Sunday, May 31, 2009

Sotomayor - The End Of Affirmative Action?

Obama may well be the Post-Racial President we've been waiting for.....
but, only by accident only.

Victor David Hansen's latest column points out in compelling detail the absurdity of Affirmative Action in today's America, and how the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor may finally pull back the curtain on this bankrupt, divisive and corrosive experiment, and help expose the devastating impact it has had on our society.

I've posted his entire essay here because to condense or truncate it in any way would be a great disservice to his work.


Lost in the Labyrinth of Race

By Victor Davis Hanson
The Sotomayor Nomination and the Politics of Racial Identity
One of the unexpected results of the Sotomayor nomination is a refocusing on the politics of racial identity and the fossilized institutions of affirmative action-or the belief that the U.S. government should use its vast power to ensure an equality of result rather than a fairness of opportunity.

In the last fifty years, United States has evolved into a complex multiracial state. Race no longer is necessarily an indicator of income or material success-as the record of, say, Japanese-Americans or, indeed Asians in general, attests.

And what criterion constitutes race itself nowadays, when almost every family has someone who is half-Hispanic, a quarter-Asian, one-half black, or part Pakistani? What percentage of one's lineage ensures purity of race, or qualifies for minority status? Are California Hispanics minorities, or so-called whites that are now a smaller percentage of the state population?

And what constitutes racial authenticity? Lack of income? An absence of success in the American rat race? Is the fourth generation upper-class Cuban an "Hispanic" who should qualify for affirmative action because his name is Hillario Gonzalez? Does the one-quarter aristocratic Jamaican qualify for American redress on account of his partial blackness?

And how does affirmative action-or even the fuzzy notion of "diversity"- adjudicate all this without mirror-imaging the statisticians of the Old Confederacy who could precisely calibrate the 1/16 drop of black blood? The university where I taught was full of South Americans and Europeans with Spanish surnames that allowed their various departments to be considered "ethnically diverse," while others, having Russian émigrés, or the foreign born from New Delhi, Israel, and Egypt, struggled to satisfy the dictates of diversity czars.

In other words, affirmative action, and the racial identity politics that fuel it, are swamped by their inherent racialist contradictions-and made irrelevant by the dynamism of popular culture of the last three decades in which intermarriage, assimilation, and integration have challenged the notion of racial fides itself.

What are we left then with?
A mess. And a rather mean and nasty mess at that.

So It Is Past Victimization?
Consider the growing Orwellian logic of affirmative action. Is it based on the notion of past grievance? Apparently to make up for historical bias, we are to give a nudge to the present generation of minorities to overcome generations of discrimination.

But wait, the University of California system has been caught in the past trying to dream up ways of reducing Asian representation while bolstering the numbers of Hispanics and blacks. Yet some Asian had parents who were put in camps during World War II by Earl Warren, FDR, and the efforts of the liberal McClatchy newspapers. Asians in the 19th century were denied housing, zoned out of cities, and treated terribly as laborers.

So the reason a Melinda Tanaka might not receive a boost surely is not because she cannot claim victim status in the past. Indeed, why should a Barack Obama qualify for special consideration in college? His mother was white; the grandparents who raised him were as well. His absent father was African-and not part of the historical American trauma of racism and discrimination accorded African-Americans.

Again, a first -generation African immigrant from Jamaica or Nigeria in theory should not tap into special treatment on the basis that his parents or grandparents had suffered in America.

So It's Present Racism?
All of which leads us to the second pillar of the new discrimination. If it is not necessarily always a claim on historical suffering in the past, then the defense for special consideration must be present racism and lingering discrimination?

But here again we get lost in the labyrinth of race. I know dozens of Punjabi immigrants who are far darker than South Americans. Many Filipinos I taught were more easily identifiable as minorities than many half-African-Americans in my classes. Yet none qualified under the racial rubrics of affirmative action. Indeed, if a Bobby Jindal were to be President, I don't think the Left would be much interested in his "special" story, at least as much as they are now with that of Sonia Sotomayor's.

If America is still a racist country, and if we still overtly discriminate on the basis of physical appearance at odds with supposed white norms, well then it is a funny sort of racism. Are we to assume taxi drivers, landlords, and employers supposedly examine nearly-black Indian-Americans, dark southeast Asians, or Spanish-speaking Cubans, and say, "Hmmm, you're OK,"-and then make it hard for Costa Ricans and Guatemalans because they have accented names or trill their r's, or more closely replicate the status of Mexican-Americans?

