We Have Choice

Posted: February 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 36 Comments

We’ve watched the Republicans flail in all directions, trying to find a message, a mission, an issue to drive them to victory in November.  It’s been tough going for the GOP with less than stellar candidates and the endless circus ride the public has witnessed.  Now down to four ‘iffy’ wannabes, attention has focused on flaws, egos, missteps and gaffes.  Uncle Newt appeals to the confederate South.  Ron Paul is loved by the Ayn Rand aficionados. Reptilian Rick Santorum cheers and warms the cockles of the Religious Right.   And Mitt Romney.  Poor Mitt is loved by virtually no one.

So, I can only imagine the excitement with the new-but-old controversy boiling over birth control and reproductive freedom.  The right to choose.  It sticks in the craw of the Republican Party, even as the loudest voices scream about liberty and individual rights.  This isn’t a question of abortion at this juncture.  We’re talking about the basics: contraception, the freedom to choose how many children we have and when we have them.  And privacy.  A woman’s right to decide these things herself in the privacy of her own space, heart and mind, with or without a husband, with or without government or religious leaders telling her, demanding she turn one way or the other.

To listen to the likes of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and the faux religious warriors, one might think that all religion, but particularly Christianity, has been put on the rack, whipped into humiliating submission or fed to the lions for the vile amusement of secular humanists.

Enough with the lying!  Enough with the bully pulpit exhortations with the emphasis on ‘bully.’

Demanding equal access to healthcare, expecting reproductive freedom and sexual/gender equality is not a Satanic plot.  It’s what reasonable people do and think.  We are not living in the Middle Ages [though I suspect many fundamentalists think of the era as ‘the good ole days].  If anyone doubts the politicization of women’s healthcare issues, please review the past week’s headlines, the unseemly expose of the Komen Foundation, more concerned about dissing Planned Parenthood than serving lower-income women with breast screenings.  Or the manufactured outrage of the Catholic Church hierarchy and their mouthpieces, who [sputter, sputter] decry the Administration’s insistence on equitable healthcare service as a vicious attack on religious freedom.

Really?  Twenty-eight states require organizations offering prescription insurance to cover contraception.   Ninety-eight percent of Catholic women use birth control and many Catholic institutions offer the benefit to their employees.

Let’s review some recent statistics:

Two-thirds of Catholics, 65 percent, believe that clinics and hospitals that take taxpayer money should not be allowed to refuse procedures or medications based on religious beliefs. A similar number, 63 percent, also believe that health insurance, whether private or government-run, should cover contraception.

A strong majority (78 percent) of Catholic women prefer that their hospital offers emergency contraception for rape victims, while more than half (55 percent) want their hospital to provide it in broader circumstances.

Yet despite these numbers, the Church, the Religious Right and the heat-seeking Republican establishment are foaming at the mouth, waving mummified fists in righteous indignation.

Make no mistake.  This is an old war.  I wrote about the struggles and absolute determination of Margaret Sanger a few days ago.  She fought these battles.  The arguments were identical; the accusations the same.  She fought the religious establishment, she fought the righteous, small-minded moralists 100 years ago.  If anything this should be a wakeup call: the defense of reproductive rights, which are basic human rights, need to be taken seriously, day-in, day-out.  Freedoms gained can quickly become freedoms lost. Gender equality, which is a matter of civil rights, should be supported with voices and votes pitched against the ugliness of bigotry and discrimination.

This is a power play wrapped in thin prayer and religious dogma.  It’s a desperate attempt by traditional religion to regain ground lost to modernity, a world where the old stories and myths have lost their power, their ability to control by fear, a world in which human dignity applies to all our members, a world where the mysteries of the Universe and our place in it is far grander than our words and imaginations can conjure.

We have choice.  We always have.  It’s time to put away childish things and become accountable, rational adults if we’re ever to deal with the problems facing us.  We can fearfully grasp the old ways, allow ourselves to be drawn into self-limiting dictums.  We can argue how many angels dance on the head of a pin with religious fanatics and the politicians who love them.

