Endless Questions
Posted: January 12, 2013 Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Free Speech | Tags: Aaron Swartz 15 CommentsIt’s always difficult to report that some one young has died. It’s even worse when the circumstances of death seem beyond explanation as always 
seems to be the case with suicides. The story of online activist Aaron Swartz is filled with glimpses into a brilliant mind, a passionate advocate for access to knowledge, a search for justice against suppression and censorship and our government who seem intent on prosecuting the wrong people these days for the wrong reasons.
Aaron Swartz, the Internet political activist who co-wrote the initial specification for RSS, has committed suicide, a relative told CNN Saturday. He was 26.
“Great minds carry heavy burdens,” wrote one user on Reddit, a popular social media website that Swartz helped develop and popularize following a merger in 2006.
Swartz also co-founded Demand Progress, a political action group that campaigns against Internet censorship.
A young prodigy, his passion pushed limits and landed him in legal troubles in recent years.
In 2011, he was arrested in Boston for alleged computer fraud and illegally obtaining documents from protected computers. He was later indicted from an incident in which he allegedly stole millions of online documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He pleaded not guilty in September, according to MIT’s “The Tech” newspaper.
Yes. Swartz helped develop Reddit and RSS feed. He will now be best known as a victim of government prosecution overkill. It’s an odd story in the endless one where big businesses and government work hard to make sure that anything slightly worth knowing must be associated with some one’s exorbitant profit and a form of ownership.
Congress passed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in 1986 to deal with the then-new problem of malicious computer hacking. Because the law was passed when the Internet was still in its infancy, the exact scope of its provisions remains murky today. For example, there have been cases of employers suing employees under the CFAA for using their employer-provided credentials to access information on the corporate intranet that wasn’t intended for them.
In 2008, the government prosecuted a woman under the CFAA after her “cyber-bullying” of a teenager contributed to her suicide. The government argued that the woman’s actions violated the MySpace user agreement, and therefore constituted unauthorized access to MySpace servers. The woman was convicted, but her conviction was later thrown out by an appeals court.
The government seems to be making a similar argument in the Swartz case. It says he violated the CFAA when he “intentionally accessed computers belonging to MIT and JSTOR without authorization, and thereby obtained from protected computers information whose value exceeded $5,000—namely, digitized journal articles from JSTOR’s archive.” By breaking Swartz’s actions up into five different date ranges and charging him under two different sections of the CFAA for each, the government has ginned up a total of 10 counts, each of which is theoretically punishable by five years in prison. For good measure, they also charged Swartz with one count of “recklessly damaging” a computer under the CFAA and two counts of wire fraud.
It’s a stretch to say that Swartz gained unauthorized access to JSTOR’s servers. Initially, he did have authorization to access both the network and the JSTOR website. But according to the indictment, “each user must agree and acknowledge that they cannot download or export contents from JSTOR’s computer servers with automated computer programs such as Web robots, spiders, or scrapers.” The government seems to believe that once Swartz ran afoul of this contractual requirement, he became an unauthorized user and therefore a felon under the CFAA.
But treating the violation of such use restrictions, or the evasion of efforts to enforce them, as a felony is overkill. Automated crawling of websites is an extremely common activity that can have social benefits. While crawling a public (or, in the case of JSTOR semi-public) website against the wishes of its owner is generally bad manners, it’s hardly comparable to hacking into someone’s computer to access private information.
Websites have been known to use their terms of use for anti-competitive purposes.
I have a major soft spot for hacktivists like Swartz. Not only is it a matter of being awed by their brilliance, but by what appears to be an ethos 
based on just getting knowledge for the sake of knowledge. There’s a basic underlying democratic principle in the idea that human knowledge belongs to all of us. Evidently, JSTOR must’ve agreed with him.
Swartz’s subsequent struggle for money to offset legal fees to fight the Department of Justice and stay afloat was no secret.
After the September charges came down, the wife of Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig – social justice lawyer Bettina Neuefeind – established and organized the site free.aaronsw.com to raise money for his defense.
Demand Progress – itself an organization focused on online campaigns dedicated to fighting for civil liberties, civil rights, and progressive government reform – compared The Justice Department’s indictment of Swartz to “trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”
Swartz’s suicide came two days after JSTOR announced it is releasing “more than 4.5 million articles” to the public.
So, this isn’t the most political or strategic post we’ve ever put on the blog. Aaron’s passing isn’t one of those newsy obits that will get played at the end of the year in some tribute gala. I think, however, we need to notice his tragic death, his brilliant short, life and his commitment to an open internet with accessible content. His story is really one about our freedom to know which is really the final frontier of our humanity.
Proving Insanity
Posted: January 11, 2013 Filed under: just because, Surreality | Tags: insane right wingers, rape 14 Comments
“We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” George Orwell
I just had to do this drop of quick links that came down the pipe today. It’s like there’s an entire group of right wingers out there that don’t understand what they’re actually proving while they’re trying to prove their points. How’s this for proving you’re insane?
Ladies of the whacked state of Georgia, if this man is your doctor, please go to the emergency room immediately and ask for a complete physical. Then, file a complaint with the state’s licensing agency so no other woman will suffer the indignity of having this pathetic excuse for a human being her doctor.
