Germany to quash historic convictions of gay men, pay compensation: minister

A reveller waves the rainbow flag during the Christopher Street Day parade in Berlin, June 23, 2012. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany plans to annul the historic convictions of tens of thousands of men charged under a law that criminalized homosexuality and to grant them financial compensation, the justice minister said on Wednesday.

The law originated in the 19th century, was toughened up by Hitler's Nazis and retained for decades in postwar West Germany, which used it to convict and jail some 50,000 men until 1969, when it finally decriminalized homosexuality.

German homosexuals who suffered under the law have had to live until now with the stigma of a criminal conviction.

"We will never be able to remove these outrages committed by this country but we want to rehabilitate the victims," Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement.

"The convicted homosexual men should no longer have to live with the black mark of a criminal conviction," said Maas, a member of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), junior partner in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition.

The move follows recommendations from Germany's Anti-Discrimination Agency which had commissioned a report.

A ministry spokeswoman said it was unclear when a draft law would be completed. It was also unclear how much financial compensation those men affected might receive or how much support Maas's plan might receive from Merkel's conservatives.

The Lesbian and Gay Association urged the government to act quickly to bring in legislation.

"Time is pressing for victims of homosexual persecution to get their unfair convictions lifted and see their dignity restored," Der Spiegel Online quoted the association as saying

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/germany-quash-historic-convictions-gay-men-pay-compensation-150234420.html?nhp=1

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Top Congo court says Kabila stays in power if election not held

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Democratic Republic of Congo's highest court ruled on Wednesday that President Joseph Kabila would stay in power beyond the end of his mandate if his government failed to hold an election due in November.

The ruling is a blow to the opposition, which had argued that an interim president should serve after the end of Kabila's mandate if the election was delayed.

Kabila took power in 2001 when his father, who was president, was assassinated, but is required by the constitution to step down in December after two five-year terms in office.

In Congo's second city of Lubumbashi, police fired tear gas on Wednesday at thousands of supporters of Moise Katumbi, a leading opposition candidate to succeed Kabila and who faced a second day of questioning over government allegations of hiring mercenaries.

The government has said the election to choose Kabila's successor is likely to be delayed due to budgetary and logistical obstacles.

"Article 70, clause two, (of the constitution) permits the president of the republic ... to remain in office until the installation of the new elected president," constitutional court president Benoit Lwamba Bindu said from the bench on Wednesday.

Opposition leaders say Kabila is trying to delay the election in order to hold on to power. He has declined to comment publicly on his intentions and called instead for a national dialogue to allow elections to take place.

(Reporting By Amedee Mwarabu Kiboko; Writing by Aaron Ross; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg and John Stonestreet)

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/congo-high-court-says-kabila-stays-power-polls-141619799.html?nhp=1

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European rights watchdog complains about Greek migrant camps conditions

People queue for free food at a makeshift camp for migrants and refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni, Greece, May 11, 2016. REUTERS/Marko Djurica

STRASBOURG (Reuters) - Urgent measures are need to address overcrowding and poor living conditions in refugee and migrant camps in Greece, Europe's top rights watchdog warned on Wednesday.

The Council of Europe, which brings together 47 countries, said some facilities were "sub-standard" and able to provide no more than the most basic needs such as food, hygiene products and blankets.

The report echoes warnings by other rights groups and aid agencies who say Greece has been unable to care properly for the more than 800,000 people reaching its shores in the last year, fleeing wars or poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

The Council described dire living conditions in several sites visited on a March 7-11 trip, just before the European Union and Turkey reached a deal that reduced arrivals but increased the number of people held in detention awaiting asylum decisions or deportation.

It said in its report that people who reached Greece were locked away in violation of international human rights standards and lacked legal access.

At Greece's Nea Kavala temporary transit camp, people were left burning trash to keep warm and sleeping in mud-soaked tents, according to the report.

The Council called for the closure of a makeshift camp in Idomeni, where some 10,000 people have been stranded en route to northern Europe due to the closure of Macedonia's border.

Germany has taken in most of the 1.3 million refugees and migrants who reached Europe across the Mediterranean in the past year, triggering bitter disputes among the 28 EU member states on how to handle the influx.

