New Poll Shows Cuomo Skyrocketing to an Commanding 35-Point Lead and Cruising Toward Biggest Landslide Victory in N.Y. Gubernatorial Race Since His Father’s 1986 Re-Election; Only 11 Percent of Voters Have Favorable View of Paladino and Solid 59 Percent Majority Say Tea Party-Backed Republican is Unfit to Serve as Governor

NEW YORKERS TO PALADINO: “WE’LL TAKE YOU OUT, BUDDY!” — Those now-infamous words shouted by Carl Paladino (left), the Tea Party-backed Republican nominee for New York governor, in a heated clash with a reporter on September 30 might become his political epitaph, as Paladino’s poll numbers have plunged dramatically since his Tony Soprano impersonation and a series of anti-gay remarks so inflammatory that his openly gay nephew publicly rebuked him and the rest of the Paladino family forced the candidate to issue an apology. His Democratic rival, Andrew Cuomo (right) has skyrocketed to a commanding 35-point lead, according to a New York Times poll published Monday, just a week before next Tuesday’s election, with a solid 59 percent majority of likely voters saying Paladino is unfit to be governor. (Photos: Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 19, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

PLATTSBURGH, New York — With just two weeks to go before the Empire State’s voters cast their ballots, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Cuomo has rocketed to a commanding 35-point lead over his Tea Party-backed Republican rival, Carl Paladino, according to a new poll released Monday — with an astonishingly large majority of respondents saying that Paladino’s “angry,” “bigoted” and “obnoxious” personality makes him unfit to be governor.

The poll by The New York Times showed the state attorney general holding a better than two-to-one lead over Paladino, 59 percent to 24 percent, a gain of four points since a Quinnipiac College poll released on October 8. Meanwhile, support for the multimillionaire Buffalo businessman plunged 10 points from the 34 percent Paladino garnered in the Quinnipiac survey.

If Cuomo’s huge lead remains intact by election day, he would be on track to score the greatest landslide victory in a New York gubernatorial election in the state’s history — topping the 33-point landslide of his father, Mario Cuomo, who buried his GOP opponent, Andrew O’Rourke, 64 percent to 32 percent, to win a second term in 1986.  

Paladino’s standing with voters — already damaged by his highly-publicized confrontation on September 30 with a reporter in which Paladino, acting like a Mafia boss, threatened, “I’ll take you out, buddy!” — plunged into a free fall after he made a series a highly inflammatory anti-gay remarks, including a speech on October 9 at a conservative Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn in which the candidate said that children should not be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option.”

SURVEY FINDS A SOLID MAJORITY JUDGING PALADINO UNFIT TO BE GOVERNOR

The Times poll, conducted Sunday through Friday of last week, found an astonishing 59 percent of respondents saying that Paladino does not have the temperament that makes him fit to serve as the state’s chief executive, and that 55 percent said the millionaire Buffalo real estate developer has neither the political nor governmental experience required for the office. More tellingly, 43 percent of respondents had an unfavorable opinion of Paladino, while only 11 percent viewed him favorably.

Poll respondents, when asked what came to mind the most about Paladino when his name was mentioned, answered with a variety of highly negative descriptions of him, including “angry” — by his own admission, Paladino said he was “mad as hell” — “bigoted” for his anti-gay diatribes and “obnoxious” for his confrontation with New York Post reporter Fred Dicker.

TEA PARTY-BACKED REPUBLICAN RAN NEARLY EVEN WITH CUOMO IN SEPTEMBER

In a September 22 Quinnipiac College poll, Cuomo led Paladino by only six points, 49 percent to 43 percent, powered at the time by solid support among Republicans (83 percent) and independents (49 percent). A separate poll by Survey USA released the same day showed Cuomo leading 49 percent to 40 percent.

But on September 30, Paladino sank the already-heated campaign to succeed outgoing Governor David Paterson into the gutter when he accused Cuomo, a divorced father of three, of cheating on his former wife, Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, without furnishing a shred of proof to back him up.

Later that same day, Paladino came unglued — in full view of TV news cameras.

When challenged by Dicker, the Post’s state news editor and Albany bureau chief, to provide evidence to back up his accusations against Cuomo, Paladino accused the reporter of working for the Cuomo campaign and, acting as though he were Tony Soprano, the fictional New Jersey organized-crime boss in the acclaimed television series, “The Sopranos,” warned Dicker, “I’ll take you out, buddy!”

The equally tough-talking Dicker, the dean of the Albany press corps, demanded to know how Paladino would “take him out” — widely interpreted as a threat of bodily harm. Paladino then replied, “Watch!” before he was hustled away by his aides while an indignant Dicker shot back, “Are you threatening me?”.

In fact, it was Kennedy who was cheating on Cuomo, not the other way around. Kennedy was having an affair with Bruce Colley, a New York restaurateur and socialite. Colley confirmed the affair in 2003 just days after Cuomo and Kennedy announced they were ending their marriage. Paladino ultimately retracted his claim against Cuomo, admitting that he had no proof.

(Paladino’s clash with Dicker ultimately cost him the editorial support of the arch-conservative Post, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The tabloid on Monday endorsed Cuomo, branding Paladino “undisciplined, unfocused and untrustworthy — that is, fundamentally unqualified for the office he seeks.”)

PALADINO IGNITES FIRESTORM WITH ANTI-GAY TIRADES      

Support for Paladino already was declining when, on October 8, the Republican went on the attack against gays, telling an ultraconservative Hasidic Jewish congregation in Brooklyn that children should not be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option. It isn’t.”

Paladino made clear his opposition to same-gender marriage, telling congregants at another Brooklyn synagogue, “I oppose the homosexual agenda, whether they call it marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships. Marriage is between a man and a woman!”

The timing of Paladino’s anti-gay remarks, amidst a rash of suicides of young people — including a New Jersey college student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge — who were bullied for being gay or perceived as gay and just two days after the vicious beating and sodomizing of two teen-agers by a Bronx street gang in a rampage of anti-gay violence, ignited a firestorm of outrage from across the political spectrum.

Undaunted, Paladino took aim at New York’s annual Gay Pride Parade two days later, when, appearing on the “Imus in the Morning” radio show, said, “I don’t think I’d be proud to take my child to a gay pride parade where you have these men in Speedos and otherwise naked grinding against each other up in the back of a truck. I think it’s disgusting.”

Less than an hour later, on NBC’s “Today” show, Paladino repeated his remarks, saying that “children should not be exposed to that [homosexuality] at a young age. They don’t understand this. It’s a very difficult thing. And exposing them to homosexuality, especially at a gay pride parade — and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one — but they wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other. It’s just a terrible thing. Why would you bring your children to that?”

HOMOPHOBIC RANTS INFURIATE PALADINO’S OPENLY GAY NEPHEW

The candidate’s homophobic rants drew a sharp public rebuke from his nephew, Jeff Hannon, who is openly gay. In an interview with the Post, the 23-year-old Hannon, who worked for the Paladino campaign until his uncle’s anti-gay tirades, said that he personally was “very offended” by his uncle’s remarks and abruptly quit the campaign. He hasn’t shown up at Paladino headquarters in Buffalo for more than a week.

The newspaper quoted a Paladino campaign staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying Wednesday that other campaign workers were concerned for Hannon’s whereabouts, particularly in the wake of the recent suicides. “Everybody was talking about it today. They are worried about him,” said the staffer. “They think he’s upset.”

So, apparently, was the rest of the Paladino family as well.  Numerous press reports said that the family demanded that the candidate issue a public apology — which he did in a written statement last Tuesday. “I sincerely apologize for any comment that may have offended the gay and lesbian community or their family members,” the Paladono statement said. “Any reference to branding an entire community based on a small representation of them is wrong.”

Paladino’s campaign manager, Michael Caputo, confirmed that the candidate’s family has pressured him to apologize, out of concern for Hannon. “Carl felt the sting of this directly through his family and thought through his response with many inputs,” said Caputo.

The candidate’s apology, however, cost him the support of the far-right ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Yehuda Levin, whose anti-gay views are only slightly to the left of the gay-hating extremist Kansas cult leader, Fred Phelps.

“Mazel tov,” Levin told reporters after Paladino’s mea culpa, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We’ll have a coming-out party. But when he came to me three days ago, he didn’t know that? I find this to be condescending.”

Paladino might have a problem with the Gay Pride parade, but he apparently doesn’t have a problem with lesbians, according to the Web site WNYMedia.net, which published on Wednesday another set of X-rated e-mails purportedly sent by Paladino to his friends. The images include a photo of two lesbians in flagrante delicto, with a one-word comment: “Awesome.”

PALADINO WAS LANDLORD TO TWO BUFFALO-AREA GAY BARS

The Tea Party-backed GOP nominee’s anti-gay outbursts were made even more bizarre when the New York Daily News disclosed Wednesday that Paladino was the landlord to two Buffalo-area gay bars from 2004 to 2006 — one of which was co-owned and managed by his son, William Paladino.

A review of liquor license records by the newspaper found that the younger Paladino co-owned and operated Cobalt, a nightclub in downtown Buffalo housed in one of many buildings owned by his father from May 2004 through July 2006. A 2005 review of Cobalt in the Buffalo News described the nightspot  as “Way Gay,” noting, “The queens, the techno, the cocktails, the kind of gyration normally confined to Manhattan was in full flaming force at Cobalt.”

But in late 2005, the younger Paladino abruptly renamed the club Tantra and converted it to a straight nightclub — retaining all the straight bartenders and firing all the gay staff, according to a gay former bartender, Kevin Van Wagner, who told the Daily News, “The way that they did it was really horrible. They told us we were no longer going to be a gay bar, that we [gay bartenders] were no longer going to have jobs.”

William Paladino is now a top executive of his father’s Buffalo-based Ellicott Development Company, a property management, leasing and real estate development firm.

The other gay nightspot, Buddies II, which is still operating, was housed in another Paladino-owned building in 2005 and 2006, according to liquor license records. The bar it described itself as a “bar where anyone and everyone is welcome [and] prejudices are left at the door.”

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Amid Rash of Suicides of Youths Who Suffered Anti-Gay Bullying, N.Y. Gang of ‘Ultra-Macho’ Thugs Go on Homophobic Rampage in Bronx Borough, Brutally Beating and Sodomizing Gay Teenager With Baseball Bat and Forcing His Partner to Burn Him With Cigarettes; While Officials Condemn Attacks, ‘Boss’ Paladino Condemns Gays

SIX FACES OF MACHISMO-FUELED ANTI-GAY HATE — Six members of a Bronx street gang were taken into custody by New York City police Friday after they allegedly went on a rampage of hate-filled violence against gays, in which  a 17-year-old gay youth was brutally beaten and sodomized with a baseball bat and his teen-aged partner was forced to burn him with cigarettes. The gang then allegedly attacked and sodomized with a plunger handle another teenager whom they perceived to be gay. The rampage came amid a rash of deaths of other teens who killed themselves after enduring relentless anti-gay harassment. (Photos: Vic Nicastro/New York Daily News)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 12, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

NEW YORK — Monday, October 11, was not only Columbus Day in the United States and Thanksgiving Day in Canada.

It was also National Coming Out Day, an internationally observed civil awareness day for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people (LGBTs) to let their families, friends and colleagues know who they are — commonly referred to as “coming out of the closet” — and to talk about what it means to be LGBT in a heterosexual-dominated world.

The day is observed by members of the LGBT communities and their supporters on October 11 every year (Today, October 12, in the United Kingdom). But this year, National Coming Out Day has been overshadowed by the recent deaths of at least six teenagers who were driven to suicide after they were relentlessly bullied for being gay or for being perceived as gay.

The suicides include the highly publicized death of Tyler Clementi, 18, a first-year Rutgers University student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after learning that a sexual encounter he had with another male student  in his dorm room was secretly broadcast live on the Internet.  

