We’re really going to learn a lot more from the 2010 census about the browning of America, as well as how many of us identify racially—understanding that “race” is an artificial construct. The white supremacists’ worst fear will be realized—we’re increasingly mixing up the gene pool; most would say that’s a good thing (for those thinking of hybrid vigor), but from the supremacist’s perspective the white race is being contaminated. How can you hate when you can’t tell what anyone is? Oh, so sad. Bring out the tiny violin.
When my brother and sister-in-law came down to visit the other weekend, we discussed how my little biracial nephew Mr. E (seen with me at left) will view the world when he’s old enough to understand the bizarre notion of race. Many questions ran through my mind, such as how he will identify? Nearly everyone who sees Mr. E and I together see the strong family resemblance, even down to our complexions. My brother, who is a bit darker than I am, had straighter, darker hair; he and I are not biracial, but the products of two light-skinned black parents who themselves were born of lighter-skinned blacks and black/Native American and West Indian heritage. Neither of us can pass for white, but obviously we have white relatives somewhere in there, but they are generations back in the family tree.
But it’s also interesting to think about those who deal in the politics of race when it comes to mixing black and white. For instance, our biracial President has chosen on the census to select “black.”
He may be the world’s foremost mixed-race leader, but when it came to the official government head count, President Barack Obama gave only one answer to the question about his ethnic background: African-American.
The White House confirmed on Friday that Obama did not check multiple boxes on his U.S. Census form, or choose the option that allows him to elaborate on his racial heritage. He ticked the box that says “Black, African Am., or Negro.”
Mr. Obama could have checked white, checked both black and white, or checked the last category on the form, “some other race,” which he would then have been asked to identify in writing.
There is no category specifically for mixed race or biracial.
Instructions for the census’s American Community Survey, which poses the question in the same way as the 2010 form, say that “people may choose to provide two or more races either by marking two or more race response boxes, by providing multiple write-in responses, or by some combination of marking boxes and writing in responses.”
That the President selected ““Black, African Am., or Negro,” suggests he politically and culturally identifies as black AND because he cannot pass for white. Some who are biracial or multiracial can pass, or come across as some vague ethnicity—in those cases my guess you’ll likely see a boost in mixed identifications written in on census forms. When it comes to Latinos, as you see there is a separate question there. And there will be many more minority babies likely to be born in United States during 2010 than white babies, according to a recent study.
There may be more minority babies born this year in the U.S. than white babies for first time ever.
It could be a “tipping point” that propels our population toward minorities becoming the U.S. majority over the next 40 years.
In 1990, 37% of children born in the U.S. were minorities, but by 2008 it was 48%. This means the country is on track to become a minority-majority country by the middle of the century, according to Kenneth Johnson, of the University of New Hampshire. He researched many of the racial trends in a paper being released Wednesday, the week before the 2010 population count, which begins in earnest next week when more than 120 million U.S. households receive census forms in the mail.
The baby trend doesn’t hold true everywhere, however. In New York City, Manhattan and Brooklyn kids are more likely to be white, he said.
Who’s biracial in this series of photos?* The answer is below the fold.
After the hated health care legislation stopped being something that Republicans used to warn about the coming social fascist takeover, and started being something that actually existed, Americans actually kind of, uh, like the plan.
Does this mean that democracy works again? Please say so, Republicans!
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 75% of likely voters now say they are at least somewhat angry at the government’s current policies, up four points from late November and up nine points since September. The overall figures include 45% who are Very Angry, also a nine-point increase since September.
Just 19% now say they’re not very or not at all angry at the government’s policies, down eight points from the previous survey and down 11 from September. That 19% includes only eight percent (8%) who say they’re not angry at all and 11% who are not very angry.
This certainly tells me a great deal about the American electorate’s ability to have emotions about vaguely concerning things. Next up, a poll on whether people think that fun is entertaining.
Are we supposed to feel better that the figure isn’t any higher? (Think Progress):
According to the poll, a combined 58% said the decade was either “awful” or “not so good,” 29% said it was fair, and just 12% said it was either “good” or “great.” [...]
Asked what they thought had the greatest negative impact on America this past decade, 38% cited the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 23% picked the mortgage and housing crisis, 20% said the Iraq war, 11% chose the stock market crash, and 6% said Hurricane Katrina.
But 37% said it lost ground on the environment, 46% said it lost ground on health and well being, 50% said it lost ground on peace and national security, 54% said lost ground on the nation’s sense of unity, 55% said it lost ground in treating others with respect, 66% said it lost ground on moral values, and a whopping 74% said it lost ground on economic prosperity.
