Is Barack Obama A Muslim

Is Barack Obama a Muslim?. Of course not. This site should be Googlebombed, so I'm trying to do so.

Bob Barr to win Libertarian Party Nomination

Wayne Allyn Root has just thrown his support to Bob Barr at the Libertarian convention, pretty much guaranteeing his nomination!

This is great news for the Democratic party.

Someone needs to send out mailers to socially conservative low-information Republicans reminding them that John McCain has voted numerous times to advance the "homosexual agenda", twice voting against protecting marriage, while Bob Barr wrote the Defense of Marriage Act and led the fight to impeach Bill Clinton.

In particular, in Mississippi. If Barr could pull 10% of the vote there, Obama would have a real shot at winning.

Is Jay Love Into Gay Love?

Given his suspicious-sounding name and his being the first to start demagoguing the California court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, I think we have to ask.



Jay Love is running for the open seat in Alabama's 2nd district.

Hopefully Montgomery Mayor Bobby Bright will be able to pull in enough white voters, to, when combined with what is expected to be high black turnout for Barack Obama in this 31% African-American district, put him in Congress.

Who is Morris Talansky?

So things are looking to get even worse in Israel thanks to the bribes Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seems to have taken.

Even more likely now that we'll see Bibi Netanyahu as prime minister again, this time as part of a Likud that has shed all of its more moderate politicians to Kadima. This would be a disaster for various reasons that I won't go into.

Anyway, back to Morris Talansky. Ha'aretz reported that rather little is known about him.

Long Island Jewish American mogul and millionaire financier Morris Talansky, who is suspected of bribing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is described by acquaintances as a man who keeps his business affairs out of the spotlight.

Although he is a known fundraiser for and contributor to Jewish causes in the United States and Israel, nobody seems to know how he made his money. Moreover, though he has participated in dozens of public events, his photograph cannot be found on the Internet.

What they do know:

• He is 77 years old


• He is an Orthodox Jew


• Yeshiva University '54; served on their board of trustees


• Was ordained as a rabbi


• Went to NYU Law School, then into business


• 3 children with his first wife (40-year marriage ended in "ugly" divorce in 1996); Yitzhak (Alan) is a dentist and lecturer in Israel; Bracha Tova (Barbara) is a psychologist in Israel; Ruth is an architect in the United States


• Now lives with second wife, Helen, in Woodsburgh, Long Island; has apartment in Wolfson Towers in Jerusalem


• Worked as a fundraiser for American Friends of Shaare Zedek (a hospital in Jerusalem) supposedly till 1997, although his tax records show they paid him 90 grand for consulting in 2004 and 2005


• Also raised money for the ORT Network, and the New Jerusalem Fund


• Contributed significantly to political campaigns here in the United States of America

Let's start with a more detailed look at his contributions.

I found one contribution to H. Carl McCall's campaign for comptroller in 1998 in the state campaign finance records area.

As for federal contributions:

There's a clear pattern of donations to Jewish politicians (all of whom in this case happened to be Democrats), which makes sense; their finance committees probably were familiar with him:

• $3,000 (over several years) to Sam Gejdenson


• $1,000 to Eric Fingerhut in 1993


• $1,000 to Joel Hyatt in 1994


• $1,000 to Dianne Feinstein in 1994


• $2,000 to Frank Lautenberg in 1994


• $2,000 to Chuck Schumer in 1995 and $500 more in 1997


• $1,000 to Paul Wellstone in 1995


• $500 to Jill Docking in 1996


• $500 to Gary Ackerman in 1997

He also gave a bunch of contributions which can be explained by his state/powerful position of recipient

• $2,000 to Ted Kennedy in 1992


• $1,000 to Tom Foley's re-election campaign in 1994


• $2,000 to "The House leadership fund" in 1993


• $1,000 to the Clinton campaign in 1995


• $1,000 to Steve Forbes* in 1996


• $1,000 to Rudy Giuliani in 2000


• $1,000 to George Bush in 2003

The rest, however, don't make any sense.

