Lee Atwater, the late Republican operative, is described by his numerous detractors as the godfather of contemporary xenophobic dog whistles to the baser instincts of a vastly Caucasian political party.  Atwater made his professional bones as chief dirty trickster for the 1978 U.S. Senate candidacy of his own godfather——fellow South Carolinian Strom Thurmond , a white supremacist who secretly fathered a child with a  black housekeeper.

As President Obama and his campaign team know, the Buffett Rule -- officially the Paying a Fair Share Act -- is a powerful symbol of many Americans' desire for economic justice and reprisal against the richest 1 percent that has arguably cached the country's wealth for itself.  So it's only rational that Obama would bring it into focus as the primaries shift to the two-man  race for the presidency. 

Burlingame, CA -- The Republican party’s desire to appeal to Latino voters is a matter of survival. Nearly 22 million Latinos in the United States are eligible to participate in this year’s election—the most ever, and up by more than 2 million since 2008. But Republicans don’t have the best track record for getting Latinos, or any minority group candidates, in office. There are no Latino, Asian or Black Republicans serving in the state’s Senate, Assembly or congressional delegation.

Colorblind racism is the new normal in American conservative political thought. Well after the election of the nation's first African-American president, in 2012 Republican candidates are using egregious signals and dog whistles to incite racial divisiveness as an effective tool for political gain. But when confronted about the nature of their offensive rhetoric, the answer is either an innocuous denial or dismissive retort.

Mitt Romney made his first attempts to gain critical support from Latino voters this month, but failed to confront his own negative record on issues of high priority to Latino voters. During a primary race stop in New Hampshire Jan. 9, he spoke of the need to "convince more Latino Americans to vote Republican" if the GOP wants to be competitive in November against the Democrats and Barack Obama, who is already campaigning for re-election.

It was an Iowa caucus night that came down to the wire, with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum running neck-and-neck for first place in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination. At 1:36 a.m. Wednesday, the Republican Party of Iowa declared Romney the winner by just eight votes over Santorum, the dark-horse candidate who ran his campaign on a shoestring budget. 

From New America Media: Things got worse for GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul when his rival Newt Gingrich recently called him out for purportedly using racially inflammatory language in official fundraising newsletters during the 1990s. The newsletters in question brought in a considerable haul of cash for Paul, a longtime politician and presidential candidate. His half-baked racial scribbles are by now well known: He’s bashed Blacks for being chronic welfare grifters, thugs and lousy parents. 

From New America Media: Romney’s record on diversity as Massachusetts governor gives a strong hint of what his White House would look like. When it came to appointing minorities and women to judicial posts, his record was atrocious. The Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association repeatedly lambasted him for his near-exclusive white male state house. Romney, partly in response to the public pounding and partly with an eye on a presidential run where he knew his state record on diversity would be closely scrutinized, made a slew of appointments of minorities and women to the state bench in his last year in office.

 

From New America Media and ColorLines: Can GOP voters stomach a presidential candidate who talks about undocumented immigrants without calling them “illegals”? Such are the questions the Republican party has been grappling with in the days since Newt Gingrich, the GOP’s most recent frontrunner, broke away from the pack during CNN’s national security debate last Wednesday and uttered a fairly startling set of words on immigration.

From New America Media: President Barack Obama asserted his commitment to achieving comprehensive immigration reform should he be re-elected in 2012. “I will make this a prominent part of my campaign and I’ll talk about it extensively,” Obama vowed. In a recent White House meeting with media reaching the Latino community, he stressed, “It’s going to be hard to have a more clear contrast between what the Republicans stand for on a whole range of issues and what I stand for and Democrats stand for.”