The Warrantless Blogtapping Program

BLOG UNDER SURVEILLANCE: Right Wing News
Issue: Hawkins AGAIN Plays the Race Card

Conservative Blogger John Hawkins once again argues that blacks are racists and whites are not because 89% of black folk approve of Obama's job performance, whereas only 41% of white folk approve of Obama's job performance. Hawkins notes the seemingly large discrepancy between the two percentage statistics as some kind of evidence of his delusions about black racism and white "colorblindness" in America. It prompt Hawkins to ask:

We're incessantly told that white Americans are racist, but given how high Obama's approval numbers are amongst black Americans, doesn't it seem likely that percentage wise, there are a whole lot more racist black Americans than white Americans?

This is a common theme of Hawkins and demonstrates yet again his disingenuousness and his schizophrenia about race. And I just can't let this confused and misguided soul spew his nonsense without some kind of sensible rejoinder.

Hawkins wants to claim that the significance of the difference in Obama's job approval ratings according to racial classification is because black folks are racist in favor of a black President. He never once tries to investigate whether there is any data to confirm what he implies. But I have to ask: What's to say that this disparity is due primiarly because white folks are racist against a black President? Is there any evidence to get to the bottom of this claim?

Well, I don't think there can be any clear evidence one way or the other short of asking people why they approve of a particular candidate's job performance and whether race is a factor in their determination. But I do think there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to suggest that race is less a factor for black people than for white people in evaluating Obama's (and any other President's) job performance. Moreover, I would propose that it is primarily political party affiliation and ideology that explains the patterns of job approval (as well as voting percentages), even when correlated to race. For instance, it is no secret that black voters heavily favor Democratic politicians and have always, whether such politicians were white or black, voted for and approved the job performance of such politicians. It is also no secret that white Democrats favor and approve Democratic politicians and their job performances in equally high numbers, regardless of that politician's race. The same might be said for conservative black folk and conservative white folk in their support for and approval of the job performance of conservative politicians, regardless of the race of such politicians. However, where there may be a slight correlation between race and job performance approval ratings or electoral preferences, the circumstantial evidence, such as it is, would indicate that its the white population that seems to be more influenced by race than the black population.

What is this circumstantial evidence? Well, let's just start with a comparison of job approval ratings for Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama along the racial matrix. Black support for Clinton and Obama in terms of job approval ratings are surprisingly fairly consistent. For instance, a 2001 poll conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post revealed the following:

Views of Clinton are deeply divided along political and ideological lines. Ninety-three percent of Democrats approve of his job performance; this dives to 32 percent of Republicans. Eighty-six percent of liberals approve, compared to 44 percent of conservatives; and 90 percent of blacks approve, compared to 59 percent of whites.

The current polling information that Hawkins references in terms of job approval ratings for Obama according to racial classification indicates that 89% of black people approve of Obama's job performance while only 41% of white people approve of Obama's job performance. Assuming that the data Hawkins references is accurate (and it's hard to know this because Hawkins doesn't provide any link to the source for these numbers), the evidence suggests that positive job approval ratings for a white President among blacks is nearly identical to the positive job approval ratings for a black President among blacks. Conversely, positive job approval ratings for a white President among whites (59%) is some 18 percentage points higher than positive job approval ratings for a black President among whites. So, it seems obvious to me that if you want to make the race argument as it applies to Presidential job approval ratings, the variance correlated to race in terms of Presidential job approval statistics would point to movement primarily among whites. This data would tend to debunk the notion that it is blacks who are basing approval ratings on race. The real story, then, is not in the high black job approval rating statistics for Obama (because black job approval ratings for Democratic Presidents are consistently high regardless of race), but in the lower white job approval rating statistics for Obama compared to Clinton.