Or we can say, ‘No!’  We have that choice.

Blowback against Specific acts of Religious Intolerance seeking legal status is not a War against Religion

Posted: February 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 primaries, religion, religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, science, U.S. Politics | 10 Comments

For a group of people obsessed about the possibility that Shari’a law might creep into US Law, christofascists sure seem to thrive on forcing their own brand of it.  All the while, there’s this claim of a “war against religion”.   Forcing other people to suffer from unjust and unconstitutional laws in the name of religion is not the kind of religious freedom the founders had in mind when they penned the first amendment.  Religious status does not give any person or institution the ability to ignore law.  Asking for enforcement of law against narrow religious doctrine does not constitution a war against religion.  Our country is not suppose to favor any one religion or enshrine its pet biases into law.  However, it seems every major Republican candidate hates our Constitution.  How can these people truly seek an office where they are sworn to uphold it yet desire to twist the Age of Reason right out of it?

These are the same folks that have declared jihad on women’s reproductive health, science, and mathematics.  Yes, remember Copernicus who had the audacity to discover that the earth revolved around the sun JUST, FINALLY got a proper burial in 2010.  It only took him 600 years and hundreds of years of science to get his ticket out of hell for heresy.  Meanwhile, Rick Santorum–who swept a round of beauty contests with record low turnouts–is still proving there are people out there that probably think that Galileo and Copernicus are wrong.  Galileo got his apology in 1992 nearly 600 years after his death. He died in 1642.   Let’s not forget the persecution and stalking of Jean-François Champollion whose Rosetta stone proved that Egypt had existed straight through the supposed dating of the great flood.  That’s just a few examples from science.  The use of religious texts to support slavery, ownership of all married women and children, persecution of GLBT populations around world, and wars and acts of terrorism is omnipresent.  Standing against these things and creating laws to make them illegal does not mean you’re against religion.  It means you are for the constitutional separation of church and state and ensuring the basic constitution granted rights of all individuals.  No one’s “God” wrote the Constitution.  Men afraid of religious dictatorships and intolerance did.

Why wouldn’t rational, freedom loving people want to stop the creep of christofascist biblical law wherever possible?  It’s not a war against religion.  It’s blowback against those who are trying to force narrow religious doctrine onto the rest of us and into law.  Luckily, even Antonin Scalia has written about the complete unconstitutionality of all this.

As conservative (and Catholic) Justice Antonin Scalia explained in a Supreme Court opinion more than twenty years ago, a law does not suddenly become unconstitutional because someone raises a religious objective to it — if this actually were true, anyone at all could immunize themselves from paying taxes or from any other law simply by claiming they have a religious objection to being a law-abiding citizen.

We have all just about had it with the Catholic Bishops, Pat Robertson, and all that crap that seems to have come to culmination in the candidacy of Rick Santorum.   Where’s that trademarked Santorum outrage about Cardinal Edward Egan who withdrew his apology for illegally covering up instances of pedophilia on his watch?  Nope, don’t wait for it.  Santorum’s too busy insisting that President Obama wants to force the Catholic Church to accept women priests.   The one thing that I’ve really learned in this primary election is that Republican politicians feel so emboldened by the current hatefest in the base that they will lie about anything and know that Fox News will repeat it every chance they can.

For weeks, Republicans have pretended that President Obama is waging some kind of war on religion because his administration recently approved regulations requiring insurers to cover contraceptive care — spurred on in large part because the conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the contraceptive care regulations. Their claim is utterly absurd. The new rules exempt churches from the requirement to offer insurance that covers contraception. And they align closely with the beliefs of actual Catholics, 58 percent of whombelieve that employers should be required to provide insurance that cover contraception.

