My sense is Obama receives more race-based votes than he is denied, negating the prejudiced dullard factor altogether. Call it naivety, but I honestly believe that racism is a dying ember. It never ceases to amaze me just how much things have changed in my lifetime, especially among white folks. But hey, that's just my two cents.

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JustAsking: go over to the thread entitled, "Will the O's Fred Stickel allow a hateful anti-Muslim DVD to be distributed with Sunday's Oregonian".

Just click on the Comments tab to get an array of the day's maunderings. You will see the thread there. I hope you post links and research. Follow the links in a couple of the posts, for they will tell you who is behind the creation of the DVD, as well as some information as to how it is linked to the maneuverings of the election.

Lets parse this pablum:

My sense is Obama receives more race-based votes than he is denied,

Translation: More racists blacks will vote their race-based votes for Obama because he is black than racists non-blacks will vote for McCain because he is white, and not black like Obama.

Both actions are equally racist, and therefore should be equally shunned.

negating the prejudiced dullard factor altogether.

Opps. Unless you are Brian C., who feels that the white racists are "prejudiced dullards" but makes no similar criticism of black racists.

Call it naivety, but I honestly believe that racism is a dying ember.

Yes, it should be called naivety. That you claim the amount of racist voting for Obama just because he is black (maybe even a clean black according to Sen. Biden) may be greater than the racists voting against Obama and for McCain, just because Obama is black and McCain is white, shows that racism is NOT a dying ember. Racism has actually increased. But it is the liberal, fashionable racism of black against white.

It never ceases to amaze me just how much things have changed in my lifetime, especially among white folks. But hey, that's just my two cents.

It does amaze me just how some people can criticize racism by one group against another group based only on the color of their skin (white against black), but then condone the exact same behavior by another group, again based only on the color of their skin.

Hypocritical?

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Larry, your argument is off-base because you are implying that black Americans are not voting for McCain on account of his skin color. I'm also going to guess that your parents and grandparents were never denied the vote, or admission to a hotel or restaurant, on account of their skin color. Memories are long and stories get passed down from one generation to the next. It's going to be another 50 years, roughly, before there are no Americans with living memory of Jim Crow laws in the South and other forms of institutionalized discrimination in the rest of the US.

Larry, your argument is off-base because you are implying that black Americans are not voting for McCain on account of his skin color

So the other argument is also off-base because it implies that white Americans are not voting for Obama on account of his skin color?

You are, of course, correct Joel dan walls. My argument is off-base.

But I also believe that the counter argument (if Obama does not win, American is by definition, a racist nation) is also off-base. There are many reasons to not vote for either candidate, not just the color of his skin.

Let's be clear here, the Bradley effect is the purported polling responses of white voters who say they will vote for the AA candidate but are secretly planning not to, because they are racist and don't want to acknowledge it.

The change suggested here is not that racism has gone away but that people are more honest in their polling responses. I happen to think that these days people who plan to vote against Obama because of race are more likely to announce it, but veil it in other justifications, like the lie that he is Muslim.

I have heard anecdotal reports of a "reverse" Bradley effect, where people are intending to vote for Obama but inclined to keep it to themselves because they think peers might think they are weird or strange for voting for an African American candidate for president, particularly those who are in the senior population. It is notable since the Wall St. worries that there is a discernible shift in the senior population moving towards Obama because of financial insecurity and McCain's plans to put soc. sec. into Wall St. In the world that seniors grew up in, and I am a "senior" on the younger side of geezerhood, the idea of an AA president was unthinkable.

I'm not so sure the "bradley effect" is gone. In two separate conversations with two separate neighbors over the past three weeks (one a 40 yr-old white male & the other a 33 yr-old white male), they both said they thought Obama would do a good job as prez. Yet, both of them were still uncomfortable with him. And my neighborhood is NE, with a definite plurality of progressives.

Regardless of why the Bradley Effect has diminished, here is one reason I hope this data gets significant attention: it is a critical defense against election fraud. Why? Because the easiest way to cover up the fraudulent counting/aggregation of electronic votes is to say "Well, of course Obama got a lower percentage than the polls were showing. It's the Bradley Effect."

Eliminate the Bradley Effect as a rationale, and it becomes much harder to justify vast discrepancies between polls and official results.

I do not think that AAs are racists. They may make decisions on factors that include the racial factor but that's racialism not racism.

I think I understand your points.
AAs are not racists.
AAs include some who are racialism-ists.

Whites who won't vote for an AA (ever) are not thinking racially, but racist-ally.

So may I add: Some, but not all, Whites are racistacally racist. All Whites could sometimes think racially, but behave either anti-racially, racialismly, or rascally. AAs never behave racially, but only based on the color of people's skin.

I would love to see the Bradley effect take place in Alaska. Obama was leading by 5 until McCain selected Sarah Palin, but Palin is not helping other Republicans in Alaska now. Wouldn't be nice if people are saying they are going to vote for McCain/Palin because they are afraid of her vindictiveness, but in the privacy of the voting booth, they go the other way?

I absolutely agree with the noteworthy talk of african american family now REALLY feeling the power of potential enfranchisement. High time.

HOWEVER -

"I do not think that AAs are racists. They may make decisions on factors that include the racial factor but that's racialism not racism."

?????????????

Generalisations serve nobody any good. Internalized racism shows its body in the inability to simply identify HUMANS behaving in the different heirarchical and/or categorizing ways we do analyze, organize, behave. This might sometimes include some "AA"'s being "racist". Others do it too. Big surprise. Let's talk AI's if you like, to drain some of the volatility out of the topic.

Shall we get our heads out of the generalities? THey aren't very informative, and, indeed, offend those of us of all stripes striving to be HUMANS.

The myth is that people won't say that they won't vote for a black person. The truth is that the exit polls were correct. Bradley actually won, but the election was fraudulently reported. Sadly, Bradley never contested it, though I believe he knew it.

<h2>I was living in California when Bradley lost to Deukmejian in the early 80s. That was a crooked election long before anyone was paying attention to ballot fraud. When the polls close in CA, the immediately reported results are from absentee ballots mailed in earlier and some hand delivered to the Registrar-Recorder. They cannot be from the precincts, because it takes a couple of hours for the poll workers to do their paperwork and the sealed ballot boxes to get to the polls. (These boxes are now returned to the RR with oversight, which was not true then.) We went to bed having been told that Bradley was the winner. In the morning, the announcement was that Deukmejian won, supposedly because of counting the absentee ballots during the night, but they were already counted during the day and announced at 8 pm when the polls closed. The truth is that the counting software in CA counties has been fixed for decades, and the many dead, duplicate and nonexistent voters have voted since the CA Elections Code revision in the late '70s. The companies counting for the smaller counties have had no oversight. Los Angeles County writes its own counting software. No copy of the counting software is escrowed by a neutral third party, which is the law in CA, but no appropriation has ever been made to carry it out. There continues to be no oversight of the registrations, many of which are fraudulent. The state has yet to get the counties to comply with the new federal elections laws to make sure the registrations are valid and purge the bad ones. The US Dept of Justice refuses to enforce the federal laws. The Insitute for Fair Elections has tried to get the USDOJ to enforce, but they refuse. I am an attorney licensed in CA and VP Legal of the IFE.</h2>