Europe's deal with Turkey last month gave its leaders some breathing space but has come under pressure since Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, one of the sponsors of the accord, stepped down.

The morality and legality of the deal has been challenged by human rights groups, however, and a provision to grant Turkish citizens visa-free travel to Europe in exchange for Ankara's help remains politically contentious.

In a separate report, a trio of European Parliamentarians on Tuesday described the poor conditions faced by people who have been returned to Turkey under the deal.

"We have seen how the migration policies imposed by the European Union have terrible consequences on the lives of thousands of people," said Cornelia Ernst, a German member of the European Parliament and a co-author of that report.

"Turkey has been hired as a deportation agency, putting into practice the migration policies designed in Brussels."

The left-wing deputies said on their May 2-4 visit to Turkey they had met people who complained of not being able to claim asylum in Europe, which would run counter to international humanitarian law.

They also described poor detention conditions, confiscation of private property and widespread difficulties in getting access to legal help or information, among other issues

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/european-rights-watchdog-complains-greek-migrant-camps-conditions-150528902.html?nhp=1

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Political Deadlock Leaves Lebanon to Unravel

BEIRUT—On the surface, Lebanon appears to be weathering the mayhem that has engulfed the Middle East surprisingly well. Despite dire predictions of sectarian strife spreading from next-door Syria, there has been relatively little violence. Fancy restaurants on Beirut’s seafront remain packed with diners, the streets clogged with traffic.

But it is also increasingly a country adrift, hostage to the regional conflict between Saudi Arabia, long a supporter of Lebanon’s Sunni political bloc, and Iran, sponsor of the Shiite bloc dominated by the Hezbollah militia. This zero-sum confrontation has translated into political deadlock—and the steady unraveling of the Lebanese state.

“It isn’t a failing state, it is a fading state. There is nothing left of it, just a shell,” said Ibrahim Shamseddine, a former Lebanese cabinet minister and a prominent Shiite politician independent of Hezbollah.

It has been almost two years that Lebanon has been without a president. The parliament has been unable to elect one because Hezbollah and its allies have boycotted the legislature’s sessions. The latest—38th—such attempt to hold the vote failed in April because of the lack of a quorum.
The parliament’s own term expired all the way back in 2013, and no national elections are in sight even though municipal polls are slated for this month. A Lebanese government, which unites all the main political forces, still exists. But the ministers have been unable to do much actual governing because important decisions require the elusive consensus.

“There is a desire to run away from reality.…It is kind of going into a suicidal process, which is unacceptable in a country that is a rare democracy in the Middle East,” said Ibrahim Kanaan, a prominent lawmaker from the Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun, one of two main contenders for the presidency.

While the political crisis hasn’t led to bloodshed—no major political force in Lebanon wants to replay the horrors of the 1970s and 1980s civil war—it already is suffocating economic activity.

Lebanon’s economy stagnated last year. It isn’t expected to do better in 2016, in part because of tensions with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, which have advised their citizens to vacation elsewhere to protest Iran’s rising influence in the country. This in turn is undermining the critical tourism and property industries.

National debt and the government deficit, meanwhile, have ballooned—a trend economists expect will continue as long as the political paralysis persists.

For a while, this deadlock was acceptable to many Lebanese political forces. Everyone was waiting to see how the war in Syria, the big neighbor that traditionally dominated Lebanese politics, would play out and how the outcome would affect the balance of power within Lebanon.
While it is far from over, Russia’s intervention to shore up President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been a vindication for Hezbollah, which has lost hundreds of fighters on the Syrian battlefields.

Hezbollah’s decision to get involved in Syria also earned it a degree of admiration from many Lebanese Christians, terrified by the prospect of Sunni Islamist radicals coming to power in Damascus, and even from some Sunnis.

“If Hezbollah had not gone to Syria, the war would have come to Lebanon, and we would have seen [Islamic State] all over our cities and towns,” said Kamel Wazne, a political analyst and director of the American Strategic Studies center in Beirut.

