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FLASHBACK: Mitt Romney Attended High-Dollar Fundraiser for Pete Wilson’s 1994 Anti-Immigrant Campaign

By Josh Dorner on Feb 6, 2012 at 10:45 pm

Yesterday, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney announced the endorsement of former California Gov. Pete Wilson (R) and named Wilson honorary California chair of his campaign.  In a statement touting the endorsement, Romney said “I’m honored to have Governor Pete Wilson’s support, because he’s one of California’s most accomplished leaders.”

Mitt Romney seen with former California Gov. Pete Wilson during Meg Whitman's failed 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, called the announcement “baffling,” citing the widespread perception that Wilson’s involvement in Meg Whitman’s 2010 California gubernatorial campaign contributed to her loss — including a stunning 86 percent to 13 percent landslide in favor of Gov. Jerry Brown among Latinos.

Others had sharper words, citing the long list of anti-immigrant politicians already signed up for Romney’s campaign, including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the author of the Arizona and Alabama anti-immigrant laws.  ”Romney can’t seem to stop himself from digging deeper and deeper into his hole with Latino voters,” said Eliseo Medina of the Service Employees International Union in a statement reported by the Los Angeles Times. “Here is what Pete Wilson accomplished: He turned Latino voters against the GOP brand.”

It turns out that Romney’s history with Pete Wilson is longer than some likely realize.  Archival news reports accessed on Lexis-Nexis indicate that Mitt Romney attended at least one high-dollar fundraiser to help retire debt from Wilson’s 1994 gubernatorial campaign, one of the most bitterly anti-immigrant campaigns in recent memory.  From a March 29, 1995 article in the Boston Herald:

Wilson later arrived in Boston, where an early evening fund-raiser sponsored by Gov. William F. Weld netted about $110,000 to help pay off the California governor’s 1994 re-election debt.[...]

About a dozen big-dollar contributors, including 1994 GOP Senate nominee Mitt Romney, gathered in the Four Seasons apartment of Weld supporter Thomas Shields to dine on a buffet supper and meet the man Weld said “may very well be” the next president.

While Wilson was at the time preparing for what would be an abortive 1996 presidential run, the fundraiser Romney attended was to retire debt from Wilson’s 1994 campaign, one which Wilson waged based on an outright demonization of illegal immigrants in an effort to boost his previously floundering re-election bid and ensure the passage of Proposition 187, an extreme anti-immigrant ballot measure.

Watch a collection of anti-immigrant/pro-Proposition 187 ads, including the infamous “They Keep Coming” ad, from Wilson’s 1994 campaign:

 

Proposition 187, which ultimately passed by an overwhelming 59 percent to 41 percent margin, was in many ways a precursor to today’s extreme anti-immigrant laws, including those in Alabama and Arizona authored by Romney adviser Kris Kobach.  Its major provisions are very similar to or even more extreme than those Republicans have passed in recent years:

  • Barred undocumented immigrants from the state’s education system: K-12 through higher education.  Schools would also be forced to verify the legal status of not only students, but also their parents.
  • Barred undocumented immigrants from receiving care at any publicly-funded health care facility.
  • Barred undocumented immigrants from receiving cash assistance and other public social services in the state.
  • Required all service providers to report suspected undocumented immigrants to the California Attorney General’s office and Immigration and Naturalization Service (now called Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
  • Required police officers to determine the legal status of all persons who were arrested and report those suspected of being undocumented to federal authorities.
  • Made the production, distribution and use of false documents felony offenses.
  • Made reports on an individual’s status to the attorney general available to any other government entity.
  • Prohibited local governments from limiting or failing to implement its provisions in any way.

After a lengthy court battle, Proposition 187 was ultimately declared unconstitutional in 1997 and finally killed by the administration of Governor Gray Davis (D) in 1999.

It’s unclear if Romney ever took a public position on Proposition 187 in 1994; however, any objections he may have had to the virulently anti-immigrant campaign run by Wilson did not stop him from helping to retire the campaign’s debt in early 1995 or from appointing Wilson to a prominent position in his 2012 campaign.

