"I'm a black American woman - can I support the Republican Party?"

"What to do? I'm a conservative, yet 21st-century Republicans are still defending slavery"

As a black Republican woman, from the South, I find it morally repugnant that 150 years after the Civil War ended, 21st-century Republicans are still defending slavery. Because that’s exactly what supporting South Carolina’s or any state’s right to fly the battle flag means. The Civil War began because Southern states seceded from the Union, refusing to abandon their slave economy of whites using and abusing their free black human labor, owned as property.

Slavery in America, which lasted far longer than in Britain, was an abomination. So why did the Republican Party, which is in desperate need of minority voters, not come out in fierce opposition to the flag two weeks ago, when the topic erupted?

Telegraph Top voted comments...

Henry Wilson
Many Blacks fly the Confederate flag in South Carolina. This author claims to be a conservative but in reality she is not. That flag in 21st century America does not represent racism for most of those who fly it. It represents pride in an era of American history which no longer exists. Nothing more. Should we dump the Union Jack because it flew over an Empire which abused half of the word's population in the name of Rule Britannia? Of course not. This whole "dust up" in the States is the way Radical Liberals punish Southern Conservatives for having the audacity to be the location of a "lone wolf" racist murderer of church goers. It is all about the Radical Left sticking it to the Conservatives. Nothing more. Britons should not allow ourselves to be pulled into this foreign bit of nonsense.

Jonathan DeBusk, Henry Wilson
"Many Blacks fly the Confederate flag in South Carolina." Citation needed. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof. I'm from South Carolina. 30% of the population is black and I have never once seen a black person fly the battle flag. And finding one somewhere suffering from Stockholm Syndrome does not *many* make.

"Democratic vs. Republican occupations"

"Most librarians are Democrats. Most farmers are Republicans.
As a group, doctors are in the middle, though pediatricians lean left and urologists right."

Below: Ratios of Democrats (blue) vs. Republicans (red).
Data source: Campaign contribution data from the FEC.

Which way does your occupation lean?

"Steve Scalise did not address a EURO conference. ... The conference was two-and-a-half hours later"

Excerpts from The Times Picayune...

Knight said Scalise, then a state representative, spoke to the civic association and was probably unaware the EURO conference was being held in the same room later that day. Knight and Scalise primarily knew each other as neighbors and not through politics necessarily, Knight said.

"The conference wasn't going to start until 1 p.m., so I decided to have the members of the civic association there Saturday morning," he said, "My relationship with Steve Scalise was as a neighbor. I don't know that Steve Scalise and I ever talked about politics."

He also is quoted saying: "Steve came in early on the first day of EURO, spoke for about 15 minutes, and he left."

Knight described the crowd as a "mixed" audience for Scalise, "people who are concerned about the survival of their race." He added: "The thing is, I don't think Scalise knew anything about EURO, about that latter group."

Knight said Wednesday that the Post reporter didn't get story right.

"I told him the same story I am telling you," he said.

For her part, Noble said she was not a member of the civic association, but was dating Knight and attended the civic meeting with him. She said Scalise addressed the neighborhood group, not EURO.

"He was just there to speak with his constituents," Noble said.

Via Instapundit.

Democrat Operative Donna Brazile On Voting

 

Any thoughts?

"Reality show strands Democrat and Republican senators on island"

"This is real: Discovery Channel is stranding Republican and Democratic U.S. senators on a deserted island and filming what happens."

"In an aisle-crossing new reality series titled Rival Survival, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) must put their political differences aside and work together for six days and six nights in an harsh isolated environment." (read more)

Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby: "Democrats losing moral clarity on Israel"

"[B]elow the surface, America’s Israel-friendly consensus is splitting along the same left-vs.-right fault line that has polarized so many other issues. While support for Israel is overwhelming among Republicans and conservatives, it has been shrinking among Democrats and liberals. “The partisan gap in Mideast sympathies has never been wider,” reports Pew, with 73 percent of Republicans sympathetic to Israel in the ongoing conflict, but just 44 percent of Democrats. Respondents identifying as liberal Democrats were five times as likely as conservative Republicans to sympathize more with the Palestinians."

Thus is the Democratic Party losing its way on one of the great moral issues of our time.

For roughly the first third of Israel’s existence, Democrats tended to support the Jewish state more strongly than Republicans did. In a compelling new book, “Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel,” foreign-affairs thinker Joshua Muravchik writes that during the run-up to the Six Day War in 1967, “Israel was above all a cause championed by liberals.” So heartfelt was this support that even ardent Democratic opponents of the Vietnam War, such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Eugene McCarthy, advocated US military action on Israel’s behalf.

Only over the last 25 years has support for Israel grown so much greater among Republicans than among Democrats. The reasons for the divergence are many. On the right, they include the high value Republicans have attached to Israel as a stable ally in a very unstable region, as well as the migration to the GOP of evangelical Christians, many of whom support the Jewish state as a matter of transcendent conviction.

But on the left, the Israeli-Arab dispute itself has been redefined. (read more)

"Study: Having daughters makes parents more likely to be Republican"

"In newly published findings that challenge earlier research, Dalton Conley of New York University and Emily Rauscher of the University of Kansas found that having more daughters than sons and having a daughter first “significantly reduces the likelihood of Democratic identification and significantly increases the strength of Republican Party identification.”

Not only is the daughter effect statistically significant, it’s substantively large. They found that overall, “compared to those with no daughters, parents with all daughters are 14% less likely to identify as a Democrat….[and] 11% more likely to identify as a Republican than parents with no daughters,” they write in the journal Sociological Forum.

The daughters effect is considerably stronger among better educated and wealthier parents, they find. But among those farther down the socioeconomic ladder, it weakens to statistical insignificance.

Pew Research via Breitbart tweet