[ASIDE: I'll even go further and suggest that liberal white Democrats, who generally constitute about 40-42% of the national white electorate, are the white voters less likely to abandon or qualify their support of a candidate's job performance. So, that 18% difference between Clinton's positive job approval rating among whites and Obama's is more than likely due to the movement of conservative white Republicans who could appreciate "Bubba" Clinton, but who just can't muster any support for "Hussein" Obama. Of course, that's a generalization that can't be supported by the evidence, but it makes intuitive sense to me.]

Now that's just looking at job approval ratings according to racial classification. What if we turn to the evidence of voting patterns according to racial classification? Does this tell us anything different than the data about job performance ratings about racially motivated preferences? In short, no.

Take a look at voting data broken down by race for the past nine Presidential elections dating back to 1976. This is what we get:

1976: 83% of blacks voted for Carter against Ford
1980: 83% of blacks voted for Carter against Reagan
1984: 91% of blacks voted for Mondale against Reagan
1988: 89% of blacks voted for Dukakis against Bush
1992: 83% of blacks voted for Clinton against Bush
1996: 84% of blacks voted for Clinton against Dole
2000: 90% of blacks voted for Gore against Bush
2004: 88% of blacks voted for Kerry against Bush
2008: 95% of blacks voted for Obama against McCain

That's an average of 87.2% blacks voting for Democratic Presidential candidates. And even if you take out the Obama year, the average is still a high 86.4%. That aligns closely with the 89% approval rating that Obama currently enjoys among blacks, and which John Hawkins references as some kind of evidence of racism among blacks.

So, what can we conclude from this? Well, in short, we might be able to say that, yes, Obama did appear to get a slight bump in the election that could be attributed to race. But we'd also have to recognize that his high levels of support among the black community are not all that much higher than other Democratic Presidential candidates over the past 30 years, all of whom were white. And certainly the 89% job approval rating Obama is currently receiving among blacks fits very much within the range of black support and approval of Democratic candidates regardless of race.

Regarding John Hawkins, all there is left to say is that he's once again wrong on the merits. He suggests and implies black racism because he can't seem to get beyond Obama's skin color. And what he points to as proof of this is nothing out of the ordinary in terms of black or white support for any Democratic candidate. In short, it is his obsession with race and with Obama's skin color that is distorting his impressions of things and making him, ironically, guilty of perpetuating the very identity politics that he claims to lament.

Palin On Iran ... No Iraq ... No Iran ... Huh? ... Screw It. You betcha! Wink, wink!

How anyone can take this farce seriously as the potential leader of the free world is beyond me. Watch the clip below. What's most disturbing is that Palin doesn't even have a clue that she's an absolute dunce.



If it were anyone else but Palin (and perhaps Dick Cheney), Hannity would be all over Palin's gaffe. But he doesn't even have the integrity to correct the record, even in a nice way. The deferential fawning that Hannity seems congenitally unable to resist with regard to Palin is sickening, especially for someone who fashions himself a serious political commentator and journalist.

TUCLA Conference

The Tulane Undergraduate Conference on Latin America (TUCLAS) is taking place this Saturday. We in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies are proud of our smart, talented, and dedicated Senior majors. And their presentations represent the culmination of a scholarly endeavor that started for many of them some 3-plus years ago. If you get the chance, come by and check it out. The event is taking place in Jones Hall in rooms 102 and 108. There are three sessions with two panels in each session. The first session starts at 9am. The provisional schedule is as follows:

VII Annual Tulane Undergraduate Conference
on Latin America (TUCLA)
Saturday Nov. 21, 2009 Jones Hall 102 and 108


Session I 9:00-10:45

Theme of Exchange
Panel Title: Contact High: Cultural Perspectives on the Global, the Local and the Spaces In-Between
Jessie Hawkins, “Gringo Shaman: The Commercialization of Shamanism in Peru”
Ashley Coleman, “Los de atrás vienen con ellos: Sonic Politics, Cultural Resistance, and a New Space for a Puerto Rico Libre in Calle 13’s Reggaeton”
Lana Butner, “Grey Area: The Façade of Racial Homogeneity in Costa Rica”
Aaron Feingold, “Breaking the Habitus: Mizik Rasin and Haitian Grassroots Agency”
Discussant: Prof. Mauro Porto, Department of Communication