But it is far from certain that success in Syria, at the end of the day, would bring meaningful political gains for Hezbollah at home. For one, the Lebanese system, based on guaranteed shares of power for its 18 religious sects, is built to limit such ambitions.

“In the Lebanese formula of power-sharing nobody can get more than what they were getting originally. No one side can be able to be the dominant power,” said Yassine Jaber, a parliament member from the Shiite Amal party, a Hezbollah ally, and a former minister of economy.

But, in the absence of a functioning state, Hezbollah—the only Lebanese political force with a significant military muscle—is able to exercise de facto control over issues that matter to it and to its Iranian patrons.

Ghattas Khoury, a former lawmaker and an adviser to Saad Hariri, the country’s leading Sunni politician, pointed out that Hezbollah continues to impede a presidential election even though both leading candidates, who must be Christian, are from political forces aligned with it.

“The status of chaos that the Lebanese institutions are living in isn’t against Hezbollah and Iran, but against all the other Lebanese,” Mr. Khoury said. “At the present time, Hezbollah and Iran don't want a president at all. They enjoy the vacuum of leadership and power.”

Source : http://www.wsj.com/articles/political-deadlock-leaves-lebanon-to-unravel-1462440603

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Difficult Political Decisions Ahead For Clinton, Trump

As a veteran political operative involved in campaigns going back to 1976 I can say that each one is different but has similar characteristics. I also feel safe in saying that this year is probably more dissimilar from any campaign I have ever been associated with or witnessed over the past four decades. Like most other observers and pundits, I have written several times of Mr. Trump’s imminent demise only to be abruptly slapped in the face by the reality of the contemporary

exasperation, frustration and anger of an electorate that is as anti-establishment as any since the turmoil of the 1960’s.

The anger and frustration is legitimate and is not relegated only to the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party but significantly enough to the millennials who have flocked to the surprisingly strong candidacy of Bernie Sanders. What lies ahead at this juncture, assuming that both Trump and Clinton will succeed in wrestling their Party’s respective nominations away from the establishment in the former case and insurgents in the latter, is the extent to which either can cobble together a coalition of the disaffected and independents to put together a winning campaign in the Fall.

It is axiomatic in the last half century that candidates play to their bases during the primaries and pivot to the center for the general election. But will the bases that have proven so powerful in this environment allow either candidate to do so without exacting a price of nonsupport or even more troubling a vote for the other candidate? That seems to be the essential question as we prepare for the next phase of the 2016 Presidential election.

Trump is already having to deal with defections on behalf of prominent Republicans worried about down-ballot consequences which could put into play at the least control of the U.S. Senate and a possibility of the House of Representatives as well. There is discussion of the possibility of a vibrant Republicans for Hillary campaign and the unnaturally strong calls for Republican unity are a bellwether of the concerns facing the party.

Clinton is facing a rebellion by Bernie supporters who are so invested in their candidate that they may either sit out altogether or in an astounding development may even turn to Trump. How could that be?
Millennials who are actively involved in a Presidential campaign or an electoral campaign of any kind for the first time could be energized by the notion that change for change sake is in order. This, of course, is somewhat irrational given that change can be either positive or negative and the relative distance between Trump and Sanders on the ideological spectrum is as different as night and day. However, there is a danger that millennials are not so much driven by ideological fervor as by a revolutionary zeal that puts far more importance on replacing the status quo than upon the substantive policies represented by either candidate.

This could pose a devilishly difficult and prickly political dilemma for the Clinton campaign as it attempts to mobilize the diverse components of a coalition that is definitely tilted in their favor. If the election were determined on strictly ideological or policy positions it would appear to be a slam dunk for the Clintonites due to their historical strengths with both minorities and women. But the new dynamic of a frustrated populace thoroughly confounded by the performance and direction of both the major political parties could upset the proverbial apple cart here.

Trump truly has his finger on the pulse of anger and fears of the populace. Whether or not he can build off of that edge is as unknown as it is dangerous. He certainly has outperformed any and all expectations up to this point. Hillary needs to assuage the passions of youths that have gravitated towards a Democratic Socialist and/or attempt to sway what is left of moderate Republicans largely in suburban populations in the Northeast and Southwest. It is a daunting proposition to think that one could do both so there may come a point where she needs Bernie to rally his troops to her side or cast her lot with what four years ago would have been the loyal opposition.