This also bears out looking at Census figures - this can’t help the ego of the man from Crawford. Aw, crap, he probably doesn’t give a damn.
While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton’s two terms, often substantially.
The best part of all of this is the most predictable—Bush cronies are desperate to rewrite history to blame Obama. After all, what on earth can they put in the W library about his Presidency that doesn’t smell of sucktitude?
Former White House adviser Karl Rove, for example, has been all over the media, issuing statements like the Bush administration has “no” responsibility for current budget deficits. Bush officials have even tried to claim that they made Afghanistan a top priority and that Obama is the one who has been screwing up their work. Fox News host Sean Hannity has gone so far as to say that Bush deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is claiming that the cure to the country’s problems is to just give political control back to Republicans (which was true for a large part of the last decade).
I know the general American public—you know, the ones who tune out politics until they have to vote (for the ones who do vote at all)—is seen as sheep by these neo-cons, teabaggers, birthers and media turd purveyors, but one can only hope they aren’t going to buy this pantload.
CNN says that Nancy Pelosi has Newt Gingrich-like approval ratings, in the sense that she has an approval rating that Newt Gingrich at one point had while he was Speaker of the House. It’s a lot like saying that Obama has “Nixon-like” approval ratings because he has an approval rating that Nixon at one point had, and he spends all of his time ranting on tape about Jews.
Nearly half of all Americans — 48 percent — disapprove of how the California Democrat she is handling her job as Speaker of the House in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Monday, while 39 percent approve of her performance.
That rating makes her less popular than other members of her party — congressional Democrats drew a 51 percent approval rating in last month’s CNN/ORC survey — and roughly in line with the congressional GOP, which drew positive ratings in April from just 39 percent of those polled.
That puts her approval rating at roughly the levels Newt Gingrich had in his first year as Speaker of the House. (Back in 1995, Gingrich’s approval rating was 37 percent; by 1997 — at the same point in his speakership that Pelosi is now — that had dropped to just 25 percent.)
However, this does lead to one potential benefit - if Pelosi’s being mentioned in the same breath as Gingrich, this means that within a couple of years, she should be mentioned not only as a presidential contender no matter how little she actually does to run for President, but her every utterance should make national news no matter how little power or influence she actually holds. I just say we do it now and get this little dance over with.
But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.
Now, there’s only one logical way to interpret this: the actual measure of how popular the president’s policies are shouldn’t include black people, because they skew the results off from the people who actually count. Blacks are effectively subhuman drones, mindlessly following along behind anyone with dark enough skin. This means, of course, that Tom Maguire will step in to explain why this isn’t the case.
What could it possibly mean? Gosh - how about, on some issue black voters support the man rather than the position, and if a white Democrat takes a similar position he will find less-than-expected support.
Is any example involving blacks and Obama too fraught with emotion? Well, suppose white evangelicals supported Bush’s adventures in the Middle East because, although the issues were over their heads, they trusted a God-fearing Christian to do the right thing. In such a scenario, neither McCain nor Romney could pick up Bush’s banner, even if they backed the same policies. One might say that Bush’s position was less popular than it appeared.
One might say that, true. Of course, that not only requires a wholesale rewrite of York’s point, it’s also a different fucking (yet equally stupid) point. Yes, different politicians have different levels of popular support for the things they say, which is the entire point of being a politician. Saying that something is less popular than it appears because the person selling it is a better salesperson of the issue not only doesn’t make sense, it’s like saying that Crank: High Voltage is actually a more popular movie than The Dark Knight once you remove everyone who ever read a comic book, because that’s an irrelevant advantage.
Of course, we could also do this another way: just have bin Laden read off each party’s platform, and whichever one Americans hate less wins everything. Yes, that seems fair.
Ah, yes. Liddy Dole’s gone…can’t wait to bounce this tool out of office. From the N&O’s Under the Dome:
U.S. Sen. Richard Burr wouldn’t mind watching basketball with Barack Obama. The Winston-Salem Republican was recently on the Charlotte sports talk show “Primetime with the Packman.” Repeating a question from the Democratic primary last year, host Mark Packer asked whether Burr would rather have dinner with Hillary Clinton or Obama.
“Hillary Clinton in a heartbeat,” Burr said. “I’ve had an opportunity in the last week to have dinner with Barack Obama. I passed on that one.”
Obama held a bipartisan “timeout dinner” at the White House with about 180 guests from Congress and his Cabinet, as well as staffers and spouses. Burr said the president is a “straight-up guy,” a “tremendous athlete” and “a very disciplined individual,” but he disagrees with him on the issues.
the black athlete is “bred to be the better athlete because, this goes all the way to the Civil War when ... the slave owner would breed his big woman so that he would have a big black kid.”
