“This grandfather was reading to his grandchild, and he said, ‘We’re going to read fairy tales.’ And the grandchild says, ‘Does every fairy tale start with ‘Once upon a time?’’ And he said, ‘Most of them start like, ‘If I’m elected, I will …’’”

Healthy laughter erupts at Iowa state Capitol

Kate Garst and Diana Lopez don’t know each other, but they sure know how to make each other laugh.


They met in the rotunda of the Iowa Capitol this afternoon by chance, and within moments were leaning into one another like old friends – Garst’s booming laughter echoing off all the marble and Lopez’s teary eyes clamped tight against a giggle just this side of hyperventilation.


Lopez, a state Department of Revenue employee, and Garst, a retired doctor, just happened to be at the Statehouse in time for Laugh Out Loud Day, an effort by Iowa’s Healthiest State Initiative to spread the health virtues of laughter.


Usually when people think about improving health, they think about diet and exercise, said Liz Cox, a project manager for the Healthy State Initiative. But just as important is emotional health – and laughter can go a long way to improving it.
“We all understand that laughter is fun, but it also lowers your blood pressure, and a good belly laugh uses every muscle in your body,” Cox said.


It’s particularly powerful as a stress-reliever, and reducing stress is a major component of emotional health.


“There’s really three good ways to metabolize stress, and laughter is one of them,” Cox said. “If you take time to de-stress and have a laugh, it energizes your brain.”


(The other stress relievers are sleep and exercise.)


Perhaps a hundred state employees, West Des Moines schoolchildren bystanders and onlookers took time to laugh and de-stress at the Capitol event, where Gov. Terry Branstad read and signed a proclamation announcing April 2 as Laugh Out Loud Day in Iowa.

Buttons the Clown "shines" Gov. Terry Branstad's shoes at Laugh Out Loud Day at the Iowa Capitol

Clowns from Korn Patch Klowns wandered through plying the crowd with balloons, silk flowers and oversized coins. Buttons the Clown even shined Branstad’s shoes – with a flashlight.


Third graders from Phenix Elementary School in West Des Moines – invited as the reigning winners of the healthiest schools in Iowa contest – batted beach balls around the rotunda, and then were led in a fitness routine by state Department of Public Health employees dressed as fruits and vegetables.


State Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, wandered through at one point, and paused to gaze out over the crowd of clowns, children and TV cameras.


“There must be some snide political comment I could make,” he said, without much of a smile on his face. “But I’ll refrain.”


When Branstad appeared, he didn’t wear a goofy hat or a big red nose, but he did tell a joke:

“This grandfather was reading to his grandchild, and he said, ‘We’re going to read fairy tales.’ And the grandchild says, ‘Does every fairy tale start with ‘Once upon a time?’’ And he said, ‘Most of them start like, ‘If I’m elected, I will …’’”

That won applause, and not a few laughs.


“I’m not the greatest joke-teller,” Branstad said through the cheers, “but I thought that was pretty good.”


In addition to Monday’s Capitol event, the Healthiest State Initiative — which aims to make Iowa the healthiest state in the country by 2016 — is circulating information sheets on boosting laughter at school, at colleges and universities, in the workplace and even at church.


The efforts appear to build on an already high level of jocularity and emotional health among Iowans. The Gallup-Healthways state Well-Being Index, which the initiative is using to measure the state’s healthiness, rates Iowa eighth in the nation when it comes to emotional health.


The real laughter on Monday got going after Branstad’s joke and after he read his official proclamation. In a calamitous blast of cheers, cowbells, plastic hand-clappers and real hands clapping the crowd erupted in real laughter that bounced off the walls and infected even the stoniest of Capitol faces.

State employee Diana Lopez, left, and retired doctor Kate Garst share a laugh at the Iowa Capitol during Laugh Out Loud day.

No laugh was as loud as Garst’s.


The Des Moines doctor was in the Capitol by chance – she had come by to pick up a plaque her family received after donating land to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. But once in the midst of the rotunda rabble, she was overcome by a long chain of ha-ha-ha-ha quartets, broken only by gasps for air.