Politics

The ‘Legislative Wall’: Dick Armey’s Top Five Tea Party Republican Candidates

By Josh Israel on Feb 6, 2012 at 8:30 pm

Former House Republican Leader Dick Armey

Former House Republican Leader Dick Armey (R-TX)

As most independent groups focus on the presidential nomination contest, FreedomWorks for America is focused on electing far-right Republicans to the U.S. Senate. The independent-expenditure-only super PAC is part of the FreedomWorks astroturf network of former U.S. House Republican Leader Dick Armey (R-TX).

Yesterday on CNN’s State of the Union, Armey said his groups aim to elect tea party-minded conservatives to Congress to force the White House on a far-right path. “We’ll build a legislative wall… We’ll either be walling a Republican president in, or walling a Democratic president out.”

Here are the bricks they aim to put in their wall:

– A not-yet-determined Republican primary challenger to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) ($237,065 in independent expenditures to date). Hatch has veered sharply to the right since the 2010 defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett (R) by conservative activists and earned a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union for 2010. But FreedomWorks wants Hatch out of the senate too, given his past support for crazy things like the Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development.

–Former Texas Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz (R), a candidate for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R)’s open senate seat ($71,647 in independent expenditures to date). Cruz has offered an unconstitutional proposal for a backdoor method of state nullification of federal laws and the Affordable Care Act and co-authored a white paper advocating a radical reading of the Constitution that would lead to Medicaid and most federal education programs being declared unconstitutional.

– Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R), who is challenging Sen. Dick Lugar (R) in a primary ($47,180 in pro-Mourdock independent expenditures to date and another $12,378 against Lugar). Critics say Mourdock wasted $2 million in state funds in his unsuccessful legal challenges to the 2009 Chrysler reorganization and federal bailout. And in a September 12, 2009 speech to the FreedomWorks “Taxpayer March on Washington,” Mourdock warned that “through obvious, brutal, criminal acts of tyranny or through subtle, creeping
incremental-ism, governments corrupt the ideal of individual freedom into statism, economic slavery, and governmental dependency, and dependency is the opposite of liberty.”

– Nebraska State Treasurer Don Stenberg (R), a former state attorney general and candidate for Sen. Ben Nelson (D)’s open senate seat ($33,230 in independent expenditures to date). He has endorsed an extreme proposal to cripple our system of federal regulation by requiring that Congress approve every single major rule or regulation before it takes effect. In its endorsement, FreedomWorks for America said “Nebraskans described Stenberg to us as ‘tea party-minded before we had tea parties.’”

– Former Florida House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, a former senatorial candidate who recently dropped out of the race to defeat Sen. Bill Nelson (D) ($12,378 in independent expenditures to date). The outspoken conservative is now a candidate for U.S. House. He supports a national anti-union “right to work” law and a freeze on any new regulation that might have a “substantial economic impact on job creators.”

If Armey and his allies succeed in electing these and other far-right conservatives to Congress, the legislative wall would continue to block progress.

Alyssa

E-Readers And The Threat Of Constant Editing

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 6, 2012 at 6:37 pm

There are some good defenses of Jonathan Franzen, particularly from an archival perspective, in our thread in his comments on E-Readers (I’m glad no one’s defending the idea that the president is too busy to read fiction, though). I absolutely agree with everyone who says we need to think carefully about and allocate appropriate resources to digital archiving. But I think Simon Pits raises the most convincing argument in defense of Franzen’s worries about e-readers making literature impermanent. He says:

Franzen’s point is that with a e-books, an author never need “finish” writing a book. The ability to constantly revise, improve or worsen and censor remains. While authors, publishers and distributors today aren’t taking full advantage of this, certainly it cannot be far. Think of the controversies surrounding the teaching of Huck Finn. In an e-book world, Nigger Jim gets renamed to Jim or Black Jim or Slave Jim or something that may offend fewer, but tells us less about the culture and society in which the book was written.

