Category: Politics

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Slice and Dice Your Demos – ZIPSkinny.com

Jon Ponder

Be sure to check out Trish’s post about Walkscore.com from last night. I happened upon a similarly interesting site this morning, ZIPSkinny.com, which slices and dices demographic information based on ZIP codes.

According to the results for my ZIP Code in West Hollywood, 55.9 percent of my neighbors are categorized “never married,” but I doubt this number counts folks like me who have California state-sanctioned domestic partnerships. Among my neighbors, a scant 24.2 percent are in dual-sex marriages.

Education-wise, we do pretty well considering the fact that movie industry types don’t always finish school: 94 percent have high school degrees and 53 percent have bachelor’s degrees or higher.

Median household income is $51k, which seems low when you consider that one-bedroom apartments rent for around $1,500 and two-bedroom homes sell for $1.5 million. Unemployment is 4.5 percent — have my doubts about this too since most everybody in the industry is self-employed and thus not considered in employment figures. The number of WeHoans living below poverty is 9.6 percent.

Our population density seems smaller than expected: 9600 people per square mile. One of the factoids that gets tossed about in these parts is that West Hollywood is the most densely populated town west of the Rockies — but this is probably an urban myth.

Another surprise: 47 percent of us have been here five years or longer. Would have thought it was more like 25 percent.

My ZIP is 82.7 percent white, 2.9 percent black and 7.3 percent latino. Multiracial is given at 2.5 percent.

The population is 59 percent male, which makes sense but the median age of the men is 39.6 years old, which means a lot of those twinks in Boys Town are lying about their ages. The median age of women is 40.6 years old.

What’s Your Walk Score?

Trish

No, it has nothing to do with heart-rate monitors. Your walk score is determined by analyzing your proximity to stores and services.

We help homebuyers, renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods. Walk Score shows you a map of what’s nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.

In my case, the results were a bit disappointing.

Despite the fact that I am about midway between a full-service grocery store and the main branch of the public library, my walk score was a weak 43 on a scale of 1 to 100. But when I clicked around the results screen a little, I noticed the grocery had disappeared, and a movie theater that is actually several miles from my side of town was shown on the next block. The popular sushi restaurant on the corner was listed as a catering service, while Arnold’s, the diviest dive bar I know, was featured prominently.

Maybe your results will be more accurate. Check it out and see how your address rates. If nothing else, you will see all the great reasons you have to walk instead of driving. Unless you’re trying to catch a movie. In that case, you’ll definitely want to crank up the roadster.

Newt Gingrich is Such a Loser

Buck Banks

When Newt Gingrich announced last weekend that he would not be running for president, I wasn’t too surprised. See, for the past several weeks, I have subscribed to Newt’s e-newsletter, Winning the Future Through Human Events.

Now I know I’m going to catch it from co-editor Trish for that confession, but I just wanted to know what Newt was up to. Call it research.

Two weeks ago, he announced in his newsletter (which carries really pathetic adverts, but more on that in a minute) that he would be announcing his American Solutions for the Future agenda in Second Life on Thursday, Sept. 27. I signed up, mainly because I wanted to see what kind of avatar Newt would choose (my guess: tall, dark, slender, handsome — after all, you can be who you want to be in Second Life, and why would he choose to be a short, chunky Georgian?).

This Free Report Reveals How You Can Reverse 50 Years of Artery Plaque With Just Four Tiny Capsules a Day!

Didn’t happen. I was supposed to get a notice about where in Second Life Newt would be ‘splaining his solutions for the future, but didn’t get one. I went to Second Life at the appointed time, but could get nothing from the virtual child molesters, pickpockets and perverts that I encountered there. And I didn’t want to spend any Linden dollars tracking the Newt down.

Then, last weekend, Newt announced that he would not run for president because he couldn’t do that and run American Solutions, due to it being a 527 organization. In other words, Newt would be prevented from running for prez while heading up his cash cow that falls into that gray area outside election finance laws:

According to the IRS, a Section 527 (§527) organization is an organization that is created to receive and disburse funds to influence or attempt to influence the nomination, election, appointment or defeat of candidates for public office.

On the face of the above definition, a §527 Organization sounds like a PAC. In effect that is what a §527 organization is—a PAC by another name. However, there is one key difference, a §527 organization does not fall within the regulator realm of the Federal Election Commission and therefore it is not subject to the same limits as FEC-regulated PACs.