“I can’t stop!” she said between guffaws.


Standing next to her was Lopez, the Revenue employee, who was driven almost to tears by Garst’s exuberance.


“You greatly made me laugh, and I needed it,” Lopez told Garst once they’d calmed down. “We’re just out on our walk and thought we’d stop in for a good laugh.”


As a doctor, Garst said she could vouch for the healthful effects of laughter, but she also knows from personal experience. She retired from her medical practice after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she said, and laughing both at herself and at her disease has been hugely therapeutic.


“During the worst periods of my life, laughter and the ability to laugh at myself and the horror of my situation” – she broke into quick ha-quartet – “has got me through,” Garst said.

Active voters totals DOWN in Iowa from March to April - Republican active voters, however, are now greater than Dems in the state. Foreboding well for God's Own Party? Independent active voters still the largest cohort, so, I'd say, "NO."

Iowa GOP voter registration surpasses Democrats 

for first time in six years

After an effort to clean up the voter registration rolls, the GOP has ended up with a nearly 4,000 voter advantage over Democrats in Iowa after being down about 3,000 last month.

It’s the first time Republicans have been ahead of Democrats in active registered voters in about six years, records show.

The news prompted Iowa GOP Chairman A.J. Spiker to tweet: “Iowa Turns Red!” But Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky noted Iowa is still a purple state – independent voters still outnumber both political parties.

New data published today by the Iowa Secretary of State shows there are 611,990 active registered Republicans and  607,999 active registered Democrats. That means the GOP is ahead by 3,991 voters, according to records updated through the end of March.

But the records also show that each political group – Democrats, Republicans and independents – lost numbers between last month and this month, records show. Republicans just lost fewer than Democrats.

The shift follows a “maintenance effort” by Republican Secretary of State Matt Schultz in February and early March. The effort to improve the accuracy of the voter rolls used post cards to confirm voters’ addresses and voting status. Those with an unverified address were bumped from the active rolls.

Last month, Democrats had a slim lead, with 3,325 more active registered voters than Republicans.

July 2006 was the first time Democrats had been ahead since 1994, The Des Moines Register reported at the time. On Aug. 1, 2006, there were 606,168 active registered Democrats statewide and 590,165 Republicans.

The year 2006 was when the Democrats took control of the Iowa Senate and Iowa House, and Democrat Chet Culver cruised to victory in the governor’s race.

There are currently about 9,800 more active registered Republicans in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, where two incumbents, Democratic U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell and Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Latham, are battling it out in a tight race.

And Republicans have a deep advantage – more than 46,000 active voters – in the 4th Congressional District, where newcomer Christie Vilsack, a Democrat, is trying to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King.

All in all, the new registration numbers reflect Iowa’s trend back from blue to purple, but this isn’t a slam dunk for Republicans, political operatives said. The GOP caucuses prompted thousands of independent voters to move Republican. GOP operatives said they hope Iowa only grows redder before the November general election.

Dvorsky, the Democratic party leader, said Iowa Democrats remain excited about reelecting President Barack Obama, but independents dominate Iowa. Recent polling shows independent voters, especially women, “abandoning Mitt Romney,” she said. The latest USA Today/Gallup poll shows Romney trailing Obama among women by more than 18 percent in battleground states, including Iowa, she pointed out.

Here’s the statewide shift in the last month:

March: 

Active Rs: 626,901Active Ds: 630,266Active independents: 701,941 

April: 

Active Rs: 611,990 (down 14,911)Active Ds: 607,999 (down 22,267)Active independents: 678,704 (down 23,237)

Joe [Baegent] often said that the Internet allowed him to find his voice. But I would argue that Joe always had his voice, and that what the Internet did for him was to permit him to find a readership. Once his essays started appearing on various websites, Joe soon gained a wide following for his forceful style, his sense of humor, and his willingness to discuss the American white underclass, a taboo topic for the mainstream media.

APRIL 02, 2012

8

The World According to Bageant

Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball

by KEN SMITH

This essay is excerpted from the introduction to Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: the Best of Joe Bageant, published by Scribe.

