Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Whose Airport Security?
Check out who dominates that industry. They also dominate telecommunications, listening in on, for example, every telephone call into or out of the United States. From a British perspective, isn't privatisation wonderful?
Workers To Lose Ninety Per Cent Of Royal Mail
As ought to be the headline.
They already own one hundred per cent of it. We all do.
And was there ever a more glaring example of how public ownership is British ownership, or of how support for the "free" market is anti-conservative in general and unpatriotic in particular?
They already own one hundred per cent of it. We all do.
And was there ever a more glaring example of how public ownership is British ownership, or of how support for the "free" market is anti-conservative in general and unpatriotic in particular?
Common Justice
It should have not have taken the constitutionally monstrous Supreme Court, implementing a foreign document by reference to a foreign precedent, to give defendants in Scotland a minimum standard of justice and liberty. In each part of the United Kingdom, there are exemplary safeguards alongside outrageous abuses. The former from each part should be used to redress the latter in each part. Only one body can do that: the Parliament of the United Kingdom. When will it?
The Blunkett Formula
David Blunkett's question at PMQs was very much a sign of the times. He admitted that he was only joking about a "White Rose Parliament". But he was not joking about the money. Nor will a lot of other people be joking about the money. One for Ed Miliband, if he has any sense.
Xtreme No More
Any ideas for characters to appear in the new look old look, de-rebranded, back-to-its-roots Dandy?
Are The Democrats Worth Defending?
Bruce A. Dixon writes:
Four years ago it was the eve of the November 2006 election, Bush's last midterm. In what was the second issue of Black Agenda Report (this is issue 213) we wrote about the imminent changeover of the House of Representatives from Republican to Democratic rule. Our first dozen issues are lost, but we vividly recall what was written on this occasion.
After 12 years of spectacularly corrupt and aggressively pro-corporate Republican domination, the House and likely the Senate too, would be ruled by Democrats. Expectations were high.
Four years ago a hundred members of the House of Representatives had signed on as co-sponsors of one or more bills to impeach Dick Cheney and George Bush. One of them was Detroit's John Conyers, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, who would chair the House Judiciary Committee beginning in January 2007, and thus have the unquestioned legal power to begin hearings on the question of impeachment. Authoritative polls repeatedly showed that a a narrow majority of the American people, and an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters favored impeachment and criminal investigation of the Bush-Cheney regime on a broad front, from waging illegal wars to torture, lying to Congress, international kidnapping, secret imprisonment without trial and tapping the phone and email of millions of Americans. Rep. Conyers was also a perennial sponsor of reparations, antiwar and single payer health care measures, causes which could surely be advanced by his long awaited ascension to power.
Democrats had always massively opposed the Iraq war, and millions were perfectly aware that a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives could bring this unjust war to a halt over any presidential objection by simply refusing to fund it.
The fall of 2006 was only a year after Katrina. The Republican congress had refused to investigate the federal role in the deaths of uncounted thousands, while the White House and military authorities barred journalists from photographing or observing the recovery of bodies. Federal, state and local authorities were making return of hundreds of thousands of residents, mostly black, impossible. A Democratic congress, some imagined, might turn this around too.
Under Democratic rule Rep. Bennie Thompson (D MS) of the Congressional Black Caucus would chair the new House Committee on Homeland Security. With his committee's subpoena power Thompson could, if he chose, investigate the role of Blackwater and other US mercenary companies in New Orleans and around the world and make people tell the truth under penalty of prison. Harlem's Charlie Rangel, another senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus would chair the House Ways and Means Committee, a position from which he could begin rolling back the regressive Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
Of course, none of this happened. It's no exaggeration to say that every single progressive expectation of the Democratic majority in the House over the last four years has been disappointed or betrayed. In the final year of Republican House rule, Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi ordered the Congressional Black Caucus NOT to hold its own hearings on Katrina, and refused to call them herself, for fear that voters might see Democrats as the party of those undeserving colored people. Only Georgia's Rep. Cynthia McKinney defied Pelosi and House Democratic leaders to hold her own hearings, which were boycotted by all but one of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Between the November 2006 election and the beginning of the new Democratic party controlled Congress in January 2007, John Conyers walked back from his pro-impeachment stand, even having demonstrators and former staffers arrested outside his office when they tried to meet with him. Among the pitiful excuses Conyers offered for not convening impeachment hearings was that “Fox News would have a field day,” the votes to convict them in the Senate weren't there, (How Conyers knew that in advance of evidence or even hearings remains a mystery!) and that Bush-Cheney would be history in two more years anyhow.
But as David Swanson has pointed out, even if impeachment could not be won, calling the hearings would have set an invaluable precedent limiting presidential power. It would have drawn a historic line in the sand against further illegalities by that and future presidents. When John Conyers repaid the trust of forty years worth of re-elections by excusing the Bush-Cheney crimes without even an investigation, he empowered all of Bush-Cheney's successors to build upon that loathsome foundation. President Obama has done just that, introducing measures to “legalize” the flagrant atrocities of Bush-Cheney. Now torture, international kidnapping and secret imprisonment without recourse to a lawyer or a day in court are “legal.” The Democratic congress of 2006 enabled this, and the Democratic congress of 2008 ratified it.