Is there a racial Czar somewhere who has clay tablets that say:
"Only those with 51% demonstrable African-American blood or Mexican-American heritage-or those from Africa, the Caribbean, and South America who can best emulate them-whose present incomes are less than the American mean, and who can cite three recent examples of racial discrimination, are equal for preferential treatment"?


If neither past collective, nor present individual, racism is a logical guide in adjudicating who receives affirmative action, then perhaps we can consider three other criteria. And here we begin to find our way a little through the frightening labyrinth of race.
There are, I think, some unspoken rules of race and racial advantage in America today.

Does Poverty Qualify?
One, you must have some claim, even if the most flimsy one, to a minority group whose average per capita income is below that of the so-called white norm-on the theory that racism, not cultural practices, entirely explains success or failure in contemporary America.

Indians, Basques, Greek-Americans, Arab-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Chinese-Americans-regardless of their appearance or superficial distance from the dominant "white" tribe" -are probably not going to receive special consideration to trump strict criteria like GPAs and test scores when applying to medical or law schools. American-Indians, Mexican-Americans, and African-Americans are. That any individual of the former group might in fact be far poorer than any member of the latter group matters not at all. That any of the former cadre may also be more instantly recognizable as non-white matters likewise not a whit.

Is It Politics, After All?
How else can we explain why the son of a light-skinned African-American general or orthodontist receives extra consideration and the dark daughter of a Kurdish taxi-driver does not? I had a Coptic student with an Egyptian name from a poor family who tried to suggest that he really was "African-American"-and was laughed out of the university's affirmative action office.

Second, the claimant at some point during his cursus honorum should clearly identify himself as proud of his tribe and liberal in persuasion. The conservative TV newsreader named Joe Lopez, who does not trill his r's, and is politically inconspicuous, will not be given as much preference as the ‘Latina' who pronounces Spanish-names with Spanish accents, adds accents to her own name, and is prominent in liberal causes. Consider the antithetical treatment accorded to a Miguel Estrada versus Sonia Sotomayor, or a dark conservative Clarence Thomas versus an Eric Holder of Barbados ancestry. Estrada, remember, was targeted by the left precisely because he was Hispanic.

Leftwing minorities apparently are seen as authentic-in the sense of being thankful and obliged to their liberal patrons for their heroic efforts at ‘leveling the playing field'. Right-wing minorities who do not consciously embrace racial identification are typecast as being bitter, unappreciative, and perhaps a little crazy.

Do We Just Make This Stuff Up?
I had half-Mexican-American students who had Hispanic first names and fathers-something like a Horacio Dominquez or Jacinta Guzman-who were fully assimilated, upper-middle-class, did not speak a word of Spanish, but were active in La Raza-like groups and, presto, were seen as authentic enough to be given the benefits of unspoken affirmative action. In turn, I also had trouble convincing graduate schools to give affirmative action consideration to those like a Bill Smith or Larry Butler, who had Mexican-American mothers and spoke Spanish. In California-given the mixed ancestry of Cherokee intermarriage of many in the Oklahoma Diaspora-a sort of parlor game among white students was to claim, often accurately, 1/4, 1/8, or 1/16 "Native-American" racial heritage.

Churchillism-As In Ward...
So affirmative action, as the chameleon-like scoundrel Ward Churchill demonstrated, can easily devolve into a conscious and often artificial construct of careerist self-identification. Take away his locks and beads, and his mumbo-jumbo chants, and Churchill was more or less a poorly educated white male teacher that had no refuge in the university as recompense for his questionable scholarly pedigree.

Half-Hispanic and very affluent William "Blaine" Richardson, former Presidential candidate, had he a Hispanic pedigree on his father's side, or had he used his mother's name, or, better, had Latinized his first name, could have much more easily reinvented himself as Guillermo Marquez-a more authentic minority -despite his family money and rather exclusive prep-school background.

Had Barack Obama kept his assumed name Barry, and used his mother's maiden name-logical, given the Dunham family's exclusive caretakership of young Barack-a Barry Dunham might have appeared far less exotic and authentically black than Barack Obama.