“I’m so damn average that what I write resonates with people”, Joe Bageant once told an interviewer in explaining how he had gained a global following for his essays published on the web. In 2004, at the age of 58, Joe sensed that the Internet could give him editorial freedom. Without gatekeepers, he began writing about what he was really thinking, and then submitted his essays to left-of-center websites.

Joe Bageant died in March 2011, having written two books, and 78 essays that were posted on his own website and also on many other sites. The 25 essays reproduced in this book were first published on the web. I’ve selected them based on many emails from readers, web traffic counts, and specific suggestions from his online colleagues. They appear here as Joe wrote them, apart from copyediting and light corrections agreed to between me and his book editor, Henry Rosenbloom, the publisher at Australia’s Scribe Publications.

Joe began writing for various publications in his twenties. He once told me how happy and proud he was when he sold his first article to the Colorado Daily, unashamedly recalling how he got tears in his eyes as he looked at a check for $5. It was only five dollars, but it was proof that he had become a professional writer. Joe freelanced articles for a dozen years, mostly writing about music, but also writing profiles of people such as Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary, and G. Gordon Liddy. With a family to support, Joe found work as a reporter and columnist for small daily newspapers. Then, for two decades, Joe submerged his rage and natural writing style while working at various hard-labor jobs, before working again as a newspaper reporter, and then as an editor of magazines — one in military history and before that a magazine that promoted agricultural chemicals.

At the age of 17, Joe enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving on an aircraft carrier. Joe had farmed with horses for several years, tended bar, and considered himself at times to be a “Marxist and a half-assed Buddhist.” Always wanting to escape, he embarked on a life-long voyage of discovery that included living in a commune and on an Indian reservation, and, later in life, in Belize and in Mexico.

Joe often said that the Internet allowed him to find his voice. But I would argue that Joe always had his voice, and that what the Internet did for him was to permit him to find a readership. Once his essays started appearing on various websites, Joe soon gained a wide following for his forceful style, his sense of humor, and his willingness to discuss the American white underclass, a taboo topic for the mainstream media. Joe called himself a “redneck socialist,” and he initially thought most of his readers would be very much like himself — working class from the southern section of the U.S.A. So he was pleasantly surprised when emails started filling his in-box. There were indeed many letters from men about Joe’s age who had also escaped rural poverty. But there were also emails from younger men and women readers, from affluent people who agreed that the political and economic system needed an overhaul, from readers in dozens of countries expressing thanks for an alternative view of American life, from working-class Americans in all parts of the country, and more than a few from elderly women who wrote to Joe to say that they respected and appreciated his writing, but “please don’t use so much profanity”.

The central subject of Joe’s writing was the class system in the United States, and the tens of millions of whites ignored by coastal liberals in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In his online essays and books, and also in conversations over beer or bourbon, Joe would rail against the elite class who looked down on his people — poor whites, the underclass, rednecks. Joe was amused that a New York book editor once said to him, “It’s as if your people were some sort of exotic and foreign culture, as if you were from Yemen or something.”

Joe spent almost as much time answering emails as he did writing essays. Often a response to an email would be rewritten and included in his next essay, and Joe would send thanks to the reader for providing the spark. In the six years that Joe was writing for publication on the web, he answered thousands of emails from readers — sometimes with just one sentence, but often churning out a thousand words or more.

He and I would talk about the response he was getting to his writing. His explanation was that he was the same as his reader friends, ordinary and fearful. “I don’t write to them,” Joe said in an email to one of his readers. “I don’t write for them. And I don’t write at them. We merely live on the same planet watching the unnerving events around us, things the majority does not seem to see. So I write about that. And maybe for just a moment, a few friends I’ve never met do not feel so alone. Nor do I.”

I first met Joe only seven years before he died, but it seems as though I had known him all of my life. I learned later that there were many people who had similarly become friends of Joe, meeting first by email, then by phone, and then often making personal visits to his home in Virginia, or Belize, or Mexico.

