Swing voters--Hispanics--text of my talk for KCRP

 

Swing voters.  Are we interested in them? If you aren’t, you should be.  They are the difference between a squeaker and a landslide.

Let me give you some examples.  Lincoln managed to come out of nowhere in the election of 1860 by swinging the farm vote. He changed the dialog of the Republican party from abolition (“People are evil if they own slaves”) to “A man should be able to enjoy the fruits of his own labor.” The Republicans went from a 15% party to 45% and won.  Reagan found the Reagan Democrats.  They agreed with Republicans on most social issues.  But they liked the entitlements. So Reagan said we have 7 safety net programs that must be preserved. Otherwise he intended to get the government off the people’s backs.

Notice that in every case, the successful candidate didn’t change his beliefs.  He just changed the approach and the impact of what he proposed. Reagan didn’t placate the swing voters by saying he was going to expand the safety net.  But he also didn’t say that if you depended on a safety net program you were wrong.

Okay, so digging around with some statistics I have discovered a potential bunch of swing voters. I want you to think, “could we work with this group?”  This group hates debt. They have little personal debt and if you do they look at you like “is there something wrong with you, man?”  They believe strongly that hard work is the only way to succeed. They are more traditional with family values than the average American. Sometimes they say they feel like old fashioned people compared to everyone else. They are anti-abortion.  But, like Reagan Dems, they are fiscally moderate and want the safety nets.  Do you think we could work with these folks and welcome them into our party? 

Of course the group I’m talking about is Hispanics.  And of course “Hispanic” is an artificial name.  People of this group call themselves by their country of origin.  “Hey, I’m Dominican.” “When you are Mex, you just have to work harder.”    One out of 3 Hispanics is Mex, like our foster daughter.

Some people fear that Hispanics won’t assimilate.  Well, listen to this statistic.  1/3 of young Hispanics marry across ethnic lines.  That’s the fastest assimilation since Germans came to America in the 19^th century and gave us all those new things we seem to think are American.  There’s nothing more American than hamburgers, hot dogs and apple pie, right?   There are 17M Hispanic children and 93% were born here in USA. They think of themselves as American as apple pie.

Yeah, but aren’t they often illegals?  Of all Spanish speaking immigrant adults, how many do you think are illegals?  It’s one in six. 10.5 million illegals and 57 million total Hispanics.  The number of Hispanics has grown from 3M to 57M in 50 years.  They have lots of kids and the group is young.

From the purely economic standpoint, that is good.  Europe and Japan have aging declining populations with not enough workers to fund their versions of social security like us.  Slow economies, meager labor force.  Backbiting over shrinking government revenues. Japan lets nobody in and they have had 25 years of depression.   In Europe, they have let Muslim Turks come to fill the worker gap who absolutely do not assimilate.  USA has done 57 M abortions and replaced with 57 M Hispanic workers.  

What about the border?  The border situation was created when LBJ and the Dems disallowed migrant guest workers in 1967.  It was to make the War on Poverty numbers look successful.  You know, shut out some impoverished people and it looks like there is suddenly less poverty.  So the Latino guys started to slip in.  It became an epidemic.  So, in 1986, Amnesty was passed with a promise to enforce the border that wasn’t kept.  I asked a guy who came here legally what it cost.  In 1990 it cost about $1000 in paperwork and lawyer fees and you waited 2 years to become legal.  Now it’s $20,000 and you wait 12-13 years.  Can you see how tempting it is to climb the fence? The median income of Mexico is $5000, by the way. Congress closed door legally but in practice we have open borders.  Open borders lets in drug cartels and gangs, terribly poor and uneducated people and of course potential terrorists.   At this point, we can secure the border but we can’t turn back the clock on what has happened. If we locked the border perfectly beginning tonight at midnight, Hispanics would still grow to 35% of population by 2050.