On Fox News this morning, GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum doubled down on this bizarre claim that Obama is going after religion — falsely claiming that the president wants to tell Catholics who they can hire as priests:

What they’ve done here is a direct assault on the First Amendment, not only a direct assault on the freedom of religion, by forcing people specifically to do things that are against their religious teachings. . . . This is a president who, just recently, in this Hosanna-Tabor case was basically making the argument that Catholics had to, you know, maybe even had to go so far as to hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues. This is a very hostile president to people of faith. He’s a hostile president, not just to people of faith, but to all freedoms.

Again, if the first amendment was really serious about that then as a Buddhist, I’d like all my war tax money back now. I’d also like to argue that Rastafarians should be allowed all the legal pot they want for their sacraments.  Then, let’s just go back to letting all those Mormons have multiple child brides.  Religious organizations do not get to exempt themselves from laws.  Again, check the Scalia reference above.

The deal is that Santorum and the Bishops and some of these other full time misogynists posing as Pharisees have had trouble with every law that’s given women the ability to make adult decisions about their own selves.  This includes the SCOTUS decision giving women the constitutional right to birth control and abortion.  Ron Paul has pretty much said that he doesn’t believe it’s possible for a husband to rape a wife.  That falls under the laws that existed in this country prior to 1882 when women were literally written in as an appendage of the husband.  Married women were not considered separate individuals which is why in many states they couldn’t own property.

It gets worse.   Paul hangs around with Christian Reconstructionists.   These folks are truly scary.

Reconstructionism, the right-wing religious-political school of thought founded by Rousas John Rushdoony. The ultimate goal of Christian Reconstructionists is to reconstitute the law of the Hebrew Bible — which calls for the execution of adulterers and men who have sex with other men — as the law of the land. The Constitution Party constitutes the political wing of Reconstructionism, and the CP has found a good friend in Ron Paul.

When Paul launched his second presidential quest in 2008, he won the endorsement of Rev. Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist pastor who travels in Christian Reconstructionist circles, though he is not precisely a Reconstructionist himself (for reasons having to do with his interpretation of how the end times will go down). When Paul dropped out of the race, instead of endorsing Republican nominee John McCain, or even Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, Paul endorsed Constitution Party presidential nominee Chuck Baldwin (who promised, in his acceptance speech, to uphold the Constitution Party platform, which looks curiously similar to the Ron Paul agenda, right down to the no-exceptions abortion proscription and ending the Fed).

At his shadow rally that year in Minneapolis, held on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Paul invited Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips, a Christian Reconstructionist, to address the crowd of end-the-Fed-cheering post-pubescents. (In his early congressional career, Julie Ingersoll writes in Religion Dispatches, Paul hired as a staffer Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist leader and Rushdoony’s son-in-law.)

At a “Pastor’s Forum” at Baldwin’s Baptist church in Pensacola, Florida, Paul was asked by a congregant about his lack of support for Israel, which many right-wing Christians support because of the role Israel plays in what is known as premillennialist end-times theology. “Premillennialist” refers to the belief that after Jesus returns, according to conditions on the ground in Israel, the righteous will rule. But Christian Reconstructionists have a different view, believing the righteous must first rule for 1,000 years before Jesus will return.

They also believe, according to Clarkson, “that ‘the Christians’ are the ‘new chosen people of God,’ commanded to do what ‘Adam in Eden and Israel in Canaan failed to do…create the society that God requires.’ Further, Jews, once the ‘chosen people,’ failed to live up to God’s covenant and therefore are no longer God’s chosen. Christians, of the correct sort, now are.”

Responding to Baldwin’s congregant, Paul explained, “I may see it slightly differently than others because I think of the Israeli government as different than what I read about in the Bible. I mean, the Israeli government doesn’t happen to be reflecting God’s views. Some of them are atheist, and their form of government is not what I would support… And there are some people who interpret the chosen people as not being so narrowly defined as only the Jews — that maybe there’s a broader definition of that.”

Again, if you hang around folks that basically want to tear apart the constitution and insert their own religious views in place of secular law, you’re not a conservative.  You’re not a libertarian.  Hell, you’re not even really supporting our Constitution and basic shared American Values.  Again, these are the people that say there is a religious war because they’ve basically started one.  They and their Republican Toadies need to be stopped.