Four years of Democratic rule in the House didn't end the Iraq war, has hardly even slowed it down. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the body responsible for recruiting Democrats candidates, collecting corporate donations and distributing these to its favorites, was headed by Chicago's Rahm Emanuel. The DCCC threw millions of dollars behind dozens of pro-war Democrats opposing antiwar Democrats in 2006 primary elections. The continued existence of the so-called “blue dog Democrats,” hypocritically accused by House Democratic leaders like South Carolina's Jim Clyburn of “gumming up the works,” hamstringing the president and “real Democrats” is largely the work of Congressional Democratic leader Rahm Emanuel, who went on to become chief of staff in a Democratic White House.
The elevation of Mississippi's Rep. Bennie Thompson to chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security had no effect on the fortunes of Blackwater and other mercenary companies, whose armed employees number more than 100,000 in Iraq, and a similar number in Afghanistan alone. The only result of his current high office is that now, during CBC week, Rep. Thompson hosts panels on how to become a minority contractor with Homeland Security.
As chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Harlem's Charlie Rangel got the big office – multiple offices, really --- and raked in the big donations that came with it. He no longer speaks against the war, even in whispers. And the Bush tax cuts remain untouched. Thus another senior black congressman repays the forty years Democratic voters invested in his career. His peer John Conyers still sponsors single payer legislation, but did little to advance it when this mattered. Reparations? Don't even mention it.
The Democratic controlled Congress passed the Bush bailout bill on the second try, thanks to Democratic candidate Barack Obama who suspended his campaign to come to DC and herd reluctant Democratic reps into line. Under President Obama, the next Democratic Congress exponentially expanded the bailout, making it the largest transfer of public wealth by far in human history, in excess of $21 trillion dollars. A Democratic congress approved a GM takeover without putting GM's vast industrial plant to work on green energy and mass transit. It stuck GM's union with the company's health care costs, and passed a paltry stimulus bill that left millions unemployed.
Four years of a Democratic congress have not produced an Employee Free Choice Act. Despite a massive Latino vote in 2006 and 2008, that community has nothing to show for its efforts but higher fences, drones on the border, and a possible DREAM Act that will extend the poverty draft to immigrant youth.
The bottom line is that the last four years of a Democratic congress have been pretty bad for Democratic voters, and very bad for African Americans. The White House, the Democratic National Committee, the NAACP and the constellation of civil rights groups, politicians and celebrities in their orbit are spending millions in a last minute effort to beg, to plead, to demand that every Democrat, every black person without exception come out to defend the Democratic president and his Democratic reps in the House and Senate.
The vice-president in record telling disappointed Democrats to “stop whining.” The Democratic president's press secretary has declared antiwar and pro-single payer Democrats to be in need of drug tests. And the Democratic president himself chides Democrats for expecting way too much. What then, should we expect from Democrats in the new Congress, whether or not they win majority?
The unfortunate answer is not much. The war in Iraq drags on, despite the “Mission Accomplished” claims of Democrats. The majority of Americans, and a crushing margin of Democrats favor withdrawal from Aghanistan and Pakistan, but Dems in congress won't give them that either. The final act of the current Democratic ruled Congress will be its lame duck session in December. Last spring President Obama created a bipartisan federal commission on fiscal responsibility. President Obama loaded it up with Republicans and Democrats who favor cutting or two-tiering social security benefits, raising the retirement age, and zeroing out Medicare and Medicaid. President Obama has given this assault on social security, Medicare and Medicaid his official blessing, declaring that “everything is on the table,” and that he will demand an up or down vote on the commission's recommendations with no amendments during the lame duck session of Congress.
Will the current Democratic ruled Congress find the spine to stand against their president on social security? They haven't found it on anything else. The prospect of return to a Republican ruled Congress is genuinely frightening. Even so, the question is unavoidable --- is Democratic control of Congress as we have known it the last four years worth defending at all?
In a word, No.
But where are the Democrats who will make common cause with the unions on the protection of American jobs? Who will make common cause with the Congressional Black Caucus, and anyone who has a black base, on halting and reversing the national emergency of unrestricted and illegal immigration, and on making English the only official language of the United States? Who will make common cause with the Congressional Prprogressive Cuacus on fair trade agreements, on repealing much or all of the USA Patriot Act, on ending completely the neoconservative war agenda, on strict campaign finance reform, on a crackdown against corporate influence in general and corporate welfare in particular, and on tax cuts for the poor and the middle class?
Where are the Democrats who will make common cause with those in the tradition of the late C Dolores Tucker and of Father Michael Pfleger on decency in the media? Who will make common cause with various other people around the fact that the black male is the victim of a triple genocide in the womb, on the streets, and on the battlefield? Who will make common cause with the Congressional Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus against the unfair consequences, and therefore the unfair principle, of the "affirmative action" that Colorado voted to end on the same day as it voted for Obama, and against the Ivy League's and other top universities' systematic exclusion of whites from poor and middle-income backgrounds, and from small towns and rural areas?