The election as best as I can tell will be Hillary’s to lose, but once again Trump has been underestimated throughout the entire election experience to date. But it may be that what has truly been underestimated is the strength of disdain Americans feel towards their elected officials and governmental institutions at this point in time. Either way the strategic hallmark of this campaign will be how to deal with these seemingly contradictory conditions and if a decision is made to throw one under the bus, which one will it be?

Souce : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lance-simmens/difficult-political-decis_b_9860484.html

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Understanding terrorism: Attacks have a political logic, although they are usually ineffective, scholar says

The site of explosions in the suburb of Beir Hassan, Beirut, Lebanon, Feb. 19, 2014, where two suicide attackers from an al-Qaida-linked group blew themselves up. (Credit: AP/Hussein Malla)

Terrorism is clearly reprehensible. Yet media reports and politicians often present terrorist attacks as if they are less calculated than they really are.

Scientific research shows that this view is mistaken. Terrorism scholars have found that, leaving aside the question of immorality, there is an internal political logic to terrorist attacks — although they are frequently ineffective.

A lot of what people think they know about terrorist attacks is wrong. For starters, no one publicly claims responsibility for the vast majority of terrorist attacks.

This has long been an unsolved “puzzle in terrorism studies,” explained Max Abrahms, an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University, in an interview with Salon.

Scholars, Abrahms said, have traditionally conceived of terrorism as “a political communication strategy, that groups use violence to amplify their grievances, and the costs to the target countries of ignoring them.”

This interpretation flies in the face of a crucial fact: only roughly one in seven terrorist attacks is ever claimed. No group takes responsibility for approximately 86 percent of terrorism attacks.

Abrahms says his research hints why this is the case: Terrorist groups “are essentially rational political actors, especially at the top,” and usually only claim responsibility when they can politically gain from it.

For a long time, “terrorism researchers worked under the assumption that terrorist groups are unitary actors,” Abrahms said.

This idea, that terrorist groups are essentially homogeneous with all members motivated by the same goals, is flawed. Abrahms criticized this “very simplistic” approach, stressing “it’s more complicated than that.”

“Terrorist groups are actually diverse social units and are internally heterogeneous,” the scholar explained. There are many differences between those at the top of the organization and those at the bottom.

Leaders of terrorist groups are frequently “rational political actors,” Abrahms said, and in many ways operate like the heads of more conventional military units. Members of terrorist groups, however, “tend to be motivated by all sorts of complex motives.”

Rationality does not assume that people are engaging in moral activities, he emphasized, “all it assumes is that people learn based upon the predictable consequences of their behavior.”

Taking credit
Abrahms published some of this research in “The Strategic Logic of Credit Claiming: A New Theory for Anonymous Terrorist Attacks,” an article in the academic journal Security Studies.

The report was co-written with Justin Conrad, an associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Abrahms’ and Conrad’s study turns a lot of terrorism research on its head. “‘Anonymous’ attacks are actually the norm,” they note, and much of the scholarly “literature simply dismisses the fact that the lion’s share of terrorist incidents worldwide goes unclaimed.”

They cite fellow scholar Bruce Hoffman, who has argued that a serious study of the majority of terrorist attacks would “require re-thinking our most basic and longstanding assumptions about terrorism.”

Some scholars grapple with this by disposing of the notion that terrorist attacks are sometimes politically logical. Abrahms and Conrad insist otherwise, arguing instead that, “far from breaching the dominant scholarly view of terrorist groups as rational political actors, their patterns of credit claiming bolster it.”

“In practice, credit claims are typically issued by the leadership or at least with its consent,” they write. “When operatives strike a target, their leaders claim credit only if the expected political return is positive. When the anticipated political fallout is negative, leaders of the group are understandably reluctant to attribute the violence to their organization.”

Their research shows that “terrorist group leaders are significantly less likely to take responsibility for an attack when their operatives have struck civilians.”