Often called “soft money” PACs or organizations, a §527 organization is permitted to accept contributions in any amount from any source. However, the organization is required to make regular reports to the Internal Revenue Service of its funding and expenditures.

Except not all 527s are required to report to the IRS. Is American Solutions? Who knows?

I received an e-mail yesterday in which Newt tries to explain why he simply can’t run for president. His explanation? Those Blue Meanies, McCain-Feingold, the campaign finance reform legislation, which rightly draws a line between shadow organizations like American Solutions and political action committees and legitimate campaign organizations.

Co-Editor Jon nailed it Sunday when he said Newt is just too damn unpopular to win the presidency and that the Newtster is more interested in maintaining a cushy source of revenue than doing the hard work of campaigning and governing.

And, man, the dough must be rolling in, given the kinds of adverts Newt is running in his newsletter. There’s this snake-oil pitch:

FREE Report
THE 23-CENT LIFE-SAVER Heart Surgeons NEVER TELL YOU ABOUT!

This Free Report Reveals How You Can Reverse 50 Years of Artery
Plaque With Just Four Tiny Capsules a Day!

Scientific studies have proven this one nutrient is up to 82%
effective at eliminating rogue calcium from plaque, causing
clogs to soften, and be flushed away. As plaque is flushed away,
healthy blood flow is restored to the heart, brain, muscles, and
every organ in your body.

This report reveals the astonishing health miracle 1.5 million
grateful patients swear by. So safe, it’s FDA-APPROVED for use
in baby food. So effective, you can actually SEE it working. So
Cheap, it’s JUST 23 cents per capsule.

I wonder how you can see it working INSIDE YOUR ARTERIES!

And this one:

NEVADA WATER DEAL SET TO PAY 381%

The fight for water in the Southwest is heating up faster than a
blow torch. The Arizona Republic calls it “a classic Western
showdown.” And right now one small company is about to turn this vicious demand into millions of dollars on one of the most
important water deals in decades — at near record prices.

This company is about turn its holdings into a 102,000% gain.
Investors have only a short time to get in on this deal before
the hedge funds or private equity gobble it up …

Wow! A 102,000 percent gain! I wonder if Fed Chair Ben Bernanke knows about that.

And then there’s this gem:

IF DEMOCRATS HAD ANY BRAINS, THEY’D BE REPUBLICANS

Ann Coulter at her funniest and most outrageous

Who knew Ann Coulter was funny?

So, not only is Newt getting dough from the 1,200 misguided individuals who actually showed up at the the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta, Ga., Saturday — so many more than the Newt expected, they had to “expand the ballroom we were in by removing a wall and setting up more chairs” — he’s raking it in off Web ads for Ann Coulter books. Ew!

No wonder a run for president seemed like too much work. “Winning the Future” indeed — one click at a time.

Michael Medved: Six Reasons Slavery Wasn’t So Bad

Jon Ponder

In a remarkable piece of sophistry titled Six Inconvenient Truths about Slavery, right-wing movie and social critic Michael Medved lays out a clear and concise justification for the slavery of Africans in America.

What is unclear is why he felt such a justification was necessary:

1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation.

Yes, Michael, slavery was excused, or at least not condemned, in the Bible, but that doesn’t make it right. Besides, who said it was a uniquely American innovation, and what difference does that make in the greater scheme of things? The fact that the Brits and the Spanish did it too is hardly an excuse.

2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic — involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans.

This is bizarre. Yes, slavery ended in the North not long after the republic was founded but slavery of Africans was present in various locales along America’s Eastern Seaboard from around 1670 until 1865.

3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit.

Got that, black Americans? You’re lucky we didn’t kill you.Where’s your gratitude for that!

4. It’s not true that the U.S.became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves.

This is historical revisionism, at best. The Southern colonies were more prosperous than the north for much of our pre-revolutionary history. Charleston, S.C., was the largest city in the colonies for years. Even after the North’s ascendancy in the early Industrial Era, the majority of the vast wealth generated by the states that would comprise the Confederacy was generated by slave labor. To ignore that fact is disingenuous and not a little reprehensible.

5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition.

All it took was the deaths of 500,000 Union and Confederate soldiers, and the complete destruction of the slave economy in the South — a loss we are only just now starting to recover from in many ways.

6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African-Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa.

It is impossible to game out what would have happened in Africa if so much of its population hadn’t been captured and exported into servitude, especially since the descendants of these people have proven to be enterprising, innovative, intelligent and talented.

