Why Many Californians & Latinos Support Hillary Clinton

From Steve Lopez at the L.A. Times

In Latino neighborhood, Clinton's experience counts

......................................

But first, from a previous Lopez column:

Hillary Clinton gets the vote of a woman who had Barack Obama in her backyard.

Yes, Vitello says, it helped that Clinton is female. But it was about more than either gender or race.

Obama's inspirational call for change was no match for the trench work Clinton is capable of. As a nurse, Vitello has studied with interest the national healthcare reform proposals by the two candidates, and she's found Clinton's a bit more to her liking and more realistic.

"I felt Obama was all surface, with no center," says Vitello, who also confesses that in her backyard, she found him a little too much of a lefty, leaning too heavily on government solutions to problems people should work out on their own.

One woman at that gathering complained that she had run up huge credit card debt trying to put her child through college. Vitello doesn't remember all of Obama's response, but she recalls her own thoughts:

Maybe the student needs to get a job first and consider starting at a less expensive college, and maybe the parent needs to know better than to put college on a credit card.

When I point out that Vitello switched parties because of a war that Clinton supported, she says:

"But Clinton made her decision based on what everyone else was saying at the time, and I can't blame her for her choice when I voted for George Bush."

......................................Back to the column on the Latino vote:

"It's not black or white, male or female, it's experience"

Nick Frousakis went to his grave in December, and one of his most loyal customers, Raul Sousa, followed him into the ground the very next day, old age doing both of them in.

"Nobody wants to sit there now," said Diego Romero, pointing to where Sousa used to hold forth at Jim's Burgers, State and 1st in Boyle Heights.

But the gang still shows up most weekdays to carry on the tradition despite the absence of Frousakis, a Greek-born businessman who had the good sense to put tacos up on the board next to hamburgers.

They drink coffee from Styrofoam cups. They soak up the sun. And they talk.

Life, death, sports, women, politics.

It was the last of those subjects I wanted to hear about last week. Latinos turned out as never before in the California presidential primary, accounting for 30% of the Democratic vote. As a group, Latinos sent an early valentine to Hillary Clinton, voting for her by a 2-1 ratio.

I wanted to know why, but first I had to find some Clinton voters. So which candidate did these guys like?

"Clinton," three men said in unison when I sat down Thursday.

"Clinton," said three different men when I took a seat at the same table Friday.

Altogether, four of the six said they had actually voted. One is a legal resident but not a citizen, and the other just didn't make it to the polls.

She should be held responsible, but that doesn't mean she's not the best candidate

The state's Latinos are overwhelmingly Democratic, and none of the Jim's crowd even considered voting for a Republican, even though Sen. John McCain supported a path to legal status for many illegal immigrants.

"They're for the greedy corporations," said retired landscaper Feliz Botello. "They don't care about us and our people."

He might get some disagreement from the estimated 10% of the state's Republican voters who happen to be Latino.

So why Clinton instead of Obama?

"El sabe menos [He knows less]," Roberto Luz, a mariachi, said in Spanish of Barack Obama.

"¿Que ha hecho, él? [What has he done?]," echoed Joaquin Vega, who used to run the auto repair shop across the street.

Most of the comments were similarly straightforward. It didn't hurt that L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa supported Clinton, said the men.

But if I had to list the top reasons the men liked Clinton over Obama or a Republican candidate, the order would go something like this:

She has more experience than Obama. The Clinton name is trusted. Times were good under Bill Clinton, and Hillary is cut from the same cloth. Too much money and too many lives are being wasted in Iraq while things fall apart at home.

Jaime Regalado of Cal State L.A.'s Pat Brown Institute told me by phone that some of Clinton's enemies on the right are seen as enemies of the Latino community, particularly on the subject of immigration. She was smart, Regalado said, to use Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in TV ads and link herself to the slain Kennedy's support for Cesar Chavez and farmworkers.

Regalado was surprised by just how strong the Latino turnout was. But in retrospect, he said, the gloomy economic news, the war and the possibility of ending Republican rule were something of a perfect storm, and Latinos were eager to make their voices heard.

"The last factor is that in the Latino community, as in all communities, there is a certain amount of prejudice," Regalado said, and some Latinos were probably more comfortable with a white woman than a black man.

Even a black man who said illegal immigrants should have driver's licenses and that immigrants can't be blamed for problems in some black communities?

Yes, and yes again.