In 2004, I was living in Nice, France and had read one of Joe’s online essays. I sent him an email praising his style and ideas. He replied with a thank-you note, asking if I were wealthy and why I, an American, was living in France. I explained that I lived frugally in a working-class neighborhood of Nice, eating and shopping where the locals did. That started an email exchange and then 

many phone calls. In one conversation, he said he was bone tired from a daily three-hour commute to a job he didn’t really like. I told him that he should take a couple of weeks off and come to France. He did just that.

Joe arrived at the Nice airport with a back-pack and his guitar. We went on daily walking tours of Nice, to my favorite bistros and some historical spots, and I introduced Joe to many of my friends. Joe had been there about a week when he said he wanted to explore the city on his own — my tour-guide services were not needed. I reminded Joe that he didn’t speak a word of French and he might get lost, so I gave him a note to show a taxi driver how to get back to my apartment. Joe had said he would be gone about two hours, but it was eight hours later that he returned. He had somehow found a beer bar where French taxi drivers met after work, and had spent the day arguing about politics and the global economy. Joe explained that one of the taxi drivers spoke English and had served as a translator. I like this anecdote because it illustrates how comfortable Joe was with working people, no matter what language they spoke. This ease of meeting and befriending working people was repeated in Mexico, where shopkeepers, gardeners, and taxi drivers would soon treat Joe as a long-lost brother.

It was during this visit to France that I convinced Joe he needed his own website, if for no other reason than to serve as an archive for his essays, which were then scattered all over the web. I told him that I would get it started and teach him how to post to it. But in seven years Joe did not post anything, never once logged onto the server, and kept asking me to do it. He would rarely look at his own website, even when I asked how him he liked changes I had made. It was not that Joe was a Luddite, ignoring the Internet. He spent hours every day reading other websites and answering emails. But when it came to his own site he was humble, almost embarrassed, by the focus on him personally. “I hate this me-me-me stuff,” he would say. He was reluctant to have news about himself posted, dragging his feet whenever I suggested that news about his books be posted. He finally agreed that I could write about him and put my name as a tag at the bottom of a post.

I left France five years ago when the dollar/euro exchange rate made it too expensive for me. Eventually, I moved to Mexico. Joe came to visit, and he liked the lifestyle, the Mexican people, and the low cost of living. He stayed in my second bedroom for a couple of months, then got his own place. Joe’s wife visited several times a year, and had discussed moving to Mexico when she retired.

While living in Mexico, Joe wrote his second book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, which was released in the U.S. just four days after his death. I wish there were a video of Joe writing this book. He worked on a three-quarter-size notebook, typing fast and furiously with two index fingers, with a burning but unsmoked cigarette in a nearby ashtray.

Between France and Mexico, I had stayed with Joe and his wife, Barbara, in Winchester for a couple of months to help with the editing and proofing of the final manuscript of Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. While in Winchester, I met many of Joe’s old friends, some of whom had known him since childhood. This helped me gain an additional understanding of the scorn and condescension of the town’s elites toward Joe and his underclass, the poor whites. In addition to his friends, I also met more than a few people who knew Joe but had few kind words to say about him because of his left-wing politics and what they felt was the negative picture he painted of the town. Not only was he rejected by the affluent class, but also by some of the very people he was trying to help — including some people he had grown up with.

The fact that Joe was gaining recognition in other countries did not register with the locals in Winchester. Joe did not consider himself a Christian, so he might object to my citing Jesus’s saying that a prophet is not recognized in his own land. While declaring that such a lofty Biblical aphorism would not apply to a redneck, Joe might also have cited the reference in its entirety, chapter and verse.

The sad fact is that Joe was not recognized in his own small home-town of Winchester, Virginia, with its population of 25,000, even though he was certainly the area’s most widely published contemporary writer. His hometown newspaper, The Winchester Star, never mentioned his name — not even when he was signed by Random House for his first book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, nor when the book was getting rave reviews in other countries. Joe would never admit to being bothered by the local newspaper ignoring him and his success, but it was obvious to those who knew him that he would have appreciated some local recognition. He dismissed this slight by explaining that the newspaper’s publisher was still angry from decades before when Joe worked briefly as a reporter for the Star and tried to organize a union for the editorial staff.

