Missouri Enlists Former Protester to Lead University System
By alan scher zagier, associated press
COLUMBIA, Mo. — Nov 13, 2015, 1:31 AM ET
The Associated Press
Michael
Middleton speaks at a press conference after the University of Missouri
Board of Curators named him interim president of the university system,
Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015 at University Hall in Columbia, Mo. Middleton
takes over for Tim Wolfe, who abruptly resigned on Monday amid
student-led protests over his administration's handling of racial
complaints. (Daniel Brenner/Columbia Daily Tribune via AP) MANDATORY
CREDITmore +
Healing
a campus riven by student protests over race relations and recent
online terror threats isn't just a mandate for interim University of Missouri system president Mike Middleton. It's also deeply embedded in his history.
The
former law professor, whose appointment was announced Thursday, spent
18 years as deputy chancellor on the same Columbia campus from which he
graduated in 1971 and later received a law degree. The 68-year-old
stepped down in August but continued to work part-time with now-ousted
Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin on a plan to increase inclusion and diversity
at the school.
As an undergraduate, Middleton was a founder of
the Legion of Black Collegians, an activist student group that
participated in the protests that led to this week's back-to-back
resignations of former system President Tim Wolfe and Loftin. Protest
leaders from the group Concerned Student 1950 — named for the year
Missouri admitted its first back student — included some of the unmet
demands Middleton helped create as a civil rights and anti-war
protester.
Middleton said he keeps a list of those original demands on his desk.
His
bona fides contributed to a warm welcome and vigorous applause from
university administrators and leaders of two black student groups who
attended Middleton's news conference.
The
following is the official record of the conversation between Adolf
Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini in Berlin. You may note that while the
Leader of National Socialist Germany seems to be committed to the battle
against world Jewry, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem is only concerned
with Arab and Palestinian's interests as one would expect him to be. In
the entire text there is not a single reference to 'Jew burning' as
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu suggested yesterday.
The Grand Mufti began
by thanking the Fuhrer for the great honor he had bestowed by receiving
him. He wished to seize the opportunity to convey to the Fuhrer of the
Greater German Reich, admired by the entireArab world,
his thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and
especially the Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear
espressos in his public speeches. The Arab countries were firmly
convinced that Germany would
win the war and that the Arab cause would then prosper: The Arabs were
Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies as had
Germany, namely the English, the Jews,
and the Communists. They were therefore prepared to cooperate with
Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war,
not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the
instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an
Arab Legion. The Arabs could he more useful to Germany as allies than
might he apparent at first glance, both for geographical reasons and
because of the suffering inflicted upon them by the English and the
Jews. Furthermore, they had had close relations with all Moslem nations,
of which they could make use in behalf of the common cause. The Arab
Legion would he quite easy to raise. An appeal by the Mufti to the Arab
countries and the prisoners of Arab, Algerian,Tunisian, and Moroccan nationality
in Germany would produce a great number of volunteers eager to fight.
Of Germany's victory the Arab world was firmly convinced, not only
because the Reich possessed a large army, brave soldiers, and military
leaders of genius, but also because the Almighty could never award the
victory to an unjust cause.
In this struggle, the Arabs were striving for the independence and unity of Palestine, Syria and Iraq.
They had the fullest confidence in the Fuhrer and looked to his hand
for the balm on their wounds which had been inflicted upon them by the
enemies of Germany.
The Mufti then mentioned the letter he had
received from Germany, which stated that Germany was holding no Arab
territories and understood and recognized the aspirations to
independence and freedom of the Arabs, just as she supported the
elimination of the Jewish national home.
An
IDF soldier was killed and 11 others injured when an Arab attacker,
armed with a gun and a knife, opened fire at a bus station in the city
of Beersheba in the south of the country. Local media also said that an
Eritrean man was mistaken for an assailant and attacked by police.
The
perpetrator made his way into the station and started shooting and
stabbing people inside, in what is one of the most violent attacks since
the escalation began, the police said. An Israeli soldier was killed,
four police officers were lightly injured and seven civilians received
wounds of varying degrees in the attack.
Despite bringing a gun
with him, the man also snatched the weapon from the soldier he gunned
down, Yoram Halevy, a police commander in southern Israel, told
journalists. The Arab attacker, whose identity was not immediately
revealed, was shot and killed by the police, she added.
It was initially reported that the attacker had an accomplice,
who was wounded and detained by the police. But it later turned out
that the Israeli security forces shot a foreign national after mistaking
him for the assailant.
Police responding to the attack entered the bus station from another area and saw a “foreign national,” opening fire and wounding him, Halevy confirmed.
The Jerusalem Post reported that the injured man was a citizen of Eritrea, who has been residing in Israel.
An angry Israeli crowd, chanting “death to Arabs” gathered outside the bus station after the attack, Reuters reported.