Where are the Democrats who will make common cause based on the fact that black and Hispanic votes reaffirmed traditional marriage in California and Florida on the same days that those states gave their Electoral College votes to Obama, with the black churches playing a pivotal role? Who, as a regular readers of Philip Giraldi, will use their own vigorous patriotic hostility to Israeli espionage against America in order to make common cause with the victims of the Israel Lobby's sustained campaign against black Democrats as such, a campaign on course to keep Florida from electing the only black Senator this year, as must not and will not be forgotten when Chicago's registered Democrats are deciding whether or not to nominate Rahm Emanuel as their candidate for Mayor?
Where are the Democrats who, as conservationists rather than environmentalists, will make common cause based on practical proposals for energy independence, proposals that would or should appeal to unions and others whose fight is primarily for jobs? And who will make common cause based on the importance of government action in bringing about and then conserving pro-life, pro-family and patriotic measures against poverty, in defence of traditional marriage, and in support of agriculture, manufacturing, coal, oil, and nuclear energy?
Where are those Democrats?
Four years ago it was the eve of the November 2006 election, Bush's last midterm. In what was the second issue of Black Agenda Report (this is issue 213) we wrote about the imminent changeover of the House of Representatives from Republican to Democratic rule. Our first dozen issues are lost, but we vividly recall what was written on this occasion.
After 12 years of spectacularly corrupt and aggressively pro-corporate Republican domination, the House and likely the Senate too, would be ruled by Democrats. Expectations were high.
Four years ago a hundred members of the House of Representatives had signed on as co-sponsors of one or more bills to impeach Dick Cheney and George Bush. One of them was Detroit's John Conyers, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, who would chair the House Judiciary Committee beginning in January 2007, and thus have the unquestioned legal power to begin hearings on the question of impeachment. Authoritative polls repeatedly showed that a a narrow majority of the American people, and an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters favored impeachment and criminal investigation of the Bush-Cheney regime on a broad front, from waging illegal wars to torture, lying to Congress, international kidnapping, secret imprisonment without trial and tapping the phone and email of millions of Americans. Rep. Conyers was also a perennial sponsor of reparations, antiwar and single payer health care measures, causes which could surely be advanced by his long awaited ascension to power.
Democrats had always massively opposed the Iraq war, and millions were perfectly aware that a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives could bring this unjust war to a halt over any presidential objection by simply refusing to fund it.
The fall of 2006 was only a year after Katrina. The Republican congress had refused to investigate the federal role in the deaths of uncounted thousands, while the White House and military authorities barred journalists from photographing or observing the recovery of bodies. Federal, state and local authorities were making return of hundreds of thousands of residents, mostly black, impossible. A Democratic congress, some imagined, might turn this around too.
Under Democratic rule Rep. Bennie Thompson (D MS) of the Congressional Black Caucus would chair the new House Committee on Homeland Security. With his committee's subpoena power Thompson could, if he chose, investigate the role of Blackwater and other US mercenary companies in New Orleans and around the world and make people tell the truth under penalty of prison. Harlem's Charlie Rangel, another senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus would chair the House Ways and Means Committee, a position from which he could begin rolling back the regressive Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
Of course, none of this happened. It's no exaggeration to say that every single progressive expectation of the Democratic majority in the House over the last four years has been disappointed or betrayed. In the final year of Republican House rule, Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi ordered the Congressional Black Caucus NOT to hold its own hearings on Katrina, and refused to call them herself, for fear that voters might see Democrats as the party of those undeserving colored people. Only Georgia's Rep. Cynthia McKinney defied Pelosi and House Democratic leaders to hold her own hearings, which were boycotted by all but one of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Between the November 2006 election and the beginning of the new Democratic party controlled Congress in January 2007, John Conyers walked back from his pro-impeachment stand, even having demonstrators and former staffers arrested outside his office when they tried to meet with him. Among the pitiful excuses Conyers offered for not convening impeachment hearings was that “Fox News would have a field day,” the votes to convict them in the Senate weren't there, (How Conyers knew that in advance of evidence or even hearings remains a mystery!) and that Bush-Cheney would be history in two more years anyhow.
But as David Swanson has pointed out, even if impeachment could not be won, calling the hearings would have set an invaluable precedent limiting presidential power. It would have drawn a historic line in the sand against further illegalities by that and future presidents. When John Conyers repaid the trust of forty years worth of re-elections by excusing the Bush-Cheney crimes without even an investigation, he empowered all of Bush-Cheney's successors to build upon that loathsome foundation. President Obama has done just that, introducing measures to “legalize” the flagrant atrocities of Bush-Cheney. Now torture, international kidnapping and secret imprisonment without recourse to a lawyer or a day in court are “legal.” The Democratic congress of 2006 enabled this, and the Democratic congress of 2008 ratified it.