Rep. Vince Weber(R-MN) in 1986, Sen. Brock Adams(D-WA) in 1992, Sen. Harris Wofford(D-PA) in 1993, Sen. Chuck Robb(D-VA) in 1993, Sen. Larry Pressler(R-SD) in 1996, Senate candidate Thomas Bruggere(D-OR) in 1996, Senate candidate Ben Nelson(D-NE) in 1996, House candidate Wayne Parker(R-AL) in 1996; running again for the open 5th seats this year)

No pattern jumps out at me.


Anyway, I did some more searching on Talansky:

• He was sued by J. Allen Harrington of North Carolina in a bankruptcy case in Pennsylvania where he and Barney Talansky (presumably a relative) were acting as agents for the Eastern Battery and Tire Co.


• Further searching shows that this Barney Talansky at some point owned the Eastern Battery and Tire Company; his obituary was in the Philadelphia Inquirer (subscription required to read it; I couldn't)


• He sued (it was thrown out) the American Jewish Historical Society over employment


• He is featured on a "How to fundraise" tape sold by the American Jewish Outreach Program


• He is listed as a "warrantholder" (don't know what that is) of Nexell Therapeutics Inc. in an SEC document from December 28, 1999
and for Lightpath technologies

Democratic House Outlook is Very Good

I have to admit that last year, after the two disappointing special elections. First, Niki Tsongas just barely beat Jim Ogonowski in what may have been the worst outcome for a Democrat in that area since John Kerry lost to Paul Cronin in 1972 (this was especially terrible since George McGovern was carrying the district while Kerry was losing it, and the seat was open at the time). Second of all, in an election that we'd thought was competitive to replace the deceased Paul Gillmor in rural northwestern Ohio's 5th district, Robin Weirauch lost by double digits to Bob Latta, son of the man (Delbert Latta) who'd held the seat before Gillmor, Latta receiving 56.9% of the vote.


But since then, things have been very good, with us picking up three seats in special elections in Republican-leaning districts (Charlie Cook's Partisan Voting Index is in parenthesis after the name
1. IL-14(R+5): Bill Foster beats asshole corrupt dairy-man Jim Oberweis by 5 points in former Speaker Dennis Hastert's vacated seat
2. LA-6(R+7): Don Cazayoux beats David Duke crony Woody Jenkins by 3 points in the long-time (for the South) Republican Baton Rouge district that became somewhat more Democratic thanks to an influx of African-Americans after Hurricane Katrina)
3. MS-1(R+10): Travis Childers beats competent if not exciting mayor Greg Davis by 8 points in the runoff.

So today, the outlook for the Democrats in House elections is amazingly good.

Today, the (Charlie) Cook Political Report estimates that there are 19 lean or tossup seats held by Democrats, and 27 lean or tossup seats held by Republicans.

Only 2 of the Democratic-held seats are open.

11 of the Republican tossups and 1 additional lean Republican seat is open.

For a reminder of how Charlie Cook does:

In 2006 on May 12th, they had 9 tossup Republican-held seats, 15 lean Republican seats and 23 likely Republican seats


Of the 9 tossups, we picked up 7 (AZ-8, CO-7, CT-2, IN-8, IN-9, IA-1, and OH-18) and did not pick up NM-1 or PA-6

Of the 15 lean Republican, we picked up 7 (AZ-5, FL-22, IN-2, NY-24, NC-11, PA-8, WI-8) and did not pick up 8 (CA-50, CT-4, IL-6, KY-4, MN-6, OH-1, OH-15, WA-8)

Of the 23 likely Republican, we picked up 10 (CA-11, CT-5, KY-3, NH-1, NH-2, NY-19, NY-20, PA-7, PA-10, TX-22) and did not pick up 13 (CA-4, CO-4, FL-8, FL-9, FL-13, KY-2, MN-2, NV-2, NV-3, NJ-7, NY-26, NY-29, VA-2)

In addition, we picked up the following seats not listed as competitive at the time: FL-16, IA-2, KS-2, MN-1, PA-4, TX-23

and we came within 2% of a pickup in NY-25, NC-8, OH-2, WY-AL, within 5% in MI-7 and within 10% in AZ-1, ID-1, IL-10, IN-3, MI-9, NE-2 and NE-3

So we look very good for November.