How do we deal with these swing voters?   How did Cory Gardner and Ted Cruz win 50% of Hispanic vote in their elections in Colorado and Texas? Latinos are a passionate people and they like a passionate leader. They want to hear someone with sympathy and empathy for the sacrifices they have made and the situation they are in.  Often cultural resonance means as much as stands on issues. If you heard Ted Cruz announce his candidacy with such passion and stories about how he came close to being another Latino kid with a single mom, you understand how he appeals.  Emotion is kinda foreign to some Republicans, but it doesn’t violate what we believe.  The word Deportation is a dirty word to Hispanics.  Almost everybody has an illegal friend or family member.  But they also want a secure border.  Why? Because open borders means the Zeta gang comes in, too.  And who do they prey on most?  The Hispanic community! Crooks ruin life for the honest immigrants more than anyone else.  Romney suggested he would make it so hard on Hispanics they would self-deport. He got 27% of Hispanic vote.  Gardner speaks warmly of immigration and wants to deport only the bad guys. His election stunned the Dems by nullifying Pueblo and Adams Counties.  I don’t know if you are acquainted with Colorado politics. All the state is red, red as Oklahoma except 3 metros, Denver county, People’s Republic of Boulder and Pueblo/Adams counties.  Pueblo area is mining and smelting industry with lots of union “Hispanos”.  Cory Gardner lambasted gun control. Hispanic union guys got hunting in their blood and worry about their jobs. God, Guns, and Jobs. Sounds like an Okie, doesn’t it!

You do not leave a messed-up country to keep living in the mess. You leave behind friends, family and your possessions.   New country, new life.  32% of Hispanic immigrants leave the Catholic church and those who stay Catholic often are far more active than they were in the old country where it seemed you could only reach God through the Virgin Mary and the priest—who was in cahoots with the state.

Are there problems in the Hispanic community?  Yes. One in five girls get pregnant as a teenager.  That compares with 1 in 6 African Americans and 1 in 11 all Americans.  They romance young and don’t abort.  Dems offer free condoms and GED baby care.  Republicans can do better.  Maybe programs like W’s faith-based/state partnerships.  Republican job fairs?  R's can solve this.  Education is another need.  Many immigrants have only partial grade school education and they dream of better things for their kids.   It could be noted that successful Republican politics also has included equal opportunity of reduced in-state college tuition. See George W. Bush and Rick Perry of Texas.  

Maybe you don’t agree with all of this.  I understand.  There are a lot of right-and-wrong arguments. But, if you are an older, traditional American, and you are dismayed at society’s change and the family’s decline, then Hispanics are your allies.  They could well be the dream of the Republicans as well.

One last thought.  Estella Hernandez, our new Party Vice Chair, says that Latinos are ripe for re-registering.  When Obama said in 2009 that he was “going to fundamentally transform America”, just about everyone who came to this country full of hope, said “What!! What needs change!!”

 

 

Knowing what you now know...

Would you have authorized a war in Iraq?”  The news goons keep asking that question and our Republicans are finding it hard to answer because the public now seems to have concluded that the war was a mistake of some dimension and they don't want to risk popularity.  So I am looking for true leadership who could also make the goons with the gotcha question twist in the wind.  Here’s how I would answer it.

            Well, Mr. Reporter, as I remember there were three reasons given for why US should declare war on Iraq as eloquently stated by Sec. of State Powell.  So why don’t you list them and I will tell you what I think on each.  What?  You don’t recall the 3 points?  Well, let me refresh you.  In order of importance the first was the most vital.  We have declared a war on terror. Does Saddam Hussein train or harbor terrorists?  The answer to that was a resounding Yes.  Al Qaeda in Iraq was one of our most robust opponents.  Saddam had the only airliner fuselage used to train terrorists and had a long history of sponsoring terror, in fact, the most prevalent country in the world to sponsor terrorism.  So the first question gets a Yes.

            Second question was, Did Saddam terrorize his own people?  And the answer we had in 2002 was not quite right.  We said he had killed 100,000 of his own people and used nerve gas to kill Kurds.  Actually, what we know now is that he killed over 600,000.  So this question gets a second Yes.

            Third question: Did Saddam pose a threat with a stockpile of WMDs to the rest of civilization?  We thought so in 2002.  But what was revealed was a failed nuclear program that Iraqi scientists had kept secret from Saddam.  That is why he wouldn’t allow any international inspections—he thought he had a nuclear program.  Ironically he didn't. A report that was released last year by the Pentagon showed that we did indeed find weapons of mass destruction interspersed with standard weapons—6500 of them, in fact.  But US military kept this fact secret lest the opponents concentrate on capturing ammunition caches.  There was a disinformation campaign to say we had found no WMDs.  But even widespread interviews with soldiers, had let the cat out of the bag on this topic however, the partisan news media wasn’t interested in doing any investigative journalism because it didn’t fit the leftist mantra that there were no WMDs.  So the answer to the third question is Yes again.  (Although this remote threat was only of tertiary concern.)

