Background is in the category: Southern Strategy
The following Rush Limbaugh example shows that there is literally a market for stereotypes and bigotry with an angry tone (a 'self-righteousness') and that he is either still on drugs or he is in need of psychiatric care...
The Colbert Report
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“Anatomy of Injustice”: Death in a small town
A real-life murder mystery and courtroom drama makes for a page-turning indictment of the death penalty
The story begins with the discovery of a body in 1982: Handsome, well-off Dorothy Edwards, a 76-year-old widow and resident of rural Greenwood, S.C., who “could have passed for 56.” Her battered corpse was found in her closet by a neighbor. He helpfully pointed out to the police a beeping alarm clock, a full pot of automatically brewed coffee and an open copy of TV guide — all conspicuously pointing to a time of death — before suggesting that the 23-year-old man who’d recently washed Edwards’ windows seemed a likely culprit. Within days, the police had arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a soft-spoken, docile laborer of very limited intelligence, with the feeblest excuse for probable cause: Edwards had written Elmore a check and one of his fingerprints was found on the windows she’d paid him to clean. Do I even need to tell you that Edwards was white and Elmore black? After that came a mockery of criminal investigation followed by a mockery of justice. The police failed to photograph the bed where they claimed Edwards had been brutally raped or to retain the bedsheets as evidence. Other evidence passed through an unusually large number of hands (some of them unaffiliated with the investigation), or disappeared and then eventually reappeared (or not). No one bothered to check out that so-helpful neighbor who discovered the body and recommended a suspect. The medical examiner delivered a convenient but highly improbable time of death in a report that an expert would later liken to the work of a “first-year intern.” As for the public defenders initially assigned to Elmore’s case, one was a racist who referred to his client as “a red-headed nigger.” The other was, in the words of a detective convinced of Elmore’s guilt, “drunk through the whole trial.” The judge made no secret of wishing to wrap things up quickly. He allowed the father of a prosecutor’s best friend to sit on the jury and incorrectly informed the jurors that those who didn’t support the death penalty were obligated to recuse themselves. He also plainly indicated that he considered Elmore to be guilty. The locally powerful lead prosecutor engaged in a colorful array of misconduct. In a week, Elmore was sentenced to death. Elmore’s advocates succeeded in overturning his conviction twice. He was awarded two additional trials. In the first he was assigned the same incompetent defense attorneys (Bonner describes it as a “video replay” of the original trial) and in the second (which was allowed to contest the sentencing only) a committed but inexperience defender was unable to outwit a wily, unscrupulous prosecutor to mitigate the penalty. Elmore’s case changed that young lawyer’s views on capital punishment by showing him a legal system plagued by outright finagling: “not human error,” he told Bonner, “but human manipulation … We don’t have the right as a civilized society to pass this judgment.” Eventually, Elmore’s case came to the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center and Diana Holt, a freshly minted attorney at age 36. Holt had overcome a childhood and youth marred by sexual abuse, drugs and divorce. She was convinced of Elmore’s innocence and the further she and her colleagues pursued inquiries that should have been made by his original defense team, the more convinced they became. Bonner is clear that most convicts on death row are guilty; at issue is not whether they committed the crime, but whether mitigating circumstances — in particular, mental deficiency — argue for life without parole. That death sentences will be appealed is taken for granted, but what Bonner underlines is the institutional defensiveness and inertia that makes those sentences so difficult to overturn. South Carolina judges were extremely reluctant to admit that South Carolina state attorneys and law enforcement could be negligent or deceitful, or their fellow judges remiss. A state attorney (like the one assigned to Elmore’s appeal) might one day expound on a prosecutor’s solemn duty to pursue justice not just victories, then battle fiercely to uphold a conviction even he can see is unjust. Perhaps most appalling to the average citizen, the emergence of persuasive evidence of innocence after a conviction is often irrelevant to the appeals process. A condemned man’s defenders must instead rely on persuading judges that his constitutional rights were violated during his arrest or trial. “Innocence alone does not entitle a defendant to a new trial,” Bonner explains. While there are good reasons for this principle, it has led to such grotesqueries as a state lawyer arguing before the Missouri Supreme Court that an innocent man ought to be executed even if the court found “absolute” evidence exonerating him of the crime. (To their credit, the justices on that court ruled that “It is difficult to imagine a more manifestly unjust and unconstitutional result than permitting the execution of an innocent person.” Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court apparently disagree.)