A couple of thoughts. First, I think even though it’s theoretically possible to keep editing a digital manuscript in a way it’s not possible to change a print copy, there are still some structural factors mitigating against it being a major problem. Most writers I know tend to feel that they have to walk away from a project at some point, if only for their own sanity. I know writing a novel is different from blogging, of course, but even then, folks feel like they have to be done sometime. And even if they don’t, I think there’s probably a limit to the extent to which digitial publishers are going to be willing to push fixes, something that requires a lot of file maintenance, checking to make sure changes haven’t introduced new errors, and then either updating or getting readers to update their texts, something that might seem particularly annoying for new tweaks rather than minor functionality.

And second, there’s been real resistance to authors going back and fiddling with what are considered foundational texts, whether George Lucas is making Greedo shoot first or an edition of Huckleberry Finn that replaces the word “nigger” with “slave.” These alterations tend to be treated as a kind of cowardice, whether it’s Lucas lacking the courage to make Han Solo kind of a jerk or the political correctness that avoids exposing people to uncomfortable ideas and words even if those things might move their thinking forward. I don’t normally trust the market with a lot of things. But I’m actually reasonably confident that outcries against endless tinkering, customer demands for the portability of content from device to device and from format to format, and the desire to retain customers will make it easier to preserve digital content in its original form. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to back up those forces with an independent dedication to digital archiving. But unless things change, I think this might be a case where customers’ demands and the imperative to preserve texts are relatively closely aligned.

Climate Progress

Exclusive: “Exciting” Public Opinion Study Debunks Claim Al Gore Polarized the Climate Debate and Many Other Myths

By Joe Romm on Feb 6, 2012 at 6:29 pm

Public Opinion Driven Largely by Media Coverage and Cues from Politicians and Other Authorities.  Obama’s Silence Matters “Very Much.”

The Climate Change Threat Index (CCTI) aggregates data from 6 different polling organizations gauging how much people worry about global warming

A must-read study published Monday in the journal Climatic Change debunks some pervasive myths about public opinion and climate change.  The lead author, Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, gave me an exclusive interview.

Stanford’s Jon Krosnick told me this paper was an “exciting contribution to the growing literature in this area.” He said, “the results he produced line up very closely  with the results of our surveys and with my thinking on the issue, with a couple of caveats,” which I discuss below.  He believes, “this paper represents a terrific amount of excellent work and is a great contribution to the literature using a well-established method.”

Here are some of the key findings from “Shifting public opinion on climate change: an empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the U.S., 2002–2010″:

  • “… media coverage of climate change and elite cues from politicians and advocacy groups are among the most prominent drivers of the public perception of the threat associated with climate change”
  • “The greater the quantity of media coverage of climate change, the greater the level of public concern.”
  • “New York Times mentions of An Inconvenient Truth significantly boosted the public’s perception of the urgency of climate change (P≤.001). The number of mentions in the New York Times is a proxy for the extent of overall media attention to this film.”
  • “Articles in popular scientific magazines do reach significance” in terms of influencing public concern, but it is a modest effect

Media coverage of climate change  accounts for almost half of the variance in the CCTI, which isn’t terribly surprising when you compare the top chart with a graph of media coverage:

US Media Coverage

This finding shouldn’t surprise anyone.  I just started reading the best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel prize in economics.  He explains:

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory– and that is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.  Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness.

Brulle’s study also finds that the public’s relative concern about global warming is affected by “structural economic and political factors play a major role”:

An increase in the unemployment rate significantly decreases the CCTI, and conversely, an increase in GDP significantly increases the CCTI. The number of U.S. war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan significantly decreases public concern about climate change (P≤.05). These findings suggest that when there is a shock to the economy or intensification in the wars, the general public may reduce their level of concern about climate change.