"He's a very good speaker, and maybe he would be better than Clinton," said Vega, who agreed that younger Latinos seemed a little more inclined to connect with Obama. "But I like Clinton."

I pointed out to Vega, Bill Escarsega and Botello that they don't exactly come from a matriarchal culture. So how did these old-school caballeros suddenly get so comfortable with the idea of a woman in the White House?

"It's not black or white, male or female, it's experience," said Vega.

"My grandfather? Macho, macho, macho," said Botello. "My father? Macho, macho, macho.

"I don't believe in that B.S. anymore. You know why? I'm civilized. I went to school."

When the men talked about all the lives lost in Iraq, and Botello said his cousin was killed in combat, I reminded the kaffeeklatschers that Clinton had voted to support the war.

"And she should be held responsible," said Vega, but that doesn't mean she's not the best candidate.

"Bush lied," Botello charged. "Bush and Cheney lied to everybody, including Congress."

As we spoke, a Latin beat warped and wobbled out of a music shop across 1st Street, and a man came along pushing a battered old bicycle someone had just given him. It needed some love, he said, but it would be fine.

So who did he vote for?

"Clinton," he said immediately, and with that, the former first lady had swept the corner of 1st and State streets in Boyle Heights.

From the L.A. Times

Technorati Tags:
Latino Voters, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, California voters, Steve Lopez

Media Critique Worth Reading: Is CNN the Corrupt News Network?

Regarding Media / Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times

CNN: Corrupt News Network

A self-serving agenda was set for the Republican presidential debates.

Tim Rutten
Regarding Media

December 1, 2007

THE United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just can't afford to be sick with anything that won't be treated with aspirin and bed rest.

So, when CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this week for what is loosely termed a "debate," what did the country get but a discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying the Confederate flag?

In fact, this most recent debacle masquerading as a presidential debate raises serious questions about whether CNN is ethically or professionally suitable to play the political role the Democratic and Republican parties recently have conceded it.

Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday's debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN's performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent.

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind Wednesday's debate was that the questions would be selected from those that ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube, which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000 submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of selectivity, the questions -- whoever initially formulated and recorded them -- actually are theirs.

That's where things begin to get troubling, because CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue -- immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it's probably because you're included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country. We've got a pretty good fix concerning what's on the American mind right now, because the nonpartisan and highly reliable Pew Center has been regularly polling people since January on the issues that matter most to them. In fact, the center's most recent survey was conducted in the days leading up to Wednesday's debate.

HERE'S what Pew found: By an overwhelming margin, Americans think the war in Iraq is the most important issue facing the United States, followed by the economy, healthcare and energy prices. In fact, if you lump the war into a category with terrorism and other foreign policy issues, 40% of Americans say foreign affairs are their biggest concern in this election cycle. If you do something similar with all issues related to the economy, 31% list those questions as their most worrisome issue. As anybody who has looked at their 401(k) or visited a gas pump would expect, that aggregate figure has increased dramatically since Pew started polling in January. Back then, for example, concerns over the war outpaced economic anxieties by fully 8 to 1. By contrast, just 6% of the survey's national sample said that immigration was the most important electoral issue. Moreover, that number hasn't changed in a statistically meaningful way since the first of the year. In other words, more than nine out of 10 Americans think something matters more than immigration in this presidential election.

So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the majority of voters' concerns? The answer is that CNN's most popular news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist platform. In fact, Dobbs led into Wednesday's debate with a good solid dose of immigrant bashing. His network is in a desperate ratings battle with Fox News and, in a critical prime-time slot, with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. So, what's good for Dobbs is good for CNN.

In other words, CNN intentionally directed the Republicans' debate to advance its own interests. Make immigration a bigger issue and you've made a bigger audience for Dobbs.

That's corruption, and it's why the Republican candidates had to spend more than half an hour "debating" an issue on which their differences are essentially marginal -- and, more important, why GOP voters had to sit and wait, mostly in vain, for the issues that really concern them to be discussed. That's particularly true because that same Pew poll reported findings of particular relevance to Republican voters, the vast majority of whom continue to support the war in Iraq.

According to this most recent poll, a substantial number of Americans believe the surge is working. As Pew summarized their findings, "While Iraq remains a deeply polarizing issue across party lines, there has been improvement in how both Democrats and Republicans view the war. At the lowest point in February, barely half of Republicans (51%) said things were going well. Today, 74% of Republicans say the same. And while Democrats remain far more skeptical than Republicans, the proportion of Democrats expressing a positive view of the Iraq effort has doubled since February (from 16% to 33%).

