Posts Tagged Nikki Haley
Cagle Post – Political Cartoons & Commentary – » Republican Women: Seen But Not Chairmen
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Opinion, Perspective on November 30, 2012
Republican Women: Seen But Not Chairmen
I blame feminism for why I feel entitled to equal rights. I have no qualms seeing the toil and struggle of my foremothers allowing me opportunities not available to them.
Dario Castillejos / PoliticalCartoons.com
For example, my generation doesn’t have to be married. This is the product of our mothers’ saber rattling. Being married is no longer necessary; now it’s a choice. And with a choice, there’s leverage and you get to negotiate your own terms. Free market!
Because of federal legislation, specifically the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) of 1974 ensuring single women could obtain their own credit card, we can now be financially independent. It’s not just Roe v. Wade, it’s women demanding birth control access and informed health care decisions. It’s women lobbying for gender parity and equal protections.
Due to feminist victories, this country has changed. Our mores have changed. Women have changed. Marriage has changed.
Nothing illustrates the quagmire this has made for Republicans more than Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s campaign for the GOP nomination for president. Bachmann stated in a speech in 2006 that she hated taxes but studied tax law in order to be “submissive to her husband.” During the primary, at a debate in Iowa, she was asked if she were president would she, in fact, be submissive to her husband. The question drew boos from the crowd, but it was on point: She was running to be commander-in-chief, but claimed to have this conservative traditional Christian marriage. For women to be the Republican ideal, they have to be unqualified to be president.
It’s a weird balancing act. Republican women are required to enjoy the fruits of feminism while championing every force that’s ever opposed it. This was made clear when Sarah Palin was tapped to be the first-ever female GOP veep candidate. Members of her own party criticized her for running for office with such young children. Palin tried out the short-lived phrase “conservative feminism,” which is up there with giant shrimp and authentic copy.
It’s an impossible standard for female Republican politicians: They have to be coy and a leader; feminine and effective; homemaker and career woman; traditional and radical feminist pioneers.
Republicans have lost battles in the war on women they initially (and unsuccessfully) launched as a war on religion. They have a woman problem. They have also maintained the majority in the House. How do these two things mesh up? The Speaker of the House chose committee chairs that are all men. A sea of white Grand Old Party dudes.
This illustrates the dichotomy of gender equality for Republicans: They want women to vote for them; they want to say they have women in their caucus; they want women to be Republicans; but they clearly don’t prefer them as leaders.
Before the GOP committee chair choices looked like the mug shot lineup for a white middle-aged groping suspect, this wasn’t as obvious, but now it’s undeniable: Republicans treat Republican women like tokens. Palin was used as an “us too” shield combating a diverse Democratic ticket. Just like Governors Nikki Haley and Susana Martinez get mentioned as a comeback to the criticism of a way too homogeneous party.
Brian Kilmeade, host of “Fox and Friends,” summed up the Republican opinion on women perfectly. When asked how Fox News, the entertainment wing of the Republican party, finds such stunning conservative stars to be on their network, Kilmeade offered, “We go into the Victoria’s Secret catalogue and we said, ‘Can any of these people talk?’”
Binders full … of women.
Cagle Post – Political Cartoons & Commentary – » Republican Women: Seen But Not Chairmen.
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Things That Shouldn’t Be Said In Modern Society To Be Said At Least 1,400 Times At RNC | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Humor/Parody, The Onion on August 27, 2012
Things That Shouldn’t Be Said In Modern Society To Be Said At Least 1,400 Times At RNC
TAMPA, FL—According to numerous sociologists and political experts, things that should never under any circumstance be spoken aloud in modern society will be said no fewer than 1,400 times this week at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL.
Throughout the three-day event, as the GOP unveils its 2012 platform and formally nominates its presidential ticket, experts predict words and phrases pertaining to science, health, and justice that are entirely unbefitting 21st-century human civilization will, on average, be voiced every 40 seconds from the podium at the Tampa Bay Times Forum.
According to alarming projections, the number of jarringly anachronistic remarks about gender alone will easily number in the hundreds.
“As the convention kicks off Tuesday with speeches from the likes of Rick Santorum and Nikki Haley, we should prepare ourselves to hear a more-or-less unending stream of ideas that should never even enter one’s mind, let alone be verbalized, in this day and age,” said Elizabeth Unger, a political scientist at Georgetown University. “It’s difficult to comprehend, but dozens of comments on such topics as human relationships and the physical world itself—which will seem as if they were crafted by some primitive unthinking civilization that existed centuries ago—will actually be emphasized, repeated, and used to punctuate key points in every single speech.”