Or this fun statement by Snyder about black coaches taking away jobs from the white man:
Perhaps I should just be kind and assume he wasn’t being racist, and just stupidly partisan. Ahem. As one reader noted:
You have an opportunity to dine with the President of the United States, and you pass on it?
How can we expect you to best represent NC when you won’t even sit down to break bread with our President (a President for whom the majority of your constituents voted.)
This seriously defies belief. I don’t care if it was racism or partisanship that led Dickie Burr to this decision; it was stupid. He had a chance to meet with the President, and possibly advocate for issues affecting North Carolina, and he passed on it?
You remember when I said that Zogby was going to come out with a poll showing the race tied so that someone could say the race was closing? Well, shock of shocks, they’re going to have McCain up one tomorrow.
This, of course, means that after weeks upon weeks of every poll showing Obama with a consistent lead in a range of about three to fourteen points, and with absolutely nothing happening on Thursday and Friday to in any way change the shape, direction or perception of this race, three days before voting starts everything that hasn’t been working for the past several weeks suddenly takes hold and FUNDAMENTALLY ALTERS THE CONTOURS OF THIS RACE AND THE WORLD OMG.
If Zogby didn’t exist, a conservative blogger would have to manufacture a story saying the liberal media was holding fake-him hostage.
John McCain isn’t really closing in this race. Over the past three weeks, Obama’s lead has oscillated wildly (massively!) between between 5.5 and 8 points. His current average RCP lead is 6.2%, which is right in the middle of that range and about as high as he ever was at any point before our entire financial system crashed.
But McCain has done one thing more successfully than anything else since he announced Sarah Palin as his running mate - sold the narrative that the race will inevitably tighten for him, and that any result which shows a closer race is evidence of a trend, no matter how fleeting or random the result is. The worst example (of the morning) is this article from Florida Today, entitled “Poll gives McCain lead in Fla. early voting”. It would be fine, except that there’s another poll, referenced in the same piece, which shows Barack Obama destroying the holy hell out of McCain in early voting.
A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll gave McCain a 49-45 lead over Democrat Barack Obama among Floridians who have already voted.
[...]
Only a tiny fraction of the Florida respondents reported voting early, leaving McCain’s lead subject to a wide margin of error. A Quinnipiac University poll, released Wednesday, showed early voters favoring Obama 58-34, another small sample with a potentially wide margin of error.
Why would you favor one poll showing a statistical tie as showing a lead when another poll shows a massive blowout in the other direction? Because that’s the narrative!
Howard Fineman wonders why this race is still so close, and why McCain hasn’t been “put away” yet, which would be a great story if McCain had a single real poll from this month ever showing him ahead, or if Obama hadn’t had a winning margin in the Electoral College for, you know, weeks. The issue isn’t Obama not putting McCain away - the issue is that nobody will write that story for fear of being “unfair” and ending the race, meaning the only story left is how Obama may fail.
The other strange part of this narrative is that this Dick Morris article is an article of faith among those covering this campaign. If undecideds were going to break for Obama, they would have (which, of course, makes no sense, because you could make the exact same argument in McCain’s direction). It all goes to the same story, though - Obama, whether or not he’s actually closed this race out, will never be said to have done so, because it renders McCain’s campaign (and therefore the entirety of election coverage) as dead as a doorknob.
Obama’s being faulted for a structural deficiency in media coverage of the presidential campaign, and McCain hailed because there has to be some reason that a race Obama’s had won for weeks isn’t yet a “victory”. Just wait until Zogby produces that Monday poll showing an exact tie…my friends.
You see, if you look at Barack Obama’s support for the past week as compared to other weeks, it’s gone down in many ideological groups - he would have lost support! And up through the 18th, he’d gained support! Devious Gallup motherfuckers!
Except that if you look at the linked page which determines support by ideological subgroup, it ends on the 14th, not the 18th. Which, of course, means that we need to look back to the 14th…which, of course, was when Obama was actually behind McCain.
In fact, there’s no reason why there’d be data for the 18th, because it’s released weekly…and the last release would have been for the week ending the 14th. Stupid explain that part of the post…outright crazy explains the rest of the rant about how a liberal troll on their site will lose the election for Barack Obama.
There’s also this John Podhoretz classic in which he uses a poll of New York Jewish voters with an eleven point margin of error to show that there’s been a sea change in this election. Given that a poll of a group of people with an eleven point margin of error pretty much only shows that said group of people exist, either Podhoretz is under the impression that Jews just gained the franchise, or he’s a functional political illiterate. I’ll take whichever is more likely to get me accused of anti-Semitism, please.