Innocent killed for crimes, especially if they are of a hated minority, is normal - though you will rarely find anyone involved in prosecuting the case who thinks they are innocent - pinning a crime on a group that is outside the real group of criminals is a time honored Southern tradition (and believing that, despite all evidence, is another tradition for example, how can anyone explain this "News Report: Republicans to declare ‘We Built This!’ in stadium built with government funds" without the SOuthern Strategy?)...
1. "Graves' brother, Arthur Curry Jr., has always insisted that Graves was home with him the night of the murders. "There is no justice, especially here in Texas. Had he done that and I knew it, I could not have hid the truth knowing that someone's family was in torture," says Curry. Graves has not been given an execution date. His lawyer is seeking a new trial."
2. "The Death Penalty Information Center keeps an "Innocence List" which names incarcerated people who have been exonerated since 1973. There are 119 to date. The criteria for inclusion on the list are: "In order to be included on the list, defendants must have been convicted and sentenced to death, and subsequently either: a) their conviction was overturned and they were acquitted at a re-trial, or all charges were dismissed; or b) they were given an absolute pardon by the governor based on new evidence of innocence."
Another victim of the South: Troy Davis .
A typical Southern Case:
Mississippi to Execute Willie Manning Tonight After RejectingDNA Tests & FBI’s Admission of Error
The state of Mississippi is preparing to execute an African-American prisoner tonight, despite an unusual admission from theFBI that its original analysis of the evidence contained errors. Willie Jerome Manning was convicted of murdering Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller, two white college students, in 1992. The execution is going ahead after prosecutors and state courts refused to allow new DNA testing that could prove Manning’s innocence. The Justice Department sent a letter saying one analyst’s testimony at trial "exceeded the limits of the science and was, therefore, invalid." Manning’s attorneys argue that no physical evidence ties him to the murders and that testing hair samples and other evidence could identify a different killer. But in a 5-to-4 decision last month, Mississippi’s state Supreme Court refused to grant a new DNA test, citing what it called "conclusive, overwhelming evidence of guilt." On top of the denied DNA test, Manning’s attorneys say prosecutors relied on two key witnesses whose credibility has since come under question. Concerns have also been raised about alleged racial bias in the selection of the jury that found Manning guilty. "We need someone to step in," says Vanessa Potkin, a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project. "It is unconscionable that an execution would go forward where there is biological evidence that can cut to the truth and show whether or not he did the crime. What is anybody afraid of?"
The Colbert Report
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1:00: Zimmerman says he saw a suspicious black man and decided to follow (despite being told NOT to)
At 1 min 17 seconds: Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because he wouldn't look like him? That just nonsense." Newt Gingrich March
23, 2012 On "The Sean Hannity Show"The above is literally the stupidest attack on anyone I have ever seen. But some people in the South will still believe such non-nonsensical statements because it's said by a white guy against a black guy.
Zimmer shot Martin and wasn't arrested thanks to Florida's new Stand Your Ground Law which allows people to use deadly force as long as they BELIEVE thier safety was in danger (supreme court witness case) Problem with this law is that without witnesses you have to take the shooters word for it i.e. a case of he said, he dead.
2:40: Our nations borderline patholigical fear of black males.
Lee Atwater, a political strategist for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, described the Southern Strategy in a 1981 interview:[2][3]
“”You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger." Michael Steele, former head of the RNC, on the Southern Strategy:
“”For the last 40-plus years we had a "Southern Strategy" that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, "Bubba" went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.[4]
The Southern Strategy
964 - the inspiration In 1964, Barry Goldwater accomplished a task that, until then, had been seen as physically impossible -- he won five states in the Deep South for the Republican Party, which had been seen for the past hundred years as the party of Abraham Lincoln and the defeat of the Confederacy. He was able to do this because of his voting record against civil rights legislation versus the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, who was in favor of civil rights. The South had, until that point, been a solidly Democratic voting bloc, often called the "Solid South." Nixon, taking note of this, campaigned on subtle race and states rights themes in 1968 and 1972 in an attempt to keep the Deep South in the Republican column.