            What we didn’t know in 2002 was that the Pussy Democrats would oppose and pull out of Iraq at the first cowardly opportunity.  After the war was won with Petraeus’s surge, Obama snubbed the Iraqi government in order to follow his Hands Up, Don’t Shoot foreign policy.  He has cut the US military by 1/3 in 6 years, shows a complete lack of resolve to solve anything in the Middle East and turns a blind eye to the genocide of Christians.  So as you can tell, I would probably favor authorizing action in Iraq, but with more nation building.  Nation-building of USA is what is needed in the worst way.

Baltimore Oreos and Jiffy Pop

Can anyone explain to me why the Baltimore Oreos, after all that whomping and stomping and getting fired up out there on the streets have a losing record this year?  You’d think they would be playing lively ball.  Maybe the mayor ordered them to let the White Sox steal all the bases they wanted.  She decided not to let the ballgame have any spectators.  She cited attendance by gangsters and murderers, terrorists, looters, drug-runners, rapists, thieves and other criminal elements could disrupt the game.  Any chance we can get Obama to appoint her to handle Border policy? BHO is just waiting for baseball to resume so he can throw out the first Molotov cocktail.

            So is rioting and looting racist?  I couldn’t see much diversity the other night on TV.  I also found myself wondering how many of those rioters were Republicans.  Could you see anyone with a Tea Party tri-brimmed hats and wearing a lot of red, white and blue.  I’m sure they were there.  I just missed them I guess.  For sure I heard Al Sharpton yell, “black lies matter!”  Ah yes, I remember all those race riots when Bush was President, don’t you?

            The Brits say we have nothing on them.  History channel theorized that Stonehenge was built to attract aliens.  Everybody in UK says it worked.

            John Boehner surprised me quite a bit when he said that the Clintons were good people.  It makes me want to cry.  If Hill gets to be Prez, we are probably going to buy new White House china for state dinners.  The old stuff that had been glued together, that they left when they moved out in 2001, looks shabby.  Bill says he has to pay the bills so that is why he charges half a million for a speech.  That’s a good idea.  Back during the dark days of my business, when I thought I might go bankrupt, I sure could have given a speech for half a mill.  Heck, I would have talked 12 hours, like Fidel Castro if I could have gotten that much moolah.  And I would have been fixed for retirement by a single speech. Hillary said that people were not going to rest until trust in the markets returned. Did I miss something?  Some guy in the Baltimore rioters saying “no trust in my broker, no peace!” You know that they did that study that showed 1/3 of those saving for retirement have less than $1000 saved. Still, they are ahead of Social Security funding by the federal government.  I do see some business coming from the riots however.  VISA: “Black ski mask, $5.  Black hoodie, $12. Getting’ whupped by yo mama on live TV, priceless.

            I read where Obama as US Senator had 324 roll call votes he missed.  Gosh, we should have had mandatory voting!

            Now we have another Muhammad cartoon contest with dead terrorists.  This one was in Texas.  Texans really know how to throw out the bait, don’t they?  I actually went to a website and looked at the supposedly offensive Charlie Hebdo cartoons a while back.  They really were sorta tame.  However, my favorite was an Arab looking smug—no identification of Muhammad—wearing a turban.  But then the turban said “jiffy pop” and there was popcorn coming out the top.  Talk about a hot head.  We used to laugh about how to make a redneck fire alarm.  You put up a nail on the wall and hang a jiffy pop by the handle on it.

            Todd Starnes said, “If all those folks coming across the border were Christians wanting to homeschool their kids, Obama would have called up the Marines.”  Thanks, Todd.  Made my day.

Big climate discoveries in history

            I was thinking about the biggest discoveries of the past 30 years or so in our understanding of history.  I’m no archeologist but here’s my list of surprising finds of the recent era. 

