StopDog is taking a break!

StopDoggers,

The StopDog team is taking a hiatus, but we hope to be back for the policy debates that the presidential transition will bring.  In the meantime, we do want your feedback on what StopDog should do next!

How can we support more education around symbolic racism, and organizing and advocacy..ya know, help community organizers govern?

Crooks and Liars: Today is the day: Has a real crisis beaten the Lee Atwater school of smear politics?

Crooks and Liars

Today is the day: Has a real crisis beaten the Lee Atwater school of smear politics?

 

If you get a chance to see The Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, you will watch the architect of the modern-day GOP’s political strategy to win elections, which is to smear the other person with slimy personal attacks and vicious lies to keep Americans focused on the politics of personal destruction while feigning innocence. The idea is that those smear tactics will deflect us away from the real issues that Americans face every day. Karl Rove, Atwater’s best student, has taken over since he died and has succeeded in continuing that disgusting legacy. Up until now, that is.

Politics has been a dirty game throughout our history, but even Michael Dukakis had no ideahow to respond to the Willie Horton ad, and in the movie he says as much. He thought it was beneath him to respond to such shameful accusations and he realized that he was wrong a little too late. Part of Atwater’s strategy was also to get theses smears planted into the main stream press and he succeeded on that level as well. “Bernard Shaw dealt a crushing blow to the Dukakis candidacy by asking the Massachusetts governor about Horton with the opening question of his final debate with George H. W. Bush.”

…

 

And as the debates finished, Obama retook the lead in all the polls, because Americans saw that in response to a crisis, he truly looked like a Commander-in-Chief. Even the Conservative Talking Head Brigade of Charles Krauthammer and Dick Morris agreed with this assessment.

What was McCain’s response to this? Open up the Atwater playbook and hammer Obama as being a friend of Bill Ayers in robo-calls, while their surrogates once again took to the airwaves for a full frontal assault. His “friends” at the National Republican Trust PAC brought in new Rev. Wright smear ads that are running now on all the cable stations. And did you know he wants to destroy electricity and the coal industry?

And how has all these wild and desperate smears worked far as we all vote on election day? Instead of the politics of personal destruction tearing down Obama, his lead widened and poll after poll told us that McCain was just being downright nasty. Instead realizing the ineffectiveness and addressing the issues at hand, the McCain camp continued a campaign of personal attacks.

McCain yelled from his pulpit, “Obama is a Socialist” and the “Redistributor-in-Chief”. He then unleashed his last political gimmick: Joe the Plumber. Unfortunately for McCain, his poll numbers kept falling.

So today is the day we all get to find out if the Lee Atwater school of politics has been defeated by the reality of our economic situation.

It has taken a real crisis to combat the very successful campaign strategy that Atwater championed to win George H.W. Bush the White House in ’88. The same techniques that Karl Rove mastered and implemented in beating McCain and then Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Will truth and reality finally win out?

I wish I could tell you that Americans henceforth will never be influenced by scurrilous personal attack ads and campaign smears in the future, but my hope today is that finally this great nation has been shocked into actually using their brains to decide who should lead us out of the wilderness that came upon due to the negligence of Conservatism. I think Americans unfortunately have a short memory span and these dirty tactics will always be with us. If Obama wins, then I do think that America have no excuses any more if they do get taken in by these cowardly tricks. So I say to you now:

Yes, We Can.

 

 

HuffPo: The First President Who is Black

HuffPo

The First President Who is Black

Barak Obama was born into an American that was a deeply segregated place. The son of a black father and a white mother, his parents could not even have lived in the same house in 1961 in about 18 different states. Anyone predicting that the son of this union would one day be president would have risked being committed in a mental hospital. The idea of a black president was not just remote, it was impossible to conceive. Only in a science fiction story about an alternative universe could the parents of the baby Barak Obama have thought he would one day be president of the Harvard Law Review, a member of the U.S. Senate, and eventually the primary resident of the White House.
Welcome to the alternative universe of 2008.

An Obama presidency will not end racism. It may in fact lead to some increase in overt racist talk, as those who don’t like his policies will blame them on race. But in other ways, an Obama presidency will change the nature of race relations. Whites who said they would never vote for a black man, in the end did just that. The Republican Party, which played the race card so effectively with Willie Horton in 1988, was unable to do so this time. Fringe Republicans and supporters of McCain offered up offensive and nasty racist characterizations of Obama, including distributing handbills that looked like food stamps with Obama on them. The McCain campaign did not denounce these, but neither did it embrace such actions. In a last desperate effort the McCain campaign focused on Obama’s former preacher, Rev. Wright. But a radical minister is no Willie Horton, and no one seemed to be much affected by the effort.