Do the ‘Okies' Count?
There are even more absurd incongruities. Poor white grandchildren of the Oklahoma Diaspora in places like Ceres or Bakersfield have still not attained parity with other groups. Yet, the fact that they are "white" ends discussion. Their race ensures that they are not due any of the exemptions accorded other minorities-despite the fact that poverty, grammatically poorly-spoken English, and cultural stereotypes against "Okies" , can ensure that they are discriminated against as much as Latinos and blacks-especially from the white elite classes. The abjectly poor, straight-A son of Oklahoma-accented cesspool-pumper Travis Thornberry from Tulare, California will probably find it far harder to get into Stanford than the B+ children of affluent, highly-educated African-Americans.

Instant Victimhood
Illegal immigrants likewise reveal the absurdities of the government entry into racial spoils. A Yolanda Trevino who crosses the border at sixteen illegally; by eighteen is eligible for federal affirmative action when applying for college-even though she has had no prior pernicious experiences in the United States-on the dubious theory that entering America in 2009 guarantees the same subordinate status as those who came in 1920. Again, the illegal alien will get deferential treatment not shown the second-generation Chinese-American.

What Are We Left With?
Note here I am not arguing that in many cases affirmative action, the diversity industry, and identity policies do not result in some sort of understandable corrective action, or draw on the logic of recompense. Instead, I suggest that in far too many cases they simply do not-and that the exceptions, distortions, and inconsistencies associated with affirmative action and identity politics have now reached enough of a critical mass to end this once utopian experiment once and for all.

Elite White Guilt
Indeed, creating, recreating, and emphasizing racial identity, especially among elites, currently involves so many contortions that it has descended from the absurd to the outright pernicious-and is becoming a sort of racism itself. One gets the uncomfortable feeling that the perpetuators of the present system-mostly elite whites-find some sort of psychological absolution in such a system that allows them to alleviate guilt without living among poorer people of color, or sending their own children to the "diverse" public schools-two concrete steps that might quickly indeed ensure better neighborhoods and better education for the "other." In any case, most white elites count on their own connections, wealth, and education, to find exemptions from the unfairness of racial identification. A Ted Kennedy, after all, had affirmative action well before it was based on race.

Unfortunately, unlike a Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Alberto Gonzales, President Obama has embraced identity politics in unprecedented fashion-and we are reaping what he has sown. In these first days of the Sotomayor nomination, we are not discussing Justice Sotomayor's judicial competence as much as her Latina identification-and the political ramifications of such tribalism.

But then only in these race-conscious times could a Barack Obama have entered the racial labyrinth as a well-educated youth of mixed and foreign ancestry, and middle-class prep school lineage, and exited as a representative totem of the African-American underclass.

By virtue of that metamorphosis it matters not at all that he once subsidized the racial hatred of Rev. Wright's Church, carelessly tossed out the epithet ‘typical white person', stereotyped the white working class as ‘clingers,' had his privileged Attorney General call Americans "cowards" on matters of race, and nominated a candidate for the Supreme Court who, despite all the tortured exegeses of exculpation, declared that white males could not possess the judicial wisdom and temperament of someone of her own race and gender.
You see, in matters of racial politics, we deal now only in fantasies rather than reality.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Craig T. Nelson - Heroic Action

Actor protests excessive Government control of our lives....
and willing to go to jail for it.

Frustrated over our politicians lack of responsiveness and accountability to citizens,  Craig T. Nelson says he's thinking of not paying taxes as a protest, and is willing to go to jail in order to make the point.






I hope that he doesn't do this, primarily because it won't have any effect and he will go to jail, but you have to applaud his willingness to speak up against excessive government spending and control, especially as an actor in Liberal Hollywood.  Given the lock-step Liberal politics of Hollywood, his problem now may be that he never has another script offered to him. 

Hat's off to Craig!  

Now we need a few more of the Hollywood elite to come to the aid of their country.  Let's see if any more find the courage to stand up and buck the herd mentality on the West Coast.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Lobbyists Back! Same Ol', Same Ol'

Some of Obama's best friends (and Administration members) are lobbyists.....