            #1 is what happened to the Old Kingdom of Egypt.  It just disappeared for 150 years and then suddenly there were new pharaohs and a Middle Kingdom.  What happened?  If you go back to a textbook of about 1980 they tell you that there was a period of social unrest and chaos, rival families competed for the throne and there must have been wars.  Eventually a new dynasty arose and began to rule.  But no explanation.  They also did a huge expansion of canals and irrigation systems.  And they began to store large amounts of grain.  What we now realize is that the final Sahara Warming occurred about 2200 BC and silt studies of the Upper Nile show that a massive drought took place.  Think Larger than Dust Bowl sized drought that went on for at least 20 years.  Starvation indications in official records and city digs show that the nation was brought to desperation and chaos by just the simple lack of an annual flood.  The new pharaohs of the middle kingdom didn’t claim to have divine powers to make the annual flood of the Nile happen.  Smart move. This is like the time I was introduced to Jeff Buffalohead, Chairman of the Otoe tribe.  “Don’t call me chief!” he said.  “Chief means you own everything nobody else wants. Like Hey, Chief, your stray dog got in my trash! Are you going to clean it up.”

            #2 is the Mayas disappearance in the middle of the 800’s.  The great Mayan achievements of mathematics, astronomy and writing just disappeared.  And so did 90% of the population.  The people didn’t migrate elsewhere, as can be shown by both DNA sampling and demographic estimates. Their great cities have been surprisingly found, but these were mysteriously abandoned.  What happened the Mayas?  There were formerly dozens of theories about war and religious self-destruction and some sort of mystery diseases arriving on their shores.  But nothing fit until a Texas banker-turned-archeologist theorized that drought was the reason.  Indeed, he found many tell-tale signs like graneries emptied and abandoned, priests slaughtered by mobs, and cannibalism.  Then a geologic team found sediment cores from a swamp that had salt deposits that fit perfectly the timeline of the demise.  The swamp must have dried up extensively for at least a dozen years.  Other signs of ocean current changes that bring lesser droughts to the Yucatan were found as well.  So most of the Mayas disappeared from famine and drought, got into desperate fights that destroyed their civilization and left it to return into jungle. Of course, there are still about 1.5 million Maya remnant people in Guatemala today.  One Guatemalan guy I met said, “Yeah we were good in math but used a base 20 number system.  It was easy to count when people were barefoot.  And we had a zero, but kids hated it when they got that score on a test.”

            #3 is the Little Ice age of Europe.  From 1309 to 1324 it is estimated that temperatures declined by 10F from the warming in the 13^th century. Famines and the bubonic plague occurred.  In sudden cooling changes rodents expand in population because their predators die while they successfully retreat to burrows and shelter.  So how do we know that climate really changed?  Prior to 1300, grapes were extensively grown in England and you can’t do that anymore. Grain crops failed in wet cold climates.  There was an Indonesian volcano which blew its head off just prior to 1300 and this may have started the cycle.  But the sun was the real culprit.  How do we know?  Chinese priests studied sunspots which were necessary to their religion.  Right on time in 1309 they recorded in alarm that the sunspots had gone away.  Indeed their records show a dearth of sunspots well into the 1600’s when Europe began to observe.  When the sun’s output slows, sunspots decline because they are like solar magnetic storms on the surface.  Less energy, fewer spots.  The sunspots returned about 1850, and our modern era of warming has progressed since then. And we note that before 1850, Dickens wrote about Christmas snow in Christmas Carol which took place in London.  Snow today is rare in London.  Which is why London has Arabs for immigrants instead of Lapps.  

            The barbarian invasions are now thought to have resulted as climate changed in central Asia and forest belts shifted north by as much as 300 miles.   Old territories of certain tribes came under dispute and the barbarians were forced or by opportunity migrated.  The best example is the Magyars or Hungarians, a tribe of Gemanic peoples who spoke a unique and thus traceable language.  As their territory warmed, they went from forest dwellers to plains riders and invaded Europe in the 900s. 

            Bottom line: Early man had a hard time adapting to climate changes.  None were due to any CO2 output from modern industrialization.  Which proves that the earth has climate fluctuations of a large order, all due to natural causes.

            But if you don’t believe this, then you have to believe in one of my favorite cartoons.  3 cavemen standing on a mountain top looking out at an enormous glacier field.  First guy says, “Dang, this is all melting!” Second guy: “It’s all our fault!” 3^rd caveman: “We will just have to install socialism and tax the bejabbers out of ourselves.”