I wont even get into the Romney/Mormon thing because BostonBoomer has already covered a lot of that.  These are not just simply pious folks that you meet at your local church potluck.  They are all fanatics and they deserve all the blowback we can muster.  It would be one thing if they all weren’t so politically active and they didn’t have such a huge impact on one political party.  Again, this isn’t just the practice of religion, this is the practice of a zealotry akin to political terrorism.  We need to recognize and call it exactly that before our rights are crushed by their very narrow interpretations of what’s science, what’s American, and what’s moral.

Swarms of flying robots

Posted: February 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 6 Comments

A small follow-up to our earlier post on drones. Here we are a few days later: fleets of tiny drones flying in formation in a lab. To tell you the truth, I want a set of about fifty or so. I’d spend days flying them around the house, cackling wildly. But, wouldn’t you know, the first thing everyone says is, “Military applications!”

The Kenyan Muslim Socialist Usurper is just a Run of the Mill Moderate-to-Conservative Pol

Posted: February 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Voter Ignorance, War on Women, We are so F'd | Tags: , , | 30 Comments

Yup, Obama is a run of the mill moderate. We’ve been saying this for years but Keith Poole’s Voteview has a better methodology for estimating presidential positions on a left-right scale since 1945.  Every one in left blogistan is talking about that and not our joint intuitions and research.  The VoteView site actually has an interesting way to look at Political Polarization of elected officials and shows that the Republican Party has been moving rapidly to an ultra right position recently.  We’ve also said this.  I can’t believe how many Birch Society positions are now “mainstream” in Republican circles.  However, the Republican party asked for it when they courted Dixiecrats and the KKK away from the old style Dem party and were simultaneously usurped by religious radicals.  State Republican parties make the Taliban look reasonable.  Just come down here to the South or go to the middle of the country.  You would think the good old days of slavery were back in vogue. The current crop of primary tap dancers only shows how extreme the party’s base has become.  Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich can’t lie about their past lives fast enough.  They also seem to subscribe to the idea that when you repeat lies enough, they become truth.

Our findings here echo those discussed in a prior post that Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats to the left in the contemporary period. Indeed, as seen below, President Obama is the most moderate Democratic president since the end of World War II, while President George W. Bush was the most conservative president in the post-war era.

So, this result is interesting on many levels.  First, Dubya has to be the most hated president since Nixon if not for longer than that.  His policies were and still are extremely unpopular.  That’s why the right is running on Reagan’s supposed rhetoric but not Reagan’s more liberal policies.  Remember, Reagan rescued social security.  Dubya wanted to privatize it.  Reagan engaged the Soviets. Dubya bombed the shit out of two countries he didn’t like. The other thing this shows is that moderate Obama is being labelled things that are outright lies.  This probably indicates the power of Fox News, the Koch Brothers money, and the current Republican fascination with denial of reality and truth.  Obama has basically stayed out of congressional politics. Ezra Klein paraphrases some of Poole’s findings.  DW-Nominate is Poole’s methodology for sorting out votes via measuring political coalitions.

DW-Nominate rates presidents by processing Congressional Quarterly’s “Presidential Support” index, which tracks roll-call votes on which the president has expressed a clear position. The system then rates the president by looking at the coalitions that emerged in support of his legislation. In essence, it judges the president’s ideology by judging the ideology of the president’s congressional supporters. So how, in an age of incredible congressional polarization, could this system rank Obama as a moderate?

There are a few answers. One, says Poole, is that Obama is very careful about taking positions on congressional legislation. In the 111th Congress, he only took 78 such positions. Compare that with George W. Bush, who took 291 positions during the 110th Congress, or Bill Clinton, who took 314 positions during the 103rd Congress. So part of the answer might be that, with the exception of high-profile bills such as health-care reform, Obama is hanging back from most of the congressional squabbling.