"Independents' assessments of how the military effort is going remain far closer to the views of Democrats than of Republicans. Currently, 41% of independents offer a positive assessment, while half say things are not going well. In February, 26% of independents expressed a positive view of the situation in Iraq."

Those are significant swings of opinion, yet the poll also found that more than half of Americans still favor withdrawing American troops. That disconnect is a real issue for the GOP candidates, all but one of whom support the war. Unless we're going to believe that the self-selecting YouTube questioners were utterly different from the rest of American voters, it seems pretty clear that CNN ignored these complex -- and highly relevant concerns -- for an issue that served its ratings interests -- immigration -- or ones that made for moments of conventional television conflict, like gun control, which doesn't even show up in surveys of voters' concerns.

THIS is intellectual venality, but it pales beside the wickedness of using some crackpot's query about the candidates' stand on Biblical inerrancy to do something that's anathema in our system -- to probe people's individual religious consciences. American journalists quite legitimately ask candidates about policy issues -- say, abortion -- that might be influenced by their religious or philosophical convictions. We do not and should not ask them about those convictions themselves. It's nobody's business whether a candidate believes in the virgin birth, whether God gave an oral Torah to Moses at Sinai, whether the Buddha escaped the round of birth and rebirth or whether an angel appeared to Joseph Smith.

The latter point is relevant because CNN's noxious laundering of this question through the goofy YouTube mechanism quite clearly was designed to embarrass Mitt Romney -- who happens to be a Mormon -- and, secondarily, to help Mike Huckabee -- who, as a Baptist minister, had a ready answer, and who happens to be television's campaign flavor of the month.

Beside considerations like these, CNN's incompetent failure to weed out Democratically connected questioners pales.

In any event, CNN has failed in its responsibilities to the political process and it's time for the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties to take the network out of our electoral affairs.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

Why Democrats are raising a stink finally about something that matters

White House & Justice Department Indecisive: Reasons for / Genesis of Prosecutor Dismissals Keep Shifting

Accounts of Prosecutors' Dismissals Keep Shifting
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post

More than two weeks after a New Mexico U.S. attorney alleged he was fired for not prosecuting Democrats, the White House and the Justice Department are still struggling to explain the roles of President Bush, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other key officials in the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors last year.

Yesterday, the White House retreated from its four-day-old claim that former counsel Harriet E. Miers started the process two years ago by proposing the firing of all 93 U.S. attorneys.

"It has been described as her idea . . . but I don't want to vouch for origination," press secretary Tony Snow said. "At this juncture, people have hazy memories."

In addition, D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned as Gonzales's chief of staff Monday, disputed the reasons given for his departure in a statement issued through his attorney last night.

"The fact that the White House and Justice Department had been discussing the subject for several years was well-known to a number of other senior officials at the department, including others who were involved in preparing the department's testimony to Congress," according to the statement by Sampson's lawyer, Bradford A. Berenson.

Snow's comments mark the latest revision of the administration's account of the firings, which has shifted repeatedly over the past week as new e-mails and other evidence have come to light in response to congressional demands for information. The precise roles of Gonzales, presidential adviser Karl Rove and the president himself remain unclear, even as calls for Gonzales's resignation continue to mount.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) yesterday became the third GOP lawmaker to call for Gonzales's ouster, saying that "it would benefit this administration if the attorney general was replaced with someone with a more professional focus rather than personal loyalty" to Bush.

The White House rebuffed demands yesterday from the House and Senate Judiciary committees for more information on the firings, saying the administration needs more time before turning over additional documents or deciding whether to allow key White House officials to testify. The Justice Department announced that it will provide new documents to the committees Monday.

The developments capped a tumultuous and difficult week for Gonzales and White House officials, who have attempted to play down the importance of more than 140 pages of documents and e-mails released so far that show the White House was closely involved in an effort to remove a group of federal prosecutors based, in part, on their loyalty to Bush. Officials had previously described the dismissals as "performance related" and handled within the Justice Department.

Seven U.S. attorneys were fired Dec. 7, and another was let go months earlier, with little explanation from Justice Department officials, who later told Congress that the dismissals were related to the attorneys' performance in office. Several former prosecutors have since alleged intimidation, including improper telephone calls from GOP lawmakers or their aides, and have alleged threats of retaliation by a Justice Department official.