The
Sunday attack has become the most serious incident in the string of
violence in Israel caused by tensions surrounding a Jerusalem holy site,
the al-Aqsa mosque, which is sacred to both Muslims and Jews.
Have the Republicans
become the white man's party? Are the depth and bitterness of
Republicans' opposition to Barack Obama and his administration the
product of racism?
Those
are questions you hear in the clash of political argument, and you will
hear plenty of answers in the affirmative if you click onto MSNBC or salon.com with any regularity.
“
"Race ... has now became the primal grievance in our politics."
”
You can find a more nuanced and thoughtful analysis in Jonathan Chait's recent New York magazine article “The Color of His Presidency.”
Chait,
a liberal, starts off by noting that the post-racial America that Obama
seemed to promise in his 2004 national convention speech and his 2008
campaign has not come into being.
On the contrary. “Race, always
the deepest and most volatile fault line in American history,” he
writes, “has now became the primal grievance in our politics, the source
of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the
world.”
Many liberals see racism in every criticism of the Obama presidency, even though, as Chait points out, Bill Clinton met with similar and in some cases more strident opposition.
Conservatives,
he argues, “dwell in a paranoia of their own, in which racism is used
as a cudgel to delegitimize their core beliefs.” Understandably so,
given his description of liberals’ “paranoia of a white racism.”
Chait
defends liberals by arguing that the debates on big government
inevitably produced by the Obama agenda and “there is no separating this
discussion from one’s sympathies or prejudices toward, and
identification with, black America.”
But he also admits that
“advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.” And he
seems to ignore the argument that policies that directed large sums of
money disproportionately at blacks--like the welfare programs
from the 1970s to the 1990s, which the Obama administration is trying
to partially resurrect--harm more than benefit their intended
beneficiaries.
This is, after all, what House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan
was getting at when he lamented “a culture, in our inner cities in
particular, of men not working.” The fact that Obama has made similar
arguments didn't prevent Ryan from being excoriated as racist by some
liberals.
Oooh, I know! I know! It's "no," right? Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThe
slow, increasingly Democratic cast of the American electorate would
seem to be a cardinal fact of American politics. The electorate is
firmly polarized, with few voters actually liable to change their minds.
The proportion of nonwhite voters has risen by about two percentage
points every four years, a rate that seems likely to persist
indefinitely as the population grows steadily more diverse. The youngest
voting cohort has decidedly more liberal views, and more Democratic
voting habits, than its elders, and partisan loyalty tends to stick throughout a voter’s lifetime. And yet the phenomenon continues to be met with an unduly wide, deep array of skepticism.
When Ruy Teixeira and John Judis wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority a dozen years ago, few of us placed much credence in their then-wild-sounding prediction. As recently as two and a half years ago, it was still being ridiculed.
As
political events have increasingly borne out the prediction, it has
been met with a series of objections, most of which have either been
confounded or made no sense to begin with. Consider a few: Objection: The growth of the Latino vote might stop (Sean Trende).
Result: Nope, the Latino vote has continued to rise. Objection: Younger millennial voters entering the electorate during the sluggish Obama recovery would turn against him (Dana Milbank, Michael Barone).
Result: No, it turns out “Younger and older millennials also have similar assessments of the job Barack Obama is doing as president.” Objection: Young voters are “libertarian,” and politically independent, and thus up for grabs (Ron Fournier, Julie Borowski, Nick Gillespie, and pretty much all the libertarians).
Result:
This goes in the “never made any sense” category. Like libertarians,
millennial voters do tend to have left-wing views on social policy and
culture. Very much unlike libertarians, they also tend
to have left-wing views on economics. They self-identify as “liberal,”
believe the government has a duty to provide health insurance to all
Americans, and support “bigger government” in the abstract at a far
higher rate than any other age cohort. It’s true that millennial voters
self-identify as “independent” more than Democrat, but they vote heavily
Democratic. (Political scientists understand that most self-identified “independents” reliably vote for the same party).
**
The
most popular new grounds for skepticism hold that the browning of
America will provoke a backlash among whites — as the proportion of
Latinos and Asians rises, threatened whites will grow increasingly
conservative. Versions of this hypothesis have reverberated not only
among conservatives like Trende and Barone, but also among liberals like Jamelle Bouie. And this theory does have at least some suggestive evidence that it may be true.
The greatest trick the Easter Bunny ever pulled was to convince the world he didn't exist.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesA recent psychological study
found that, when researchers read a news story reporting the rising
share of minorities in the United States to a group of white subjects,
the subjects grew more Republican. The study has attracted widespread
attention, confirming the liberal fear, and the conservative hope, that
the growth of Asian and Latino voters will produce an offsetting shift
to the right among whites. “The changing American polity may come to
look more like Texas than like the multicultural Democratic stronghold
of California,” concludes political scientist Larry Bartels. “In an increasingly diverse America, identity politics will continue to cut both ways.”