I wanted to share others’ thoughts on the Poole analysis.  Digby basically says the findings confirm “why liberals are frustrated”.  In deed, the real left wing of the Green and Democratic Parties do not like Obama’s policies at all.  This is something completely lost on Republicans in la la land.

Paul Krugman–ever the wonk–focuses on Poole’s methodology. This is something that bears reviewing.   It shows how Nixon’s southern strategy and the politicization of christofascists has changed party dynamics.

I’ve long been a great admirer of the work done by Poole and his collaborators. What they do is use roll-call votes to map politicians’ positions into an abstract issue space. You can think of this as a sort of iterative process: start with a guess about how to rank bills from left to right, use that ranking to place politicians along the same spectrum, revise the ranking of bills based on the politicians, and repeat until convergence. What they actually do is more complicated and flexible, and allows for multiple dimensions; but that sort of gets at the general idea.

And it turns out that US politics really is one-dimensional, that once you know where politicians stand on a scale that clearly has to do with taxation and the size of the welfare state, you can predict their votes very well. There used to be a second dimension, clearly corresponding to race; but once the Dixiecrats became Republicans, that dimension collapsed into the first.

Exzra Klein does some longer analysis of the findings along with his usual Beltway Bob spin. Can’t he just quit the man crush thing for a bit?

Obama’s financial rescue effort was largely a continuation of the Bush administration’s policies. He resisted calls to nationalize or break up the big banks, modeled his health-care reform bill after legislation that Republicans had proposed in Congress and Mitt Romney had passed in Massachusetts, extended the Bush tax cuts once and intends to make most of them permanent, signed legislation cutting domestic discretionary spending to its lowest level in decades, and supported the same sort of cap-and-trade plan that John McCain once introduced in the Senate. Obama’s presidency has been ambitious and it’s been polarizing, but in terms of the policy it has produced, it’s been much closer to the market-based approach of Clinton than the forthright reliance on government of LBJ.

Republicans, however, can and should take partial credit for this. Obama is so moderate in part because the Republicans are so extreme. Politicians are ideological, of course, but they are also opportunistic. And the GOP, in closing ranks against almost every major initiative Obama has attempted, has taken away most of his opportunities to be truly liberal. The fight to get to 60 votes in the Senate has ensured, over and over, that Obama must aim his legislation at either the most conservative Democrats or the most moderate Republicans. In this, Obama has only been as liberal as Sens. Ben Nelson and Scott Brown have permitted him to be. And that’s not very liberal.

That’s left Obama a moderate president in an immoderate time. For progressives, that moderation has been a continued frustration. For conservatives, it’s been obscured by a caricature of the president as a free-enterprise-hating socialist. And for the White House, it’s been a calculated strategy. We’ll know in November whether it was the right one.

I’m probably an archetypical independent these days. I’m gravitating towards Obama not because I like anything he’s done, but because Mitt Romney can’t seem to speak with out lying and Gingrich, Paul, and Santorum represent what is undoubtedly the WORST thing about this country.  All of their positions are straight from either the christofascist or Confederate states of America playbooks.   I can’t for the life figure out what it is–other than personal promotion–that drives Mitt Romney.  His do anything, say anything brand of politics frankly makes Obama look like a reasonable choice.  Plus, the more I find out about Romney’s personal decisions–like baptizing his outspoken atheist father-in-law post mortem–is horrifying.  The dog on the roof struck me as the most inhumane act I’d ever heard until I read about his Stake President lectures to women in Vanity Fair.  The man seems capable of speaking out and out lies with no sign of remorse or self-realization at all.

So, here we are together between the Barack and the Willard Hard Place.  We’ve got the shallow boyfriend who offers us promises he never intends to keep and the preppy boyfriend who’ll tell us anything if we just give him that blow job.  What a freakin’ choice that is.

Larry Summers And Another Luddite Analogy

Posted: February 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , | 10 Comments

A hattip to United Republic, their new site Republic Report and for this ‘most’ enlightening tidbit on Larry Summers.