Adding to the pall is news of an “ultra-macho” New York City street gang, driven by an extreme hatred of gays, going on a homophobic rampage in the Bronx borough on Friday, brutally beating and sodomizing a 17-year-old gay youth with a baseball bat and forcing his teen-aged partner to burn him with cigarettes.

The gang attacked and sodomized a second teenager with the handle of a toilet plunger, then beat up and robbed an adult male before they were apprehended by police. The fourth victim turned out to be the older brother of one of the youths who were attacked, police said.

GANG MEMBERS REPORTEDLY LAUGHED, BRAGGED ABOUT ATTACKS WHILE IN JAIL

The suspects showed no remorse while they were locked up over the weekend, the New York Daily News reported Monday.  In fact, the suspects considered it amusing that they were being branded “degenerate monsters” by the New York media, according to a cellmate at the Bronx House of Detention.

“They thought it was funny — one of them was laughing,” the cellmate told the Daily News.

The witness, who was identified only by his first name, Danny, was in jail on an unrelated charge of marijuana possession. “He was saying ‘I’ll take five years.’ They were all joking around like it was funny,” he said. “They had no fear.”

The rampage was swiftly condemned by city officials. “These suspects employed terrible, wolf-pack odds of nine against one, odds which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters. “This was not part of an initiation. This was a reaction to the fact that [the victims] had engaged in homosexual activity.”

“These attacks are appalling and are even more despicable because the victims were clearly targeted in acts of hate simply because they are gay,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said. Mayor Michael Bloomberg branded the rampage “an act of pure evil.”

The rampage occurred less than a week after police arrested two suspects for allegedly pummeling a gay man inside the landmark Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village — the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement — and a third suspect in connection with the beating of three other gay men in Manhattan’s heavily gay Chelsea district.

WHILE OTHER POLITICIANS CONDEMN ATTACKS, ‘BOSS’ PALADINO CONDEMNS GAYS

But as the latest round of homophobic violence was roundly condemned by public officials, one New York politician chose instead to condemn gays.

Tea Party-backed Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino — who made nationwide headlines September 30 with his Tony Soprano-like confrontation with a reporter in which he threatened, “I’ll take you out, buddy!” — went on the attack against gays, telling a Hasidic Jewish congregation in Brooklyn that children should not be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option. It isn’t.”

Paladino made clear his opposition to same-gender marriage, telling congregants at another Brooklyn synagogue, “I oppose the homosexual agenda, whether they call it marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships. Marriage is between a man and a woman!”

In a slam at Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, Paladino added, “Tell your people that I am the religious-values candidate and my opponent is the ultra-liberal, socialist social extremist that he is!”

RUTGERS STUDENT’S SUICIDE RESULT OF ANTI-GAY ‘CYBER-BULLYING?’

The rash of violent anti-gay assaults in New York and elsewhere comes against the backdrop of a disturbing increase in suicides among teenagers who have been the targets of relentless bullying because they were gay or were perceived to be gay.

In the highly publicized New Jersey case of Tyler Clementi’s suicide, two other Rutgers University students, identified as Dharun Ravi — a roommate of Clementi — and Molly Wei, were charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy after allegedly placing a Web camera in Clementi’s room on September 19 and broadcasting Clementi’s sexual encounter live on the Internet without his or his partner’s knowledge, according to a written statement by Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan.

Under New Jersey law, it is a crime to collect or view images depicting nudity or sexual contact involving another individual without that person’s knowledge or consent, and to transmit or distribute such images. If convicted, Ravi  and Wei could face up to five years in prison. Authorities are still investigating whether Ravi and Wei can be held accountable for Clementi’s death.

A Twitter page allegedly operated by Ravi — now offline — contains tweets in which Ravi claims credit for broadcasting Clementi’s sexual encounter on the Internet. “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into Molly’s room and turned on my Webcam,” Ravi allegedly wrote. “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay!”  

OTHER TEEN SUICIDES CAUSED BY ANTI-GAY BULLYING

Clementi’s death is the sixth known suicide of a teenager in recent months as a result of being “outed” or having endured relentless anti-gay harassment or intimidation. Among the other deaths:  

# Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old Tehachapi, California boy who hanged himself from a tree in his back yard after years of being bullied. He died in a local hospital September 28 after nine days on life support. Police investigators interviewed some of the young people who taunted Seth the day he hanged himself. “Several of the kids that we talked to broke down into tears,” Police Chief Jeff Kermode said. “They had never expected an outcome such as this.”

# Asher Brown, a 13-year-old Houston eighth-grader who shot himself in the head September 23 after enduring what his mother and stepfather say was constant harassment from four other students at his middle school. Asher, his family said, was “bullied to death” — accused of being gay, some of his tormentors performed mock gay sex acts on him in his physical education class.

# Billy Lucas, a 15-year-old Greensburg, Indiana high school student, who hanged himself September 9 in a barn at his grandmother’s home. Friends say that he had been tormented for years. “He was threatened to get beat up every day,” a close friend and classmate of Billy said. “Sometimes in classes, kids would act like they were going to punch him and stuff and push him. Some people at school called him names,” the classmate said, saying most of those names were anti-gay epithets.

# Zac Harrington, a 19-year-old Norman, Oklahoma man who killed himself October 4 after attending a City Council meeting in which he endured anti-gay invectives from opponents of a resolution recognizing October as LGBT History Month. The resolution passed by a 7 to 1 vote — but not before Harrington heard opponents voice claims that gays would try to “infiltrate” the school system and flatly reject the notion that gay and lesbian couples had a civil and constitutional right to marry, while others invoked religious approbations against homosexuality.

CELEBRITIES SPEAK OUT, LAUNCH ANTI-BULLYING CAMPAIGN

The rash in teen suicides has prompted a slew of celebrities — including Ellen DeGeneres, Dr. Phil McGraw, Kathy Griffin, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and others — to speak out and launch a campaign to stop the bullying and further youth suicides.

Cooper, appearing on DeGeneres’ talk show “Elllen,” lashed out at the use of anti-gay slurs and epithets — taking direct aim at actor Vince Vaughn’s upcoming movie, “The Dilemma,” in which Vaughn’s character proclaims, “Ladies and gentleman, electric cars are gay.”

“I just find those words, those terms — we’ve got to do something to make those words unacceptable, ’cause those words are hurting kids,” Cooper said. “Someone else I talked to recently said that the words people use and the things people say about other kids online, it enters into their internal dialogue. . . I think we need to really focus on what language we’re using and how we’re treating these kids.”

For her part, Griffin — who for the last several years has appeared with Cooper on CNN’s New Year’s Eve special — is donating all proceeds of her December 16 comedy show in Los Angeles to The Trevor Project, an organization focused on suicide prevention among LGBT youth.

For some celebrities, including DeGeneres, gossip blogger Perez Hilton, “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy and advice columnist Dan Savage, the campaign is deeply personal:  They have first-hand experience with having been bullied during their own youth for being gay.

Having once been a closeted gay teen in an all-boys high school, Hilton told ABC News that he’s “wholeheartedly committed” to the cause. “What’s really powerful is to admit and acknowledge that we’ve all been bullies,” he said. “I’ve been a bully, I can still be a bully on my Website. The point is to not be a bully to the point where someone is going to want to kill themselves — threatening violence, calling them homophobic names repeatedly.”

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

In New York, Carl Paladino Acts Like a Mob Boss by Threatening to ‘Take Out’ Reporter; In California, Meg Whitman Is Exposed as Hypocrite on Volatile Issue of Employing Illegal Immigrants; In Delaware, Christine O’Donnell Is Caught Lying on Her Job Resumes

GOP CANDIDATE FOR N.Y. GOVERNOR THE TONY SOPRANO OF POLITICS? — From the day he won the his party’s nomination, Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino (left) made good on his promise that the campaign to become New York’s next governor — already nasty — would get a lot nastier: Not only has he accused his Democratic rival, Andrew Cuomo, of infidelity, but in an extraordinary confrontation captured by TV cameras, the Tea Party-backed GOP nominee acted like the fictional New Jersey Mob boss Tony Soprano (right) when he made a threat against Fred Dicker, state news editor of the New York Post, telling Dicker, “I’ll take you out, buddy!” When the equally tough-talking Dicker asked him how he’d “take me out,” Paladino replied, “Watch!” (Photos courtesy Buffalo News and HBO)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 5, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

With just a month to go before the November 2 midterm elections, the campaign has been jolted by a series of controversies involving Republican candidates, in what appears to be a repeat of the scandal-plagued GOP campaign of 2006.

In quick succession over the past week, Carl Paladino, the Tea Party-backed Republican nominee for governor of New York, made headlines for hurling lurid accusations against his Democratic rival, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, accusing him of infidelity after Paladino acknowledged his own extramarital affair — and threatening to “take out” a reporter who challenged him to provide evidence.

On the other side of the country, Meg Whitman, the GOP nominee for governor of California, suddenly became embroiled in a scandal when her former housekeeper, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, sued Whitman for anti-Latino discrimination and her attorney accused Whitman — who has talked tough on the campaign trail about employers who hire illegal immigrants — of rank hypocrisy.

And in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate running for Vice President Joe Biden’s old Senate seat — already plagued by one controversy after another over her past history as a Christian Right activist — was caught having lied about her education on her job resumes.

PALADINO ACTS LIKE MOB BOSS — IN FULL VIEW OF TV NEWS CAMERAS    

Paladino took the campaign for New York governor into the gutter on Wednesday when he accused Cuomo of having “paramours” — only hours after he told a reporter for WNYW-TV, the Fox station in New York City, that the already-nasty race would get a lot nastier. “I don’t mind being nasty, okay?” Paladino told the station.

“Has anybody asked Andrew Cuomo about his paramours?” Paladino asked in an interview with Politico.com, referring to Cuomo’s 13-year marriage to his former wife, Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

“When he was married — or asked him why his wife left him or threw him out of the house? Has anybody ever done that?” Paladino — who admitted having an extramarital affair of his own a decade ago that produced a daughter — demanded.

But, in fact, it was Kennedy who was having an extramarital affair — with Bruce Colley, a New York restaurateur and socialite. Colley confirmed the affair in 2003 just days after Cuomo and Kennedy announced they were ending their marriage.  

Challenged by a New York Post reporter to provide evidence to back up his accusations against Cuomo, Paladino — in full view of television news cameras — accused the reporter of working for the Cuomo campaign and, acting as though he were Tony Soprano, the fictional New Jersey crime boss in the acclaimed television series, “The Sopranos,” warned the reporter, “I’ll take you out, buddy!”

When the equally tough-talking Fred Dicker, state news editor of the Post and the dean of the Albany press corps, demanded to know how Paladino would “take him out” — widely interpreted as a threat of bodily harm — Paladino replied, “Watch!” before he was hustled away by his aides while an indignant Dicker shot back, “Are you threatening me?”.

Paladino admitted the following day — after his confrontation with Dicker made front-page headlines across the state — that he had no proof of Cuomo’s alleged infidelities, acknowledging that he made the accusation out of frustration with questions about his own affair.

CUOMO STRIKES BACK AT PALADINO — HARD

For his part, Cuomo said Friday that Paladino’s claims that he was unfaithful to Kennedy was “hurtful” and “destructive” to his three children. “Now he says it was a baseless accusation,” an angry Cuomo told reporters during a campaign stop inthe New York City borough of Staten Island.

The Cuomo campaign struck back hard with a blistering TV ad that accused Paladino, a Buffalo-area real estate developer, of having “given almost a half-million dollars to politicians and who gets insider deals from Albany.”

The ad claimed that Paladino “got a 1.4 million-dollar tax break to create jobs, but his official filings show that only one job was created.” and blasted the Tea Party-backed Republican as “a welfare king who got rich by milking New York taxpayers.”

