When the Republicans went bad (audio)

Ashley Wells, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; Mitch Jeserich (L&P, KPFK.org, L.A., KPFA.org, Berkeley, 2-2-15), historian Prof. Heather Cox Richardson, Boston College

But how do we get women to vote for our Southern Strategy against blacks, against their own interests, against kids, against workers, against the environment? We have to seduce them (Tom Tomorrow/thismodernworld.com).

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I wanted to call myself a Republican

Movement conservatives hate this book, but others year for their original, moderate, progressive party. It has been attacked by the National Review and Wall Street Journal, but most level headed people will be shocked by the big turn around of the "Grand Old Party" (GOP) with its love of big military, big business, big racism, and big spying. But many Republicans innocently say these are Democrat evils. Meanwhile, both parties are united in eradicating any viable third party that tries to rise up against their money-in-politics system.

• LISTEN NOW: L&P, KPFK, L.A.'s Pacifica free speech radio, Monday, Feb. 2, 2015 10:00 am (Archive.KPFK.org)

Maybe Hitler and Cheney had a point, that's all I'm saying. Obstructionist-politics suck when we in the GOP can run this whole game ourselves without Barry and Biden playing along!

 

A History of the Republican Party

Reviewer Beverly Gage (washingtonpost.com)

A History of the Republican Party

Here’s a good rule of thumb for studying the history of American political parties: Forget what we know about the present.

A century ago, Republicans were likely to be the country’s big-government progressives, its advocates of civil rights and social reform. Democrats were often small-government conservatives, especially in the one-party stronghold of the Solid South.

The electoral map looked radically different, with a swath of blue below the Mason-Dixon line and a block of red in the Northeast. Just about the only things that have stayed the same are the party names: Democrat vs. Republican [two sides of the same gold coin], locked in eternal electoral combat.

 

In To Make Men Free, Boston College historian Prof. Heather Cox Richardson sets out to tell half of the story about how we got from there to here. “The journey,” she notes, “has not been straightforward.”

This party will make MEN free! We women can wait and stay in our place with blacks.

The book offers a lively survey of Republican politics in all its diversity, from the “transformational presidency” of Abraham Lincoln (to borrow a 21st-century term) to the conservative ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. Along the way, Prof. Richardson aims to counter the claims of today’s tea party diehards, who insist that anyone to the left of Rand Paul is a RINO (“Republican in Name Only”).

She makes a simple point but one that bears repeating: The Republican Party has had a long tradition of government activism, moderation, and racial egalitarianism. The question of the 21st century is what happened to it.

 

Science is wrong. (The Republican Brain)

As Prof. Richardson notes, the Republican Party’s first years were arguably its finest, at least as measured in terms of legislative accomplishment. Under Lincoln, Republicans helped to establish the nation’s first income tax, its first civil rights laws, its first federal draft and large-scale army, and its system of land-grant universities, in addition to passing the Homestead Act and winning the Civil War.

Over the next century, Republican presidents continued this record of innovation. Theodore Roosevelt championed new labor laws and established food and drug regulation. Dwight Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system and poured money into public schools. More

Bravo! Sexist white power (KFI AM)