“And what’s more baffling is that speakers will receive legitimate applause for saying things in public that no reasonable, informed member of society would ever willingly say in private,” she continued. “In fact, the more monstrous and archaic the thing sounds, the more ardent the ovation will be.”
Unger said the broad range of antiquated and inappropriate things that will be articulated each night on live television will not, as one might suspect, be blurted out by accident, as an involuntary reflex, or from momentary lack of forethought. While she acknowledged that such remarks would defy all contemporary definitions of logic and propriety, Unger confirmed they would actually be written down, organized, and rehearsed in advance, as if they in fact represented the speakers’ fully formed opinions and deeply held convictions on those particular issues.
“What’s fascinating is that these things, which will be spoken against all sense of contemporary decency and rational judgment, will not be the rantings of degenerates or imbeciles,” said Erik Olin Wright, president of the American Sociological Association. “Rather, they’ll be voiced by well-known political figures, distinguished business leaders, and top minds of national conservative movements—dozens of outwardly functional, ordinary people who for some reason appear eager to vocalize bizarrely backward-looking ideologies that no right-thinking modern human being would ever fathom giving voice to.”
“It’s almost as if these people are unaware that the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, various civil rights movements, and the entirety of social progress over the previous several centuries even occurred,” Wright added.
Scholars also affirmed that sentiments relating to economic opportunity, natural resources, and human culture that should never exit a person’s mouth would in fact be chanted in unison throughout the convention, easily bringing the total count of grossly inappropriate utterances into the hundreds of thousands.
According to the vast majority of experts contacted, such bizarrely out-of-date concepts, if ever fully acted upon, would nullify scores of generations of human advancement.
“If this gathering were held in the 1700s or 1800s, a certain fraction of the comments they will make on issues like religion and commerce might be considered somewhat appropriate by people of the time,” anthropologist Gregory Switzer said. “But much of what is said at the RNC about fairness and the treatment of fellow human beings in need, for example, is far more consistent with the very beginnings of rudimentary social empathy in our species dating back to the earliest emergence of human civilization some 10,000 years ago, when our barely developed ancient ancestors would literally smash each other’s skulls in with large rocks without a care or second thought.”
In stark contrast, scholars noted, several hundred things that desperately needed to be said in modern society would be uttered throughout next week’s Democratic National Convention by gutless speakers who would not possess anything remotely close to the strength or resolve needed to act on them.
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South Carolina Voters Weigh Priorities – NYTimes.com
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Economy, Jobs, Social, Society on January 11, 2012
South Carolinians Weigh Priorities as Primary Nears
Andy McMillan for The New York Times
Rhoetta and Pete Bradley at work in Edisto Grocery, a gas station and store in rural South Carolina.
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: January 11, 2012
NORTH, S.C. — The grim just gets grimmer here at the Edisto Grocery, where all day long people with not enough work come to eat $2.25 fried bologna sandwiches, pick up some horse feed and complain about the price of diesel.
“Jobs are all I hear about every day. Where are the jobs?” said Pete Bradley, who owns the small store and gas station here in Orangeburg County, where unemployment is 15.6 percent and the median income is $32,699.
After stops in Iowa and New Hampshire, states that are doing relatively well economically, the Republican presidential race is coming for the first time to a state that is struggling mightily through the downturn and, like much of the country, has distinct pockets of poverty and prosperity.
Just a 45-minute drive from the Edisto Grocery toward the capital city of Columbia, South Carolina looks quite different. Here, in Lexington County where Gov. Nikki Haley lives, unemployment is 7 percent and the median income is $51,523. New companies, lured to South Carolina by generous tax incentives and the state’s right-to-work policies, are hailed as heroes.
Amazon’s sprawling new distribution center could net as many as 2,000 jobs. The Nephron Pharmaceuticals Corporation, a maker of respiratory medicine, will break ground in the same industrial park this month and bring about 700 jobs. Continental Tire plans to invest $500 million to build a plant in nearby Sumter County.
Building on those potential new jobs, Ms. Haley delivered a message of promised prosperity last week as she traveled to the wealthy coastal communities of Charleston and Myrtle Beach with the presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, trying to give him an edge in the Jan. 21 Republican primary.