PATERSON, PALADINO CAMP IN ANGRY WAR OF WORDS

Meanwhile, Governor David Paterson denounced Paladino as “unfit for public service” at a business breakfast, citing a series of pornographic and racially offensive e-mails Paladino sent to friends before launching his gubernatorial campaign six months ago. One of those e-mails included an image of President Obama dressed as a pimp and First Lady Michelle Obama dressed as a prostitute.  

Paterson, who shared the dais with his predecessors, George Pataki and Elliot Spitzer, said he understood the anger over taxes and government excess that is powering the Tea Party movement, but that such anger  should not feed the “shrill and . . . pedestrian antics of individuals who are unqualified to hold office at all, let alone be governor or United States senator.”

Paladino’s campaign spokesman Michael Caputo blasted back at Paterson, calling the governor, who is legally blind, “addled” — a derogatory term for a person with attention deficit disorder, or ADD, which Paterson does not have — and pointing out that Paterson was investigated for taking free tickets to the World Series and for getting involved in a domestic-violence case against a top aide who subsequently resigned.

“Nearly all New Yorkers are counting down the days until he stops embarrassing this state,” Caputo said.

WHITMAN ROCKED BY SCANDAL OVER HIRING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT HOUSEKEEPER

In California, the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who spent months on the campaign trail talking tough against employers who hire illegal immigrants, was rocked to its core Wednesday by Whitman’s bombshell admission that the billionaire former eBay CEO and her doctor-husband had themselves employed an illegal immigrant as their housekeeper.

Whitman insisted that she didn’t know that her nanny and housekeeper of nine years, Nicky Diaz Santillan, was an illegal immigrant until the housekeeper acknowledged her undocumented status last year, to which Whitman said she responded by firing her.

But Diaz, in a emotional press conference in Los Angeles with her attorney Gloria Allred, told reporters that Whitman was dismissive when Diaz asked for her assistance in obtaining legal immigrant status and told her upon her dismissal, “From now on, you don’t know me, and I don’t know you.”

Whitman “treated me like a piece of garbage,” a tearful Diaz said. “She treated me as if I were not a human being.”

Allred said that the Social Security Administration had alerted Whitman and her husband, Dr. Griffith Harsh, back in 2003with a latter notifying them that Diaz’ Social Security number did not match the number the agency had in its database — which, the attorney said, should have served as a “red flag” about Diaz’ legal status.  

Whitman hotly denied ever receiving such notification, and a campaign spokesman blamed Diaz. “Nicky handled all of the mail into and out of the house,” Whitman spokesman Andrea Jones Rivera said.

But almost immediately after Whitman’s denial, Allred produced a copy of the Social Security Administration’s letter, dated April 2003, in which the agency informed Whitman and Harsh that, “We can’t put these earnings on the employee’s Social Security record until the name and Social Security number you reported agree with our records.”

The copy of the letter included a handwritten note addressed to Diaz that read, “Nicky please check this. Thanks.” Allred said the handwriting was that of Harsh, which the attorney said proved that, at the very least, Harsh knew that there was a problem with Diaz’ status with the Social Security Administration. Harsh acknowledged that the handwriting on the letter was likely his, but said that he has no memory of receiving the letter.

The revelation about Diaz came only a day after Whitman and her Democratic opponent, former Governor and current state Attorney General Jerry Brown, clashed over immigration in their first televised debate, with Whitman saying she “wouldn’t support a path to legalization” for illegal immigrants and that “we have to secure the borders” and called for the imposition of tougher sanctions on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

The fallout from the Whitman scandal was swift. A conservative political action committee issued a statement Thursday demanding the arrest of both Whitman and Diaz for “numerous immigration and employment law violations.”

William Gheen, president of the right-wing Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee (ALIPAC) demanded that Diaz “be charged and deported” and that Whitman “face the existing penalties under current U.S. law as well.”

IN DELAWARE, O’DONNELL CAUGHT HAVING LIED ABOUT HER EDUCATION ON JOB RESUMES

Ever since she scored a stunning upset victory in the September 14 Delaware Republican Senate primary over former Representative Mike Castle, Tea Party-backed nominee Christine O’Donnell has endured one embarrassing revelation after another, primarily video clips of controversial remarks on social issues stemming from her past role as an arch-conservative social activist with ties to the Religious Right.

O’Donnell, who first gained national exposure in the mid-1980s as a spokeswoman for conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s Concerned Women for America, had been dogged by her statements on masturbation, the use of condoms, the fight against AIDS, the role of women in the military, and even witchcraft.

But now, O’Donnell has come under fire for apparently having made false statements about her education on her job resumes.

Oxford University in Britain and Claremont Graduate University in California both denied O’Donnell was a student in their institutions, contrary to statements on her resumes that she was a student at the two schools.

Rod Leveque, a spokesman for GCU, issued a statement to TalkingPointsMemo.com declaring flatly that “Claremont Graduate University has no student or education record for an individual named Christine O’Donnell.”

In fact, O’Donnell received a Lincoln Fellowship in 2002 from the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank which is not related in any way to Claremont Graduate University.

The university’s denial came just days after it was revealed that O’Donnell falsely listed Oxford University in the educational record portion of her profile page on the professional social network, LinkedIn.com. The page has since been taken down.

Actually, O’Donnell was a student of the Phoenix Institute, a conservative Christian educational organization which rented space on the campus of one of Britain’s two most prestigious universities — home of the world-famous Rhodes Scholarships.

The new controversies come on the heels of earlier questions about O’Donnell’s tenure at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative think tank which O’Donnell sued for gender-based discrimination. O’Donnell’s $6.9 million lawsuit claimed that ISI “violated its promise to allow Miss ODonnell time to take Master’s degree classes at Princeton.”

But O’Donnell’s campaign manager, Matt Moran, later acknowledged in a statement to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine that O’Donnell did not have her Bachelor’s degree at the time she filed her lawsuit and only audited one undergraduate class at Princeton.

NEW CONTROVERSIES AN EERIE ECHO OF SCANDAL-PLAGUED 2006 GOP CAMPAIGN

The sudden eruption of controversies involving Republican candidates in this year’s midterm elections is eerily reminiscent of the scandal-plagued — and ultimately ill-fated — GOP campaign in 2006 to keep control of Congress.

Remember Mark Foley? The Florida Republican congressman resigned in disgrace after revelations that he had sent sexually suggestive e-mails to teen-aged male Capitol Hill pages.

Foley later claimed that he was gay, but sources familiar with Foley told The ‘Skeeter Bites Report that they could not recall Foley ever having had relationships with adult gay men and that, to the contrary, strong evidence emerged elsewhere that the disgraced former congressman had a pedophile, rather than homosexual, orientation.

Then there was Representative Don Sherwood (R-Pennsylvania), who in 2004 allegedly assaulted Cynthia Ore, a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair. No criminal charges were ever filed against Sherwood, but Ore later filed a $5.5 million civil lawsuit against Sherwood, accusing him of repeatedly assaulting her during their relationship. On November 8, 2005, Sherwood and Ore ended the lawsuit by reaching a settlement, the terms of which were not released.

The relationship became public only when Veronica Hannevig, who ran against Sherwood on the Constitution Party ticket in 2004, distributed copies of the police report to several newspapers and television stations. As in the Foley case, the House Republican leadership knew about Sherwood’s indiscretions, but took no disciplinary action against him. Sherwood subsequently lost his bid for re-election.

The Republican Hall of Shame class of 2006 also includes:

# Then-Representative Jim Gibbons, the 2006 Republican nominee for governor of Nevada, who was dragged into a scandal in which there were allegations that he made unwanted sexual advances toward a woman on the night of October 13, 2006 — a Friday — and assaulted her outside a Las Vegas restaurant when she refused. Despite what came to be known as the “Friday the 13th scandal,” Gibbons won the election, only to see his tenure as governor plagued by continued controversies. He lost his bid for re-election in the June 9 GOP primary.

# Representative Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who was brought down by the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal. Ney was forced to resign from Congress after he pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and making false statements in relation to the scandal. Ney was identified in the guilty pleas of Abramoff, former House Minority Whip Tom DeLay’s deputy chief of staff Tony Rudy, former DeLay press secretary Michael Scanlon and former Ney chief of staff Neil Volz for receiving lavish gifts in exchange for political favors. Ney now hosts a radio talk show in West Virginia.

# The chief of staff of Representative Rodney Alexander (R-Louisiana), whose former page was one of the first to receive inappropriate e-mails from Foley —  who was sued by a former member of his staff for sexual harassment. Royal Alexander (no relation) was accused of engaging in “a course of misconduct” toward Elizabeth Scott, who worked as a scheduler for Representative Alexander form 2005 to 2006. including “inappropriate sex-based comments, ogling and touching.” The congressman’s office maintained Scott made her claims in retaliation for having been demoted by Royal Alexander for incompetence. Within months following Royal Alexander’s unsuccessful run for Louisiana Attorney General in 2007, the case was dismissed.

NEW SCANDALS LIKELY TO MAKE GOP’S GOAL OF RETAKING CONGRESS MUCH HARDER

With the new scandals roiling an already volatile campaign, the GOP’s sky-high hopes of retaking Congress have suddenly been thrown into doubt. And the fact that these new controversies have erupted right at the beginning of the all-important final month of the campaign — perhaps the 2010 edition of the long-dreaded “October Surprise” — could not come at a worse time for the Grand Old Party.

But with the electorate still very much in a throw-the-bums-out mood over the continued sour economy, it remains to be seen whether this latest turn of events will translate into a third consecutive anti-Republican backlash at the polls.    

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Results Reveal African-Americans Continued Their Decades-Long Boycott of GOP Primaries and Latino Participation Nosedived Amid Red-Hot Furor Over Immigration; Advocacy Group Charges Plot by Republicans and Tea Party Groups in Wisconsin to Suppress Nonwhite Voter Turnout in November’s General Election

UNPREPARED FOR AN INCREASINGLY NONWHITE ELECTORATE — Voters enter and leave a polling station in Savannah, Georgia during the 2008 general election. With the U.S. population — and electorate — becoming more and more racially and ethnically diverse, the Republican Party faces a crisis of survival as the results of this year’s GOP primaries show that turnout, while greater than that in the Democratic primaries for the first time since the 1930s, was overwhelmingly — and in some states, almost exclusively — among white voters. To complicate matters for Republicans even more, a liberal advocacy group is accusing the Wisconsin GOP and Tea Party groups of plotting to suppress nonwhite voter turnout in the November 2 general election and has called for an investigation by the U.S. Attorney and the state’s Attorney General. (Photo: Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, September 28, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Much has been discussed and written in the mainstream media about how Republicans stand poised to gain seats in November’s midterm congressional elections — perhaps even taking control of the House of Representatives.

Much also has been discussed and written about the fact that for the first time since the 1930s, more people voted in Republican primaries than in the Democratic primaries, amid a wide “enthusiasm gap” between partisans of the two parties.

But almost nothing has been discussed and written about a striking pattern in the primary voter turnout that should sound loud alarm bells to the Republican Party’s electoral viability in the future — and not just Tea Party insurgents scoring stunning upset victories over establishment Republican candidates.

In state after state, the results found that turnout in the Republican primaries was overwhelmingly — in some states, almost exclusively — among white voters, as African-Americans continued to shun the GOP in droves, despite the largest number of black Republican candidates for Congress  since the post-Civil War reconstruction era.