Four years of Democratic rule in the House didn't end the Iraq war, has hardly even slowed it down. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the body responsible for recruiting Democrats candidates, collecting corporate donations and distributing these to its favorites, was headed by Chicago's Rahm Emanuel. The DCCC threw millions of dollars behind dozens of pro-war Democrats opposing antiwar Democrats in 2006 primary elections. The continued existence of the so-called “blue dog Democrats,” hypocritically accused by House Democratic leaders like South Carolina's Jim Clyburn of “gumming up the works,” hamstringing the president and “real Democrats” is largely the work of Congressional Democratic leader Rahm Emanuel, who went on to become chief of staff in a Democratic White House.
The elevation of Mississippi's Rep. Bennie Thompson to chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security had no effect on the fortunes of Blackwater and other mercenary companies, whose armed employees number more than 100,000 in Iraq, and a similar number in Afghanistan alone. The only result of his current high office is that now, during CBC week, Rep. Thompson hosts panels on how to become a minority contractor with Homeland Security.
As chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Harlem's Charlie Rangel got the big office – multiple offices, really --- and raked in the big donations that came with it. He no longer speaks against the war, even in whispers. And the Bush tax cuts remain untouched. Thus another senior black congressman repays the forty years Democratic voters invested in his career. His peer John Conyers still sponsors single payer legislation, but did little to advance it when this mattered. Reparations? Don't even mention it.
The Democratic controlled Congress passed the Bush bailout bill on the second try, thanks to Democratic candidate Barack Obama who suspended his campaign to come to DC and herd reluctant Democratic reps into line. Under President Obama, the next Democratic Congress exponentially expanded the bailout, making it the largest transfer of public wealth by far in human history, in excess of $21 trillion dollars. A Democratic congress approved a GM takeover without putting GM's vast industrial plant to work on green energy and mass transit. It stuck GM's union with the company's health care costs, and passed a paltry stimulus bill that left millions unemployed.
Four years of a Democratic congress have not produced an Employee Free Choice Act. Despite a massive Latino vote in 2006 and 2008, that community has nothing to show for its efforts but higher fences, drones on the border, and a possible DREAM Act that will extend the poverty draft to immigrant youth.
The bottom line is that the last four years of a Democratic congress have been pretty bad for Democratic voters, and very bad for African Americans. The White House, the Democratic National Committee, the NAACP and the constellation of civil rights groups, politicians and celebrities in their orbit are spending millions in a last minute effort to beg, to plead, to demand that every Democrat, every black person without exception come out to defend the Democratic president and his Democratic reps in the House and Senate.
The vice-president in record telling disappointed Democrats to “stop whining.” The Democratic president's press secretary has declared antiwar and pro-single payer Democrats to be in need of drug tests. And the Democratic president himself chides Democrats for expecting way too much. What then, should we expect from Democrats in the new Congress, whether or not they win majority?
The unfortunate answer is not much. The war in Iraq drags on, despite the “Mission Accomplished” claims of Democrats. The majority of Americans, and a crushing margin of Democrats favor withdrawal from Aghanistan and Pakistan, but Dems in congress won't give them that either. The final act of the current Democratic ruled Congress will be its lame duck session in December. Last spring President Obama created a bipartisan federal commission on fiscal responsibility. President Obama loaded it up with Republicans and Democrats who favor cutting or two-tiering social security benefits, raising the retirement age, and zeroing out Medicare and Medicaid. President Obama has given this assault on social security, Medicare and Medicaid his official blessing, declaring that “everything is on the table,” and that he will demand an up or down vote on the commission's recommendations with no amendments during the lame duck session of Congress.
Will the current Democratic ruled Congress find the spine to stand against their president on social security? They haven't found it on anything else. The prospect of return to a Republican ruled Congress is genuinely frightening. Even so, the question is unavoidable --- is Democratic control of Congress as we have known it the last four years worth defending at all?
In a word, No.
But where are the Democrats who will make common cause with the unions on the protection of American jobs? Who will make common cause with the Congressional Black Caucus, and anyone who has a black base, on halting and reversing the national emergency of unrestricted and illegal immigration, and on making English the only official language of the United States? Who will make common cause with the Congressional Prprogressive Cuacus on fair trade agreements, on repealing much or all of the USA Patriot Act, on ending completely the neoconservative war agenda, on strict campaign finance reform, on a crackdown against corporate influence in general and corporate welfare in particular, and on tax cuts for the poor and the middle class?
Where are the Democrats who will make common cause with those in the tradition of the late C Dolores Tucker and of Father Michael Pfleger on decency in the media? Who will make common cause with various other people around the fact that the black male is the victim of a triple genocide in the womb, on the streets, and on the battlefield? Who will make common cause with the Congressional Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus against the unfair consequences, and therefore the unfair principle, of the "affirmative action" that Colorado voted to end on the same day as it voted for Obama, and against the Ivy League's and other top universities' systematic exclusion of whites from poor and middle-income backgrounds, and from small towns and rural areas?