Theme of Creativity
Panel Title: Democracy as a Work in Progress: Rethinking Representation in Latin America
Michael Murray, “Corruption: The Myth and Mystery of the Chilean Exception”
Ashley Rhodes, “The 2009 Democratic Disruption in Honduras: Delegative Democracy or Dangerous Precedent?”
Allison Bakamjian, “Chile’s ‘Penguin Revolution’: Student Responses to Incomplete Democracy”
Brenna Horan, “Human Rights Advocacy in Authoritarian Chile: The Critical Role of the Catholic Church (1976-1990)”
Discussant: TBA

Session II 11:00-12:30

Theme of Encounter
Panel Title: Entre lo público y lo privado: Recent Trends in Environmental and Economic Policy
Annalisa Cravens, "The Mexican Environmental Condition: Policy Enforcement, Industry and Infrastructure"
John Coffee, “The Role of the State in the Creation and Growth of Brazilian Ethanol Production”
Robin Baxley, “Microfinance: A Viable Means of Development Even in Times of Crisis?”
Discussant: TBA

Theme of Nation
Panel Title: Knowledge and Other Dangerous Things: The Politics of Literacy in Contemporary Latin America
Meredith Soniat du Fossat, “Cuban Literary Production during the Special Period.”
Lauren Elliot, “The Word is our Weapon: Reading the Zapatistas through Paulo Freire and bell hooks”
Christine Sweeney, “Politics to Pupils: The Role of Governments in the Classroom in Argentina”
Discussant: Prof. Rebecca Atencio, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Lunch Break 12:30-1:15

Session III 1:15-2:30

Theme of Identity
Panel Title: Beyond Tolerance: Gender, Sexuality and Power in Latin American Society
Annie Robinson, “Transvestite Visibility in Buenos Aires: Progressive Port or Machista Metropolis?”
Ereeni Roulakis, “Intertwining Realities: A Holistic Feminist Vision for Aymara Rural Migrants”
Kelsey Torres, “Larger than Life: Honor and Shame in the Argentine Tango”
Discussant: Prof. Elizabeth Manley, Department of History, Xavier University

Theme of Welfare
Panel Title: Cultural Prescriptions: State Responsibility in Health Care and Human Rights
Chelsea Cipriano, “Wronged: The Government's Role in the Lives of Guatemalan Street Children”
Amy Brown, “Milagro o Muerte: The Fate of Pregnant Women in Rural Peru”
Phillippa Chadd, “Morality in the Way of Care: The State Response to HIV/AIDS in Argentina”
Discussant: Prof. Laura Murphy, School of Public Health

From the "Now Why Doesn't It Surprise Me That This Happened At Wal-Mart?" Files

Checkout line scuffle. Yeah, yeah. I know. I'm just being the "pretentious elitist liberal" that conservatives like to say about folks like me. Call the Sarah Palin "Real America" victim hotline.

Football as Dogfighting: Are the NFL and We Football Fans Culpable for Michael Vick?

In short, I think so.

From Kyle Turley, former Saints lineman, in a gripping and disturbing article in The New Yorker magazine:

I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.

Malcolm Gladwell's entire piece in The New Yorker magazine (H/T to Jon K. for bringing this article to my attention) makes a persuasive case that the frenzied fanaticism of the sport of football is so wrapped up in and glorifying of the violence of it, that football players are conditioned to playing the sport like a mad dog in a dogfight -- desperate to please their fans, coaches, and team owners -- that not only to they play to physically crush their opponents, but also to push their own bodies to physical limits that cut years off their lives and permanently damage the functionality of their brains. In essence, the Sunday football games are nothing more than a ramped up dogfight, with players regularly getting carted off the field with injuries, sometimes severe, until the final seconds of that 60 minute contest tick off the clock and the spent teams, winners and losers alike, hobbling and limping off the field.