That's why the following was just reported by Roll Call.....
"The White House moved Friday evening to loosen lobbying restrictions related to stimulus funds, lifting the ban on federal lobbyists communicating with agency officials on specific projects for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Funds."
This Administration is doing everything in a very orderly way, ticking off the to-do list one by one;

  • Unions - "Stimulus bill and the Auto bailouts - check 
  • Baby-Killers - foreign aid restriction lifted, new embryonic stem cell research funded, Notre Dame speech - check; 
  • Environmentalists - new auto mileage standards - check 
  • Rule of law folks - tossed the Chrysler and GM Bondholders for the Unions - double check
  • Bushies - released the "enhanced interrogation" files & hinted at prosecution - check
  • Anti- Illegal Invasion folks - pulled money for fence - double check
  • Hispanics - got the Supreme Court nomination -check 
  • Lobbyists - back on the list - check

The only difference between Biden's, Pelosi's, and Reid's lies and Obama's lies pragmatic deceptions is that Obama doesn't get called out on them.

Let's see if the Main Stream Media reports on this story.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

The Obama "Chaff" Effect

Chaff, a WW II developed radar countermeasure in which aircraft spread a cluster of metallic fibers to mask or diffuse themselves from effective countermeasures. 




By both design and circumstances, the Obama administration has initiated or become involved in so many significant, or potentially significant issues, that like a jet fighter wing with chaff defenses, it's almost impossible for an adversary, let alone the general public, to spot and track the main targets.


With the latest piece of "chaff" being Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, the Republicans are struggling in keeping up with effective responses to all the Democrat initiatives and issues. 


At last count all the following significant issues seemed to be concurrently in play:
  1. TARP
  2. The Auto Bailouts 
  3. Government ownership of the Auto Companies
  4. The Bank Bailouts
  5. Government ownership of the Banks
  6. The Stimulus Bill
  7. Mortgage Bailouts
  8. Health Care Legislation
  9. A Value Added Tax (VAT) to pay for it
  10. Funding $100 Billion in payments to the World Bank
  11. A tax on worker's medical benefits
  12. Energy Policies and Carbon Taxes
  13. Afghanistan escalation
  14. Iraq troop withdrawal
  15. China's Fiscal relationship
  16. China Military Buildup "threat"
  17. North Korea's Nuclear Bomb and Missie Tests
  18. Iran's Nuclear Weapon Development
  19. Russia's continued push to re-assert authority in Europe 
  20. Russia's push to initiate trouble in South America
  21. Immigration
  22. Continued Job loses
  23. Decreased Tax Revenues
  24. Enhanced "Torture" Interrogation Techniques and criminalizing the people who approved them
  25. Closing "Gitmo"
  26. Allowing Gay's to serve openly in the Military
  27. CIA "lied" to Congress (and Madam Pellosi)
  28. The Census and statistical "adjustment"
  29. The "Fairness" Doctrine 
  30. Bailing out the state budgets
  31. The new SCOTUS nominee Ms. Sotomayor
With all these issue in play, there aren't enough hours in the average citizen's day to effectively prioritize, let alone stay on top of them all.  The Republicans, given that they're effectively leaderless, are like the Keystone Kops trying to put out a fire.


To be fair to the Republicans, and actually all the rest of us who are struggling to stay abreast of all the issues, the one element of our society that really isn't doing it's job and holding the government's feet to the fire....is the press.


There are enough issues here that need to be independantly, and thoroughly researched, evaluated and reported on, that the media could break the bank on if they'd only do their job.  Unfortunately, they've really taken the term the "4th Estate" to heart, and they just think that they're another part of the Obama Administration.  Whatever tune the White House plays, they hum along.  And that's why they're dying (oh, that should be item # 32, Newspaper Bailout).


Every reporter should be working hard to make elected officials uncomfortable to be in their presence.  Instead, our "journalists" get shiver's up their legs when they come into contact with our Public "Servants".


It's time to change that.....

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Obama and the "I" Word


I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I.........



ie, yei, yei!

Clarice Feldman, noted in her post -"Obama's Verbal Onanism" an interesting aspect of President Obama's (the exceptional orator) use of the first person singular in his "Protecting our Security and Values"  speech on Friday...... Danube calculated that he said "I", 108 times! 

I know that he wasn't an English major, but, come on.......


I did a bit of an experiment. I found the complete text of Obama's national security speech from last week. Using the control-f function on my browser, I discovered that the man used the word "I" 108 times in that speech. As rendered [sic] by the NYTimes, the speech was 8+ pages--let's call it an even twelve times per page that the man said "I".

I'm reliably informed that his speech lasted 60 minutes. That's 1.8 times per minute, or one "I" every 33 seconds.

I believe that must be a record for an American president. Can anyone think of a speech that would top it?