Mississippi's History of Race-Baiting & the MS-1 Special Election

The state of Mississippi has had a terrible problem with race-baiting over the years.

Most of the worst race-baiters in the United States Congress have come from this, the most heavily African-American state in the union.

In 1900, 58.5% of Mississippi's population was black, but the combination of literacy tests, poll taxes (with grandfather clauses to allow whites to waive those tests) and violent intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan and others made the electorate overwhelmingly white.

Like the rest of the South, the black percentage of Mississippi's population declined significantly during the 1st (1910-1940) and 2nd (1940-1970) Great Migrations out. In Mississippi, there were 1,009,487 black residents in 1910, and only 815,770 in 1970 [the absolute black population also decreased in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky and South Carolina; it decreased absolutely from 1910-1940 in Georgia and Virginia as well]

At any rate, Mississippi had some of the very worst race-baiters in the Congress

• Theodore Bilbo-terribly racist even by Mississippi standards, Bilbo was declared "unfit to sit with honest, upright men in a respectable legislative body" due to his having accepted a $645 bribe in 1910. This didn't stop him from being elected Lieutenant Governor and Governor. Spending 10 days in jail for contempt of court in 1923 didn't hurt him either. A famous cry of Bilbo's "I call upon every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the nigger away from the polls," helped push the Republican-controlled [this was still to some extent the party of Lincoln] Senate to attempt to not seat him after his re-election in 1946; a compromise was made whereas the matter would be left alone until he returned from Mississippi following recuperation from illness (he died and so it was never an issue)


• James Vardaman-a Senator from 1913 to 1919, Governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908; once declared that he would rather see William Jennings Bryan defeated than be elected by "votes of veneered savages" (as he called black voters); it was because of men like Vardaman that the editor of the New York Age, the black Republican newspaper, remarked that "It's against human nature for a negro to vote Democratic. It is the party of Tillman and Vardaman" (New York Times, August 9, 1908)


• Ross Robert Barnett-joined the 1920's Ku Klux Klan, believed (and stated) "the Negro is different because God made him different to punish him", helped get Byron De La Beckwith off in his first trial for murdering Medgar Evers, and as Governor was extremely active in opposing James Meredith's admission to Ole Miss


• Paul B. Johnson Jr.-as Governor, surmised that James Chaney, Michael Schwermer and Andrew Goodman had not been murdered but in fact "maybe went to Cuba" (i.e. they were damned Commies for supporting voting rights)


• James O. Eastland-Senator from Mississippi, one of the longest-serving ever; Time magazine called him "the nation's most dangerous demagogue" in the 1950's; Lyndon Johnson once said "Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he'd say 'The niggers caused it, helped out some by the Communists.'"


• John Rankin-Representative who refused to ever sit next to Harlem Representative Adam Clayton Powell and, contrary to all evidence, blamed African-Americans for losing a battle in WWII; also a vicious anti-Semite.

Of course, these were the pre-Civil Rights days when blacks didn't vote in Mississippi .

Later on, the Republican party adopted the race-baiting strategy, starting with Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, continuing with Ronald Reagan's law-and-order rally in Philadelphia, Mississippi [site of the murders of Schwermer, Goodman and Chaney].


The blogosphere gained prominence when Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo exposed Trent Lott's remarks at the 100th birthday of J. Strom Thurmond (South Carolina also had many of the worst race-baiters, perhaps not a coincidence as it had also had the second-highest black percentage of the population at the time)) "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either."


Then, of course, there was this special election. Republican Greg Davis ran ads attempting to tie Democratic candidate and now Representative Travis Childers to "scary liberal black man with foreign-sounding name" Barack Obama. The claim, is that it's "wrong" to be endorsed "a liberal black man who claims you'll help build his movement" (I assume by movement, they mean something like "Obama will sleep with your wife, force you to convert to Islam and sodomize you" [all untrue, of course, but that's the message they seemed to want to convey]



his "anti-American and very, very very scary black preacher who wants to 9/11 your gun with his anti-American Christian Islamic religion" [it does not have to make sense] Jeremiah Wright.