Even though neither Joe’s hometown newspaper nor any mainstream U.S. newspaper or news service noticed his death, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation replayed an interview from his book tour a year before. And La Stampa, one of the largest and most prestigious newspapers in Italy, published an obituary and another glowing review of the Italian edition of Deer Hunting with Jesus.

Looking back now, it is clear that Joe’s energy was being sapped in the months before his cancer was diagnosed. Just three days before a massive and inoperable abdominal tumor was discovered, Joe had spent the day riding a horse with Mexican cowboys. But, for a month or two before this, he was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate sufficiently to finish an essay. I didn’t see it at the time. His last essay, “AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM”, took Joe more than a month to write, in fits and starts. He emailed me a draft of this essay, which was more than 8,000 words — long even for Joe. I cut about 3,000 words from the draft, re-arranged chunks of text, and sent it back to Joe with a note that the draft could potentially be one of his best essays, but that it was a jumble of thoughts and he needed to sweat blood while re-writing it. Rather than coming back with a typically argumentative response, Joe agreed and replied that he would do more work on it. Now I feel guilty about having pushed a sick and dying man to be creative, even though neither Joe nor anybody else knew how ill he really was. But I try not to feel too bad about it, because I think it is indeed one of his best essays.

Things are often more clear in retrospect. One book that Joe often referred to in conversations was Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire  by Morris Berman. As it happened, Joe and I had both independently been corresponding with Berman, and we learned that Berman was also a sixtyish American expat living in Mexico, just a mountain range to the east of us. Joe and I had been planning to invite ourselves to visit Berman, but it didn’t happen. Berman wrote a review of Rainbow Pie, and he summed up Joe with a phrase that had never occurred to me, nor probably to Joe either. Berman wrote that the source of Joe’s frustration was “extreme isolation”, adding that Joe realized the U.S. was the greatest snow job of all time, likening the country to a hologram, “in which everyone in the country was trapped inside, with no knowledge that the world (U.S. included) was not what U.S. government propaganda, or just everyday cultural propaganda, said it was. He watched his kinfolk and neighbors vote repeatedly against their own interests, and there was little he could do about it.”

On his last day, with his family gathered around his bed, Joe said: “Dying isn’t as bad as I thought it was going be. I’m just going into this blank space where there’s nothing.”

That’s not quite true, Joe. Your books and essays remain with us, and through them you are still alive. Goodbye, good friend.

Ken Smith was a friend of Joe Bageant and managed his website since its launch. Ken currently lives in Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico. He can be reached at ken@kvsmith.com.

All proceeds from sales of this book will be donated to Joe’s favorite charities.

With high unemployment, low home values and downsized retirement accounts, hundreds of thousands of baby boomers are turning to college to boost their job skills

Unemployed baby boomers turn to college to boost jobs skills

Published: Sunday, March 25, 2012, 6:00 AM

 By Special to The Plain Dealer 

Fred Squillante, Columbus DispatchSteve Newman operates a forklift at Boehringer Ingelheim in Colmbus. He is a former civil engineer who was laid off three years ago and went to Columbus State Community College to train for a different career.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Steve Newman never expected to be going back to college in his 50s to train for a new job.

But the 51-year-old resident of Hilliard, near Columbus, also never expected to get laid off three years ago after 25 years as a civil engineer.

"Fortunately, my wife and I had been making provisions for an undefined emergency since the middle of the previous summer, so we were not without resources," Newman said.

With high unemployment, low home values and downsized retirement accounts, hundreds of thousands of baby boomers are turning to college to boost their job skills. The number of students ages 50 to 64 increased 17 percent nationwide between fall 2007 and fall 2009, according to the latest data available from the National Center for Education Statistics.

The growth has been even more dramatic at Columbus State Community College. The number of students age 50 and older increased more than 81 percent, to 1,506 students, between fall 2007 and fall last year. That age group is the fastest growing population at the school.

