Right Wing's Fear: Minority babies now in majority A little reality check, a little visual political humor

Right winger's fear; they are in an increasingly smaller and smaller minority.  They have money, but they don't have enough bodies, and the bodies they DO have are mirrored in this image.  Their demographic is a bunch of fat old white guys who tote guns and believe any false line of nonsense told to them by the NRA, a demographic that is dying off, OR the wealthy manipulators behind ALEC, the well-described 1%s and those who vote with them, the aspirational voters who hope someday to be wealthy even if that doesn't happen.  The Mitt R-money demographic are the few, the wealthy, the old, the white, who turned out for him in the primaries, the 1% to maybe the top 10%.  Some of the Tea Partiers and more blue collar right wing, the ill-educated right, the anti-science, anti-intellect and anti-education right might vote for him -- or they might not show up to vote at all in 2012, the way that most conservatives failed this time to show up at the primaries.  The anti-gay wedge issue isn't working; the anti-immigrant wedge issue is still a hot button...........but not one that will bring over the minority and independent voters.  Conservative voters are divided pretty much along the lines below:

From the WaPo this past March:
Exit polls in both Michigan and Ohio show voters making more than $100,000 per year turning out in much higher numbers this year than they did in 2008. And in both cases, they might well have provided the difference for Romney.
In 2008, 22 percent of GOP primary voters in Michigan made at least $100,000, and that group made up 21 percent of the electorate in Ohio, according to exit polls.
This year, 33 percent of voters in Michigan made that much money, while 30 percent of Ohio voters did.
In both cases, the number of wealthy voters grew by about 50 percent — a pretty stunning increase in that demographic over just a four-year span.
And an argument could be made that the increase put Romney over the top.
In both states, Romney won this demographic by 14 points but didn’t win among any other income demographic. And given he won by such small margins overall — 1 point in Ohio and 3 points in Michigan — it’s not unreasonable to think he would have lost those states without the uptick in wealthy voters.
But in a general election, that doesn't work.  In a general election, you don't win on only older white rich  voters.  R-money - and the GOP and Tea Partiers - have seriously alienated women and Hispanics.
The offensively anti-women vote yesterday in the House that badly weakened the Violence Against Women Act was only the latest of those insults and injuries which antagonize those voting populations.

Tap dancing around the anti-minority, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-immigrant Republican legislation, lying and denying it, isn't going to persuade immigrant and minority populations to support conservatives.  Not with the English only laws, not with the praise for the Arizona SB11070 'papers please' legislation, not with the anti-immigrant voter suppression amendment for voter ID; these demographics will look at what you do, they will look at what legislation you propose, and they will emphatically reject Republicans and Tea Partiers.  If the GOP changes their positions on these issues, they lose their old white crabby flabby and religiously intolerant core that they have cultivated.  They lose the people who threw out their more moderate members in purity tests.  It would be the smart move, but so long as those are the people controlling the GOP, and so long as they are represented by candidates like........well, all of them......they will fail.  They will fail and fail and fail, until the GOP purges itself of the extremists and moves back from the far right.

So it is terrifying news to the current GOP and Tea Party to see the headline on the front page of the May 17, 2012 Strib the very situation that the CPAC conservative white anti-diversity crowd feared, and that the rest of the conservatives did not repudiate.  This is the Anders Breivik fear, the mass murderer in Norway's reason for killing all those people, the conservative fear of non-white non-European immigrants and culture changing the white, male dominant status quo:

Minority babies now in the majority
Census estimate marks a first for the nation, serving as a harbinger of change to come

By CAROL MORELLO Washington Post WASHINGTON - For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation’s babies are members of minority groups, said new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority.

Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian or other minority members. That’s almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010. Census demographers said the tipping point came three months later, in July.
The latest estimates, which gauge changes since the last census, are a reflection of an immigration wave that began four decades ago. The transformation of the country’s racial and ethnic makeup has gathered steam as the white population grows collectively older, especially compared with Hispanics.

The census has forecast that non-Hispanic whites will be outnumbered in the United States by 2042, and social scientists consider that current status among infants a harbinger of the change. “This is a watershed mo- ment,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in family issues. “It shows us how multicultural we’ve become.”

Although minority members make up about 37 percent of the U.S. population, the District of Columbia and four states are majority minority - California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas.

One of the biggest factors in the demographic change is age. Whites are by far the oldest group. Their median age is over 42, so many are beyond their prime childbearing years. In contrast, the median age for Hispanics is under 28. Blacks and Asians have median ages in their early 30s.

As the number of white women in their 20s and 30s declined over the past decade, the number of white children dropped in most states, said Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist with the University of New Hampshire.

‘This is the first tipping point’

“The population is literally changing before us, with the youngest replacing the oldest,” he said. “This is the first tipping point. The kids are in the vanguard of the change that’s coming.”

Places that serve Hispanic mothers and children are experiencing a baby boom. Mary’s Center, which started in Washington in 1988 to provide immigrant women with prenatal care, opened its fifth center Wednesday just outside of the city in Maryland.

“The people who migrate are the young and healthy people,” said Maria Gomez, founder of the center. “They are fertile, and that’s the cycle of life.”

In the short term, it’s not clear whether the baby boom will continue. Immigration from Mexico, the country of origin for the vast majority of Hispanic immigrants in the United States, has come to a standstill, and may be moving in reverse.

William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, said the slowdown in immigration may delay the nation’s transformation to a majority-minority society from 2042 to 2050 or beyond. But he said it will not prevent it.

“Eventually, when the economy returns, we’re going to get more immigrants, maybe not from Mexico but from other parts of the world,” he said. Without so many youthful immigrants, he added, the United States would look more like Japan with its disproportionate share of elderly citizens.
‘We had a perfect storm’

“We were already seeing a declining youth population in large parts of the country,” Frey said. “Without immigrants, we’d be essentially youthless. We had a perfect storm. We got them all coming, younger immigrants having children, at a time when we really needed them.”

Cherlin said the immigrant baby boom eventually will taper off. Studies suggest that the children and grandchildren of the newest immigrants will have birth rates much closer to those of non-Hispanic whites.

“The changes to the country may not be as huge as some people think,” he said. “Immigrants will change our society, but our society will change the immigrants.

The ONLY way to cultivate the growing immigrant population in Minnesota, or any of the other demographics statewide and in nationwide, is for the GOP to abandon EVERY position they currently hold. EVERY ONE OF THEM must go..........or it is only a matter of time until the GOP goes the way of the dinosaur. In anticipation, here are some imaginative illustrations

generic GOP dinosaur

creationist and fundie GOP dinosaur

the GOP new ideas, new health care and economic solutions dinosaur

the big oil GOP dinosaurs

the Tea Party GOP dinosaurs

the far right fringie GOP dinosaur

the anti-gay, anti-climate change, anti-comprehensive
sex ed, anti-women, children and social safety net,
anti-medicare, anti-medicaid, anti-social security
GOP dinosaur

Then there is the GOP taxation and fiscal policy dinosaurs, which bankrupt the country, destroy the middle class, outsource jobs overseas, crash wall street and exclusively benefit the 1%:

GOP dinosaur ideas on debt and deficit policy

the anything-from-Grover Norquist GOP fiscal dinosaur

the Mitt Romney economic policies dinosaur

There are more, and I may post some of the separately later, but these make the point.  The GOP is out of touch, out of money, out of competent new people, and out of ideas.  They must change, completely, or go the way of fossils.  My favorite illustration of that impending doom to the GOP (look carefully):

the Tony Sutton / Michael Brodkorb MN GOP legacy