new corporate assault on ICANN, the entity that manages top level domain names on the Internet.
“There’s a lot of movement at the White House,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen. “I just had a meeting at the White House counsel’s office, trying to encourage them to move forward with the executive order. They have the perfect window of opportunity to get the executive order done.”
“It’s simple—any company that is paid with taxpayer dollars should be required to disclose political contributions,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who has pushed for the White House to issue the order. “With public dollars come public responsibilities, and I hope President Obama will issue his executive order right away.”
The order, if issued, would likely be the only campaign finance initiative to emerge from Washington this year as nothing is expected from Congress.
"Many of the government contractors that would be captured under the executive order probably are the big contributors to the Chamber of Commerce, so as a result, the chamber is pursuing their battle against this with extreme vigilance," said Craig Holman, lobbyist for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, one of 30 organizations that sent Obama a letter last week urging him to sign the order.
Nonprofit 501(c) groups, as the third-party groups are legally known, plowed at least $134 million from secret donors into the last election — $119 million of which was spent by GOP allies, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
The order would require disclosure of any contribution over $5,000, and has the signature support of 62 House Democrats. Worth noting in advance of the pearl clutching over corporate free-speech, the information is mostly available already. The order would simply centralize the info in one public database, and clarify penalties for non-compliance.
jeromearmstrong Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years By Republicans (and Quickly Imitated by Democrats http://bit.ly/ewXlXI #bblue
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