This article is a real head-scratcher. It appears to be a preemptive argument against paying reparations to the descendants of African slaves, but if the reparations movement has made significant inroads lately, it is news to me.

On the other hand, if Medved’s piece was intended to open a new dialog on racism in America, it is clear that liberals and conservatives are as far apart as ever on this issue.

Iran Designates CIA, U.S. Army As Terrorist Organizations

Jon Ponder

Last week, the Democratically controlled U.S. Congress was caught red-handed aiding and abetting the Cheney-Bush drumbeat for war in Iran — just as they helped the administration in its run-up to the war in Iraq when Republicans controlled both houses.

On Tuesday, the House voted 397 to 16 to endorse the Cheney cabal’s assertion that the Iranian military’s Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization. In a 76-22 vote on Wednesday, the Senate agreed to similar language.

On Saturday, the Iranian parliament countered with an in-kind declaration that elite U.S. institutions to be terrorist organizations, a move that was backed by Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday:

Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters in his weekly brief that he agreed with the symbolic resolution passed by Iran’s hardline parliament Saturday, which condemned the two American institutions for its actions in Japan in World War II, as well as more recently in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The label of terrorist is suitable for the military and security forces of the United States,” he said.

Seymour Hersh reported last week in the New Yorker that the administration has shifted the rationale for war because the public was not buying an earlier assertion it floated that Iran’s deployment of nuclear weapons was imminent.

Now Bush and Cheney are trying to convince Americans that Iran is responsible for the violence in Iraq because Iranian Shias are supplying weapons to Iraqi Shia insurgents in their civil war against Sunnis. This is ironic, of course, because it is the United States who invaded and is occupying Iraq — and because U.S. ally Saudi Arabia is also supplying weapons to Sunni insurgents in the sectarian civil war.

By voting for the Cheney-Bush designation of the Iranian military’s elite guard as a terrorist organization, Democrats in Congress have given the administration their tacit approval to escalate the U.S. war in the Middle East.

Giuliani Backer Behind Failed Scheme to Give 19 of California’s Electoral College Votes to 2008 GOP Nominee

Jon Ponder

Two big stories broke over the weekend about the Republican scheme to change California’s winner-take-all primary to a proportional system that would give nearly half the state’s 55 Electoral College votes to the GOP in next year’s presidential election.

If the initiative had passed, it could well have resulted in handing Giuliani the presidency in a close election.

First came word that the campaign to put an initiative on the June ballot had failed and was closing shop. Then we learned that campaign’s once-secret major donor was a key back of Rudolph Giuliani, the GOP frontrunner and, not incidentally, the person most likely to have benefited if the initiative had passed.

Pundits have all but ceded the California primary to Giuliani because he is the most liberal GOP candidate. But it is considered highly unlikely he or any Republican could win the state in the general election.

The stakes were actually quite huge. Under the proposed change, if the GOP candidate were to win all the California districts his party won in 2006, even though he lost the state overall, he’d still have 19 additional Electoral College votes — roughly the total votes held by Ohio.

In the story Saturday that broke the news of the initiative’s failure, note the reference to the lack of disclosure of the identity of a donor:

Unable to raise sufficient money and angered over a lack of disclosure by its one large donor, veteran political law attorney Thomas Hiltachk, who drafted the measure, said he was resigning from the committee … Campaign spokesman Kevin Eckery said he was ending his role as well … [Backers] said Thursday that they believed the measure was all but dead, at least for the 2008 election.

In the second story, we learn the donor’s name and that he has close ties to Giuliani:

A close friend and major fundraiser of… Giuliani has identified himself as the mystery financier of the proposed California initiative to apportion the state’s 55 electoral votes by congressional district instead of winner-take-all.

He is New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. He said he provided the $175,000 to initially finance the petition drive to get the measure on the June 2008 ballot …

Singer oversees Elliott Associates, an $8 billion investment fund. He is also chairman of Giuliani’s northeast fundraising operation that produced a third of the New Yorker’s $33.5 million campaign war chest in the first six months of 2007. Singer and his employees have donated at least $182,000 to the Giuliani campaign so far this year.

“I made the contribution without any restrictions,” Singer’s statement said. Some Democrats have threatened legal action, complaining that federal campaign finance laws were violated if the Giuliani campaign was involved.