Where are the Democrats who will make common cause based on the fact that black and Hispanic votes reaffirmed traditional marriage in California and Florida on the same days that those states gave their Electoral College votes to Obama, with the black churches playing a pivotal role? Who, as a regular readers of Philip Giraldi, will use their own vigorous patriotic hostility to Israeli espionage against America in order to make common cause with the victims of the Israel Lobby's sustained campaign against black Democrats as such, a campaign on course to keep Florida from electing the only black Senator this year, as must not and will not be forgotten when Chicago's registered Democrats are deciding whether or not to nominate Rahm Emanuel as their candidate for Mayor?
Where are the Democrats who, as conservationists rather than environmentalists, will make common cause based on practical proposals for energy independence, proposals that would or should appeal to unions and others whose fight is primarily for jobs? And who will make common cause based on the importance of government action in bringing about and then conserving pro-life, pro-family and patriotic measures against poverty, in defence of traditional marriage, and in support of agriculture, manufacturing, coal, oil, and nuclear energy?
Where are those Democrats?
Nil Sine Numine
W. James Antle III writes:
There’s only one state where the Republican gubernatorial candidate is polling in the single digits less than a week before the election but conservatives remain hopeful that one of their own may yet prevail. The colorful race for governor of Colorado has become a contest between Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a liberal Democrat, and former Congressman Tom Tancredo.
Tancredo served five terms as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives and was an appointee in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Today, however, Tancredo is running for governor as the nominee of the American Constitution Party, Colorado’s state affiliate of the national Constitution Party. “It’s a small party with about 9,000 members,” he says. Yet Tancredo’s campaign has reduced the official GOP nominee to the status of a mere onlooker.
For weeks, polls have consistently shown Tancredo in second place. A few have shown him nipping at the Democratic front-runner’s heels. In late October, Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, showed Hickenlooper winning 47 percent of likely voters to Tancredo’s 44 percent — well within the survey’s margin of error. Republican nominee Dan Maes received just 5 percent.
The more Republican-friendly Rasmussen Reports also showed Tancredo within striking distance of Hickenlooper, taking 38 percent to the Democrat’s 42 percent. Maes lags well behind at 12 percent, with 6 percent still undecided. Even the Denver Post, which paid for the most recent public poll (taken by Survey USA) showing Hickenlooper up by double digits, has Tancredo hovering near 40 percent and Maes at just 9 percent. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Tancredo at 40.2 percent and the official Republican at 9.4 percent, with a 6-point Democratic lead.
All this has completely flipped the usual script. Typically, Republicans dismiss conservative third-party candidates as spoilers and try to rally the right behind the GOP nominee, no matter how liberal, because third parties can’t win elections. This has been particularly pronounced this year, as Tea Party activists have resisted channeling their energies into third parties and have instead contested the Republican primaries.
Early on, this bit of conventional wisdom held the Colorado gubernatorial race as well. Local Republicans were initially cool to Tancredo’s candidacy despite Maes’s weakness, with state party chairman Dick Wadhams describing it as the GOP’s “worst nightmare” and blasting Tancredo for being “dishonest.” “I’ll bet he wishes he hadn’t said that now,” Tancredo says. Indeed, Wadhams told the Denver Post, “I think Tom is in a position to pull this off.”
Ford O’Connell and Steve Pearson, writing in The American Spectator, weren’t just worried that Tancredo would cost Republicans a chance at retaking the governorship. They feared he would doom Republicans up and down the ballot. “But it’s not just the governor’s office that could slip away from the GOP,” they argued. “The dispute between Tancredo and Maes could significantly undermine Republicans throughout Colorado and, in fact, the nation.”
How quickly things change. Republicans have been abandoning Maes in droves and endorsing Tancredo. The Colorado Senate race, which Republican Ken Buck narrowly leads, seems to be unaffected. And many conservatives have been calling on the GOP standard-bearer to drop out of the race so the third-party candidate can win. Tancredo hasn’t been shy about exploiting this sentiment. “You’re not going to win, hello! Hello?! You’re not going to make it, you know? So what’s the purpose?” he said in an interview with Fox News, pretending to speak to Maes through a megaphone. “Uh, if you stay in, what is the purpose? What are you trying to accomplish?”
In fact, Fox political blogger Alicia Acuna went so far as to say that Maes was the real third-party candidate in this race, not Tancredo. That could wind up being literally true: under Colorado state law, the Republicans could lose their major-party status if Maes fails to win 10 percent of the vote next week. The GOP would then have to wait two election cycles to regain top billing on the ballot and be allowed to raise as much money as the Democrats. (Many observers believe the law will be changed to prevent this from happening even if Maes can’t.)
A Tancredo victory would be predicated on his ability to become the de facto Republican candidate. “If I can get about 65 percent of the Republican vote, I can win,” he told me in an interview. “If I can’t, Hickenlooper will win.” The situation is similar to last year’s special election for New York’s 23rd congressional district, where Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman ended up winning more GOP and conservative support than the official Republican nominee, liberal state legislator Dede Scozzafava. Conservatives ended up losing that election because of the Republican’s intransigence: Scozzafava didn’t drop out until after her name couldn’t be removed from the ballot and she endorsed the Democrat.