I interviewed Brulle, whom the NY Times has called “an expert on environmental communications,” about his paper.  Here are some of his comments:

  • “I think this should close down forever the idea that Al Gore caused the partisan polarization over climate change.”
  • “The fact that Obama isn’t talking about the issue or even using the word matters very much.”
  • “Popular scientific magazines and the release of major reports (NRC and IPCC) do have a statistically significant effect.”
  • “The only messaging campaign that works is one that is consistent. It has to be, especially since it is facing an opposing campaign that is much better funded.“

I have previously pointed out that extensive polling data simply doesn’t support the widely-held myth that Gore polarized the debate (see “Polarization on Climate Jumped in 2009 — Long After Gore’s 2006 Movie“).  I’ve asked many leading experts on social science and public opinion — including McCright and Dunlap, authors of “The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001–2010″ — and they all agree the data don’t support this myth.  I just asked Krosnick the same question, and he also agrees there is no data to support it.

Indeed, the data actually suggest the reverse, that, if anything, Gore’s movie and his “We Campaign” to bring together well-known figures on both sides of the partisan divide, actually decreased polarization temporarily:

Read more

Politics

Senior Gingrich Campaign Official Scrubbed Infidelity, Tiffany Credit Line From Wikipedia Page

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Feb 6, 2012 at 6:20 pm

Newt Gingrich loves technology, but apparently it doesn’t always love him back enough on its own and sometimes needs encouragement.

Gingrich has already been caught vastly inflating his Twitter following with phony accounts, and now CNN now reports that the campaign’s communications director, Joe DeSantis, has been aggressively making dozens of edits of Gingrich’s Wikipedia page. DeSantis has attempted to scrub or embellish embarrassing information about Gingrich’s marital troubles, House ethics investigation, and $500,000 Tiffany credit line:

Wikipedia records show DeSantis has made over 60 adjustments to entries in the online, publicly-edited encyclopedia to the biographical entry on Gingrich, the similar page on his wife, Callista, and a separate page on one of their books, Rediscovering Good in America. [...]

DeSantis’ edits, which began in October of 2008, included rewriting, removing, and editing lines, including several edits to references of Gingrich’s marriages, according to Wikipedia edit records, which are published and publicly viewable on the site.

While it’s common for campaigns to monitor and request edits to their candidates’ Wikipedia pages, what’s surprising is the degree to which DeSantis, a senior campaign official, has personally gone to great lengths to micromanage his boss’s entry.

NEWS FLASH

Chart: Economic Growth Is Depleting Our Natural Wealth | A new report by the Demos think tank explains that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a poor measure of economic health. Not only are the fortunes of everyday Americans not tied to the rise in GDP, but this growth is based on the most dangerous kind of deficit spending — using up irreplaceable natural resources and ecosystems. Using data from the Global Footprint Network, the chart below shows how our planet’s biocapacity is being sacrificed for short-term rewards that mostly go to the richest few.

By Brad Johnson on Feb 6, 2012 at 6:12 pm

Climate Progress

Is Climate Change Bringing the Arctic to Europe?

By Joe Romm on Feb 6, 2012 at 6:10 pm

Less Summer Arctic Sea Ice Cover May Mean Some Colder, Snowier Winters in Central Europe [For Now]

[T]he probability of cold winters with much snow in Central Europe rises when the Arctic is covered by less sea ice in summer. Scientists of the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association have decrypted a mechanism in which a shrinking summertime sea ice cover changes the air pressure zones in the Arctic atmosphere and impacts our European winter weather. These results of a global climate analysis were recently published in a study in the scientific journal Tellus A.

That’s the news release for yet another new study examining what will inevitably be the huge implications for extreme weather from the massive amount of heat released by the declining Arctic sea ice cover.


Arctic sea ice in September 2007 reached its lowest extent on record, approximately 40% lower than when satellite records began in 1979. Sea ice loss in 2011 was virtually tied with the ice loss in 2007, despite weather conditions that were not as unusual in the Arctic. ”Such a large area of open water is bound to cause significant impacts on weather patterns, due to the huge amount of heat and moisture that escapes from the exposed ocean into the atmosphere over a multi-month period following the summer melt.”  Image: Cryosphere Today.