"It used to be that many older adults came to college to help pass the time during their retirement and to enrich their lives," said Chandra Bell, a counselor and career-assistance coordinator at Columbus State. But people are now coming back "because they have lost their jobs, need new skills to keep their jobs or are planning a new career because they can't afford to retire as planned," Bell said.

About this series

Aging Ohio: Boomer Bust

The recession has been a shattering experience for tens of thousands of Ohio baby boomers. Ohio newspapers and the Associated Press are examining the ripple effects across families and communities.

Want to share your own story? Email us atbusiness@plaind.com

Experienced workers needed

With 78 million baby boomers entering their retirement years, the country -- not to mention Ohio -- needs more of these experienced workers to stay in the work force longer, even in part-time positions, officials said.

"Keeping older workers engaged in the labor force is vital for the continued economic growth of our region," said Bill LaFayette, a Columbus economist and owner of the consulting firm Regionomics.

The labor force growth rate has already been declining and is projected to slow to a crawl between 2020 and 2025 because of the exodus of baby boomers, he said.

With people living longer, healthier lives, there also is a new demand for programs designed to train the over-50 population, said Celia Crossley, a career strategist and managing partner of Crosworks.

Last year, about 36 percent of workers said they expected to keep working past age 65, compared with 20 percent in 2001, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

"It's a different world today where 50 to 70 is considered the new 'middle age,' " Crossley said.

Martha Harrison, 52, of Powell, also near Columbus, started playing with the idea of going back to college in 2005 after more than 20 years as a preschool teacher. She was motivated by two primary factors: money and a desire to get a counseling degree to help children deal with their increasingly complicated home lives.

"Preschool teachers barely make above minimum wage, which makes no sense when you think about taking care of someone's most-valuable asset," Harrison said.

She tried a few online psychology classes with a for-profit college in 2005 but didn't really get started on her education until she enrolled at Columbus State's Delaware campus in fall 2010. Harrison has enjoyed school so much she wants to transfer to Ohio State to work on a bachelor's degree and eventually earn a master's so she can become a school counselor. She isn't daunted by her age.

"The way I look at it, people my age, we have maybe 25 or more years left of working in us, especially in something that we enjoy," she said.

College can be a challenge

When Newman lost his job, he and his wife, Deb, who is a stay-at-home mom, had saved about half of what they thought they might need to sustain themselves for about six months with no other income.

"We were glad to have made such decisions, despite not having had time to complete our preparation," he said.

Through friends, Newman immediately landed a job as a marketing director for a men's legwear company in Granville. He took a job 11 months later as a traffic engineer for the Ohio Department of Transportation.

But neither worked out long term. So the father of four signed up for a free three-week program at Columbus State that was created to train dislocated workers in logistics -- the movement and storage of goods from the beginning to the end of a supply chain.

After the training, Newman got a job as an inventory specialist at ODW Logistics Inc. in Columbus. He then enrolled in a three-quarter-long online certificate program at Columbus State, which helped him move to a more-advanced job at the pharmaceutical company of Boehringer Ingelheim Roxane Inc.

Even though Newman had earned a bachelor's degree from Ohio State in 1984, going back to college was challenging, he said.

"In the past 13 days, I've had to read seven chapters, take nine quizzes, solve four sets of problems, take one midterm and two finals -- and that doesn't even count working 40 hours and spending time with my family."

Newman is just thankful for a second chance, even though he's making $60,000 a year less than his peak salary as a civil engineer. He's also looking forward to working his way up in what he hopes turns out to be a long, successful second career.

"Getting laid off was quite a blow," he said. "But finding something else to go after and making strides to move ahead has me feeling good again."

-- Encarnacion Pyle, Columbus Dispatch

© 2012 cleveland.com. All rights reserved.