Unlike Scozzafava, Maes’s problem isn’t liberalism as much as shaky finances and odd pronouncements. A Republican donor in the state said she gave Maes $300 to help pay his mortgage. He claimed it was a campaign contribution. Taking a cash contribution would appear to be a violation of campaign-finance laws. Maes has already been fined $17,500 for such transgressions.
Maes has dismissed these charges as “nonsense.” He has also called Tancredo an “illegal immigrant” and fretted about the United Nations gaining control of the state via bike paths. Few people gave Maes any chance of winning the GOP gubernatorial primary, until Republican front-runner Scott McInnis was beset by a plagiarism scandal from which his campaign never recovered.
Before the campaign, Tancredo urged both McInnis and Maes to drop out for the good of the party and allow the Republican state committee to choose an acceptable candidate instead. Tancredo pledged to support the committee’s choice but said if either McInnis or Maes won the primary, he would be forced to run for governor as a third-party candidate. Both McInnis and Maes refused Tancredo’s ultimatum, contending he should have entered the primary if he felt he was the more viable conservative.
Tancredo has made good on both his promise to run and provide conservatives with a realistic alternative. His success may also benefit the Constitution Party, which has struggled since the early 1990s to capitalize on conservative discontent with the GOP. The Constitution Party has also been looking for a big-name Republican defector for about that long, courting Pat Buchanan, former Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire, and “Ten Commandments Judge” Roy Moore.
Constitution Party leaders finally thought they had what they were looking for when Alan Keyes joined in 2008. Keyes ostensibly shared many of the party’s constitutionalist positions, was an eloquent Christian conservative, and an outspoken opponent of abortion. He also seemed to be on friendly terms with party founder Howard Phillips. But Keyes was rejected when he ran for the CP presidential nomination because of his support for the Iraq war and other neoconservative foreign-policy positions, with Phillips leading the charge against him. After his defeat, an angry Keyes left the party as abruptly as he entered it, taking part of the American Independent Party, its California chapter, with him.
Tancredo also voted for the Iraq War, as did Virgil Goode, another former Republican congressman who made common cause with the Constitution Party. But like many “Jacksonian” conservatives, Tancredo’s foreign-policy views mix hawkish nationalism with skepticism about interventionism abroad. Tancredo was a vocal opponent of the Kosovo war and a more quiet one of the surge (he publicly disagreed with the decision to send more troops to Iraq but he also voted against a nonbinding anti-surge resolution). “I’ve promised not to take us into the fight,” he says of his foreign-policy differences with the party that has nominated him for governor.
On domestic policy, Tancredo is solidly pro-life, a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, and was usually a reliable vote against big government whether it was proposed by Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Reason admitted before the 2008 primaries that if illegal immigration into the United States were miraculously to stop, Tancredo would be a surprisingly libertarian Republican.
Of course, immigration — both legal and illegal — is Tancredo’s signature issue. He was an early proponent of the attrition through enforcement strategy of reducing the population of illegal immigrants through improved border security and actually enforcing the law. Tancredo also favors a moratorium on net legal immigration, reducing the number of new immigrants to the 200,000 to 300,000 people who annually leave the U.S. Both of these positions reflect the Constitution Party platform.
An early poll showed that Virgil Goode, who previously won his Virginia congressional district as a Democrat, independent, and Republican, could conceivably retake his House seat as a Constitution Party candidate. But Goode is backing the Republican challenger against the Democrat who beat him two years ago. He remains a member of the local GOP and doesn’t seem to want his relationship with the Constitution Party to extend beyond paying dues.
Meanwhile, Tancredo looked like he would probably ruin his political career by running as a third-party candidate so soon after leaving his House seat and running a disastrous campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Instead he is in a race where the Republican is the potential spoiler. Tancredo’s gubernatorial bid may boost the immigration issue, the Constitution Party, and his own status as a conservative leader.
If elected, Tancredo would in some respects be a Republican governor. He will side with the GOP on redistricting and probably wouldn’t let it slide into minor-party status. “Obviously, I’ll appoint conservatives to my administration, who will mostly be Republicans,” he says. But when asked if he would rejoin his old party after November, regardless of the outcome, Tancredo seems unsure.
“I don’t know,” Tancredo says. “Maybe if it moves back in a more conservative direction, I guess. Otherwise, what would be the point?”
Colorado gave its Electoral College votes to Obama on the same day as it voted to end legal discrimination against working-class white men. The rise there of a figure such as Tancredo should be a spur to find Democratic candidates who can reach out to that constituency with reference to fair trade agreements, to repealing much or all of the USA Patriot Act, to ending completely the neoconservative war agenda, to strict campaign finance reform, to a crackdown against corporate influence in general and corporate welfare in particular, and to tax cuts for the poor and the middle class.
With reference to halting and reversing the national emergency of unrestricted and illegal immigration, and making English the only official language of the United States. With reference to traditional family values. With reference to fiscal responsibility, recognising that neoliberal economics and the neoconservative war agenda are anything but fiscally responsible, and that on healthcare, confronted with a straight choice between the passed Senate Bill and what is for now the lost House Bills, it is obvious which is more responsible fiscally, just as it is obvious which is more pro-life.