Of much greater concern to the party, however, Latino voter turnout in the GOP primaries also nosedived to record-low levels, the clearest sign yet of a backlash by Latino voters — even conservative Cuban-Americans in South Florida — against Republicans over the volatile issue of immigration that could have serious repercussions for the party in November and beyond.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Wisconsin and the state’s Attorney General have been asked by a liberal advocacy group to investigate the Wisconsin GOP, the conservative Americans for Prosperity and Tea Party groups in the Badger State after the group made public what it said were documents and tape recordings of a plan to suppress turnout of nonwhite and college-student voters in the November 2 election.

Implementation of the plan would violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the advocacy group Own Wisconsin Now charged in a press conference last Monday.  

THIRTEEN OF 33 BLACK REPUBLICANS WIN IN PRIMARIES — BUT WITHOUT BLACK VOTER SUPPORT

Thirteen of the record 33 black candidates seeking Republican nominations for Congress won in their states’ GOP primaries. But they did so with very little support from African-American voters, who have cast their ballots for Democrats by overwhelming margins since the early 1970s. Most of the black GOP candidates are staunch conservatives, some with the backing of the Tea Party movement.

The most high-profile black Republican candidate, South Carolina state Representative Tim Scott, knocked off Paul Thurmond, son of the late Senator Strom Thurmond, in a June 22 runoff for the GOP nomination.

Scott — who won the backing of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin — will face a black Democrat, Ben Frasier, in the November election. Scott is heavily favored to win in this deeply conservative state, but is unlikely to win over black voters, who make up nearly 30 percent of South Carolina’s population and who vote Democratic by a margins of up to eight to one.  

There have been no black Republicans in Congress since Representative J.C. Watts of Oklahoma retired in 2003 amid rumors, denied by Watts, of a feud with then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas. Watts’ late father, Buddy was often quoted as saying that  “A black man voting for the Republicans makes about as much sense as a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.”

WISCONSIN GOP ACCUSED OF PLOTTING TO SUPPRESS NONWHITE VOTES IN NOVEMBER

Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, told reporters at a press conference in Madison, the state capital, that his organization had obtained documents and tape recordings that he said showed the state Republican party was plotting with Tea Party groups and Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a national conservative group, an effort to suppress turnout by nonwhites and college students in November’s election by employing the practice of “voter caging.”

Ross identified on one audiotape Time Dake of the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty, a local Tea Party group, as talking during a June 12 meeting with Reince Preibus, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party and Mark Block, the Wisconsin state director of Americans for Prosperity, about sending out mailings to voters across the state and use any mail that is returned to challenge voters’ registrations.

The result? “Some voters are forced to cast provisional ballots, which require them to follow-up the day after an election for the ballot to be counted,” Ross said. “Historically, about 35 percent of all provisional ballots are never counted.”

Ross said his organization had made formal requests to the U.S. Attorney and to the Wisconsin state Attorney General’s office for an investigation into the alleged plot “to engage in voter suppression and to monitor the organizations’ activities leading up to the November 2, 2010 election to prevent any actual unlawful voter suppression.”

TEA PARTY LEADER INSISTS EFFORT AIMED AT STOPPING VOTER FRAUD

Dake confirmed in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal of Madison that he and other local Tea Party members had attended the June 12 meeting, but said it was AFP that had been planning on sending out mailings to confirm people are “legitimate voters.” But Dake insisted that the effort was aimed at preventing voter fraud and denied targeting nonwhites or college students.

“No, it wasn’t targeting anyone,” Dake said. “I don’t know how you could tell these were minorities or students.”

Mark Block, a spokesman for AFP, denied attending the June 12 meeting, telling the State Journal that he wasn’t in Madison. But in a separate interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Block said he had discussions with Dake and others about targeting voter fraud.

DISTRUST OF GOP BY BLACKS RUNS DEEP — BUT IT WASN’T ALWAYS THAT WAY

For nearly a century after the Civil War,  African-Americans were the Republican Party’s most loyal voting constituency. This was, after all, the party of the “Great Emancipator,” President Abraham Lincoln. The GOP was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party by former members of  the  Whig Party, which tore itself apart in the early 1850s over the slavery issue.

It’s hard for anyone alive today to imagine, but the fact is the two major parties’ political philosophies in Lincoln’s time were the exact reverse of what they are today. From its founding in 1792 until the late 1940s, the Democratic Party was far from friendly to African-Americans. On the contrary, the party was an arch-enemy of blacks, especially in the Deep South, where Democrats wrote, passed and strictly enforced the region’s blatantly racist “Jim Crow” segregation laws.

Many Southern Democrats in the 1920s and 1930s were, in fact, also members of the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan. That anti-black hostility by the Democrats didn’t leave post-Civil War African-American voters  — That is, those outside the South who could vote — much of a choice than the GOP, the party of Lincoln.

Things began to change in 1947, when President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, issued an executive order to desegregate the Army and introduced civil-rights legislation to Congress the following year. This resulted in conservative southern white delegates walking out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention in protest. The southerners later formed the States’ Rights Party — which came to be known as the “Dixiecrats” — with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond as its presidential nominee.

By the 1960s, the Democratic Party was a house bitterly divided — pitting northern liberals against southern conservatives — over civil rights for African-Americans. It took the support of Republicans in Congress, mostly northern and midwestern liberals and moderates, to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

President Lyndon Johnson, a southerner from Texas, confided to his aide, Bill Moyers (now a prominent TV newsman and commentator) after signing these two landmark bills into law, that “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”

GOLDWATER AND NIXON SET THE STAGE FOR A MASSIVE REVERSAL OF FORTUNE FOR BOTH PARTIES

By “we,” Johnson meant his Democratic Party. But what Johnson didn’t anticipate was that the Republicans were about to lose Black America for a generation — and longer — when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination in 1964. Goldwater voted against both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (which he publicly regretted years later).

The damage to the GOP’s standing with African-Americans had only just begun.    

Enter Richard Nixon. In a bold and determined comeback bid eight years after losing his first run for the White House to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon devised an electoral strategy for victory in 1968 that forever altered the character of the Republican Party — and turned the fortunes of both major parties completely upside-down.

It was a formula best described by Kevin Phillips, a top Nixon campaign strategist, in a 1970 interview with The New York Times: “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the [African-American] vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

“The more [blacks] who register as Democrats in the South,” Phillips continued, “the sooner the [anti-black] whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

But there was also the threat posed to Nixon’s 1968 candidacy by the third-party run of the arch-segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace. The Nixon campaign felt compelled to outflank Wallace in the South in order to win the election. In the end, Wallace took enough Southern votes away from Nixon to nearly cost him the White House.  

NOW REPUBLICANS LOSING LATINOS OVER IMMIGRATION

More than four decades later — and despite the election in 2009 of an African-American, Michael Steele, as its national chairman — the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” is still very much alive and now threatens to alienate another entire segment of the electorate: Latinos.

Unlike blacks, however, Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population — and of the electorate. A recently-released study of U.S. Census Bureau data by the University of New Hampshire predicts that non-white births will likely outpace white births sometime this year — and that the Latino birth rate already is outpacing the white birth rate in the Southwest, particularly California.

Indeed, the current furor over illegal immigration may very likely have led to the defeat of two incumbents in the Texas Republican primary in March. Both incumbents were Latino and they both lost to white challengers by landslide margins.

In a blog posting on LatinaLista.net, blogger Marisa Trevino blamed the defeat of incumbent Texas Railroad Commissioner Victor Carrillo and other Latino candidates in the March 2 Texas GOP primary squarely on “a steep rise in anti-Hispanic sentiment perpetuated by GOP politicians, ultra-right conservatives, conservative talk-radio hosts and the budding Tea Party movement” brought on by the bitterly divisive issue of immigration.

Another Latino Republican incumbent, Judge Felipe Reyna of the Waco-based 10th District Court of Appeals, was soundly defeated by a white challenger, Al Scoggins, 68 percent to 32 percent. Four other Latino Republicans in Texas also lost to white candidates in the primary by landslide margins.

By contrast, in the seven Texas Democratic primary contests in which Latino candidates competed, the Latino candidate won in six. Of the three Latino Democratic incumbents who lost their bids for renomination, two lost to  Latino challengers. The lone Latina who lost to a non-Latino challenger, state Representative Dora Olivo, was defeated by an African-American, Ron Reynolds, in a heavily African-American Houston-area district.

POLL: CALIFORNIA LATINOS STILL DISTRUST GOP 16 YEARS AFTER PROP.187

A newly-released Los Angeles Times poll  found that California Republicans are still paying a severe political price among Latino voters for their support of Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that designed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using the state’s social services, health care, and public education.

The measure, introduced by Republican state Assemblyman Dick Mountjoy and strongly backed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, passed with 59 percent of the vote — only to be struck down by the federal courts on the grounds that immigration is the exclusive domain of the federal government.

With Latinos comprising 30 percent of the California electorate, the state GOP’s support for Prop. 187 cost it control of both houses of the state Legislature, both U.S. Senate seats, the majority of the state’s congressional delegation  and four of the five statewide elected offices.  

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — a moderate who is himself an immigrant from Austria — is the only Republican in the last 16 years to have escaped Latino voters’ wrath.  And he’s likely to remain so, for the Timespoll found that Latino voters are still refusing to support Republican candidates, backing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown — a former governor who is currently state attorney general —  over his Republican opponent, former eBay executive Meg Whitman, by 19 percentage points.

In the race for the U.S. Senate, Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer holds a commanding 38-point lead over her Republican challenger, Carly Fiorina among Latinos, the poll found.

Passage by the GOP-dominated Arizona Legislature of Bill 1070, a highly controversial anti-illegal-immigration measure, has triggered a backlash by Latinos against Republicans across the country . The law itself, which requires police to verify the status of someone they have stopped or arrested if they suspect that the person is in the country illegally, has come under withering legal attack as a state intrusion into federal authority and as opening the door to racial profiling by police against Latinos, who make up nearly a third of Arizona’s population.

With Latinos comprising the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population — already outpacing whites in births, according to the Census Bureau — Republicans are staring into permanent minority status, if not outright oblivion, if they continue to play the anti-immigrant card.  

GOP POISED TO MAKE GAINS IN 2010, BUT ITS WINS ARE LIKELY TO BE SHORT-LIVED

Historically, with the notable exception of the post-9/11 election of 2002 — when the dominant issue was national security and the “war on terror” — the party in control of the White House has suffered losses in every midterm congressional election since 1934.  The 2010 midterms are unlikely to buck that trend, with pre-election polls all pointing to Republicans making significant gains this November as voters grow increasingly disgruntled over the still-sour economy.

But with Tea Party-backed candidates scoring  a stunning string of primary victories — including the shocking upset wins in Delaware by Christine O’Donnell and in New York by Carl Paladino — The GOP is being pulled ever farther to the right, while at the same time alienating nonwhite voters at an astonishing rate.

While the GOP may claim big gains this November, its victories could prove to be short-lived. already, there is much speculation about whether former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is positioning herself to make a run for the top spot at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

If she runs, Palin will likely face a formidable opponent who has his own designs on winning the White House: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  A Palin-Gingrich battle for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination would be bruising enough; the power struggle between the Tea Party movement and the GOP old guard is almost certain to intensify in the next two years, regardless of what happens this November.