Friday, May 22, 2009

Obama vs. Cheney On Security - Part 3

"The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard"


If you've read President Obam's speech on Protecting our Security and Values, and Vice-President Cheney's speech on Detainees and Guantanamo and now want to find out the details of why Guantanamo was opened,  what actually has gone on there, and why the story became the sensation it has, read Arthur Herman's story in the June issue of Commentary magazine.  Mr. Herman has authored in painstaking detail the "Who", "What", and "Why" of Guanatanamo.  
You'll learn the key role that one man, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, played in the Guantanamo myth creation.  Here's the story......

Obama vs. Cheney On Security - Part 2

Adult vs. Adolescent 




Yesterday’s “dueling” speeches given by President Barack Obama and former Vice-President Cheney provided a clear contrast, of not only style, but content.

My impression of Obama’s style is that he seemed that of a defensive adolescent, evidenced even by his tactic of scheduling so as to pre-empt Cheney’s speech , which had been previously scheduled for some time. Parents with two or more children may be familiar with a similar scene; upon arriving home after an evening out, they find something broken and one child attempting to pre-empt the other’s story, because he knows that if the other child's story is told first, his story will be suspect.

Although delivered with his usual professional demeanor, Obama’s content seemed whiney and defensive, with an emphasis on emotion. His stage prop was the national archives; he mentioned his immigrant father; and he bemoaned the “mess” (Guantanamo) that he was handed. The “mess” that he was handed was actually a well reasoned and pragmatic approach to dealing with enemy combatants (not uniformed military and signatories to the Geneva Conventions) captured on the field of battle, and not subject to the protection or justice of our Constitution. The present awkward situation is one of his own making, as he recklessly announced that he would close Guantanamo within one year without any plan to accomplish it, and then subsequently releasing some of the Bush Justice Department memos detailing the constrained structure of enhanced interrogation tactics, but not releasing the ones that evidenced their efficacy and significance.

Obama’s usual rhetorical technique was evident; claiming to not want to litigate the past, but then going on to constantly blaming the Bush administration for every current problem. He made statements without any demonstrated basis, such as that the enhanced interrogation techniques didn't work, Guantanamo was an al Qaeda recruiting tool, and that the prison at Guantanamo "likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained." But he went further too, accusing the Bush Administration of operating out of “fear”, as if that were a failure. 3,000 American had just been killed, anthrax was being mailed to member of Congress, and Sadam Hussein was paying families of suicide bombers and reportedly developing WMD’s . Of course they operated out of fear! It was the only responsible response.

Despite his efforts to create the impression that he was changing what Bush had put in place, by the end of his speech he had effectively validated all of the Bush decisions on dealing with enemy combatants, simply by making cosmetic changes: he will still utilize rendition; he will house captured enemy combatants in either “Gitmo” or a “Gitmo-like” facility; he will use military tribunals to prosecute them; he will have to keep some imprisoned indefinitely; and he will even maintain the right to personally determine if and when to use enhanced interrogation procedures on enemy combatants. And he did it without once ever reflecting that his initial assessment as a candidate had been naïve and ill-informed, but instead, constantly denigrated the Bush Administration’s work, while maintaining a self-righteous attitude.

On the other side of town, Vice President Cheney played the part of the adult, delivering a concise, non-emotive rational for the strategy and actions that the Bush Administration put into play after 911. He explained the pre-911 approach which had been to treat each terrorist action as a criminal law situation, and then prosecute and close the case - a pure response driven approach. Cheney effectively established the context of the situation after 911 that caused Bush to initiate a pre-emptive and comprehensive approach to stopping future attacks on the U.S., which have obviously been successful.

Stressing the importance of obtaining accurate intelligence, the Bush administration gave tools and lawful authority to obtain vital information. Cheney disputed the “torture” label Obama and the Democrats have used to describe the enhanced interrogation techniques that were used on only three hardened terrorists, and only after all other interrogation methods had failed. He pointed out the bi-partisan agreement that was involved in establishing these methods, as well as the deliberate caution that was employed to ensure that the interrogations never crossed the line into torture. Since Obama had already compromised National Security by allowing some of the memos to be released ,Cheney acclaimed the success of these interrogation methods, but then questioned Obama’s reluctance to release the complete set of memos, including the ones detailing the results, suggesting allowing the American people to decide the appropriateness of the interrogation procedures.