With reference to the Ivy League's and other top universities' systematic exclusion of whites from poor and middle-income backgrounds, and from small towns and rural areas, as exposed by Pat Buchanan. With reference to Philip Giraldi's exposure of Israeli espionage against the United States. And with reference to the prioritisation of agriculture, manufacturing, and small and family-run businesses.
In Colorado and elsewhere, where are those Democrats?
There’s only one state where the Republican gubernatorial candidate is polling in the single digits less than a week before the election but conservatives remain hopeful that one of their own may yet prevail. The colorful race for governor of Colorado has become a contest between Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a liberal Democrat, and former Congressman Tom Tancredo.
Tancredo served five terms as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives and was an appointee in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Today, however, Tancredo is running for governor as the nominee of the American Constitution Party, Colorado’s state affiliate of the national Constitution Party. “It’s a small party with about 9,000 members,” he says. Yet Tancredo’s campaign has reduced the official GOP nominee to the status of a mere onlooker.
For weeks, polls have consistently shown Tancredo in second place. A few have shown him nipping at the Democratic front-runner’s heels. In late October, Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, showed Hickenlooper winning 47 percent of likely voters to Tancredo’s 44 percent — well within the survey’s margin of error. Republican nominee Dan Maes received just 5 percent.
The more Republican-friendly Rasmussen Reports also showed Tancredo within striking distance of Hickenlooper, taking 38 percent to the Democrat’s 42 percent. Maes lags well behind at 12 percent, with 6 percent still undecided. Even the Denver Post, which paid for the most recent public poll (taken by Survey USA) showing Hickenlooper up by double digits, has Tancredo hovering near 40 percent and Maes at just 9 percent. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Tancredo at 40.2 percent and the official Republican at 9.4 percent, with a 6-point Democratic lead.
All this has completely flipped the usual script. Typically, Republicans dismiss conservative third-party candidates as spoilers and try to rally the right behind the GOP nominee, no matter how liberal, because third parties can’t win elections. This has been particularly pronounced this year, as Tea Party activists have resisted channeling their energies into third parties and have instead contested the Republican primaries.
Early on, this bit of conventional wisdom held the Colorado gubernatorial race as well. Local Republicans were initially cool to Tancredo’s candidacy despite Maes’s weakness, with state party chairman Dick Wadhams describing it as the GOP’s “worst nightmare” and blasting Tancredo for being “dishonest.” “I’ll bet he wishes he hadn’t said that now,” Tancredo says. Indeed, Wadhams told the Denver Post, “I think Tom is in a position to pull this off.”
Ford O’Connell and Steve Pearson, writing in The American Spectator, weren’t just worried that Tancredo would cost Republicans a chance at retaking the governorship. They feared he would doom Republicans up and down the ballot. “But it’s not just the governor’s office that could slip away from the GOP,” they argued. “The dispute between Tancredo and Maes could significantly undermine Republicans throughout Colorado and, in fact, the nation.”
How quickly things change. Republicans have been abandoning Maes in droves and endorsing Tancredo. The Colorado Senate race, which Republican Ken Buck narrowly leads, seems to be unaffected. And many conservatives have been calling on the GOP standard-bearer to drop out of the race so the third-party candidate can win. Tancredo hasn’t been shy about exploiting this sentiment. “You’re not going to win, hello! Hello?! You’re not going to make it, you know? So what’s the purpose?” he said in an interview with Fox News, pretending to speak to Maes through a megaphone. “Uh, if you stay in, what is the purpose? What are you trying to accomplish?”
In fact, Fox political blogger Alicia Acuna went so far as to say that Maes was the real third-party candidate in this race, not Tancredo. That could wind up being literally true: under Colorado state law, the Republicans could lose their major-party status if Maes fails to win 10 percent of the vote next week. The GOP would then have to wait two election cycles to regain top billing on the ballot and be allowed to raise as much money as the Democrats. (Many observers believe the law will be changed to prevent this from happening even if Maes can’t.)
A Tancredo victory would be predicated on his ability to become the de facto Republican candidate. “If I can get about 65 percent of the Republican vote, I can win,” he told me in an interview. “If I can’t, Hickenlooper will win.” The situation is similar to last year’s special election for New York’s 23rd congressional district, where Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman ended up winning more GOP and conservative support than the official Republican nominee, liberal state legislator Dede Scozzafava. Conservatives ended up losing that election because of the Republican’s intransigence: Scozzafava didn’t drop out until after her name couldn’t be removed from the ballot and she endorsed the Democrat.
Unlike Scozzafava, Maes’s problem isn’t liberalism as much as shaky finances and odd pronouncements. A Republican donor in the state said she gave Maes $300 to help pay his mortgage. He claimed it was a campaign contribution. Taking a cash contribution would appear to be a violation of campaign-finance laws. Maes has already been fined $17,500 for such transgressions.
Maes has dismissed these charges as “nonsense.” He has also called Tancredo an “illegal immigrant” and fretted about the United Nations gaining control of the state via bike paths. Few people gave Maes any chance of winning the GOP gubernatorial primary, until Republican front-runner Scott McInnis was beset by a plagiarism scandal from which his campaign never recovered.