Even as he became the first black president, Obama transcended race. His earliest support did not come from the black community, but from upper middle class Americans of all races, who were charmed by his intelligence and thoughtfulness and anxious to find a new political leader in the new century. Obama campaigned on economics, foreign policy, health care, and jobs. He rarely spoke of inequality or civil rights, not because he is not concerned about them, but because he understood that they were not the central issues of the election. Furthermore, he understood and inequality in health care and jobs opportunity cannot be overcome until we all have health care and the economy is no longer in free fall. Thus, Obama campaigned on issues that affect all Americans, without regard to race, geography, or class.

Indeed, in the end Obama is not America`s first black president — he is America`s first president who happens to be black. The difference is huge.

Michelle Obama Watch: It Starts Already:Michelle Obama Emasculation Meme

Michelle Obama Watch

It Starts Already:Michelle Obama Emasculation Meme

OH great, I thought we would get a “grace period” here we go with the “Michelle Obama cuts her husband down to size” meme courtesy of the Telegraph. While they did let us know one interesting tidbit, Michelle Obama will be the youngest First Lady Since Jackie O, they had to get in several dings:

Others may gush over her husband but Michelle Obama, not only the first black First Lady but one of the youngest presidential wives since Jackie Kennedy, likes to be brutally honest about him.
Critics have labelled her arrogant, haughty, cold and an “angry black woman”. Supporters portray her instead as independent-minded, unafraid to speak out and a devoted mother who puts family firmly before career.

During the campaign she would give a standard 45 minute stump speech, which she wrote herself and delivered without notes. While other would-be presidential wives traditionally stick to sunny, uncontroversial topics, Mrs Obama would tackle issues such as education and inequality.

And, of course, she talked about her husband. Thanks to her, we now know that the president elect never puts the butter away, cannot make beds and tends to be a bit smelly in the mornings. Such tidbits might have helped humanise the Obama image but critics claimed she emasculated him.

Interesting sketch

FOX News: Ralph Nader calls newly elected Barack Obama an Uncle Tom

FOX News

Ralph Nader calls newly elected Barack Obama an Uncle Tom

Media Matters: Liddy: Obama concentration camp will serve “ham hocks and turnip greens”

Media Matters

Liddy: Obama concentration camp will serve “ham hocks and turnip greens”

On the November 4 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, G. Gordon Liddy spoke to a caller who stated: “I’m ready to go to the concentration camp, that [Sen. Barack] Obama’s police force — he will round me up. Because I — I’m a white American.” Liddy then said, “Well, listen to this,” and aired an edited clip of Obama saying in a July 2 speech in Colorado Springs: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” Liddy then stated: “Shades of the Gestapo. The Geheime Staatspolizei,” to which the caller replied: “How’s the cooking going to be? What will — what will they serve, at the camp?” Liddy responded: “Well, I think, probably, there’ll be ham hocks and turnip greens.”

Taegan Goddard Political Wire: Bonus Quote of the Day

Taegan Goddard Political Wire

Bonus Quote of the Day

“If people were walking into the polling booth thinking terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, probably no way that Barack Obama has a chance of winning.  McCain wins.”

— Rudy Giuliani, interviewed on CNN.

Detroit Free Press: Nader concedes race, predicts Obama landslide

Detroit Free Press

Nader concedes race, predicts Obama landslide

Ralph Nader, the self-styled consumer crusader and perennial third party presidential candidate, conceded today, telling the Free Press minutes ago that there was going to be “a landslide” for Barack Obama.

“The streets are going to be filled with revelry … both here and in Africa,” Nader predicted, followed by a 10-minute denunciation of most of the Democratic Party candidate’s policy and record. 

AmSpec: Report:Obama Told Abbas He Supported Dividing Jerusalem

AmSpec

Report:Obama Told Abbas He Supported Dividing Jerusalem

Israel National News has the following disturbing report:

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama privately expressed his support for a new Arab state within Israel’s current borders, including eastern Jerusalem, during his meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah this summer.

According to a report published Tuesday in the Lebanese newspaper al-Ahbar, Obama told Abbas that he supports a PA state, and Arab “rights to east Jerusalem” as well.  The sources said Abbas and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad “heard the best things they ever heard from an American president” during the meeting. However, said sources quoted in the report, the candidate asked them to keep his declaration a secret.

To recap, this means that he went before AIPAC in June and told a pro-Israel audience that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided,” then, after Palestinians raised a fuss, he said it was a “final status issue,” and then he went to the Palestinian leadership and told them the exact opposite — that he actively supports a Palestinian state with a capital in eastern Jerusalem.

If, like me, you’ve approached Obama with skepticism, nothing about this should suprise you. There has been ample reason to believe that Obama’s election-year statements on Israel are meant to mask his true feelings on the subject, and now, on the day of the election, we get an account that if accurate, means that all along he was secretly planning to shift U.S. policy in the region toward the Palestinian point of view