This Larry Summers.

The Larry Summers that President Obama chose to head the White House National Economic Council, even after the blowback from Summers receiving beaucoup speaking fees in 2008 at banking meetings, as in JP Morgan dishing out $67, 500 for a February engagement.  This, after JP Morgan reaped $25 billion in Government bailouts.  Or Citigroup, another happy camper after receiving $50 billion in taxpayer monies, found enough spare change to pay Summers on two occasions, once for $45,000 and two months later for $54,000.  Or everyone’s favorite, Goldman Sachs. Sachs was really generous after receiving $10 million in bailout funds but managed a double decker of $135,000 for one appearance and another for $67,500 eight weeks later.

Oh, and Summers also had managed another $5.2 million, an easy-peasy salary from D.E. Shaw, which just happens to be a major hedge fund.

Who says government doesn’t work?

When Summers exited his WH duties, he hit the lecture circuit once again. His love of giving speeches seems to have slipped under the radar.  Until it didn’t.  Interest appears to have shredded the text of his presentation at a particular business forum.  Mysteriously, the stirring words disappeared and no one could retrieve then.  Poof!  But here’s what we know: this time Summer’s concluding keynote speech celebrated the wonders of outsourcing and off-shoring jobs.  Here’s a brief statement from the catalog introduction of the 2011 World BPO/ITO Forum:

Resisting the prospect of offshoring withholds a major totem of competitive parity from the most profitable producers of economic progress, Dr. Summers said. “It is to deny the US and American businesses an opportunity to participate in this revolution in emerging markets, which is the most important economic story of our time.” He added that increasing trade in tasks makes businesses more efficient and competitive, and allows them to exploit different skills, capacities and labor costs anywhere in the world. Critics who automatically label outsourcing or offshoring a threat to prosperity “resemble luddites who took axes to machinery early in England’s industrial revolution,” he said. Instead of killing jobs, as luddites feared, machines spawned millions of jobs and better standards of living.

Oh yes, I’m sure the majority of Americans now collecting unemployment or those working two, three jobs to pay the electric bill, buy the Kraft mac and cheese dinners in bulk, while hoping to God no one in the family gets sick could appreciate this finely-tuned statement.  But this statement [though applicable to many workers] was specifically directed to business process [as in payroll, tax and benefits] and IT workers—you know, all those geeky kids that were told ‘Go for the computer degree.  You can’t go wrong.’

Oops.

Because those innocent initials in the forum’s title?  That would stand for ‘business process outsourcing/information technology outsourcing.’

And people wonder why there are so many college grads with gargantuan school loans associated with the Occupy Wall St. Movement.  These grads are mad as hell and not getting over it.

But notice the analogy that Summers uses for describing critics of massive outsourcing of jobs, jobs, jobs.  Critics are Luddites, Summers says, no better than the extremists who smashed machinery during the early days of the Industrial Revolution.  I suspect there are ‘things’ citizens would enjoy smashing right now.  And it’s not the machines.

But here’s the word that flew out at me: exploit, as in exploitation:

an act or instance of exploiting<exploitation of natural resources> <exploitation of immigrant laborers> <clever exploitation of the system>

Ding, ding, ding!  We exploit our natural resources, our fellow citizens.  We exploit immigrant workers, every chance we get.  And we exploit the system by having people like Larry Summers, whirling through the revolving door of government/business, and then pretending the damage left behind is a good thing, the most important economic story of our time.

How about the biggest heist of all time!

But it gets better.  We get to exploit workers in other countries, too, making their lives so miserable they threaten to commit suicide en masse.

What’s not to love?

If this sort of thing wasn’t so sickening, it would be laughable.

I am not laughing.

Btw, the Republic Report site will be tapping none other than Jack Abramoff for an insider’s view of  DC corruption and influence peddling.  Super-lobbyist Abramoff, released from jail last year, will be a regular contributor to RR because if you want to catch a bunch of rats what better strategy than employ a King Rat?

Could get very interesting!

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