The Vice President also derided the Obama team’s tendency to conflate the individual abuses committed at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo with the use of enhanced interrogation, as well as their tendency to portray terrorists as innocent victims of US policy.

In closing, Cheney dismissed Obama’s approach to find some middle ground to appease the liberals and conservatives in maintaining the security of the United States and fighting terrorism stating, “… in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States. Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy”.

Charles Kruathamer summed the “debate” up very effectively…

“On Guantanamo, it's Obama's fellow Democrats who have suddenly discovered the wisdom of Bush's choice. In open rebellion against Obama's pledge to shut it down, the Senate voted 90 to 6 to reject appropriating a single penny until the president explains where he intends to put the inmates.…. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, no Gitmo inmates on American soil -- not even in American jails. 
The genius of democracy is that the rotation of power forces the opposition to come to its senses when it takes over. When the new guys, brought to power by popular will, then adopt the policies of the old guys, a national consensus is forged and a new legitimacy established. 
That's happening before our eyes. The Bush policies in the war on terror won't have to await vindication by historians. Obama is doing it day by day. His denials mean nothing. Look at his deeds.”

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Obama vs. Cheney On Security

You can decide who presents the best case .....



Protecting Our Security and Our Values

By Barack Obama
National Archives Museum
Washington, D.C.

vs.


The United States Has Never Lost Its Moral Bearings

By Dick Cheney
American Enterprise Institute
Washington D.C.

Comments to follow in next post....

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Obama The Great And Powerful

He takes over the Banks, the Car Industry, makes cars run cleaner and on less fuel, creates a new auto-recycling industry that will save untold energy and creates new jobs, while at the same time builds new linkages with Cuba to go along with his reduction of restrictions on that country .......

With the establichment of higher fuel efficiency standards of 39 MPG by 2016 for all new cars, you won't be able to buy any of those large, practical, convenient, comfortable, and safe cars and pick-up trucks that you grown to love....but that won't be a problem, because Obama has already figured out how to accomplish even more to cut energy usage and promote greater recycling on our journey to being a green country.....

The Obama - Cuba Auto Recycling Joint Venture!

That's right! The perfect way to build a meaningful relationship with our brothers and sisters in the revolution, save money, save energy, and put more of our university grads to work at low-paying, but high satisfaction, community service work - Community Car Mechanic Activist!. Cuba has spent years and untold research into extending the usefulness of American-made auto's.  We can learn a tremendous amount from them.  Most Cuban cars owners only buy two or three gallons of gas a year.......  Amazing!

And for those who yearn for the good ol' days, a special imported car service will be established (and they already have the logo's that you've grown to love).  Another brilliant concept from the Obama Democrats!


We can tap into that deep Cuban knowledge base and learn, once again, how to keep those big pieces of iron that you love purring for you.  You won't be forced to buy one of those new put-put's made out of aluminum foil made necessary to meet the new standards, because we're going to have a Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill that will include special set asides for Master Cuban Auto Technicians who will help train our ACORN members in providing local shade tree mechanic community advisor services to keep your old gas guzzler purring like a tiger.


He's thought of everything!  Obama.  Yes, We can!

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Republican Rebound

Honeymoon with Obama appears to definitely be over......

Republicans head-to-head with Democrats!

Despite the overwhelming adoring press reports for Obama, the men and women in the streets seem to hold a different perspective on the two Party's.



In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent? (Asked of independents: As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?)

Gallup Poll Selected Trend on Party Affiliation: 2004-2009
Republicans
Independents
Democrats
Republicans
(including
"leaners")
Democrats
(including
"leaners")
%
%
%
%
%
2009 May 7-10
32
34
32
45
45
2009 Apr 20-21
27
36
36
39
50
2009 Apr 6-9
24
40
35
34
53
2009 Mar 27-29
28
35
35
40
51
2009 Mar 5-8
25
35
38
35
53
2009 Feb 20-22
27
36
34
39
51
2009 Feb 9-12
29
36
33
39
51
2009 Jan 30-Feb 1
27
35
36
38
53
2009 Jan 9-11
30
33
36
41
51
2008 Dec 12-14
26
35
37
35
52
2008 Dec 4-7
27
33
37
39
51
2008 Nov 13-16
26
35
39
37
55
2008 Nov 7-9
28
37
33
40
51
2008 Oct 23-26
33
32
34
45
48
 ~~~~~~~~~~~
2004 Jan 2-5
32
40
28
48
46

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