The Giuliani campaign denied having any role in the campaign:

A Giuliani campaign spokeswoman, Maria Comella, said today that Singer’s donation “was completely independent from our campaign.”

But this strains credulity because, if the initiative had passed, it could well have resulted in handing Giuliani the presidency in a close election next November.

Why We Can’t Ignore the Termites in the Basement

Trish

How can governments, including ours, say it would hurt their economies to fix climate change? Don’t they realize, as Al Gore pointed out in the scene in An Inconvenient Truth with the gold bricks, that losing life as we know it not only costs more but trumps, well, everything?

PAX World Mutual Funds’ Julie Gorte, senior vice president of sustainable investing, explains the attitudes of those who think we have the luxury to ignore, or postpone dealing with, global warming.

The termites will destroy your house much more quickly and much more surely than some of those wolf-at-the-door problems, but you always have the feeling that you can get to them later

I sort of divide all problems into two types. There’s a wolf-at-the-door problem, which is how we think about things like terrorism and taxes, and then there’s the termites-in-the-basement problem, which is what climate change is. The termites will destroy your house much more quickly and much more surely than some of those wolf-at-the-door problems, but you always have the feeling that you can get to them later — that we can cut our energy consumption, that we can replace fossil fuels, that we can cut emissions next year or the year after that, when we can afford it.

And we end up never getting to those problems, and then we wind up in a world where the sea level rises not 35 millimeters but 35 feet, and the disease vectors have expanded so that tropical diseases are all over North America and they affect our food supply and everything else. There are so many things that climate change can do that will make this world something we never thought we’d see in our lifetimes that I think it’s the most important thing that we need to focus on.

Now It’s Official: FlaDem Chair Thurman Really Is Working for Lobbyist Cardenas Who Works on Romney Campaign

Buck Banks

In what is being called a “bipartisan” effort, Florida Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman is now officially working for Republican lobbyist Al Cardenas, who advises Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to the Miami-Dade County Commission. The strange bedfellowship was first reported by the Miami Herald in July, and while some in the Democratic Party questioned the head of the state party organization lobbying with a Republican operative to the tune of $3,500 per month while receiving $100,000 per annum from the FDP.

It sure is strange to read a letter from Cardenas, a top advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, praising the woman determined to turn Florida from red to blue in 2008.

A couple of months down the road and a real crisis in the Florida Democratic Party, and the relationship still just doesn’t seem right.

It’s interesting to note that none of the articles on the topic of Thurman’s unholy alliance with Cardenas mentions exactly what she’s supposed to be lobbying for.

… it sure is strange to read a letter from Cardenas, a top advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, praising the woman determined to turn Florida from red to blue in 2008.

”During her time in Congress, Karen worked tirelessly on issues related to healthcare, taxes and the economy,” the letter says. It also notes her “ability to work productively with members of both parties.”

And Cardenas is nothing if not a staunch Republican. Here’s an excerpt from an article in South Florida CEO from 2003, after he stepped down as state Republican chair:

Background: Cardenas’ name has been synonymous with GOP power for decades, including a stint on President-Elect Ronald Reagan’s transition team. Now, with Florida’s governor, cabinet and two-thirds of the state legislature — plus two-thirds of Florida’s federal legislators — all Republicans, says Cardenas, “It’s more of a mission-accomplished feeling in deciding to move on to the next challenge.”

Ambition: Cardenas is now building a high-end government relations practice in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., with a focus on “up-tier” clients. He is busy hiring top-drawer attorneys to create that type of practice for the firm.

My theory — and I’m sticking to it — is that the commission is trying to shake loose big fed money to pay for a $1 billion tunnel project between the Port of Miami and the mainland. The City of Miami Commission has so far resisted voting on ponying up $50 million for the project. Only last Thursday a looming Sept. 30 deadline to have funding in place was extended indefinitely, to allow the commissioners who are up for re-election in November to defer the vote until after the election.

The state of Florida is kicking in more than $400 million, but that still leaves a gap in the overall $914 million price tag. Enter Cardenas and Thurman, who will be going after federal transportation grants and homeland security grants for the Port of Miami on behalf of the Miami-Dade County Commission. At least that’s what I’m betting.

I’ll leave the questions about whether Thurman helped kill the Florida Democratic Party for the 2008 presidential election to the conspiracy theorists.