And that — combined with the GOP showing little sign of reflecting America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity — spells serious trouble for the Republican Party in the not-too-distant future.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved

Republicans in Delaware and New York Face November Rout After Far-Right Candidates Backed by Tea Party Movement Score Stunning Upsets in Respective Primaries for Senate and Governor; Rightward March Puts Northeast Republicans on Endangered Species List in a Fiercely Moderate-to-Liberal Region of the Nation Already Dominated by Democrats

SURVIVAL OF REPUBLICAN PARTY IN NORTHEAST IN JEOPARDY — Republicans are gleeful about having outdrawn Democrats in the 2010 primaries across the country for the first time since the 1930s. But GOP hopes of taking control of the Senate were likely dashed last week when Christine O’Donnell (left) scored a stunning upset victory over GOP establishment-backed Representative Mike Castle in the Delaware Senate primary, while another Tea Party-backed hopeful, Carl Paladino (right), came from behind to overwhelm former Representative Rick Lazio in the New York GOP primary for governor. But the shocking twin victories scored by the hard-line right-wing movement also pose a serious threat to the long-term electoral viability of the Republican Party in the Northeast, a fiercely moderate-to-liberal region that was once a rock-solid GOP bastion but is now is overwhelmingly Democratic. (Photos Courtesy Examiner.com and Rochester Daily Record)

(Posted 11:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, September 21, 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: Due to a computer crash, this week’s column is being posted six hours later than usual. We regret any inconvenience that the delay may have caused.

By SKEETER SANDERS

Republicans are in a heady, almost gleeful,  state of mind as the final campaign toward the November 2 midterm elections gets under way in earnest.

For the first time since the 1930s, more people cast ballots in the Republican primaries than in the Democratic primaries, and there is a far higher level of enthusiasm and willingness to vote among Republicans this year, as anger over the sour economy continues to trump nearly every other issue. Historically, such anger over bad economic times has been bad news for the party in control of the White House and Congress — in this case, the Democrats.

But Republicans shouldn’t pop the bubbly just yet. In fact, they need to be seriously worried about the party’s long-term electoral survival in the one region of the country where Republican officeholders are a shrinking minority: The Northeast.

The headline-grabbing GOP primaries in Delaware and New York last Tuesday, which saw hard-line right-wing Tea Party-backed candidates score stunning upset victories over party establishment-backed candidates, threaten to sink  the Republicans into political irrelevancy  in the most  fiercely moderate-to-liberal region in the country — home to nearly 46 million people in 11 states from Maine to Maryland — that was once a rock-solid GOP bastion but is now overwhelmingly Democratic.

O’DONNELL ALREADY HAUNTED BY CONTROVERSIAL PAST COMMENTS ON SOCIAL ISSUES

In Delaware, Tea Party-backed candidate Christine O’Donnell set off a political earthquake by defeating longtime Representative Mike Castle for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat long held by Vice President Joe Biden. And in New York, Tea Party-backed candidate Carl Paladino shocked former Representative Rick Lazio for the GOP nomination for governor.

But within hours of O’Donnell’s upset victory, the newly-minted GOP nominee’s past role as an arch-conservative social activist with ties to the Religious Right came back to haunt her — and to cause deep embarrassment for GOP leaders — when video clips quickly surfaced on the Internet and cable-news channels in which O’Donnell, who first gained national exposure in the mid-1980s as a spokeswoman for conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s Concerned Women for America, made a series of highly controversial statements on the use of condoms, the fight against AIDS, the role of women in the military, and even witchcraft.

With TV gadfly Bill Maher vowing to release more embarrassing video clips of O’Donnell’s appearances on his now-defunct ABC talk show “Politically Incorrect” — on which O’Donnell was a frequent guest —  former Bush political adviser Karl Rove lambasted O’Donnell’s remarks as “nutty” and declaring flatly that the Senate race in Delaware “is not a race we’re going to be able to win.”

In a heated exchange with Sean Hannity on Hannity’s Fox News Channel show last Wednesday night, Rove raised questions about O’Donnell’s personal finances amid allegations by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an ethics watchdog group,  that she illegally spent campaign funds to pay her personal bills.

Hannity sought to defend O’Donnell by claiming that the allegations about her finances were “trumped-up charges from my standpoint that the Republican establishment was against her.”

Rove immediately fired back, “Did you ask her about the people who were following her home to her headquarters? There are just a lot of nutty things she’s been saying that don’t add up. Why did she mislead voters about her college education? How come it took nearly two decades to pay her college bills so she could get her college degree? How did she make a living?”

PALADINO GOES BALLISTIC ON CUOMO AFTER PRIMARY WIN

A week after millionaire real estate magnate Carl Paladino came roaring back from a double-digit deficit in pre-primary polls to overwhelm former Representative Rick Lazio for the GOP nomination for governor in a 67 percent-to-33 percent landslide,  New York Republican Party leaders remain in a state of shock, whipsawed by a hurricane of anti-incumbent fever fueled by a Tea Party movement that the GOP establishment failed to take seriously.  

Paladino spent more than $3 million of his own money in a campaign that was marked by often-incendiary rhetoric on the stump, including a vow to invoke eminent domain to block the construction of an Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero. “I’ve been driving land-use issues for 40 years, and I understand the full powers of the governor. If the [American Civil Liberties Union] or anyone else wants to challenge me in court, I’m ready for the fight,” Paladino said in a campaign statement.

That was music to the ears of former Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams, who touched off a firestorm of controversy last May when he blasted the proposed Park 51 center as “a monument to the 9/11 terrorists” and “the terrorists’ monkey-god.”

And Paladino wasted no time in lashing out at his Democratic rival, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo — by hitting him below the belt, at least figuratively. In a written challenge to Cuomo to a debate, Paladino all but challenged Cuomo’s manhood. “Frankly, I don’t think you have the cojones to face me and the other candidates in an open debate,” he wrote. Cojones is the Spanish word for testicles.

In a rip at Cuomo’s father, Mario, who was governor from 1983 to 1995, Paladino wrote, “So Andrew, for the first time in your life, be a man!” Paladino wrote. “Don’t hide behind Daddy’s coattails even though he pulled strings to advance your career every step of your way. Come out and debate like a man!”

The New York Daily News reported in its Tuesday editions late Monday night that a “furious” Cuomo was preparing to strike back hard at Paladino. “If a guy says you have no cojones, how do you punch him back, call him an a–hole?” the newspaper quoted a source close to the  Cuomo campaign as saying.

DESPITE TEA PARTY BRAVADO, NORTHEAST REPUBLICANS FEAR DISASTER IN NOVEMBER

Despite assertions by Tea Party activists of a “people’s revolution” at the ballot box on November 2, Republicans in Delaware and New York — and the rest of the Northeast — are openly fearful that the right-wing movement’s primary wins will spell disaster for their party and render irreversible a 20-year erosion of voter support for a GOP that has moved too far to the right in a region of the country that remains fiercely moderate to liberal.

The Northeast was a solidly Republican bastion for nearly a century after the party eclipsed the Whigs in the 1870s. It has been home to such moderate-to-liberal GOP stalwarts as Theodore Roosevelt, Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller of New York; George Aiken, Ralph Flanders and James Jeffords of Vermont; Lowell Weicker and Christopher Shays of Connecticut; Edward Brooke and William Weld of Massachusetts; Thomas Kean and Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey; Richard Schweiker and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Margaret Chase Smith, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine.

But the political loyalties of Northeasterners began to shift from Republican to Democrat after conservatives led by Barry Goldwater overthrew the “Northeastern Liberal Establishment” at the 1964 Republican National Convention. The trend accelerated in 1968 after the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon instituted its now-infamous “Southern Strategy” of openly appealing to conservative white voters in the South who vehemently opposed the Democratic Party’s support for the civil rights movement.

By the turn of the millennium, the Republicans’ conservative drift turned into a full-scale ideological purge when right-wing party hard-liners began a full-scale jihad to drive the GOP’s few remaining moderates and liberals — whom the hard-liners derisively brand “RINOs” — Republicans in name only — out of the party altogether, culminating in the departure in 2007 of Lincoln Chafee, the last truly liberal Republican in the Senate, who lost his 2006 bid for re-election to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.

Chafee is now running for governor of Rhode Island as an independent.

Today, the Northeast remains the most solidly moderate-to-liberal region in the country — but now its voters are overwhelmingly Democratic. Not a single Republican represents the six New England states in the House of Representatives. Only three of the region’s 22 U.S. Senators and three of its 11 governors are Republican. All 11 Northeastern states’ legislatures are controlled by Democrats.

With the Tea Party victories in Republican primaries across the country, many of the party’s few remaining moderates fear that not only will O’Donnell and Paladino be buried in Democratic landslides in their respective races, but that they will drag other Republicans in the Northeast down with them, rendering the region lost to the GOP for generations — just as the Democrats lost the South in the 1960s and that region has remained a conservative Republican bastion ever since.

In an interview with The New York Times, Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) warned that “We [Republicans] can’t be a majority party if we can’t appeal across the spectrum, if we have an exclusionary approach in general.

“A 100 percent ideological purity test – I don’t live in that Utopian world; it’s not reflective of the real world,” Snowe  told the Times. “I hope that’s not the approach.”

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Pastor Terry Jones Might Not Have Carried Out His Planned Burning of Korans, But a Gay-Hating Kansas Cult Went Ahead and Did Just That — and So Did Other Christian Extremists, a Sure Sign That Paranoid Religions Fanaticism Is No Longer Limited to Radical Muslims and Potentially Poses the Greatest Threat to World Peace Since the Cold War

A member of the rabidly anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church holds provocative protest signs during the 2006 funeral in Minnesota of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. Westboro made good on its promise Saturday to burn copies of the Koran and the American flag outside its headquarters in Topeka, Kansas. There was also a Koran burning in Tennessee and an unidentified man  ripped out pages of the Muslim holy book and set them afire during a protest rallies both for and against a proposed Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero in New York. (Photo courtesy Minnesota Public Radio)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, September 14, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

As America marked the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks over the weekend, the solemn remembrances of the more than 3,500 people who lost their lives were overshadowed by a raging global firestorm sparked by a disturbing rise in anti-Muslim sentiment.

Ceremonies at New York’s Ground Zero to mark the destruction of the World Trade Center took a back seat to massive demonstrations both for and against construction of an Islamic community center and mosque to be located two blocks away on Park Place — during which an unidentified man ripped out pages from a copy of the Koran and set them afire.    

A Florida pastor who drew international condemnation after he announced plans to burn copies of the Muslim holy book backed off at the last minute. But that didn’t stop a gay-hating cult in Kansas from staging its own Koran burning. Members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church burned not only a Koran, but also an American flag outside their headquarters in Topeka.

Westboro, made up entirely of relatives and in-laws of its iron-willed leader, Fred Phelps, has generated nationwide outrage in recent years — including a lawsuit that will be heard before the Supreme Court later this fall — over its viciously homophobic protests at the funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cult believes that U.S. troops are dying as “God’s punishment for America’s tolerance of homosexuality” and attacks Muslims as following a “false religious system with a pedophile as its prophet.”

TENN. MINISTERS, N.Y. PROTESTER ALSO BURN KORANS — FLA. MOSQUE FIREBOMBED

Westboro wasn’t alone. In Springfield, Tennessee, two local Christian ministers  held a private Koran burning Saturday in the backyard of their home. The Rev. Bob Old and the Rev. Danny Allen denied that they were holding their Koran burning to protest the Park 51 project in New York.  “It’s about faith, it’s about love, but you have to have the right book behind you,” said Old, as he held up a copy of the Koran before setting it aflame. “This is a book of hate, not a book of love.”

Meanwhile, an unidentified man tore out pages from a copy of the Koran and set the ripped pages aflame during a massive protest against the proposed Park 51 Islamic center, the New York Daily News reported Sunday. He was not arrested. A second man also tore pages out of a Koran and offered them to anyone in the crowd as “toilet paper,” according to the newspaper.

Most disturbing was an incident that happened in Jacksonville, Florida in May, but didn’t become national news until last month: A mosque was firebombed while worshippers were inside for Friday prayers. A surveillance video released by the FBI showed a middle-aged white man believed to be carrying a can of gasoline walking in the courtyard of the Jacksonville Islamic Center of Northeast Florida on the night of the incident.