“Attacks on military targets are not only more likely to be claimed by the leadership, but to evoke competing claims of responsibility from multiple groups,” the scholars add.

Abrahms has studied terrorism for more than a decade, and, through collecting data, he has found again and again that not all attacks are equally beneficial for militant groups.

Specifically, indiscriminate violence against civilian targets is almost always more harmful to the militant group than selective violence against military targets.

“Not all types of violence pay equally,” Abrahms told Salon. “Civilian targeting is genuinely counterproductive.”

Governments are less likely to grant political concessions to groups when they indiscriminately target civilians in terrorist attacks than they are to groups that selectively attack military targets.

Moreover, militant groups are, unsurprisingly, more likely to lose support among the civilian population when they attack civilians than when they attack military targets.

“In this sense, civilian targeting is counterproductive,” Abrahms said.

Over time then, the scholar noted, terrorist groups often move away from civilian attacks and toward military ones, “because leadership understands that their operatives are actually jeopardizing their political goal by striking politically sub-optimal targets.”

“ISIS is very anomalous in all sorts of ways,” Abrahms said, but al-Qaeda — the terrorist group off of which ISIS broke in early 2014 for not being extreme enough — is actually a more typical reflection of terrorist groups overall.

Abrahms details how his research provides insight into ISIS and al-Qaeda in another Salon article.

“Dying to Win”
In some ways, Abrahms’ and Conrad’s research is consonant with that of Robert Pape, a prominent terrorism studies scholar who revolutionized the field.

In his book “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, famously showed that terrorism is fundamentally political in nature, not religious.

Pape documented all known 315 suicide terrorism attacks around the world from 1980 to 2003 and carefully analyzed them. He found “little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions.”

“Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland,” Pape explained in the book.

The group that carried out the most suicide attacks, he found, was not even religious; it was a secular nationalist group, the Tamil Tigers.

Abrahms says he agrees with Pape on some of his findings, but disagrees with him on numerous issues, and has criticized him for years.

“I respect his work greatly,” Abrahms added. “My empirical research is very much a response to” Pape’s, he added. Yet Abrahms says his work uses much more data, whereas Pape’s is less quantitative.

“I have measured very systematically whether terrorism facilitates government concession,” and the data demonstrates that terrorist attacks are frequently ineffective, Abrahms maintained.

Both scholars agree that terrorism is a fundamentally political action with a kind of internal logic, yet Abrahms says the data shows that, overall, terrorism does not pay as an instrument of coercion, while Pape argues the opposite.

“Pape can’t explain which terrorist leaders don’t take credit for all their attacks, whereas my research can explain the variation in credit claiming,” Abrahms said.

“Takes seriously the empirics raises real questions about core theories within terrorism studies,” he stressed.

This article was written by Ben Norton from Salon and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

Source : http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/understanding-terrorism-attacks-have-a-political-logic-although-they-are-usually-ineffective-scholar-says/ar-BBsOfp6

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Unconventional #10: This year’s conventions won’t be ‘contested.’ Here’s why they could still be crazy

1. Why this year’s conventions could still be crazy — even if they aren’t ‘contested’

May 3, 2016, will go down in history as the day that every political journalist’s most feverish fantasy — the fantasy of a contested GOP convention in Cleveland — finally slipped out of reach.

With his commanding win in Indiana over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — and with Cruz’s and John Kasich’s subsequent decisions to suspend their campaigns — tinsel-haired mogul Donald Trump cemented his status Tuesday night as the Republican Party’s likely nominee.

Cruz’s supporters were shocked. As he delivered the news, cries of “No! No!” filled the Grand Hall Ballroom of Indianapolis’ Crowne Plaza Hotel. But in retrospect it appears that Cruz didn’t have much of a choice.

It’s not just that Trump clobbered Cruz 53 percent to 37 percent at the ballot box, surpassing his pre-primary polling average by 10 percentage points and securing at least 51 of the Hoosier State’s 57 prized delegates.

It’s that Trump’s poll numbers, which skyrocketed in the days before Indiana, had also been shooting up nationally (by 6 points in the past week alone, to 56 percent, according to the latest NBC News tracking poll) and in delegate-rich California (where Trump now leads by a staggering 26.4 points, on average).

