The National Journal has published a deep piece on the obsolescence of the “Reagan Democrat.” More precisely, it discusses the hardening reality in which the Democratic Party doesn’t need to rely on white conservative voters to win the White House anymore if it continues to strengthen its progressive multi-cultural and younger coalition.
With the GOP and the times, white conservative voters turned inward into a tribe of neo-fascists susceptible to mass paranoia, easily motivated to hatred of everything and everyone not exactly like them.
On issues from gay rights to gun control, immigration reform, and climate change—all of which he highlighted in his ringing Inaugural Address last week—Obama is now unreservedly articulating the preferences of the Democratic “coalition of the ascendant??? centered on minorities, the millennial generation, and socially liberal upscale whites, especially women. Across all of these issues, and many others such as the pace of withdrawal from Afghanistan and ending the ban on women in combat, Obama is displaying much less concern than most national Democratic leaders since the 1960s about antagonizing culturally conservative blue-collar, older, and rural whites, many of whom oppose them …
[The] ongoing racial and ideological sorting of the electorate has rapidly reduced the Democrats’ dependence on those voters. In 2012, Obama lost more than three-fifths of noncollege whites and whites older than 45; he carried only one-third of noncollege white men, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale was buried in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide. Yet Obama nonetheless won a solid victory by posting strong numbers with minorities (a combined 80 percent), the millennials (60 percent), and college-educated white women (46 percent overall and more in many key states); moreover, each of those groups expanded its share of the total vote. (For the first time, white women with college degrees cast more votes last year than white men without them.)
Similarly, Democrats last November regained House seats in districts that are more racially diverse than the national average, while continuing to suffer losses in those more heavily white: After 2012, Democrats hold just 31 of the 143 districts in which whites constitute at least 80 percent of the population.
In the Senate, the Democratic majority still relies on a significant number of members from states that lean Republican in presidential politics. But, overall, the pattern of the party’s presidential and congressional support in 2012 largely fulfilled the dreams of liberal strategists from the early 1970s, who believed Democrats could build a more ideologically forceful party if they reduced their reliance on conservative whites. As Richard Nixon’s landslide defeat of George McGovern in 1972 demonstrated, a coalition of minorities, young people, and socially liberal upscale whites was far from a majority. Four decades later, amid the headwind of a grueling recovery from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Obama emphatically proved the opposite. The result is that the president, to a striking extent, appears unshackled from the fear of alienating conservative white voters …
AN internet geek from Burnley who was caught with an Al-Qaeda manual and the Anarchist’s Cookbook has been told he should spend less time online.
But Mr Justice Fulford, sitting at the Old Bailey, ruled that Niall Florence, 21, was not a terrorist but a ‘young and naive computer addict’.
Florence was auctioning off copies of the Anarchist’s Cookbook, the infamous 1971 guide to bomb-making, lock-picking and credit card fraud, on the e-Bay website.
And he sold 25 copies, at £1 each, before police swooped on his parents’ home in St Cuthbert’s Street in December 2011 …
Police also found an Al Qaeda jihadist training manual, during the raid, and instructions on how to make the poison ricin.
Florence was about eleven years old when the original suspects in the London ricin trial were arrested.
Florence received a suspended sentence on convictions for “collecting a record of information for terrorist purposes and one count of disseminating terrorist publications.”
The judge admitted he recognized Florence was not a terrorist and “posed no threat to the public.”
The New York Times, which today (Jan. 31) detailed a massive attack upon its computer systems, is certainly not the first U.S. company to be hit by hackers apparently working for Chinese interests.
Hundreds of Western companies, organizations and government agencies have been attacked by hackers from China over the past five years. But the Times is among the few companies — Google is another — willing both to disclose details of the attack and to accuse Beijing of being behind it …
George Smith, a senior fellow at the Alexandria, Va., think tank GlobalSecurity.org, believes corporations might be concerned that blaming China will make it harder to do business in China.
“The Chinese actually have been blamed for a long time,” Smith said. “However, many U.S. multi-nationals, unsurprisingly, have business in China and aims directed at exploiting markets there.
“You can see where such a business would think it’s in a bind if it needs permissions and cooperation from [the] Chinese central government and, at the same time, finds out it has been penetrated by cyber-espionage efforts that may originate from the same.”
There’s more, quote from Sophos and F-Secure on the nature of the business world in relation to such intrusions.
The New York Times is in a unique position. Its reputation and capabilities are based on the bedrock of truth and a relative transparency in the way it conducts news gathering and publishing.
Most of corporate America does is not built on any such foundation. US businesses are not at all transparent. Hacking, intrusions of any kind, exacerbate their already existing environments of paranoia and secrecy.
Everywhere, it’s part of what WhiteManistan has to say. They all talk like this and say it so often it would sound better if they sang it. Some do, using an assortment of similar refrains.
Which is what this is about. From the comments for Gun Nut Folk Tune. When you sing it for them, the truth apparently is of a lower moral standard. Should leave the country, too.
Yesterday I was reading Howard K. Smith’s “Last Train from Berlin,” published in 1941 before this country entered the war. It’s an exceptional piece of reporting on the Nazi capitol just as it was beginning to sink in to the people of Germany that Hitler was not going to win the war and the day of reckoning, when it arrived, would be terrible. It eloquently captures the bleakness of Nazi Germany and a growing fear among its citizens.
Entertainment died in Nazi Germany because the best of it involves telling the truth. But truth was forbidden. And most of the country’s artistic talent had either been driven out, imprisoned or killed.
This caused a crash in movie attendance. Smith writes about German movies made to glorify the war effort. And one he picks to describe has some resonance when compared with the US taste for war movies during the last decade — which is nonexistent. The recent thing involving the good guys (or woman) torturing a bad guy and the hunt for bin Laden.
Wrote Smith:
The [German propaganda films] can be exhaustively described by a five-letter word. Lousy. Take the one called “Stukas.” It was a monotonous film about a bunch of obstreperous adolescents who dive-bombed things and people. They bombed everything and everybody. That was all the whole film was — just one bombing after another. Finally the hero gets bored with bombing and lost interest in life. So they took him off to the Bayreuth music festival, where he listened to a few lines of Wagnerian music, his soul began to breathe again, he got visions of the Fuhrer and guns blazing away, so he impolitely left right in the middle of the first act and dashed back and started bombing things again, with the old gusto.
That’s wonderful writing. And the entire piece is like that.
Americans no more want to see movies from Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever, than the people of Berlin wanted to see “Stukas” in the autumn of 1941. What, a real movie called “Day of the Drones,” showing the remote pilots between flying missions in a windowless building and returning to their tract homes in the suburbs, would have an audience?
And it made me think about why I also detest the journalism that has evolved to cover the war on terror and the technology of America’s national security industry. Because it’s all like “Stukas” must have been. Deadening and stupid.
Even when its young reporters work in some pallid snark, between the lot they never come up with anything even remotely as supercilious or appropriate as what’s in Last Train from Berlin.
The reasons for that have always been fairly obvious. They can’t have the natsec biz and the Pentagon thinking they’re combative.
“The only things that are not trash are their guns, which are handsome and terrifying,” writes Smith of the arms in Berlin. “The biggest and handsomest [are] anti-aircraft cannon mounted on a tower which, itself looks like a fantastic monstrosity from a lost world, or another planet. It is huge and positively frightening just to look at (Nazis like to hear it described this way; they are specialists in fright propaganda. But the world has now advanced beyond the stage of being frightened in any decisive way by anything the Nazis do or create.)”