The FBI is investigating the incident as a possible hate crime and act of domestic terrorism, a bureau spokesman told radio station WOKV. “It was a dangerous device, and had anybody been around it, they could have been seriously injured or killed,” said spokesman James Casey. “We want to sort of emphasize the seriousness of the thing and not let people believe that this was just a match and a little bit of gasoline that was spread around.”

ANTI-MUSLIM INCIDENTS IN U.S. SPARK ANTI-CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE OVERSEAS

The Koran burnings in the U.S. triggered an outbreak of anti-Christian violence by outraged Muslims in India, Afghanistan  and Indonesia.

In India, violence erupted in the Kashmir Valley and in two towns in Punjab state, the New Delhi-based Indo-Asian News Service reported Monday.  At least three people were killed  and several people were injured when rioting mobs burned a Christian missionary school to the ground in the Muslim northern Kasmir town of  Tangmarg.

Indian authorities imposed a round-the-clock curfew throughout the territory, but angry Muslims continued to stage protests in the Pulwama district of southern Kashmir, shouting pro-Koran and anti-American slogans, IANS reported. Similar  protests erupted in the city of Srinagar in Punjab state, which borders Pakistan. There were conflicting reports about the fate of a Christian church in Srinagar. Some reports said the church was torched, but others said that only its wooden cross was set afire by the protesters.

In Afghanistan, two people were killed and half a dozen injured as protests held against the event on Sunday turned violent, the Los Angeles Times reported. Hundreds of protesters in Lowgar province, south of the Afghan capital, Kabul, tried to storm the provincial governor’s headquarters.  Afghan police responded by firing on the crowd.

And in Indonesia, a Christian worshipper and a minister were attacked by assailants as they headed to Sunday morning prayers at a church in the city of Bekasi, 25 miles east of the capital,Jakarta, according to Catholic Online, a Catholic news and information Web site.

The worshipper was stabbed in the stomach and the minister was hit on his head with a wooden plank.  Neither victims’  injuries appeared to be life-threatening. No one claimed responsibility for the attacks, Catholic Online reported, but a group of Muslim hard-liners are suspected.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous majority-Muslim country with 220 million people, is a secular democracy with a long history of religious tolerance. But Islamic militants have been been agitating in recent years for the imposition of Sharia law. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono condemned the attack and vowed to bring the assailants to justice.

FLASHBACK TO 2006: THE CONTROVERSIAL PROPHET MOHAMMED CARTOONS

Those who burned Korans over the weekend had to have known that they would provoke strong and even violent reactions among many Muslims. One only has to look back four years, when a Danish newspaper, the conservative Copenhagen daily Morgenawisen Jyllands-Posten, published a series of highly unflattering editorial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

That the cartoons depicted any image at all of the prophet — which is strictly taboo in the Muslim world and considered even by moderate and secular Muslims to be the ultimate blasphemy against their faith — is bad enough. That they depicted Mohammed in an unflattering, even mocking, light — including one cartoon showing the prophet wearing a turban the looked like a bomb — made the outrage among Muslims even more heated and ultimately, it boiled over into violence.

Thousands of enraged Muslims rampaged in Beirut on February 5, 2006, setting fire to the Danish Embassy, burning Danish flags, lobbing stones at a Maronite Christian church and ransacking a Christian neighborhood in the Lebanese capital.

Troops fired bullets into the air and used tear gas and water cannons to push the crowds back after a small group of Islamic extremists tried to break through the security barrier outside the Beirut embassy. Flames and smoke billowed from the building. Security officers said that at least 30 people had been injured in the violence.

When other European newspapers republished the cartoons, the violence spread across the Middle East, as angry mobs torched the Danish Embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, stormed and ransacked European Union buildings, and desecrated the Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, French and German flags in Gaza City.

In an editorial published on january 30, 2006, the editors of Jyllands-Posten, while defending their right to publish the cartoons, nonetheless apologized, stating that “they have indisputably offended many Muslims.”

A DANGEROUS NEW COMBUSTIBLE ELEMENT: CHRISTIAN EXTREMISTS

While the motivations of the newspapers’ printing of the Mohammed cartoons remains a subject of debate, there’s no doubt about the motivations of those who burned the Koran this past weekend: Sheer anti-Muslim bigotry. They did it deliberately, fully aware that it would be extremely offensive to Muslims and knowing that it would provoke a violent response from Muslim hard-liners.

That the Koran burners were Christian extremists who, like Pastor Terry Jones, believe that “Islam is of the Devil” — or, in the case of the virulently homophobic Westboro cult, believe that Muslims “follow a pedophile prophet” — introduces a dangerous new combustible element in this age of the Internet that, if left unchecked, could threaten world peace to a degree not seen since the 40-year Cold War between the United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union.

In the nine years since 9/11, religious extremism can no longer be seen by Americans — or the world — as the exclusive province of Islamic radicals. There are also radical Christians among us, some of them all too eager to re-launch a crusade against “the Islamic devil.”

For centuries, religious leaders have perpetuated and reinforced this “us-versus-them” mentality by preaching that there is only one true pathway for humans to relate to God, that all other pathways are false and that those who follow those other pathways are wrong — even “evil” — and must be opposed by whatever means necessary.

If it’s not put in check, this “us-versus-them” mentality will ultimately destroy us all.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. all rights reserved.  

Kansas-Based Westboro Baptist Church, Which Has Drawn Much Controversy (and Lawsuits) Over Its Rabidly Homophobic Protests at Funerals of American Soldiers Killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Says it Will Burn Copies of Muslim Holy Book if ‘Sissy Brats of Doomed America’ Persuade Jones into Calling Off His Planned Burning on 9/11 Anniversary, Which Is on Hold — For Now

UNYIELDING CULT A THREAT TO U.S. TROOPS? — A member of the rabidly anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church holds highly inflammatory signs in a recent protest at the funeral of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan. Westboro, whose members are made up entirely of the family of its iron-willed leader, Fred Phelps, insist that U.S. troops’ deaths are “God’s punishment for America tolerating homosexuality.” Westboro has now vowed to burn copies of the Koran, the Islamic holy book, after the Rev. Terry Jones shelved plans to burn Korans outside his Pentacostalist church in Florida today (Saturday), the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. (Photo: Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Saturday, September 11, 2010)

(Updated 12:00 noon EDT Saturday, September 11, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

A rabidly anti-gay Kansas-based cult — which has drawn nationwide outrage for staging protests at the funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — has vowed to burn copies of the Koran, now that the pastor of a fundamentalist church in Florida has put on hold his planned burning of the Muslim holy book that was scheduled for today (Saturday), the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

In a press release posted Friday on its Web site, GodHatesFags.com, the Westboro Baptist Church announced that it will “burn the Koran and the doomed American flag” at noon local time today (1:00 p.m. EDT) at its headquarters in Topeka.

The cult branded Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida a “false prophet” who allowed himself to be “bullied by sissy, intolerant rebels worldwide into cancelling plans to burn that blasphemous idol called the Koran.”

===============================

BULLETIN — PASTOR JONES NOW SAYS HE’LL ‘NEVER’ BURN KORANS

==============================    

FLORIDA PASTOR BACKS OFF AMID DIRE WARNINGS OF NEW WAVE OF TERROR ATTACKS

Amid worldwide outrage from Muslims and threats of violence, Jones announced Thursday that he was putting on hold his plans to burn copies of the Muslim holy book after receiving a telephone call from Defense Secretary William Gates, who, according to press reports, warned him that he and his followers would put the lives of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in “grave jeopardy” and urged him not to carry out his plans.

Meanwhile, the international police agency Interpol and the U.S. State Department issued warnings that terrorist attacks would likely increase around the world if the Koran burning went ahead.

Jones told reporters at a Thursday press conference that his decision not to carry out his planned Koran burning was prompted by assurances from a local Muslim imam that a controversial Islamic cultural center and mosque to be built two block away from Ground Zero — where the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by al-Qaida terrorists — would be moved to s site farther away.

But in New York, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who purchased the property last December on which the proposed center would be built, denied any such agreement. “I am glad that Pastor Jones has decided not to burn any Korans,” Feisal said in a statement. “However, I have not spoken to Pastor Jones or to Imam Musri [of Florida]. I am surprised by their announcement. We are not going to toy with our religion or any other. Nor are we going to barter. We are here to extend our hands to build peace and harmony.”

EXTREMELY HOMOPHOBIC WESTBORO UNLIKELY TO BE PERSUADED TO BACK DOWN

Unlike Pastor Jones, however, the Phelps clan at Westboro is unlikely to be persuaded to back down form its threat to burn Korans. In fact, the cult has burned the Muslim holy book before, in 2008. But at that time, their book-burning drew almost no media notice.

Westboro’s absolute hatred of homosexuality is what drives its highly controversial actions. It has drawn nationwide outrage for its protests at the funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — and is the defendant in a harassment lawsuit by the father of a soldier killed in Iraq that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices will hear arguments in the case when the high court begins its 2010-2011 term next month.

Westboro’s extreme homophobia is what also drives its hatred of Muslims. It openly accuses the Prophet Mohammed — without a shred of proof — of being a pedophile. In its announcement of its planned Koran burning today, the cult employs highly inflammatory language against not only Muslims, but also Catholics. “Like priests-rape-boys Catholicism, Islam is just another false religious system with a pedophile as its prophet,” the Westboro statement says. “You’re not supposed to be finding common ground with idolatrous perverts, but throwing down their altars, as God instructed!”

State and federal laws have been passed to keep Westboro picketers hundreds of feet away from the military funerals. But the cult is highly litigious: Shirley Phelps-Roper, the eldest daughter of pastor Fred Phelps, is an attorney and has filed numerous lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of those laws. She’s also countersued the plaintiff in the case now pending before the Supreme Court.

The cult was expelled in 1991 from the conservative Southern Baptist Convention in part for its extremist interpretations of the Bible and for its membership being exclusively of the Phelps family.

“We share concern over the unbiblical views and offensive tactics of Fred Phelps and his followers,” the SBC said in a statement posted on its Web site.  “His church is not in any way affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, and his extreme position not only stands in contrast to ours, more importantly they stand in contrast to God’s Word. . .”

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Civil-Liberties Watchdogs Say Proposed Cordoba House Islamic Cultural Center Near New York’s Ground Zero Is Likely to Come Under Intense U.S. Government Surveillance Once It’s Completed; ACLU Sues FBI for Information on the Bureau’s Surveillance of Muslims in California and Elsewhere; FBI Says No Probable Cause — or Warrant — Is Required for Such Surveillance

As controversy over a proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque to be built two blocks from New York’s Ground Zero continues to rage, new concerns are being raised by civil-liberties watchdogs that the planned Cordoba House and other Muslim houses of worship across the country are being subjected to intense U.S. government surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information on the FBI’s probe of Muslims in the San Francisco area. For its part, the FBI says that no suspicion of wrongdoing is required for the agency to conduct such surveillance. (Photo courtesy Getty Images)  

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, September 7, 2010)

By WILLIAM FISHER

Inter-Press Service

(Published under a Creative Commons license)

The bitter controversy over the building of an Islamic community center and mosque near the site of the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 is sparking new fears of government snooping on Islamic holy places — which it now claims it can do without a warrant.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper are suing the FBI in U.S. District Court in San Francisco over the agency’s failure to respond to a five-month-old request for information on its investigation of Muslim groups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The groups are seeking details under the Freedom of Information Act of any surveillance the FBI has carried out since 2005 on area mosques and Islamic centers, as well as information on the recruitment of Muslim school children into the agency’s Junior Agent Program.

ACLU ATTORNEY: FBI SHOULD TARGET SPECIFIC SUSPECTS, NOT SPY ON ALL MUSLIMS

Julia Harumi Mass, staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, told IPS that the FBI “should focus its resources on targets for whom it has specific facts that support a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, rather than using undercover informants to spy on people in their houses of worship.”