This is what it looks like when a party coalesces around its nominee, and it put Trump on a glide path to hitting the magic 1,237-delegate mark by the end of the primaries, which in turn would ensure him a first-ballot nomination in Cleveland. All the Donald had to do was win the remaining states where he was favored (New Jersey, West Virginia), pick up some spare change in the less favorable states (New Mexico, Washington, Oregon), and not choke in California.

Cruz, on the other hand, needed to suspend the laws of gravity. He needed to reverse the tide. He needed to tear a hole in the fabric of space and time.

He accepted reality instead.

So what does Cruz’s exit mean for political journalists like us — and for political junkies like you? Does it mean that we have to abandon our dreams of convention drama, either in Cleveland or in Philadelphia?

Not a chance.

So far, the media has obsessed over the idea of a contested convention — the delegate bribing, the floor fight, the endless rounds of balloting. It makes for a romantic vision (and, not incidentally, great TV).

But actual contested conventions are extremely rare in contemporary American politics. In fact, every convention in the modern primary era has been decided on the first ballot — even the ones, like the 1976 GOP confab, that we tend to remember as “contested.” The last time it took Democrats or Republicans multiple ballots to settle on a nominee was in 1952, long before statewide primaries were the most decisive part of the process.

Far more common is what we might call the “conflicted convention.” These are conventions at which the nominee is basically known ahead of time, yet conflict ensues anyway. It could be because a rival with little chance of winning remains in the race in order to influence the party platform (as Gary Hart did in 1984); it could be because a distant runner-up is trying to change the rules and get pledged delegates released from their voting commitments (as Ted Kennedy did in 1980). Whatever the reason, conflicted conventions are anything but boring.

And the least boring — the most dramatic and combustible — of conflicted conventions is the kind likely to consume both Cleveland and Philadelphia this summer: conventions defined by deep divisions over the ideological direction of the party and passionate opposition to the presumptive nominee.

Both Republicans and Democrats have endured this kind of conflicted (if not contested) convention in the not-too-distant past.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey and his running mate, Maine Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Aug. 29, 1968. (Photo: AP)

In 1968, the Democratic Party seemed destined for a contested convention in Chicago. As antiwar candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy gathered steam, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from the race, anointing his loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to run in his stead. Kennedy competed in the primaries; the pro-war Humphrey chose to amass delegates through other means. Then, the night he won the pivotal California primary, Kennedy was assassinated.

The dream of a contested convention died with Kennedy. With the progressive vote divided between McCarthy and George McGovern, Humphrey arrived in Chicago as the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, and he wound up winning by more than 1,000 votes on the first ballot. But the convention was hardly drama-free: Inside the hall, Humphrey faced a major credentials fight, with delegations from 15 states attempting to unseat his delegates and install anti-Vietnam delegates instead. Hostile debates between pro-war and “peace” delegates broke out on national television. City policemen allied with the local political machine roughed up liberal delegates and journalists in plain view of news cameras. Behind the scenes, insiders maneuvered to get Ted Kennedy to run. And on the streets of Chicago, antiwar progressives staged massive demonstrations that soon escalated into riots. While the protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching,” police bombed them with tear gas and beat them with billy clubs, leaving many bloody and dazed.

Four years earlier, Republicans had endured their own conflicted convention — less traumatic, perhaps, but still tension-filled — in San Francisco. Described by historian Rick Perlstein as the “ugliest of Republican conventions since 1912,” the 1964 GOP confab saw entrenched moderates facing off against conservative insurgents in a fight that would eventually redefine the party. In the primaries, archconservative Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater vanquished his main rival, moderate New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, along with several lesser competitors. But moderate forces didn’t give up when the primaries ended. On June 6, they launched a movement to draft Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton. A week later, he announced his bid.

“Today the nation — and indeed the world — waits to see if another proud political banner will falter, grow limp and collapse in the dust,” Scranton said in his speech. “Lincoln would cry out in pain if we sold out our principles.”

“The hour is late,” lamented Rockefeller, “but if all leaders in the moderate mainstream of the Republican Party will unite upon a platform and upon Gov. Scranton, the moderate cause can be won.”