Mr. Romney hopes that message will secure South Carolina and, with it, the nomination. For the last 32 years, whoever has won in South Carolina has become the Republican candidate for president.
As it does in much of the rest of the country, the economic gap looms large in this state. Since 2007, South Carolina has lost 78,000 jobs, many of them in construction. The question is whether economics will overshadow the reliable platform of smaller government and deep social conservatism important especially to poor and middle-class white Republican voters in South Carolina.
Although it is a relatively small state — it ranks 24th in population and 40th in size — South Carolina is a place of stark contrasts between the haves and the have nots, and one in which the political landscape can be brutal and difficult to anticipate.
Three bands of wealth run across the state. Fiscally conservative but less socially conservative retirees populate the coast. To the northwest, along the Interstate 85 corridor toward Charlotte, N.C., Spartanburg’s BMW plant and other manufacturers offer solid jobs for a region with deeply felt conservative views on social issues and Christian institutions like Bob Jones University.
In the center of the state sits the capital, Columbia, where a recent burst of new business and a state government dominated by a Republican majority and a governor who rode to office on a wave of Tea Party support help define the political playing field.
The Republican primary will probably be a study in the balance between social conservatism and the economy, many here believe. And although issues of black-white relations remain an undercurrent in the state where the Civil War began, courting black voters is not much of a factor for Republicans.
“Blacks, whether they are rich or poor or middle class, largely vote Democrat,” said Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Citadel Symposium on Southern Politics. “Poor whites tend to vote Republican.”
Pamela Barksdale, an African-American and an unemployed former BMW worker who lives in a part of northeast South Carolina that was devastated by the collapse of the textile industry, said neither she nor any other black person she knew would ever vote for a Republican.
“Do you think I want to choke myself to death?” she said.
In South Carolina, Mr. Buchanan said, the Republicans are the party of conservative social issues and limited taxes.
As a result, many Republican candidates here are trying to position themselves as the true social conservative while being mindful of the importance of promising economic recovery.
Mr. Romney, perhaps more than any other candidate, is pushing the economy as a campaign theme. Ms. Haley is his echo chamber. Certainly, she said in an interview by phone while on the road with Mr. Romney in New Hampshire, Republican voters in South Carolina want a candidate who believes marriage should be only between a man and a woman and abortion should be outlawed.
But, she said, the state is not as narrow as people think.
“This is the South Carolina that elected a 38-year-old Indian female,” she said. “The No. 1 focus is jobs, spending and the economy.”
How much Ms. Haley’s support for Mr. Romney factors into the race will be closely watched. Although some here applaud her nearly singular focus on sharply reducing government spending and lowering the state’s unemployment rate, which now sits at 9.9 percent, she is not broadly popular.
A December poll by Winthrop University showed only a 35 percent approval rating among all registered voters, lower than that of President Obama, who had a 45 percent rating. Among Republicans, her approval rating was 53 percent.
The state may also be, in the coming years, something of a national study on the effects of deep cuts in government spending for education and social programs.
“We’ve all seen our state budgets erode unmercifully,” said Jeffery S. Allen, interim director of the Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs, which is based at Clemson University. “Lots and lots of people desperately need the help of government to survive. The big question we’re looking at for the future of the state is: are things sustainable at the level to which they have been cut?”
That will probably be writ large in towns like Laurens, where the economy has been devastated first by the collapse of the textile industry and then by the recession. Conversations about the presidential election do not engage people as much as the price of a state lottery ticket, which will double to $2 on Sunday.
Farther south, in Orangeburg County, the outcome of the Republican primary does not seem to matter much, either. It is a hand-to-mouth existence for many, with little hope that a new president would change their lives.
“People are too tired to care,” said Tina Sullivan, 47, who manages three bars in Orangeburg. “If they have any money, they’ll come spend it drinking because they are so depressed.”
Randy Shumpert, who makes a living drilling water wells in nearby Neeses, wants a true social conservative in office. And he also wants more work. But he does not see anyone who appeals to him.
“I plan to vote, but it’s just terrible what we have to vote for,” he said.
To Mr. Shumpert and others at the Edisto Grocery, including one Democrat who happened to wander in and joked that he was the only one in the county who was not black or a woman, no one feels a part of the national race that is descending on the state.
“These people don’t care about us,” Mr. Shumpert said. “We’re the little people.”
South Carolina Voters Weigh Priorities – NYTimes.com.
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