That white Southerners could be persuaded to vote Republican in presidential races by the 1960s is attributable to the greater power of race than class by that time. For the first half of the 20th century, white Protestant voters in the South tended to be quite populist on economic issues, forming an important part of the "New Deal coalition" and supporting government infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority. However, they were quite conservative on race and other social issues. For decades, class was more important than race because of the greater poverty in the South, but with growing affluence after World War II, race began to be more important than class. The Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1950s and gained momentum in the 1960s put race in sharper perspective, while other cultural changes in the 1960s (the sexual revolution, the counterculture, the New Left) also drove white religious conservatives away from the Democratic Party.
[edit] 1968 - failure and success In 1968, this strategy failed to win over the South, although Nixon did win the election. The reason was Alabama's Democratic governor, George Wallace, running on a third party ticket -- the American Independent Party. Wallace won most of the South in 1968, then returned to the Democratic Party and sought the Democratic nomination unsuccessfully in 1972 and 1976, while the American Independent Party (AIP) became an increasingly fringy hangout for John Birchers and washed-up segregationists in subsequent presidential elections. The organized conservative movement was split during that time as to their electoral strategy. One faction wanted to build the American Independent Party, while the other sought to take over the Republican Party. The latter eventually won out. In 1972 the American Independent Party nominated Bircher John G. Schmitz of California, who did poorly and carried no states at all, with his highest vote percentage of 9.3% in Idaho, then split into two factions (southern segregationists in the American Independent Party, Birchers in the American Party) for the 1976 and 1980 elections and faded off into history. The American Independent Party is now only active in California, and gave Alan Keyes their ballot line in 2008.
[edit] 1972 - success and sadness With the AIP nomination of Schmitz, any hope conservatives had of the AIP as a viable electoral vehicle in the south faded, and Nixon played his Southern strategy well in 1972, sweeping all the Southern states and most of the rest of the country. Among the bones Nixon threw out to the South was his nomination of two anti-civil rights judges to the Supreme Court, George Harrold Carswell and Clement Haynesworth. (Neither of them won confirmation by the Senate; Carswell was later busted in a public restroom soliciting an undercover policeman for sex. The more things change...) Nixon also played to ignorant rubes in northern cities as well, such as the (at the time) reactionary and thuggish AFL-CIO trade union leadership who had organized pro-Vietnam War riots in the wake of the Kent State shootings, and popularized "silent majority" as a neologism - which included playing the racism card in the south and the patriotism card in the north. Both the formerly-solid South and longtime union/Democrat strongholds in the rust belt went heavily for Nixon. Since that time, the conservative movement's strategy has been to use the Republican Party as their electoral vehicle.
1976 - scandals will have their way Nixon, of course, was pwned in 1974 by Chuck Colson and G. Gordon Liddy and turned the reins over to Gerald Ford. The Democratic nomination of the Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, running as the anti-Watergate candidate, temporarily halted the Southern strategy, as Carter won every Southern state except for Virginia[1]. As the 1968 and 1976 elections showed, the South was still reluctant to move into the Republican column, especially if a Southerner were on the ticket. However, the conservative movement had gotten fully behind Ronald Reagan, who gave incumbent Gerald Ford a strong challenge for the nomination, and the Southern strategy was resurrected during the late 1970s in a more organized form involving the rise of the religious right and groups like the Moral Majority, all intended to change the political landscape in the south for good. Part of this strategy also involved wooing ultraconservative Southern Democratic senators to switch parties, and many of them did.
[edit] 1980 In 1980, Reagan launched his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi a highly symbolic move showing the Southern strategy was alive and well (that was the town infamous for the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964). Reagan won with a combination of the Southern strategy and figuring out how to get the working poor angry at the welfare poor, and vote Republican.
[edit] 1984 Reagan didn't need the Southern strategy, since Mondale won only his home state, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C.
[edit] And so on... While the Southern United States has been viewed as a solid Republican voting bloc since 1980, recent elections have shown a number of cracks starting to show in this strategy: Bill Clinton won much of the South (although mostly in the border states rather than the Deep South) in 1992 and 1996, and Barack Obama carried North Carolina, Virginia and Florida in 2008. Due to Sun Belt migration patterns, some political observers are predicting a split in the South as a unified political bloc, with the eastern Atlantic states (most notably the ones Obama carried in 2008) becoming liberal and Democratic-leaning and the Deep South remaining a conservative stronghold.