As any superhero reaches a certain saturation point of popularity and public acclaim, it behooves fans of said superhero to point to other, competing heroes and remark that their fans are sucky asswads who are totally undeserving of the basic mark of respect that would be owed to someone who wasn’t totally in love with a crappy fuckface loser hero.
I do believe I had about seven* online iterations of this conversation when I was 14 and we’d just gotten the internet at my house. If it’s good enough for Compuserve and Prodigy, it’s good enough for Pandagon.
Our dear hero has reached the 50% level of support in both the Gallup and Rasmussen polls, the first time he’s done so he was created in the mystical nubian labs of Oahu Harlem and began the legendary “Stomp Whitey” tour of 1992.
Fly, you Audacious Ace of the Airways! Fly! And John McCain sucks. Aquaman could kick his ass, seriously.
Lost in all the spin about “common ground” is the bottom line reality that Americans already share common beliefs about abortion policy. A Gallup poll released this May found that while 50 percent of Americans describe themselves as “pro-choice,” a full 71 percent of Americans believe that abortion “should be legal only under certain circumstances,” or “illegal in all circumstances.”
Unfortunately, looking at the results of the poll linked in the quote, what Yoest did was conflate support for abortion rights with absolute opposition to abortion rights for a national consensus that we should and shouldn’t have abortion rights. Which is, uh…what’s the word? Dishonest? Stupid? Mendacious? That’s it. Mendacious!
I’m not a particular fan of the “legal under any circumstances” versus “legal only under certain circumstances” distinction, if only because I think most people can think up at least one circumstance where someone shouldn’t be allowed to get an abortion that would immediately push them into the more restrictive second group - most of them revolving around non-medical late-term abortions. But regardless, what we see above is that 82% of America supports abortion rights of some sort. Seventeen percent don’t. This constitutes a national consensus…against choice. Don’t ask.
Common-sense restrictions on abortion, like parental notification and spousal notification receive high levels of support. And this is the second reason the truth about the data on abortion reduction matters. There are policies that have been proven to reduce the abortion rate. For example, research from Michael New of the University of Alabama has demonstrated the effectiveness of parental-notification laws in reducing abortions. Nevertheless, it is precisely this kind of common ground, abortion reduction policy that Obama actually opposes.
And good for him! As Yoest points out, the primary purpose of notification laws isn’t to help women make the right choice, but instead to keep them from making a particular choice. How most who don’t believe condoms are murder and embryos are people look at abortion reduction is A.) encouraging measures that prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place and B.) providing a system of health care and an economy that treats children as more than once-a-year tax credits and families as more than higher premium opportunities for insurance companies.
You see, the way you have happier, healthier families and happier, healthier children is for families to make the conscious, planned decision to have children, and be able to ensure to the best of their ability the children’s access to food, shelter, health care and the other basics. It’s why they’re called “Planned Parenthood” and not “Reckless Pill Poppin’ and Unforeseen Baby Squeezin’ Parenthood”.
We’re really going to learn a lot more from the 2010 census about the browning of America, as well as how many of us identify racially—understanding that “race” is an artificial construct. The white supremacists’ worst fear will be realized—we’re increasingly mixing up the gene pool; most would say that’s a good thing (for those thinking of hybrid vigor), but from the supremacist’s perspective the white race is being contaminated. How can you hate when you can’t tell what anyone is? Oh, so sad. Bring out the tiny violin. 
When my brother and sister-in-law came down to visit the other weekend, we discussed how my little biracial nephew Mr. E (seen with me at left) will view the world when he’s old enough to understand the bizarre notion of race. Many questions ran through my mind, such as how he will identify? Nearly everyone who sees Mr. E and I together see the strong family resemblance, even down to our complexions. My brother, who is a bit darker than I am, had straighter, darker hair; he and I are not biracial, but the products of two light-skinned black parents who themselves were born of lighter-skinned blacks and black/Native American and West Indian heritage. Neither of us can pass for white, but obviously we have white relatives somewhere in there, but they are generations back in the family tree. 
This also bears out looking at 
As any superhero reaches a certain saturation point of popularity and public acclaim, it behooves fans of said superhero to point to other, competing heroes and remark that their fans are sucky asswads who are totally undeserving of the basic mark of respect that would be owed to someone who wasn’t totally in love with a crappy fuckface loser hero. 
How do you artificially inflate opposition to abortion? Make like Charmaine Yoest and conflate people who 