Yeah, yeah ... I know that the difference is that NFL players are free to choose this for themselves and that they can simply walk away from the game whenever they feel like it. Even still, what bothers me is that the NFL and its fans could pretend such outrage and shock at Michael Vick for his dogfighting transgression, and not even reflect upon even the slightest parallels between the "sport" of professional football and the "sport" of dogfighting. From Gladwell's article:

“I was not aware of dogfighting and the terrible things that happen around dogfighting,” [NFL Commissioner Roger] Goodell said, explaining why he responded so sternly in the Vick case. One wonders whether, had he spent as much time talking to Kyle Turley as he did to Michael Vick, he’d start to have similar doubts about his own sport.

The scientific evidence is indisputable. What the vicious, violent, collision-demanding sport of football does to the brain is horrendous.

For his article, Gladwell consulted with Ann McKee, a brain trauma specialist who runs a hospital neuropathology laboratory. Through her study of the brains of former football players, she, among all people, knows the tragic consequences of football to the quality of life that players will have to suffer once the sport has long forgotten them. Yet, McKee also embodies the cultural paradox about the sport that defines our culture. As Gladwell notes in his article:

McKee is a longtime football fan. She is from Wisconsin. She had two statuettes of Brett Favre, the former Green Bay Packers quarterback, on her bookshelf. On the wall was a picture of a robust young man. It was McKee’s son—nineteen years old, six feet three. If he had a chance to join the N.F.L., I asked her, what would she advise him? “I’d say, ‘Don’t. Not if you want to have a life after football.’”

So, are we football aficionados partly responsible for Kyle Turley and for Michael Vick? In a very real way we are. We glorify the sport that destroys them. We pay the big money to see them perform and it's that big money that lures them. And we expect them to sacrifice themselves physically, emotionally, and mentally for the team.

Ray Nagin's Thank You to NOLA

I remain absolutely stunned by Ray Nagin's attitude towards the City of New Orleans in his final days. Once again, Nagin is jetsetting around the world on the taxpayer's dime. This time it's to Merida, Mexico. I love Mexico, but Nagin has absolutely no business going there. Furthermore, his itinerary clearly shows that the trip has absolutely no business attached to it and is exclusively a fun junket at the taxpayer's expense.

I'm just sick of the man. I don't think I've ever seen a Mayor so brazenly and unashamedly give the big middle finger to the citizens of New Orleans. I knew the man was an arrogant and dismissive twit, but it's utterly, gobsmackingly shameful what he's doing. How does the man live with himself?

I hold Rob Couhig solely responsible for this affront. Couhig knew what Nagin was and yet couldn't fathom a city run by Mitch Landrieu, so he threw his support to Nagin, delivering enough of the City's delusional conservative Republican base into Nagin's corner. I blame Couhig and every single one of Couhig's supporters who cast their lot with Nagin the last time around. Look what you gave to this city. Pathetic.

District 10-5A Football

On the first weekend of the LHSAA football playoffs, I think it merits noting that every single one of the five Catholic League teams (District 10-5A) -- Jesuit, Rummel, Brother Martin, Shaw, and Saint Augustine -- made the State High School Playoffs.

Every. Single. One.

I think that says volumes about the strength of the Catholic League in Louisiana High School football.

[UPDATE: November 13, 2009, 11:48PM: The Jesuit Blue Jays won their first round playoff game against the Airline Vikings by a score of 27-7. This sets up a potential and probable second-round showdown between Jesuit and their District rival and No. 1 seeded Rummel Raiders, who play the No. 32 seed tomorrow in their first round matchup. Jesuit lost their regular season game to Rummel in a close game decided in the final 2 minutes by a score of 21-14.]

Beck Logic

And this is the guy that is now the voice of reason and logic among conservatives and one of the movement's revered leaders? What a joke!