Before the campaign, Tancredo urged both McInnis and Maes to drop out for the good of the party and allow the Republican state committee to choose an acceptable candidate instead. Tancredo pledged to support the committee’s choice but said if either McInnis or Maes won the primary, he would be forced to run for governor as a third-party candidate. Both McInnis and Maes refused Tancredo’s ultimatum, contending he should have entered the primary if he felt he was the more viable conservative.
Tancredo has made good on both his promise to run and provide conservatives with a realistic alternative. His success may also benefit the Constitution Party, which has struggled since the early 1990s to capitalize on conservative discontent with the GOP. The Constitution Party has also been looking for a big-name Republican defector for about that long, courting Pat Buchanan, former Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire, and “Ten Commandments Judge” Roy Moore.
Constitution Party leaders finally thought they had what they were looking for when Alan Keyes joined in 2008. Keyes ostensibly shared many of the party’s constitutionalist positions, was an eloquent Christian conservative, and an outspoken opponent of abortion. He also seemed to be on friendly terms with party founder Howard Phillips. But Keyes was rejected when he ran for the CP presidential nomination because of his support for the Iraq war and other neoconservative foreign-policy positions, with Phillips leading the charge against him. After his defeat, an angry Keyes left the party as abruptly as he entered it, taking part of the American Independent Party, its California chapter, with him.
Tancredo also voted for the Iraq War, as did Virgil Goode, another former Republican congressman who made common cause with the Constitution Party. But like many “Jacksonian” conservatives, Tancredo’s foreign-policy views mix hawkish nationalism with skepticism about interventionism abroad. Tancredo was a vocal opponent of the Kosovo war and a more quiet one of the surge (he publicly disagreed with the decision to send more troops to Iraq but he also voted against a nonbinding anti-surge resolution). “I’ve promised not to take us into the fight,” he says of his foreign-policy differences with the party that has nominated him for governor.
On domestic policy, Tancredo is solidly pro-life, a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, and was usually a reliable vote against big government whether it was proposed by Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Reason admitted before the 2008 primaries that if illegal immigration into the United States were miraculously to stop, Tancredo would be a surprisingly libertarian Republican.
Of course, immigration — both legal and illegal — is Tancredo’s signature issue. He was an early proponent of the attrition through enforcement strategy of reducing the population of illegal immigrants through improved border security and actually enforcing the law. Tancredo also favors a moratorium on net legal immigration, reducing the number of new immigrants to the 200,000 to 300,000 people who annually leave the U.S. Both of these positions reflect the Constitution Party platform.
An early poll showed that Virgil Goode, who previously won his Virginia congressional district as a Democrat, independent, and Republican, could conceivably retake his House seat as a Constitution Party candidate. But Goode is backing the Republican challenger against the Democrat who beat him two years ago. He remains a member of the local GOP and doesn’t seem to want his relationship with the Constitution Party to extend beyond paying dues.
Meanwhile, Tancredo looked like he would probably ruin his political career by running as a third-party candidate so soon after leaving his House seat and running a disastrous campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Instead he is in a race where the Republican is the potential spoiler. Tancredo’s gubernatorial bid may boost the immigration issue, the Constitution Party, and his own status as a conservative leader.
If elected, Tancredo would in some respects be a Republican governor. He will side with the GOP on redistricting and probably wouldn’t let it slide into minor-party status. “Obviously, I’ll appoint conservatives to my administration, who will mostly be Republicans,” he says. But when asked if he would rejoin his old party after November, regardless of the outcome, Tancredo seems unsure.
“I don’t know,” Tancredo says. “Maybe if it moves back in a more conservative direction, I guess. Otherwise, what would be the point?”
Colorado gave its Electoral College votes to Obama on the same day as it voted to end legal discrimination against working-class white men. The rise there of a figure such as Tancredo should be a spur to find Democratic candidates who can reach out to that constituency with reference to fair trade agreements, to repealing much or all of the USA Patriot Act, to ending completely the neoconservative war agenda, to strict campaign finance reform, to a crackdown against corporate influence in general and corporate welfare in particular, and to tax cuts for the poor and the middle class.
With reference to halting and reversing the national emergency of unrestricted and illegal immigration, and making English the only official language of the United States. With reference to traditional family values. With reference to fiscal responsibility, recognising that neoliberal economics and the neoconservative war agenda are anything but fiscally responsible, and that on healthcare, confronted with a straight choice between the passed Senate Bill and what is for now the lost House Bills, it is obvious which is more responsible fiscally, just as it is obvious which is more pro-life.
With reference to the Ivy League's and other top universities' systematic exclusion of whites from poor and middle-income backgrounds, and from small towns and rural areas, as exposed by Pat Buchanan. With reference to Philip Giraldi's exposure of Israeli espionage against the United States. And with reference to the prioritisation of agriculture, manufacturing, and small and family-run businesses.
In Colorado and elsewhere, where are those Democrats?
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