That Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey were Republicans when they shattered baseball’s color barrier in 1947 is only surprising if you consider the changed GOP – after its Southern Strategy and unsubtle appeals to racism, leading to demonizing the first black president. But there was this other principled GOP, says Independent Institute’s Jonathan Bean.
Exclusive: A new poll says 44 percent of Republicans believe “an armed revolution” may be needed in the next few years “to protect liberties,” proof of the Right’s success in re-branding itself with Revolutionary War symbols and fueling paranoia about the elected national government, Robert Parry reports.
Special Report: Today’s Republican Party doesn’t believe in democracy, at least not when an election is decided by the votes of blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and young urban whites comfortable with multiculturalism. Then, the outcome is deemed illegitimate and deserves obstruction, as Robert Parry explains.
Though Republicans lost the popular vote for Congress by more than one million votes, they kept control of the House thanks to aggressive gerrymandering. Now, the GOP is using that “majority” to force spending cuts and obstruct work on vital issues like global warming, notes Robert F. Dodge.
Exclusive: Behind today’s fight over government spending is a bigger struggle for U.S. democracy’s future, pitting the traditional white-ruled country against a new multicultural nation, or the Right’s Real America against Other America. To win, Real America must make Other America fail, says Robert Parry.
Exclusive: Stung by back-to-back defeats to Barack Obama, the Republican Party is undertaking a national strategy to devalue the votes of blacks and other minorities, a partial revival of the infamous clause in the U.S. Constitution rating African-American slaves as “Three-Fifths” of a person, says Robert Parry.
Exclusive: House Speaker John Boehner warned his fellow Republicans that President Obama may be preparing “to annihilate” the GOP, surely an overly dramatic claim but one that marks a stunning reversal of fortune for swaggering Republicans who once dreamt of their own one-party state, says Robert Parry.
With a late-night vote, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a partial plan – negotiated by the Senate and the White House – to avert the “fiscal cliff,” but most House Republicans voted no, with Tea Partiers continuing to flaunt their nihilistic extremism, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.
The United States tends to view itself as the gold standard for democracy and bristles at international criticism of its electoral flaws. But recent corrosion of democratic principles, caused mostly by Republicans, has lowered the quality of U.S. democracy, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
Exclusive: President Obama’s reelection was a victory for him and the Democrats but also for the principles of democracy. The Republicans sabotaged the economy, sought to suppress the vote and flooded TV screens with attack ads, but young people and minorities led the way in rejecting these tactics, says Robert Parry.
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