Hate speech ... defaces the environment, and like a broken window, if left untended, signals to other hoodlums that the coast is clear to do more damage

Vandalized by speech: Gregory Rodriguez

Published: Monday, April 02, 2012, 3:00 AM

Plain Dealer guest columnist 

Hate speech is a form of vandalism. It defaces the environment, and like a broken window, if left untended, signals to other hoodlums that the coast is clear to do more damage.

But unlike the proverbial broken window, which urban police departments and criminologists urge us to repair to maintain the aura of social order, nobody seems to be in much of a hurry to nip hate speech in the bud. That's because since the ill-fated attempt by several universities to regulate hate speech in the 1980s and '90s, any discussion of reining in racist taunts inevitably degrades into charges of political correctness and ends abruptly with the invocation of the First Amendment.

America's future depends on how well we learn to manage our diversity. Yet when it comes to hate speech, we pretty much adhere to the advice we give elementary school students to defend themselves against bullies: Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you. Or, as a First Amendment lawyer might say in a haughtier tone, because regulating speech could erode our freedom to criticize the government, hateful rhetoric is the cost of democracy.

But the cost of democracy isn't exactly being borne equally by all Americans. Despite, or perhaps because of, the social and political gains by minorities, nonwhites seem to be facing a barrage of invective these days that, if left unchecked, could damage our democracy in the long run. Even conservative cultural critics like Charles Murray are acknowledging the emergence of a disenchanted white lower class, and the Republican Party in particular is leveraging this group's disillusionment to its advantage. Some of this resentment is expressed in racial terms and goes well beyond politics.

Last week, a blatantly racist anti-Obama bumper sticker went viral on social media. Not long before that, a federal judge in Montana admitted having emailed a joke about the president that compared interracial sex to bestiality. During an NCAA tournament game a few days ago, members of the Southern Mississippi pep band hounded a Latino point guard for Kansas State with chants of "Where's your green card?" And Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Morain wrote recently about a heckler who told the U.S.-born mayor of Los Angeles to "go back to Mexico."

A decade ago, I would have made a sharp distinction between discrimination and prejudice. I understood and agreed that while the law could prohibit discrimination -- that is, the denial of opportunity based on race, ethnicity, religion, etc. -- it couldn't do much to keep people from feeling and expressing prejudice toward others. But nowadays, with racist rhetoric rising, I've decided we aren't taking the social effects of this type of vandalism seriously enough.

I'm not worried about anyone's hurt feelings. What I am concerned about is the extra burden nonwhites (and other minorities) are expected to bear when entering the public square, and the way tolerated hate speech may keep them on the sidelines and weaken our democracy.

Political scientists proved a long time ago that negative campaigning depresses political participation. Sociologists have argued that the decline in all kinds of civic engagement is a consequence of individual citizens becoming alienated from the larger community. Surely there's nothing like a public square awash in racial invective to foster such alienation. Although concerted attacks on a minority could mobilize its members in the short run, it stands to reason that a steady barrage of hate will force them out of civic action in the long run.

In his forthcoming book, "The Harm in Hate Speech," New York University political philosopher Jeremy Waldron calls racist rhetoric a "slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word, so that eventually it becomes harder and less natural for even the good-hearted members of the society" to engage all the members of the community. He argues that hate speech is calculated to undermine the "good standing" that everyone in a diverse democracy must have for it to function smoothly.

It's that good standing, by which he means dignity, that enables citizens to engage "on a straightforward basis with others . . . in public, on the streets, in the shops, in business, and to be treated -- along with everyone else -- as proper objects of society's protection and concern."

I'm not ready to say that the United States should take steps to follow Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Britain, Denmark and Germany in adopting laws to regulate hate speech. But we also can't afford to continue pretending that this rhetorical vandalism isn't the kind of broken window that represents a serious threat to an orderly society.

Gregory Rodriguez is executive director of the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times (McClatchy-Tribune).

© 2012 cleveland.com. All rights reserved.

Thank you Cleveland Plain Dealer: " for anybody-but-Obama voters, it might not matter whether Obama's Republican foe were Romney or Santorum. The point for the Party of Lincoln's true believers is that somebody -- anybody -- must retire the president. But that calls to mind another maxim, this one from the Statehouse: You can't beat an incumbent -- Obama -- with a comparatively weak challenger."