While the firings themselves initially prompted questions from Congress, a major issue for lawmakers has since become whether they were misled in testimony by Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, and subsequently in public explanations by Justice and the White House.

Administration officials have acknowledged in recent days that, in Gonzales's words, "mistakes were made," but have defended the dismissals as justified by the prosecutors' performance and management issues. They have denied partisan motives in any of the firings.

The e-mails released this week show that the Justice Department had advocated ousting up to 20 percent of the U.S. attorneys in early 2005 and that Gonzales had discussed the idea of the firings even before he became attorney general. Rove also expressed an interest in the status of the effort in January 2005.

One January 2006 memo written by Sampson attributed the initial idea to Miers. "Harriet, you have asked whether President Bush should remove and replace U.S. attorneys . . . " he wrote.

Many of the documents released over the past week were sent or received by Sampson, whose resignation, Gonzales and other Justice officials said, was prompted by his failure to tell others in the department about his contacts with the White House, leading to testimony by McNulty and others that may have been misleading.

Sampson disputed that version of events in his statement last night, saying he "felt he had let the attorney general down in failing to . . . organize a more effective political response to the unfounded accusations of impropriety in the replacement process."

Sampson's statement also suggested that his contacts with the White House were well known within Justice. If the contacts were not brought to the attention of McNulty and others, the statement said, it was "because no one focused on it or deemed it important at the time."

The Justice Department had no immediate comment last night.

The department announced earlier that Sampson would be replaced by Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney in Alexandria, who previously served in similar roles for former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

Snow and other administration officials previously said that Miers first suggested firing all U.S. attorneys after the 2004 elections, citing e-mails from Sampson and Rove's recollection of events.

Officials have said that Gonzales and Rove opposed that idea and that Justice embarked on a more limited effort that led to the firings of the eight U.S. attorneys.

Snow was asked yesterday whether Bush might have suggested the firings.

"Anything's possible . . . but I don't think so," he said, adding that Bush "certainly has no recollection of any such thing. . . . I want you to be clear here: Don't be dropping it at the president's door."

Democrats pounced on the latest shift in events.

"The story keeps changing, which neither does them or the public any good," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). "They ought to gather all the facts and tell the public the truth."

Democrats also criticized the White House for saying it needed more time to turn over records and decide whether senior aides, including Rove, should be allowed to submit to interviews with congressional investigators.

"The White House is playing a dangerous game of chicken," said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), chairman of a Judiciary subcommittee leading an investigation into the firings.

Washington Post staff writers Michael Abramowitz and Jerry Markon and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

---

From the LA Times

Why Democrats are raising a stink
Congressional investigations into the firing of U.S. attorneys are about checks and balances, not politics, says Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

By Dianne Feinstein

DIANNE FEINSTEIN is California's senior U.S. senator.
March 17, 2007

A FIRESTORM has been ignited over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, with new revelations about the Bush administration's abuses exposed on a daily basis. We now know that this isn't about some partisan "conspiracy theory" concocted by administration critics, as a Times editorial claimed on Jan. 26.

The record shows that this was a premeditated plan to remove U.S. attorneys and replace them indefinitely with others — who might not be qualified — without Senate confirmation. The means to accomplish this was a provision slipped into the 2006 reauthorization of the Patriot Act with no notice. The end result is a clear abuse of power that reaches into the highest offices of the Department of Justice and the White House, touching Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, former White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers and presidential advisor Karl Rove.

The way to curb this abuse is to return to our nation's basic principle that checks and balances on power are necessary and desirable.

That's why I have proposed legislation to restore the process that was in place before 2006, which would require Senate approval of every U.S. attorney. This legislation would allow the attorney general to appoint an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days when vacancies occur. If, after that time, the president has not sent a nominee to the Senate and had that nominee confirmed, the authority to appoint an interim U.S. attorney would fall to a local district court. This was the process put in place under the Reagan administration.

This legislation was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month with bipartisan support and will be debated in the Senate next week. Times editorials have called this legislation "misguided," but had it been in place, it would have prevented the abuses.

Let's review the facts:

• In early 2005, Miers, then the White House counsel, and Rove asked about the desirability of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys . They were told by Gonzales' staff that this would result in an unacceptable shock to the system.

• Nonetheless, top officials at the White House and the Justice Department hatched a plan to remove a smaller number of U.S. attorneys. One of the keys in the evaluation was whether the prosecutor showed loyalty to the administration.