You may recall the recent repost of the discussion by meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters (see “Our Extreme Weather: Is Arctic Sea Ice Loss Partly to Blame?” the source of the figure above):

“The question is not whether sea ice loss is affecting the large-scale atmospheric circulation…. It’s how can it not?” That was the take-home message from Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, in her talk “Does Arctic Amplification Fuel Extreme Weather in Mid-Latitudes?”, presented at last week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Dr. Francis presented new research in review for publication, which shows that Arctic sea ice loss may significantly affect the upper-level atmospheric circulation, slowing its winds and increasing its tendency to make contorted high-amplitude loops. High-amplitude loops in the upper level wind pattern (and associated jet stream) increases the probability of persistent weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, potentially leading to extreme weather due to longer-duration cold spells, snow events, heat waves, flooding events, and drought conditions.

The new German study looks at the specific case of winters in central Europe.  The UK Independent story explains, “A growing number of experts believe complex wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above.”

As cold weather hit much of Europe, the story describes the findings this way:

Read more

Economy

Former Wall Street Trader: ‘There’s No Other Industry Where You Could Get Paid So Much For Doing So Little’

By Pat Garofalo on Feb 6, 2012 at 6:00 pm

One of the problematic developments for the U.S. economy in the last several decades has been increased financialization. In the 1950s, the financial sector made up less than 3 percent of the economy. Today, it is back to its pre-recession heights of more than 8 percent. The financial sector accounts for about 30 percent of total corporate profits, which is actually down from before the financial crisis, when it made closer to 40 percent.

Increased financialization is of dubious societal use; as former Federal Reserve Chairman and big bank critic Paul Volcker has said, “I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence.” (Volcker has opined that the last useful bit of financial innovation was the ATM.) At the same time, the industry is one of the highest paid. In a new piece in New York magazine, a former Lehman Bros trader explained that, in his view, “there’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little“:

Many [on Wall Street] acknowledge that the bubble­-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism—and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said.

The Great Recession destroyed nearly $20 trillion in wealth, and total family wealth is still down $15.1 trillion (in 2011 dollars) from its last peak. And there’s very little that the financial industry can point to that could possibly be worth that cost. To the contrary, as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, the era of “boring” commercial banking — when strict regulations kept investment banking and commercial banking separate — “was also an era of spectacular economic progress for most Americans.” (HT: Jillian Berman)

NEWS FLASH

Arab League Chief: Russian And Chinese Veto Of Syrian Resolution Is ‘Unacceptable’ | Russia and China lost diplomatic credit in the Arab world following their “unacceptable” veto on Saturday of a U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria said Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby. The vetoed resolution backed an Arab initiative calling for Syrian President Bashar Al Assad to step aside but Elaraby acknowledged that the Arab League would still work with Moscow and Beijing “because we need them.” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov will present an initiative to Assad when he visits Damascus on Tuesday but Elaraby declined to offer details of the plan. The U.N. reports that the 11 month Syrian uprising has taken more than 5,000 lives.

By Eli Clifton on Feb 6, 2012 at 5:45 pm

NEWS FLASH

Virginia’s Anti-Gay Adoption Restrictions May Create Costs For State | A Williams Institute study suggests that Virginia will incur additional costs by passing a provision that allows private adoption agencies to refuse to place children with couples based on religious or moral beliefs, essentially legalizing and encouraging discrimination against same-sex couples. The House passed the bill last week and the Senate has advanced it out of committee. According to the report, for every child that cannot be placed in an appropriate foster or adoptive home, the state will have to pay an addition $2,000 for congregate care. The state will also have to pay nearly $30,000 for every child that remains in foster care. Currently, there are about 5,500 children in Virginia’s foster care system. Given Virginia law already prohibits unmarried couples from adopting, the new policy will likely further limit the state’s ability to find homes for children.

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