She added, “The lawsuit we have brought is one seeking records, so that we — and the public — can evaluate the FBI’s policies and practices to make sure they enhance national security without undermining our civil liberties.

“We have not sued for any misconduct other than failing to provide governmental records as required by law,” Harumi continued.

FBI: NO SUSPICION OF WRONGDOING NEEDED FOR SURVEILLANCE

But, according to the FBI itself, the agency needs no suspicion of wrongdoing before it initiates surveillance.

In a July 28 letter addressed to Senate Judiciary committee members Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) — following the testimony of FBI Director Robert Mueller — the agency said that suspicion of wrongdoing was not necessary to launch an investigation against an individual or organization.

“No particular factual predication is required” for the initiation of a preliminary investigation, according to the FBI’s operational guidelines.

FBI’S POSITION BLASTED AS ‘DRAGNET’ APPROACH

“This is intelligence gathering run amok,” said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. “The FBI is saying it can initiate surveillance without a reason.”

“This is a dragnet way of uncovering information and a dramatic step backwards in the history of civil rights,” he charged.

“The FBI has made an admission that we’ve known all along: That the agency is allowed to surveil without any suspicion of criminality,” according to Nura Maznavi, counsel for the Program to Combat Racial and Religious Profiling at Muslim Advocates, an affiliate of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers.

PLAINTIFFS ACCUSE FBI OF RACIAL PROFILING OF MUSLIMS

Muslim Advocates, the ACLU, and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee are among the organizations claiming that the FBI’s guidelines use race as a basis for determining whether to initiate surveillance, thereby unfairly targeting Muslims.

But Mueller told the Senate Judiciary committee that race and religion could not be used as sole criteria for initiating an investigation of a person or organization.

Maznavi and Buttar have accused the FBI of initiating investigations in Muslim homes and mosques that they characterized as “general fishing expeditions” that could lead to clues about other members of the community.

The FBI also visits people at their jobs, said Maznavi, adding that such surveillance impacts a person’s reputation at their place of employment.

The agency also frequently sends informants into mosques, Maznavi alleged, pointing to two high-profile cases in California and Florida. Such a practice makes congregants suspicious of one another and promotes fear within the community, she said.

FBI MAY BE VIOLATING FOURTH AMENDMENT

The basis of the FBI’s contention is unclear. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. It specifically requires search and arrest warrants be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.

The ACLU of Northern California made its initial request for records under the Freedom of Information Act in March, according to their complaint. The plaintiffs hope to persuade the U.S. District Court to force the FBI to process their FOIA request and release the records immediately.

The plaintiffs first sought out the FBI records after area Muslims contacted the ACLU and the Asian Law Caucus with concerns that the Bureau was scrutinizing their activities and attempting to recruit “informants and infiltrators,” according to the ALC.

In a statement, the group said the FBI had failed to produce its records despite admitting in March that media attention on the investigation of Muslim groups entitled his clients to expedited processing of their FOIA request.

“The lawsuit is about transparency,” said Somnath Raj Chatterjee, a pro bono lawyer for the groups.

In 2009, it was revealed that the FBI used paid informants and agents provocateurs in U.S. mosques. The American Muslim community says this news sends a devastating message to community leaders and imams who have worked diligently to foster greater understanding between law enforcement and their communities.

Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the Justice Department began rounding up Arabs and other Muslims and — mistakenly — anybody who looked “Middle Eastern,” including Sikhs from South Asia, according to a 2008 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

In the months after the attacks, some 5,000 men were held in detention without charges, most without access to lawyers or family members. There were no prosecutions and no convictions of any of these people, according to the CCR report.

Some, who were in the U.S. with expired visas or who had committed other immigration infractions, were deported.

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Special Report Copyright 2010, Inter-Press Service. Published under a Creative Commons license.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

9/11/01 Has Been Called ‘The New Pearl Harbor’ for Today’s Generations of Americans, But Nearly Forgotten is the Wave of Anti-Japanese Bigotry That Swept the U.S. After 12/7/41, Leading to the Forced Removal and Internment of Upwards of 120,000 Japanese-Americans — Will America’s 1.3 Million Muslims Face the Same Fate?

Copies of a 1942 edition of the San Francisco Examiner announce with a screaming — and highly derogatory — banner headline the impending removal of thousands of Japanese-Americans from their homes and businesses in California and relocation to internment camps located in remote areas across the western U.S. As many as 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated amid a wave of anti-Japanese bigotry that swept the country following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 have often been called “The New Pearl Harbor” for today’s generations of Americans. But a mounting controversy over plans to construct an Islamic center near Ground Zero has unleashed a wave of anti-Muslim passions across the country of a magnitude that, if it continues unchecked, could match the ill will toward Japanese-Americans during World War II. (Photo courtesy National Archives)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, August 31, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

— George Santayana

* * *

As controversy continues to build over the planned construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks away from New York’s Ground Zero, there has been a dramatic spike in incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry in recent weeks, indicative of a wave of Islamophobia that is sweeping across the United States.

Opposition to new mosques isn’t limited to New York. There have been demonstrations and acts of violence against existing and proposed Muslim houses of worship from coast to coast — including a suspected arson fire Friday night at the site of a new Islamic center in suburban Nashville.

A spokesman for the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department said that the blaze, which destroyed construction equipment at the future site of the Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, has been ruled as arson. Gasoline was poured over the equipment and ignited.

The Sheriff’s Department and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — as well as the FBI — are jointly investigating the fire as a possible hate crime, according to Andy Anderson, special agent for the BATF.

MUSLIM TAXI DRIVER IN NEW YORK ATTACKED

Acts of violence against individual Muslims have also risen sharply — the most notorious such incident so far being an attack on a Muslim taxi driver last Tuesday night in New York. The driver, an immigrant from Bangladesh, was slashed by his knife-wielding passenger after he acknowledged being a Muslim.

Police arrested Michael Enright, 21, who had just returned from filming U.S. Mariens serving in Afghanistan and charged him with felony attempted murder motivated by religious bias in the attack on 43-year-old taxi driver Ahmed Sharif. Police said Sharif was slashed across the face, arm and hand.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg condemned the attack, telling reporters at a hurriedly-called City Hall news conference that it was “clearly motivated by anti-Muslim bias. . .This attack runs counter to everything that New Yorkers believe, no matter what God we pray to.”

ANTI-MUSLIM PASSIONS RAGING ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Much of the anti-Muslim passion is being fanned by conservative politicians and hard-line right-wing Christian evangelicals who consider Islam an “evil” religion and an “enemy of the Judeo-Christian way of life.”

Long before the controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” escalated into a major headline-grabbing battle over the right of Muslims in America to freedom of worship under the First Amendment, there has been a steady uptick in anti-Muslim sentiment across the country:

# Several Christian ministers in Sheboygan, Wisconsin led a noisy protest in May against a proposal to build a local mosque in a former health food store purchased by a Muslim doctor.

# Members of the right-wing Tea Party movement in late July insultingly brought dogs — much beloved by Westerners but considered unclean animals by Muslims — to picket Friday prayers at a mosque in Temecula, California, whose leaders want to build a new house of worship on a vacant lot nearby.

# Also in late July, trustees of a Roman Catholic church in the New York City borough of Staten Island rejected a proposal to sell a former convent owned by the parish to a Muslim group that wanted to convert it into a mosque, after word of the proposed sale was made public, sparking loud anti-Muslim protests by local residents.

# Muslim leaders in Bridgeport, Connecticut asked for police protection on August 6 after members of a right-wing Christian-supremacist group staged an angry protest outside a local mosque during Friday prayers, shouting hateful anti-Muslim invectives at the worshippers, and accusing their children of being “murderers” as they left the mosque. The protesters were members of the Texas-based Operation Save America — an offshoot of anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue.

# And just last Tuesday, a zoning board in Mayfield, Kentucky reversed its decision to allow a group of Muslim refugees to use a local building as a mosque. The owner of a flower shop located next door to the building, a self-described evangelical Christian, said it might have been different if the building was to be used as a Baptist church.

AT HEART OF ISLAMOPHOBIC WAVE: 9/11, THE ‘NEW PEARL HARBOR’

By now, the source of the current wave of anti-Muslim bigotry sweeping the country should be obvious: The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, damaged the Defense Department’s headquarters at the Pentagon in Washington and killed more than 3,500 people.

The attacks, committed by 19 al-Qaida terrorists, was almost immediately considered an act of war against the United States by a foreign force on U.S. soil — the first such act of war since the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941, which plunged this country into World War II.

Even this columnist, a New York City native whose stepfather was a member of the construction crews who built the twin towers when I was a kid, regarded the events of September 11, 2001 as a repeat of December 7, 1941 — the new Pearl Harbor for the present generations of Americans alive today — as I watched the full horror of the 9/11 attacks unfold on live television.

I even remember writing on a chalkboard in a now-defunct juice bar in my adopted hometown of Burlington, Vermont, the following message as I watched the destruction of the twin towers:

“Days of Infamy: December 7, 1941 — September 11, 2001.”

September 11, 2001 would, for my generation and for every generation of Americans alive today, forever live as a day of infamy, much as December 7, 1941 would live as a day of infamy for the World War II-era GI Generation — whom retired NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw dubbed “The Greatest Generation” — most of whom are no longer with us and the shrinking number of them who remain are now well into their 80s and 90s.

AN EERIE ECHO OF AN UGLY CHAPTER IN U.S. HISTORY RIGHT AFTER PEARL HARBOR

It truly is unfortunate that there are fewer and fewer Americans of the GI Generation still living, for lost with their passing is the collective memory of one of the ugliest chapters of American history — one that the current wave of Islamophobia threatens to repeat.

That chapter is the even more virulent wave of bigotry against Japanese-Americans that swept the country in the months following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — bigotry so intense and widespread that it ultimately resulted in tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans forcibly removed by the federal government from their homes and businesses and sent to internment camps located in remote area across the western U.S.

The discrimination and hostility that German-Americans experienced during World War I was nothing compared to what Japanese-Americans would endure after Pearl Harbor. The Germans were white and European; the Japanese were neither. What happened to Japanese-Americans during World War II was — most historians today agree — one of the most blatantly racist episodes in the nation’s history.

And it was directed by none other than the man considered America’s greatest president of the 20th Century — Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

That the treatment of Japanese-Americans was motivated by anti-Asian racism was made clear by the uncovering of FBI documents from that era. From 1939 to 1941, the FBI compiled what the bureau called the Custodial Detention Index on U.S. citizens, “enemy” aliens and foreign nationals which might be dangerous. Interestingly, the so-called “enemy races” identified in the FBI’s files specifically excluded those of German and Italian descent.

ANTI-JAPANESE SENTIMENT RAN HIGHEST IN CALIFORNIA, HAWAII

Nowhere did anti-Japanese bigotry run higher than in California and Hawaii, where Japanese-Americans were most heavily concentrated. Unlike German-Americans and Italian-Americans, who numbered in the millions and were spread across the country, there were fewer than a half-million Japanese-Americans. The attack on Pearl Harbor led to fears that Japan was preparing a full-scale attack on the U.S. west coast, making Japanese-Americans — particularly the American-born, second-generation nisei — a convenient target for discrimination.

Japan’s rapid military conquest of much of Asia made their war machine appear to some Americans frighteningly unstoppable. Civilian and military officials had concerns about the loyalty of Japanese-Americans and considered them to be a security risk.

Upon examination of historical record, however, it became clear that these concerns often grew more out of anti-Asian racial hatred than any actual security risk, particularly since no such alarm was raised about German-Americans and Italian-Americans.

Nor was the racist sentiment one-sided. Japanese propaganda films captured after the war revealed an equally racist attitude by Japan against the mostly-white Americans — making it clear that each side saw the other as less than human.