It is certainly plausible that
this study portends a future racially polarized America. But it seems
strange to treat mass trends in evidence among successive elections
involving over 125 million Americans while hanging confident predictions
of the future of American politics on a laboratory microsimulation.
People are highly susceptible to priming — which is to say, even slight
changes to the context in which they make a decision can produce large
differences in their actions. Making white people focus on increasing
diversity while sitting in a controlled room may cause them to
immediately report more conservative beliefs. That does not necessarily
tell you what the open vista of American politics, a vast ecosystem
teeming with messages and context of all kinds, will look like.
LAS VEGAS
— A Nevada rancher who became a conservative folk hero for standing up
to the government in a fight over grazing rights lost some of his
staunch defenders after wondering aloud whether blacks might have had it
better under slavery.
Republican
politicians from around the country who have rallied to Cliven Bundy's
defense in recent weeks denounced the comments and distanced themselves
from the rancher, including potential 2016 presidential contender U.S.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and U.S. Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada.
Democrats were quick to pounce on the comments and label Bundy a racist.
Bundy
has gone from a little-known rancher and melon farmer in rural Nevada
to a national political star since he resisted the federal government's
attempts to round up his cattle from federal land because he hadn't paid
grazing fees for two decades. His supporters, especially those on the
right, have praised him for standing up to what they believe is a
heavy-handed federal government, and several armed militia members
traveled to his ranch to back Bundy.
His comments were first
published in The New York Times on Wednesday, but he did little to tamp
down the controversy as he sought to address the public outrage on
Thursday.
Bundy was quoted in a Times story referring to black
people as "the Negro" and recalling a time decades ago when he drove
past homes in North Las Vegas and saw black people who "didn't have
nothing to do." He said he wondered if they were "better off as slaves"
than "under government subsidy."
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/04/25/4981156/nevada-rancher-defends-remarks.html#storylink=cpy
Rancher
Cliven Bundy, right, leaves the podium with bodyguards after a news
conference near his ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, on Thursday, April 24.
Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management have been locked in a dispute
for a couple of decades over grazing rights on public lands.
..
Editor's note:
LZ Granderson is a CNN contributor, a senior writer for ESPN and
lecturer at Northwestern University. Commentary by the former Hechinger
Institute fellow has been recognized by the Online News Association, the
National Association of Black Journalists and the National Lesbian and
Gay Journalists Association. Follow him on Twitter @locs_n_laughs. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN)
-- Bashing Cliven Bundy for his remarks regarding race is like Lebron
James dunking on a 5-foot rim: Pointless. But we're going to do it
anyway because it's fun. He said a lot of stupid things, and there are
few things more entertaining than well-executed memes and a hashtag in
front of stupidity.
The problem is Bundy is not the face of racism.
Not today's version.
But
we'll place that yoke on his shoulders anyway because it's easy. Some
conservatives will quickly pedal away from the Bundys and the Ted
Nugents of the world, insisting that they are not like those rodeo
clowns. They don't have a racist bone in their body because they would
never make such outlandish statements. But then they turn around and
marvel at how "well-spoken" or "articulate" a black person is and think
nothing of it.
Politicians
of all stripes will publicly denounce the offensive things that Bundy
said but continue to construct policies that caters to his
sensibilities. Today, racism isn't a crazy old white man with a dead
calf on his shoulders proclaiming he's "unracist." No, it's elected
officials like Paul Ryan saying inner-city men are "not even thinking
about working or learning the value and the culture of work" and then
feigning shock that people see a racist element to his statements.
A
group of armed militia and protesters, some sporting nametags reading
"domestic terrorist," remain camped out on a cattle ranch in Nevada,
where they have been purportedly defending the property since a tense
showdown ended with the federal government last week.
A 20-year
struggle between rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management
over decades of alleged illegal cattle grazing on public land ended last
Sunday, with the government backing down from a controversial week-long
cattle round-up.
Las Vegas Review-Journal, John Locher/AP Photo
Flanked by armed supporters, rancher Cliven Bundy speaks at a protest camp near Bunkerville, Nev. Friday, April 18, 2014.
The
BLM defused the standoff, citing safety concerns for its employees and
the protesters, some of whom were on horseback and others who were set
up in sniper positions on the Interstate 15 overpass pointing
military-style rifles at federal agents. Among the citizen army were
dozens of women and children under the overpass who could have been
caught in the line of any possible gunfire.
But many people who
say they support Bundy said they felt the battle was far from over, as
evidenced by some responses ABC News received on social media, after the
BLM first announced on April 12 that it was withdrawing from the area and releasing the 380 cattle already collected as part of the round-up on an area of land half the size of Delaware state.