However, things may have changed in Mississippi. This tactic may have "blackfired" (galvanized black turnout in this 27% black district; thanks to the Voting Rights Act, blacks voting is something the Republicans have to worry about).

It's not clear whether it did. I used Excel to plot the relative gain in terms of votes Travis Childers made in a county on May 13th vs. April 22nd (that is, to what extent if any the increase in votes on May 13th slanted towards Travis Childers) versus the African-American percentage of that county.

It seems like there is some correlation, but it's not clear and it's not that significant (only about .3 when running a linear regression analysis). It's quite possible, though, that it's more significant when calculated by precinct [of course, then I need to figure out how I determine how black a precinct is]

Democrats Take Back MS-1

Unlike Louisiana's 6th district, Mississippi's 1st district did not go Republican until Newt Gingrich's short-lived Republican Revolution (note: this is different from R0n |>4v1's rEVOLution) of 1994.

However, Travis Childers is only the third person to represent this area of Mississippi since Wall Doxey resigned after winning the special election to succeed the great Pat Harrison (the execrable James O. Eastland had been appointed to fill the seat in the interim and later beat Wall Doxey in the primary).

Jamie Whitten, the longest-serving Representative in history, held this seat from November 4, 1941-January 3, 1995. He was Chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee from 1979-1993 [not a record; George H. Mahon of Texas, the previous Appropriations Chairman holds that record in terms of consecutive years, while Clarence Cannon holds the record for most years period; David Obey has been ranking member for 14 years since Bill Natcher(KY-2) died [Ron Lewis' victory in the special election to replace him was a harbinger of the Gingrich revolution], but spent most of those years in the minority; it looks like he'll continue to be Chairman for as long as he wants to be (he's still a relatively young 69 for someone who's been ranking member of Appropriations for 14 years; 10 more years is certainly not out of the question).

At any rate, I did some map-drawing at college in the library using Congressional Quarterly sources. I figure this is a good place to post the Mississippi district maps.

When Jamie Whitten was first elected, he was elected to the 2nd district (in purple) of Mississippi. The current 1st district contained parts of that district and parts of the then 1st district, represented by the viciously anti-Semitic John Rankin, and a bit of the 4th district, represented by Thomas Abernethy (Mississippi is one of a very few states never to have elected a Jewish Congressperson, incidentally).



After the loss of a seat (down from 7 to 6) in 1950, they consolidated, and Rankin lost in a primary with Abernethy.



The 1960 apportionment reduced Mississippi's delegation from 6 seats to 5 seats. Other than Whitten's 2nd district absorbing Frank E. Smith's entire 3rd district (Jamie Whitten beat him in the primary) and the 2nd shedding Calhourn County, the map remained unchanged.



However, drastic changes followed thanks to the landmark "one man, one vote" cases in the 1960's such as Wesberry v. Sanders and Baker v. Carr. In Mississippi's case, the redistricting was also heavily influenced by the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which greatly hampered the ability of whites to scare blacks away from voting.

To compensate, they split the heavily black western part of the state into 4 different districts, preventing a single district from being majority black and thus electing an African-American to Congress.



This same pattern continued in the 1970's



and to some extent in the 1980 redistricting



However, the Justice Department ruled that a black majority district had to be created, and this was done in 1984 with the 2nd district.



Similarly, in the 1990's, a majority black district was retained.



Finally, Mississippi again lost a seat in the 2000 redistricting (down to 4 seats)

Despite the Democratic legislature, the merging of Democratic Representative Ronnie Shows' district with that of Republican Representative Chip Pickering favored Pickering, and Pickering won the election in 2002.



Tonight, Travis Childers won back Mississippi's 1st, and Pickering is the only Republican left in Mississippi's House delegation.


Once the precinct results have been posted, I'm going to look and see if Greg Davis' strategy did in fact "blackfire" (i.e. instead of pushing white voters away from Childers and towards him, it in fact galvanized high black turnout)