Nonetheless, American attitudes toward the Japanese and Japanese-Americans in World War II stood in stark contrast to their attitudes toward Americans of German and Italian ancestry — even when compared to the prejudice toward German-Americans during World War I. Then-President Woodrow Wilson never issued an executive order for the detention of Americans of German or Austro-Hungarian ancestry during that war.

FDR ORDERS INTERNMENT OF UP TO 120,000 JAPANESE-AMERICANS

Thus, on February 20, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, ordering the forcible relocation of approximately 112,000 to 120,000 ethnic Japanese — 62 percent of whom were U.S. citizens — from their homes to hastily-constructed “war relocation camps” located primarily in remote regions, far from the country’s major urban centers.

Roosevelt’s order authorized U.S. military commanders to designate “military areas” at their discretion, “from which any or all persons may be excluded.” These “exclusion zones,” unlike the “alien enemy” roundups, were applicable to anyone that an authorized military commander might choose, whether citizen or non-citizen.

Eventually such areas would include both the east and west coasts, and about a third of the country’s interior — and were applied almost exclusively to all of those of Japanese ancestry, although there were many instances of Chinese-Americans also getting caught up in the internment. Indeed, the internments in California brought back memories of violent attacks on Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans by white mobs in San Francisco in the late 1800s.

INTERNMENT PROVED IMPRACTICAL IN HAWAII

The internment order proved, however, to be impractical to enforce in Hawaii — despite the fact that Japanese-Americans there were closer to essential military facilities than most of their compatriots on the U.S. mainland. This was because Japanese-Americans were over a third of Hawaii’s population — and were too vital to the islands’ economy.

Instead, the whole of Hawaii — which, although a U.S. territory, was not yet the nation’s 50th state — was placed under martial law. The Army imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the entire population of Hawaii except those on official business and compiled intelligence dossiers on nearly half a million Hawaiians.

Today, Hawaii is the only state in the U.S. that has a majority-Asian population. Slightly more than 50 percent of Hawaii’s residents today are of Japanese ancestry — including U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye — a highly-decorated World War II veteran — and U.S. Representative Mazie Hirono.

In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation stated that government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Over $1.6 billion in reparations were later disbursed by the U.S. government to Japanese-Americans who had either suffered internment or were heirs of those who had suffered internment.

WILL HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF WITH AMERICA’S 1.3 MILLION MUSLIMS?

With the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II all but faded from the collective American memory, there is a real danger that this dark chapter of American history, as the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana warns in his famous aphorism quoted at the beginning of this column, could be repeated — this time against America’s estimated 1.3 million Muslims.

The open hatred that the 9/11 attacks have generated against Muslims ignores the fact that, of the more than 3,500 people who were slaughtered at the hands of the 19 al-Qaida terrorists, there were dozens of victims who were themselves Muslims — including Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old New York City police cadet who was also a part-time ambulance driver and a medical student; and Mohammed Jawarta, who worked for MAS, a private security firm.

Let’s not forget that among the nation’s 1.3 million Muslims include a significant number of celebrities, including three-time heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali; basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; the reigning Miss USA, Rima Fakiah — even though she has herself come out against the proposed Cordoba House Islamic Center; actor/comedian Dave Chappelle; Aasif Mandvi, of the faux-news comedy “Daily Show;” and composer A. R. Rahman, a frequent visitor to the U.S. from India who’s best known for scoring the music of the Golden Globe and Oscar-winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire.”

WAVE OF ISLAMOPHOBIA A DANGEROUS PRECURSOR TO OUTRIGHT FASCISM

The strong, passionate feelings expressed by the loved ones of the more than 3,500 people murdered by the 9/11 terrorists are something that has to be taken seriously. But the voices of the relatives of the 9/11 victims have, unfortunately, been joined by an ugly chorus of anti-Muslim bigots and extremely arrogant WASP evangelicals who believe that all non-Christian people of faith are condemned to go to hell for praying to a “false god.”  

That this chorus is disregarding the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion to ALL Americans — including the nation’s Muslims — is an obscene affront to the very foundations upon which this country was built — and to which I, as a member of a faith minority myself (I’m a Wiccan) — must raise my voice in protest.  

It is also a dangerous descent into an ideology that this country sent up to 12 million of its bravest to fight against in World War II.  

That ideology is fascism — the belief that one race or one religion or one ethnicity or one nationality is superior to all others and/or that all others are evil. What some Americans are saying about Muslims today is little different from what Hitler and his Nazis said about Jews in Germany more than 70 years ago.

Even Japanese-American survivors of the World War II-era internment see dangerous parallels between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, with some survivors warning within days of the 9/11 attacks that what happened to them could happen to American Muslims.

Santayana is right. Those who cannot remember the past truly are condemned to repeat it.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

President Striking a Delicate Political Balancing Act, Reassuring Military Commanders That His 2011 Deadline for U.S.  Troop Pullout From Iraq ‘Isn’t Set in Stone’ While Seeking to Assuage the Democratic Party’s Anti-War Hardliners

As the last U.S. combat brigade in Iraq prepared to leave the country and cross the border into neighboring Kuwait early Monday — seven years after the U.S.-led invasion to topple dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime and 20 years after Saddam sent his army to invade Kuwait — some 50,000 American troops are to remain Iraq until the end of 2011 to advise Iraqi forces and protect American interests. But there is some doubt that President Obama will keep his self-imposed deadline and American forces could remain in Iraq indefinitely. (Photo: Reuters)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. PDT Tuesday, August 24, 2010)

By GARETH PORTER

Inter-Press Service

(Published under a Creative Commons license)

When the Obama administration unveiled its plan last week for an improvised State Department-controlled army of contractors to replace all U.S. combat troops in Iraq by the end of 2011, critics associated with the U.S. command attacked the transition plan, insisting that the United States must continue to assume that U.S. combat forces should and can remain in Iraq indefinitely.

But the differences between the administration and its critics over the issue of a long-term U.S. presence may be more apparent than real.  

All indications are that the administration expects to renegotiate the security agreement with the Iraqi government to allow a post-2011 combat presence of up to 10,000 troops, once a new government is formed in Baghdad.

OBAMA WALKING A POLITICAL TIGHTROPE AS MIDTERM ELECTIONS LOOM  

But Obama, fearing a backlash from anti-war voters in the Democratic Party, who have already become disenchanted with him over Afghanistan, is trying to play down that possibility. Instead, the White House is trying to reassure its anti-war base that the U.S. military role in Iraq is coming to an end.  

An unnamed administration official who favors a longer-term presence in Iraq suggested to The New York Times last week that the administration’s refusal to openly refer to plans for such a U.S. combat force in Iraq beyond 2011 hinges on its concern about the coming midterm congressional elections and wariness about the continuing Iraqi negotiations on a new government.  

Vice President Joe Biden said in an address prepared for delivery Monday that it would take a “complete failure” of Iraqi security forces to prompt the United States to resume combat.

Obama referred to what he called “a transitional force” in his speech on August 2 — ironically, the 20th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait — pledging that it would remain “until we remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of the next year.”  

He also declared an end to the U.S. “combat mission” in Iraq as of August 31. But an official acknowledged that combat would continue and would not necessarily be confined to defending against attacks on U.S. personnel.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS: TRANSITION PLAN STILL BEING WORKED OUT  

The administration decided on the transition from military to civilian responsibility for security at an inter-agency meeting the week of July 19. It made the broad outlines of the plan public at an August 16 State Department news briefing and another briefing the following day, even though crucial details had not been worked out.  

Colin Kahl, the deputy assistant defense secretary of for Middle Eastern affairs and Michael Corbin, Kahl’s counterpart at the State Department, presented the  administration’s plan for what they called a “transition from a military to civilian relationship” with Iraq.

PRIVATE SECURITY CONTRACTORS TO TAKE OVER FROM U.S. TROOPS  

The plan involves replacing the official U.S. military presence in Iraq with a much smaller State Department-run force of private security contractors. Press reports have indicated that the force will number several thousand, and that it is seeking 29 helicopters; 60 personnel carriers that are resistant to improvised explosive devices; and a fleet of 1,320 armored vehicles.  

The contractor force would also operate radars so it can call in airstrikes and fly reconnaissance drones, according to an August 21 report in The New York Times.  

Kahl argued that the transition is justified by security trends in Iraq. He said al-Qaida is “weaker than it’s ever been,” that the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army has been “largely disbanded” and that there is no strategic threat to the Iraqi government.

CRITICS NOT CONVINCED IRAQIS READY TO TAKE CHARGE OF THEIR OWN SECURITY  

That provoked predictable criticism from those whose careers have become linked to the fate of the U.S. military in Iraq and who continue to view the United States as having enormous power to decide the fate of the country.  

Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, a frequent visitor to Iraq at the invitation of General David Petraeus, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and General Ray Odierno, Petraeus’ successor, dismissed the idea of giving the former U.S. military role in Iraq to the State Department and Kahl’s assessment of security trends as far too optimistic.  

Some officials were talking “as if we’re on the five-yard line,” Pollack told the Christian Science Monitor. “We’re on more like the 40 — and it’s probably our 40.”

Pollack argued that the U.S. has great influence in Iraq, which it must use for “persuading” Iraqi leaders to do various things. If the U.S. troop presence ends in 2011, he argued, that U.S. power would suffer.

CONCERN OVER IRAQ’S STILL-UNRESOLVED POLITICAL CRISIS

Other variants of that argument were offered by Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, both of whom have been frequent guests of the U.S. command in Iraq and have generally hewed to the military view of Iraq policy.

Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who shared the media spotlight and adulation of Congress with Petraeus from 2007 to 2009 before retiring from the Foreign Service, opined that the military needs to keep enough presence in Iraq to  encourage Iraq’s generals to stay out of politics.  

The real position of the administration over the issue is not much different from that of its critics, however. In answer to a question after a briefing August 17, Kahl said, “We’re not going to abandon them. We’re in this for the long term.”  

Then Kahl observed, “Iraq is not going to need tens of thousands of [American] forces.” That is consistent with the figure of 5,000 to 10,000 being called for by the military, according to the administration official quoted by The New York Times on August 18.

‘WE HAVE TO SEE WHAT BAGHDAD DOES NEXT’

At another point, Kahl said, “We’ll just have to see what the Iraqi government will do,” adding that the “vast majority of political actors in Iraq want a long-term  partnership with the United States.”

It is been generally assumed among U.S. officers and diplomats and the Iraqi officials with whom they talk that once a new Iraqi government is agreed on, it will begin talks on a longer-term U.S. troop presence, as former National Security Council official Brett H. McGurk told the Times last month.

At a Pentagon press conference in February, General Odierno referred to the purchase by the Iraqi government of “significant amounts of military materiel from the United States,” including M1A1 tanks and helicopters.  

Odierno said he expected it would require a “small contingent” of U.S. personnel to “train and advise” the Iraqis. That formula implicitly anticipated a continuation of the U.S. combat presence in the guise of “advisory and assistance” units.

COMMANDERS TOLD: DON’T STRAY FROM WHITE HOUSE MESSAGE

But the administration apparently made it clear to Odierno and to others that they were not to contradict the administration’s public posture that U.S. troops were being withdrawn by the end of 2011.  

During the interagency meeting that adopted the administration’s transition plan, Odierno told reporters at a breakfast meeting July 21 he expected U.S. troops in Iraq to be down to zero by the end of 2011.  

Meanwhile, the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is not admitting  publicly that it would consider such an extension of the  U.S. troop presence. The spokesman for al-Maliki said on August 12 there are alternatives to keeping U.S. troops in the country, such as signing “non-aggression and non-interference pacts” with its neighbors.

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Special Report Copyright 2010, Inter-Press Service. Republished under a Creative Commons License.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. all rights reserved.