Scranton spent the next month holding massive rallies and trying to sway GOP delegates, with some success. According to a Harris Poll taken late that June, 62 percent of rank-and-file Republicans preferred Scranton to Goldwater.

The GOP delegates, however, did not agree. In San Francisco’s Cow Palace, they openly clashed with “Stop Goldwater” Republicans; a fistfight nearly broke out when a Goldwater supporter mocked Italian Americans. Meanwhile, “Goldwater devotees grew increasingly vicious as the days wore on,” as historian Josh Zeitz has recounted:

It “wasn’t just the galleries,” recalled one moderate attendee. “It was the floor, it was the hall. The venom of the booing and the hatred in people’s eyes was really quite stunning.”
A leader of the New York Young Republicans recalled the event as “horrible. I felt like I was in Nazi Germany.” No less a party stalwart than former President Dwight Eisenhower called the gathering “unpardonable. … I was deeply ashamed.”
In the end, however, the delegates awarded Goldwater an easy victory on the first ballot.

Sen. Barry Goldwater accepts the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, July 16, 1964, with a blast at the Democrats and a promise that “together we will win” in the November election. (Photo/AP)

It’s too early to say whether Cleveland or Philadelphia will look anything like 1964 or 1968. But many of the conditions this year are the same: the serious ideological rifts, the widespread antipathy toward the likely nominees, the sense that America is at a turning point.

Will Bernie Sanders — who upset Hillary Clinton last night in Indiana and is likely to win additional contests in the weeks ahead — threaten to withhold his support for Clinton unless the party’s platform and primary process are reformed? Will some daring Republican mount a William Scranton-like challenge to Trump in Cleveland? Will a third-party candidate emerge and scramble the entire equation?

Whatever happens, we’ll be covering it all right here in Unconventional.


2. What’s next for Ted Cruz and the #NeverTrump movement

With his wife Heidi by his side, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz suspends his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, May 3, 2016, in Indianapolis. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

By Jon Ward

National conservative leaders and activists who have held private meetings over the past month to determine if a third-party candidacy is viable know that their window of opportunity is effectively closed. In Texas, a third-party candidate would have to submit roughly 80,000 signatures of Texas voters who had not voted in either primary by next Monday. And that is not going to happen.

(Read the full version of this story here.)

Erick Erickson, a conservative radio talk show host and publisher who has been one of Trump’s most vocal critics, said Tuesday that there is growing resignation among some members of the group who have been meeting to discuss a third-party bid.

Erickson said that when the group convenes a conference call Wednesday, “my guess is the consensus is going to be, we can’t mobilize a third party to do much good.”

“A lot of people are thinking, let’s let this shake out and let there be a reckoning,” Erickson said.

But another person involved in the third-party talks was adamant that such work will continue to move forward.

“Conservatives against Trump will remain conservatives against Trump even if he gets the nomination,” the Trump opponent said. “We will be looking for every alternative to Donald Trump.”

The anti-Trump group is looking at how to provide a reason for NeverTrump voters to come out to the polls, to keep their votes for House and Senate candidates from going uncast. This could be a national write-in campaign, or a state-by-state patchwork effort.

But even an anti-Trump super-PAC, Our Principles PAC, signaled that if Trump is the nominee, they will not continue to oppose him. “We will continue to educate voters about Trump until he, or another candidate, wins the support of a majority of delegates to the convention,” said Katie Packer, the group’s chair.

And many influential Republican operatives behind the scenes gave up the cause of stopping Trump days ago, resigning themselves to his nomination.

“He appears to me to be an amoral, arrogant, divisive man. However, I think he has tapped into the desperate frustration of many Americans and just maybe could grow as a candidate and politician.” one Republican insider said.

In Cruz’s concession speech, he positioned himself for a future presidential run by referring to Ronald Reagan’s speech in 1976 after narrowly losing a contested convention to incumbent President Gerald Ford.

Cruz cast himself as a Reaganesque figure who he said looked past “the close horizons” that preoccupied those thinking only of “their own fortunes” and peered far ahead into the future, concerned for coming generations of Americans.

