Fascinating look at how Haiti became a critical wedge issue in the 1932 presidential election, allowing Republicans to keep African-American votes for FDR remarkably low. The story goes back to the US occupation of Haiti almost a century ago and how FDR, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, actually wrote the new Haitian constitution himself. Yes, FDR wrote the Haitian constitution! That fact and the US occupation itself came back to haunt him in 1932. Check it out – amazing chapter of 20th century history I was totally unaware of.
Tennessee legislature considering bill to shield Tennessee students from Islamic ‘indoctrination’.
Please join us for a discussion with J. Dana Stuster, a counterterrorism expert and journalist, who will be joining us in the Hive at 2 PM Eastern (sub req). Dana is a policy analyst at the National Security Network, and he’s written about the Middle East for publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and Defense One.
Alabama Governor Bentley (R) floating plan to reopen DMVs in Alabama’s ‘black belt’ after voting rights outcry.
As Hillary Clinton gets ready for the first Democratic nomination debate tonight and testimony before the ‘Benghazi Committee’ later this month, the tables are suddenly dramatically turned. Ever since ‘Benghazi’ got pulled into the maelstrom of the House GOP leadership debacle with former-future Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ill-considered frankness about the political priorities of the ‘Benghazi’ ‘investigation’, everything’s changed. There are calls for the committee to be disbanded. Everyone associated with it is on the defensive. And now suddenly there’s a former committee investigator suing over wrongful termination because he claims he refused to focus the entire investigation on Hillary Clinton.
The most notable change is the attitude of the Beltway press corps. After a year of peddling selectively leaked transcripts and hyperventilating over and repeating tendentious readings of unexceptional process stories, suddenly everyone is asking whether it could possibly be true that this was just a political witch hunt all along.
Whenever we have a spate of news on a highly polarized issue, I usually get at least one lengthy email from a reader who seems to confound the accustomed partisan and ideological alignments behind the issue. (Remember TPM Reader LC, the liberal cop from the greater New York metro region during the height of the Ferguson protests). This time it’s guns and TPM Reader JA, self-identified ‘liberal gun nerd’ from Austin, Texas. As preface, as I told JA privately via email, I disagree with his core premise, which is that gun control advocates are missing or passing up lots of opportunities for constructive compromise with responsible gun owners. As I noted, in my posts last week I think the last two decades have shown this is demonstrably not true.
Militia members look to stop takeover by white supremacist.
We kicked off our Prime membership drive on three weeks. And so far so good. But we need a lot of people who’ve always thought, “Yeah, I’ll sign up at some point” to take a couple minutes right now and join our club, our team. It’s not much: just a touch more than a pricey cup of coffee each month. ($50 annually; $4.99 monthly) As I noted, there are lots of features and site enhancements you get by joining Prime (more details on that here). But the best and most important reason is that it’s critical to the future of TPM – because TPM is that rare thing, a truly independent publication. There’s no big corporation behind us, no VC money, no generous philanthropist or foundation. We need to balance the books the old fashioned way. And to do that, we need a significant amount of our revenue to come from our readers. So can you stop for a moment, right now, and sign up? Just click right here. And from all of us, thanks.
Who do you think will win the Republican presidential nomination?
Since July we’ve been running an Insight Poll asking people who they believe will win the Republican nomination. As I’ve noted before, these are polls of center-left voters who rank as ‘opinion leaders’ or ‘influencers’ by a variety of metrics. In a sense, they’re the last people you’d look to for insight on who’s going to be the GOP nominee. But their opinions are valuable because, unlike Republicans, they have no dog in the fight. Since few if any of them are Republicans, they’re not biased by who they’d like to see win. For people who closely follow politics, they’re as close as you get to disinterested observers.