@libertyideals@lianzifields No, just a pull back to retrench and attack again. This is a diversionary tactic. They will be back.
— Bossy for Bundy (@BeckyJoSpray) April 12, 2014
The
government maintains that Bundy owes more than $1.1 million in unpaid
trespass fees and penalties after letting his herd of some 900 cattle
graze on federal land near the town of Bunkerville, about 80 miles
northeast of Las Vegas, for the last 20 years.
Agency officials also told The Associated Press that the roundup contract was $900,000.
The
BLM said it would now move to resolve the matter "administratively and
judicially," although the government has unsuccessfully gone head to
head with Bundy in Court since 1993, after it established the area as a
protected habitat for the endangered desert tortoise and slashed Bundy's
cattle allotment.
On the day before Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, the New Yorker unveiled an extended interview with Obama in which the flailing leader blamed his poor approval ratings on racism.
“There’s
no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because
they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama told the editor of
the liberal magazine known for its cloyingly obscure cartoons and
overwhelmingly white readership.
Obama
began his first term with an approval rating of 68 percent; a figure
unmatched since JFK. No Republican had enjoyed a starting approval
rating above 60 percent in 60 years, indicating how much more willing
Republicans were to give the other guy a fair shot than their Democratic
counterparts. At 12 percent, his disapproval ratings were also much
lower than those of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.
If his current
approval rating of 40 percent pro and 51 percent con can be put down to
anything, it isn’t race. When Obama began his first term in office, he
had the approval of 41 percent of Republicans. By the time the year was
out, that number had fallen to 16 percent.
At the start of his
first term, he had the approval of 62 percent of independent voters.
Today he has the approval of less than half that number. Only his
support from his own party has remained unchanged.
Any honest
politician would put those numbers down to his actions, but Obama always
takes refuge in race, telling Remnick, “There is a historic connection
between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history
of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those
issues.”
Few men knew that history better than the black
Republican minister who stood on the steps of a memorial to the
Republican president who ended the Democratic Party’s institution of
slavery and, with a resonance that echoes across time, said, “I have a
dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of
their character.”
The post-equality civil rights movement of the
left has long since buried that dream, exchanging it for a nightmare of
calculated racial inequalities where your race is what you will be
judged by when you apply for college, apply for a job or face low
approval ratings after your national health care scheme explodes into a
broken $600 million website and millions of angry people who have lost
their health insurance and are being forced to pay more money for fewer
benefits.
Obama Says Racial Animus Blunts Approval, New Yorker Reports
By Brian WingfieldJan 19, 2014 1:01 PM CT
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
U.S. President Barack Obama’s second term has been marked by controversies including a... Read More
President Barack Obama
said that racial tensions may have softened his popularity among white
voters within the last two years, according to a story posted on the New Yorker magazine’s website today.
“There’s
no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because
they don’t like the idea of a black president,” Obama said in the
article by David Remnick, appearing in the magazine’s Jan. 27 edition.
“Now,
the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white
folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely
because I’m a black president,” Obama said in his most direct comments
on how race has affected his political standing since he’s been in
office.
Obama’s second term has been marked by controversies
including a partial government shutdown in October, revelations that the
National Security Agency has gathered personal mobile phone data and
the troubled rollout of health-insurance expansion.
Obama’s approval rating
among all voters is 39 percent and his disapproval rating is 53
percent, according to a Gallup Poll conducted Jan. 14-16. In the 2012
presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney
won 59 percent of the white vote, compared with Obama’s 39 percent,
according to exit polling by a consortium of major news outlets. Obama
won 43 percent of the white vote in 2008 against 55 percent for opponent
John McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona.
On Sunday, The New Yorker released an interview with President Barack Obama in which the president stated that his approval ratings had been suppressed due to racism. "There's no doubt that there's some folks who just really dislike me because they don't like the idea of a black president," Obama stated. "Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I'm a black president."
Obama's current approval rating is down to 39 percent according to Gallup; his approval rating in the black community remains extraordinarily high, although it is significantly lower now than it was when he was re-elected.
Obama's overall approval ratings have tumbled coincident with the failed rollout of Obamacare, as well as his mishandling of the Syria and Iran crises. Obama's supporters have often suggested that political difficulties he experiences are attributable to generalized racial anxiety.
.....
Race to blame for President Obama's low approval rating
Published on Jan 23, 2014
Tonight DLAKE 4 PREZ covers Obama's recent statements: There's no doubt that there's some folks who just really dislike me because they don't like the idea .
MSNBC: Obama Poll Numbers At All Time Lows, Dragging Down 2014 Democrats - Obama Poll Numbers At All Time Lows, Drag.
Rancher
Cliven Bundy, right, leaves the podium with bodyguards after a news
conference near his ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, on Thursday, April 24.
Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management have been locked in a dispute
for a couple of decades over grazing rights on public lands.