But the mention of Reagan and 1976 also raised questions about why Cruz will not continue his candidacy on to the GOP convention this year in Cleveland.

One adviser noted that dropping out was an attempt to be a team player for the Republican Party. However, a Cruz endorsement of Trump seems unlikely. The Cruz adviser, asked about the chances of such an endorsement, just rolled his eyes.

In the closing days before this primary vote, Cruz spoke in increasingly bitter terms about Trump.

He implied that Trump is “evil,” said that “we are staring at the abyss” and “it is only Indiana that can pull us back.” Cruz also called Trump a “serial philanderer,” a “pathological liar” and “amoral,” and said that voters should choose him over Trump because “we are not a petty, bigoted, angry people.”

Cruz still has 546 delegates bound to him on the first ballot at the Republican convention in Cleveland this July. He could use them to negotiate for input on the party platform, as many past presidential candidates in competitive primaries have done.

But his campaign is just now beginning to reckon with what to do next. Former Virginia Gov. Ken Cuccinelli, tasked with overseeing Cruz’s delegate operation, didn’t have an answer for what will happen to those 546 delegates.

“We’re not ready to talk about that,” Cuccinelli said.

3. Inside Sanders’ new campaign to transform the Democratic primary process

Bernie Sanders speaks at his “A Future to Believe In” rally in April, at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington, W.Va. (Photo: Sholten Singer/The Herald-Dispatch via AP)

By Liz Goodwin

At July’s convention, which he insists will be “contested,” Bernie Sanders plans to get his key policy goals, such as a $15 minimum wage and a ban on fracking, into the party platform. His even more ambitious goal is to transform the way the party picks its presidential nominee, to make it easier for a Sanders-like candidate to win in the future.

(Read the full version of this story here.)

First on the agenda is changing the primary system in each state so that independents and even Republicans can vote to pick the Democratic nominee. Sanders has done much better in these so-called open primaries than in closed ones.

“I think clearly the convention and the Democratic National Committee can change the rules and can create a scenario that makes it clear that we want open primaries in 50 states in this country,” Sanders told the Washington Post last week. He also said it’s time for the party to “rethink” its superdelegate system.

But can Sanders, who did not identify as a Democrat until this past year, convince Democrats to so dramatically change their own rules at their convention? The Clinton campaign clearly does not think Sanders has as much leverage as the thinks he does.

The former secretary of state laughed when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked her Tuesday about Sanders claims that the convention will be “contested” in July.

Meanwhile, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the DNC, said on MSNBC Monday that if anything, she would prefer to change all 50 primaries to be closed, not open.

“I believe that the party’s nominee should be chosen — this is Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s opinion — that the party’s nominee should be chosen by members of the party,” she said.

Another problem for Sanders: The convention is usually not the place where major primary rules changes happen. “Reforming the rules for the next primary season four years from now will probably not happen in a major way at the convention,” said former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a superdelegate who backs Clinton. “The Democrats generally make their rules two years ahead with a rules committee put together largely by the president’s people, if there is a Democratic president.”

Dean added that changing the primaries to be fairer is difficult because states can be stubborn about their processes. “Caucuses are even more undemocratic than closed primaries because they discriminate against Americans stationed overseas, the infirm and disabled, those in nursing homes, etc. Try getting caucus states to give up their status,” Dean said.

The former governor said it’s far more likely that the Democrats would rethink the role of the party’s superdelegates. Superdelegates, who are party officials and politicians, were created to act as a check against nominating a candidate too liberal to win general elections. But they’ve never functioned that way, instead just backing the candidate who won the most pledged delegates in each election. A move to officially change the rules so that superdelegates function the same as pledged delegates may gain traction. Delegates could appoint a committee to look into those changes at the convention, or pass a non-binding resolution to change that process.

Sanders has not made it explicit whether he will push for a floor fight on the rules at the convention or if he’ll just demand his fair share of delegates on the platform writing committee and other committees. Sanders’ top strategist Tad Devine did not respond to a request to comment about the team’s strategy.

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/unconventional-10-this-year-s-conventions-1421697039564854.html

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