Even in GOP-ruled Ohio, Mitt Romney is running uphill: Thomas Suddes

Published: Saturday, March 31, 2012, 2:25 PM     Updated: Sunday, April 01, 2012, 3:56 AM

 By Thomas Suddes, The Plain Dealer 

Gerald Herbert, Associated PressMitt Romney at a campaign appearance in Dayton before last month's Ohio primary.

Had next November's election been held instead this March, Ohioans would have voted to re-elect President Barack Obama, according to a Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll.

That, in itself, was no surprise, given a slowly bettering economy. Youngstown maxim: People vote their pocketbooks.

What was telling about the poll was this: Matched against Democrat Obama, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the perceived Republican front-runner, would lose 41 percent to 47 percent.

But -- and this was the eye-opener -- Romney's tally was just 1 percentage point better than that of former Sen. Rick Santorum, a suburban Pittsburgh Republican, would have been against Obama.

According to Quinnipiac's polling, Santorum would collect 40 percent of Ohio's vote to (again) the president's 47 percent in a hypothetical head-to-head.

Yet Santorum is supposedly an "extreme" Republican compared to Romney, at least to the Republican Establishment.

True, for anybody-but-Obama voters, it might not matter whether Obama's Republican foe were Romney or Santorum. The point for the Party of Lincoln's true believers is that somebody -- anybody -- must retire the president.

But that calls to mind another maxim, this one from the Statehouse: You can't beat an incumbent -- Obama -- with a comparatively weak challenger.

Romney has indeed worked: He leads Santorum in the quest for Republican presidential convention delegates. But as demonstrated by Ohio's March 6 presidential primary, rank-and-file Republicans in GOP heartland counties prefer Santorum.

It's impossible to believe that many, if any, of those Ohio Santorum voters would vote for Obama if Romney became the Republican nominee. But those Ohioans might stay home. And that'd be a big headache for Romney.

Consider a good measure of GOP commitment in Ohio. Only twice in the 20th century, in 1944 (Republican Thomas E. Dewey vs. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt) and 1960 (Richard M. Nixon vs. John F. Kennedy), has Ohio been on the losing side in a presidential election.

That is, no matter how the rest of the United States was voting in 1944 and 1960, no way was Ohio going to vote for a Democrat, not even mid-World War II incumbent Roosevelt.

Of the 22 counties (one-quarter of Ohio's 88) where Dewey (and his running mate, then-Gov. John W. Bricker) ran strongest in 1944, all but Delaware supported Santorum on March 6, not Romney. And Dewey, be it noted, bested Roosevelt in Ohio by only about 12,000 votes. That is, maximum Republican turnout bucked a national Democratic victory.

In 1960 in Ohio, Nixon (who, by heritage, could be considered an Ohioan) beat Massachusetts Democrat Kennedy by about 273,000 votes (albeit, some of those Nixon votes were the product of now-pass anti-Catholicism). Nixon's vote margin over Kennedy in the 49 Ohio counties where Nixon ran strongest in 1960 can account for his entire 273,000-vote edge.

But on March 6, Republicans in 45 of those 49 Nixon counties preferred Santorum to Romney. The pro-Romney exceptions: Delaware, Warren (Lebanon), Medina and suburban Cincinnati's Clermont.

Those pro-Romney counties are growing suburbs, so that's "where the votes are" -- and that's a plus for Romney. And yes, Ohio Republicans probably would prefer anyone for president, even Mitt Romney, to any Democrat. But Ohio's March 6 tally suggests enthusiasm for Romney isn't even lukewarm among the salt-of-the-earth Ohioans who go door to door for Republican candidates, distribute their literature and post their signs.

For Romney, that's bad news. If he can't romance an Ohio whose GOP runs every statewide executive office and the General Assembly, and elects most of the state's congressional delegation, Republicans have a big problem -- and Barack Obama a big opportunity.

Suddes, a member of The Plain Dealer's editorial board, writes from Ohio University.

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