The Daily Kos has the article Actual photo of the moment Democrats lost the white working class vote. The picture is exactly the picture you think it is.

However, the paper the article quotes explains why the title of the article is misleading.

In a paper (PDF) published on the eve of the 2012 election, political scientist Elisabeth Jacobs presented compelling data pointing to that exact conclusion:

On average, Democratic presidential candidates prospects with self-identified white working class voters have diminished somewhat over time. … Yet, the downward trend in Democratic presidential vote choice between 1956 and 2008 is concentrated amongst the Southern white working class. … White working class presidential party vote choice for non-Southerners is remarkably stable over time; if anything, the period between 1984 and 2008 has been one of improvement for the Democrats amongst this group. The opposite is true in the South. Prior to the 1960s rights revolutions (including, most notably for the South, the major upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement), a strong majority of the Southern white working class voted for Democratic candidates. Southern white working class voting appears to have settled into a basic equilibrium with Reagan’s 1984 election, with the notable exception of an uptick for Clinton’s first election in 1992, and again for Obama’s 2008 election gambit.

Obviously the more accurate title would be “Actual photo of the moment Democrats lost the southern white working class vote”.

So I suppose the Southern strategy of the current Republican party is the same one the plantation owners used before The Civil War. They convinced the white working class that they had it so good because at least they weren’t slaves.

When the white working class in the south finally finds out that they now are slaves to the 1%, do you suppose they will change their voting habits? Is this a strategy that Democrats could use? Those are rather shocking words. If you think it is going overboard, tell me why.

The Real News Network has the interview with Larry Wilkerson, Karzai Justified In Refusal of Bilateral Security Agreement.

DESVARIEUX: So, Larry, let’s talk about the role of the Taliban, ’cause you have a spokesperson for Karzai actually saying that they’ve been in negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. What do you foresee their role being?

WILKERSON: Well, everybody’s been in negotiations with the Taliban. That’s an amorphous term. As I said, there is an extreme there. On the one extreme, you’ve got a farmer who’s angry that we stepped on his opium crop, poppy crop, and so forth. He’s a Taliban. He’s fighting. He shoots at U.S. soldiers. On the other extreme, you’ve got the people like Mullah Omar and so forth who are dedicated Taliban. In between lies a wide range of people.

They are going to have to be a part of any political solution in Afghanistan. So all these negotiations, whether it’s the Pakistanis, whether it’s the Afghans themselves or ISAF or NATO or the United States, all looking at the Taliban, they’re going to have to incorporate a body of that group that we call Taliban into whatever political solution occurs. And I don’t see that as being that–difficult, but not being impossible.

One of my interlocutors in Afghanistan has told me that there’s no way the Afghan people are going to allow the Taliban version that we associate with the word Taliban, hat is to say, the people who brought about the kind of coercion and oppression on Afghanistan during their reign, though they might have eliminated drugs to a certain extent and so forth. They’re not coming back. Those people are not coming back and going to control Afghanistan.

I think he’s probably right about that. But there are a lot of people, as I suggested, in that title, Taliban. And since there are a lot of people, some of them are going ta have to be incorporated somehow in the political solution.

Is it just possible that everyone, including us, would be better off if we just got out of Afghanistan the way we finally got out of Iraq?

Should we take the chance that Wilkerson is right that the Taliban as we think we know them would not come back to power in the form that they were in when we threw them out? If they don’t, then haven’t we already accomplished our mission in Afghanistan? Why can’t we accept our success, and just get out?

The more we try to make absolutely sure the Taliban won’t return in their previous form, the longer it will take for us to find out if we have already succeeded. The risk may be bigger if we stay there than if we leave.