• Gonzales' chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, advocated using the new Patriot Act powers and argued that the legislation would allow the Justice Department to bypass the checks inherent in the Senate confirmation process. He wrote that by avoiding the Senate, "we can give far less deference to home-state senators and thereby get (1) our preferred person appointed and (2) do it far faster and more efficiently, at less political cost to the White House."

• In June 2006, the first firing that we know of occurred, though it received little national notice. H.E. "Bud" Cummins III of Arkansas was forced to resign and was replaced with Timothy Griffin, special assistant to Rove.

• Finally, on Dec. 7, 2006, seven other U.S. attorneys were forced to resign by January. Five were involved in ongoing corruption probes. These prosecutors had received strong performance reviews by independent evaluators and some were originally judged — by the Justice Department's own subjective standards — to be among the top prosecutors who were loyal to the president and the attorney general.

Making a bad situation worse, the attorney general's justification for the firings has shifted over time.

At first, Gonzales flatly denied charges of wrongdoing when asked by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I would never, ever make a change in the United States attorney position for political reasons," he said. It was later revealed that Cummins' removal was political.

Later, the administration's justification became "performance-related" issues, and finally, a "loss of confidence" in these U.S. attorneys.

It is absolutely critical for Congress to restore the approval process in place before 2006. This is the only way to ensure that another administration doesn't travel down the same path.

We also must determine the role played by key White House officials and Gonzales, who has "taken responsibility" for the matter but also said that he did not know what was going on. Five out of eight of the fired U.S. attorneys were involved in investigations into public corruption. What signal does it send to other U.S. attorneys about investigating matters of corruption involving public officials, particularly if those officials are of your own party? It creates a chilling effect.

I recognize that U.S. attorneys are political appointments, but their appointments should require Senate confirmation. And once these prosecutors take the oath of office, they are responsible to the people of the United States — not just the president — and they must be independent and objective.

Valerie Plame Wilson Testifies Before Congress

American Hero: CIA Agent Deliberately Outed by Bush Cheney Rove Libby Republican White House Valerie Plame Wilson a former covert CIA agent working on intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was the target of a systematic outing by — not a foreign terrorist jihadist entity or Al Qaeda or a hostile foreign government — but by our very own United States Government, specificially the Bush-Cheney White House in collaboration with right-wing pundit and apologist Bob Novak. Why? Because the republican administration did not like being criticized by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson for faking intelligence and lying about the reasons they misled the nation into the illegal Iraq War and invasion.


Proudly doing the devil's work:
Tom Davis of Virginia -- another republican right wing member of Congress working extremely hard to continue the White House and repugnacon smear of Valerie Plame -- protecting and covering for Rove, Bush, Cheney, Libby, Bob Novak and all those republicans and their hacks who outed covert, classified, undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. Davis and the other republican members continue to distort the facts of this troubling crime despite the facts and reality.

Congressmember Sarbanes:

"Administration of Bullies"

"Arrogance of Power run amok"

"Petulant behavior on their part"

"Orchestrated effort" to out a covert CIA agent

Chairman Waxman:

"Did Bob Novak or Karl Rove or Mr. Cheney or President Bush or anyone from the administration call and apologize to you for the damage done to your career and the danger to you and your family?

Valerie Plame Wilson:

"No, Mr. Chairman"

Meanwhile on Spit(Hard)ball with the preferred and highly superior David Gregory, (substituting for the stupidly rude, loud, bully, blowhard and sycophant in residence), Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times has finally and completely relinquished his 'official journalist press' card — he has shed any false or actual sense of responsibility as a fact-based journalist/analyst and has fervently donned his McCain-Republican Talking Points Toady Hat.

With a mostly straight face Brown-nose declared today's hearings in the House to not serve much purpose in scoring political points/advantage. He was concerned with crass political posturing versus history being corrected, facts being found and truth being told.

Thumbs Down, Jeers and Hall of Shame Award goes to Ron Brownstein; you can pretty much write him off and check the Right-wing Republican publicist column (in great cowardly company with Robert Novak) — he'll have to do something massively important to redeem himself if this is his new hack, no P.R, er wait .... writing/reporting path.

On the other hand, Matt Cooper, one of the journalists to whom Rove and the White House Traitors leaked Plame's identity/name seemed to understand the serious historical value of these hearings and to confirm the public's right to know about the smear tactics and mendacious antics of this Shrub-Loyalty-Above-the-Constitution White House/administration.