At Secret Meeting, Christian Nationalists Threaten to Leave GOP If Giuliani Is Nominee

Jon Ponder

More signs that Christian extremists are awakening to the fact that their nearly 30-year marriage to the mainstream Republican Party has been a sham from the start:

Republicans brought Christian nationalists into the fold in the wake of Watergate when it became clear that their rapidly dwindling coalition of country club-types, gun nuts and isolationist-paranoiacs was not large enough to win against Democrats.

According to anonymous sources present at a clandestine breakaway session held alongside the secret thrice-annual meeting of the extreme rightwing Council for National Policy, a handful of America’s top Christian nationalists signed onto a resolution that threatens to leave the GOP and run their own candidate if Republicans select Rudolph Giuliani as their party’s nominee next year.

Among those at the double-secret meeting were heads of two wealthiest organizations in the homophobia industry, James Dobson of Focus on the Family — with total revenues in 2006 of $142,279,843 — and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, which had revenue in 2006 of $10,858,374. Also in attendance was Richard Viguerie, the conservative guru of direct-mail marketing, a cutting-edge political communications tool of the 1980s.

The breakaway session resulted in a written resolution stating that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate.”

According to Sourcewatch, the CNP is a “secretive forum that was formed in 1981 by Tim LaHaye” — a one-time John Birch Society member who is the multi-millionaire author of the theocratic fantasy “Left Behind” book series. Sourcewatch says CNP is “a networking tool for leading US conservative political leaders.” Mark Crispin Miller, author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” is also cited, describing the CNP as a “highly secretive … theocratic organization — what they want is basically religious rule.” Another source says the CNP is a meant to counter the Council on Foreign Relations.

Republicans brought Christian nationalists into the fold in the wake of Watergate when it became clear that their rapidly dwindling coalition of country club-types, tax-haters, gun nuts and isolationist-paranoiacs was not large enough to win against Democrats.

For the first two decades, Republican leaders who were not particularly religious, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Newt Gingrich, paid lip service to the theocrats in order to keep them in line. It is ironic, however, that the fissure between the GOP and its religious extremists base has erupted during the presidency of George H. Bush, who claims to be an evangelical Christian.

If Christian nationalists do abandon the Republican Party, the numbers could look a bit grimmer for the GOP next year. Among the 31 percent of voters who describe themselves as Republicans, fewer than one-third say they are evangelicals. If the evangelicals move their support to a third-party candidate, the GOP nominee would be forced to try to court back an additional 10 percent of conservative independent voters, many of whom left the GOP during the Bush term because of the party’s profligate spending and a series of back-to-back scandals that have exposed the party’s corruption and hypocrisy.

Say It Ain’t So, Newt!

Jon Ponder

It was just one week ago today that Newt Gingrich challenged Fox News viewers to raise $30 million dollars for his presidential campaign. “I don’t see as a citizen how you could turn that down,” he said.

Newt’s image probably can’t be rehabilitated, but if he’s going to try, it will take a lot more money than $30 million and a lot more time than three months.

Yesterday, however, the AP reported that Newt will stay out of the race:

“Newt is not running,” spokesman Rick Tyler said. “It is legally impermissible for him to continue on as chairman of American Solutions (for Winning the Future) and to explore a campaign for president.”

Gingrich decided “to continue on raising the challenges America faces and finding solutions to those challenges” as the group’s chairman, Tyler said, “rather than pursuing the presidency.”

So Citizen Newt had to choose between running for president of the United States and keeping his cushy seat atop his nonprofit ideas empire, and he chose cushy. Call me old fashioned but I remember a day when public officials put service ahead of everything else, especially their cushy seats.

I guess Republicans really do hate government.

A cynic might suggest the real reason Newt won’t run is because stepping down would remind him that he was forced to step down as speaker of the House after his colleagues learned he was having an affair with a staffer at the same time, under his leadership, their party was impeaching Pres. Clinton for having an affair with a staffer. (And both Gingrich and Clinton were having these affairs when they jointly passed the Defense of Marriage Act into law.)

It’s likely the real reason Gingrich isn’t running is poll results like these: In a CBS poll this spring, 43 percent gave Newt a “not favorable” rating; 16 percent were favorable. In a USA Today poll around the same time, 48 percent were unfavorable, 29 percent favorable.

The public has a clear picture of who Gingrich is. His image probably can’t be rehabilitated — confessing his affair to Father Dobson did nothing for him among “values voters” — but if he’s going to try, it will take a lot more money than $30 million and a lot more time than three months.