Rep. Phil Gingrey, an ob-gyn and chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, explained to the audience at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast Thursday in Smyrna, Ga., that Akin wasn’t far off on the science when he said rape victims rarely get pregnant because their bodies have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”
“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”
“But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak,” Gingrey continued. “And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”
Rep. Phil Gingrey, an ob-gyn and chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, explained to the audience at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast Thursday in Smyrna, Ga., that Akin wasn’t far off on the science when he said rape victims rarely get pregnant because their bodies have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”
“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”
“But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak,” Gingrey continued. “And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”
Rep. Phil Gingrey, an ob-gyn and chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, explained to the audience at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast Thursday in Smyrna, Ga., that Akin wasn’t far off on the science when he said rape victims rarely get pregnant because their bodies have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”“But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak,” Gingrey continued. “And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”
Audio, shared with TPM by the Marietta Daily Journal:
Gingrey also defended Akin’s theory that women who claim to be rape victims are often lying about it.“‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape,” Gingrey said. “I don’t find anything so horrible about that.”
Then, there’s this story from Portland.
Two men walked the streets of Portland armed with assault weapons earlier this week because they said they wanted to “educate” residents, who reacted by fleeing and calling police.
Warren Drouin and Steven Boyce told KPTV that they were forced to take drastic measure to make sure people were aware of their Second Amendment rights after 20 children in Connecticut were massacred with same type of AR-15 rifles they were carrying.
“We’re not threatening anyone,” Drouin explained. “We don’t have that type of criminal behavior.”
“This happens to open that line of communication, to let people know that you can defend yourself in a time of crisis or any time that you want to,” Boyce added.
But KPTV’s Kaitlyn Bolduc reported that the demonstration created a “state of panic” in Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood.
“Employees inside of E Hair Studio hid in the back of the salon and locked there doors, while other ran for help for fear the two were really there to cause harm,” Bolduc said.
Police spoke to Drouin and Boyce and said the conceal-carry permit holders had not broken any laws.
The men insisted that they understood that people were on edge after recent mass shootings but hoped residents would approach them to ask questions during future demonstrations.
“We did mind the school posting signs,” Boyce pointed out. “We don’t don’t want to cause any trouble with that. We totally respect — there is a little bit of emotional sensitivity towards that and it’s just — we were walking the streets.”
Followed by this from the bottom of all the bottom feeding red states.
Today marks the deadline for Mississippi’s sole remaining abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to comply with the restrictive, unnecessary restrictions that the state’s Republican legislators imposed last summer. The new regulations require the clinic’s doctors to secure hospital admitting privileges, but all seven hospitals in the surrounding area have so far denied them. A Bush-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked the law to give the doctors more time to secure the privileges they need, but that order expires today.In public, anti-choice advocates claim they support enacting additional regulations for abortion clinics as an important measure to protect women’s health and safety. But when Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) attended an anti-abortion event on Thursday, he didn’t feel the need the sugarcoat his real motives for signing the restrictive measure into law last year:
“My goal of course is to shut it down,” Gov. Phil Bryant said after addressing a group of pastors attending a pro-life luncheon Thursday in Jackson.
The governor doesn’t have that authority. Instead, by Friday lawyers representing the state must file a response in federal court to a motion by the Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Bryant himself doesn’t have the authority to ensure that women in Mississippi are forced to go without a single abortion clinic, but he certainly can move closer to his goal by imposing “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers” (TRAP) laws with the sole intention of indirectly restricting women’s reproductive rights. TRAP laws have been a successful method of targeting abortion providers in other states, since clinics are often forced to close when they are unable to meet the complicated new standards.
Oh, and this from Faux’s brightest and best …
Fox News host Eric Bolling on Wednesday accused some schools of “pushing the liberal agenda” for teaching an algebra lesson about the distributive property.
During a segment about “indoctrination in schools,” Bolling reminded viewers of a 2009 video of children chanting, “Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Barack Hussein Obama,” which outraged conservatives at the time.
“But even worse is the way some textbooks are pushing the liberal agenda,” the Fox News host explained, pointing to an algebra worksheet that Scholastic says gives students “[i]nsight into the distributive property as it applies to multiplication.”
“Distribute the wealth!” Bolling exclaimed, reading the worksheet. “Distribute the wealth with the lovely rich girl with a big ole bag of money, handing some money out.”
Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle explained that the algebra worksheet had put her on “high alert” for the liberal agenda in her 6-year-old son’s curriculum.
And from some whacked up party of North Carolina:
A lesbian couple said an owner of a restaurant handed them a letter condemning homosexuality as they were walking out of the building.
Ariel and Shawnee McPhail said they went into The Stingray Café, on 520 S. Front Street in New Bern, and ate a meal there on Dec. 4. But they said as they were leaving, the restaurant’s owner, Ed McGovern, handed them a letter that stated God’s opposition to homosexuality. The letter reads as follows:
“God said in the last days that man and wom[a]n would be lover of self, more [than] the lover of God.
That man and woman would have unnatural [affection] for one another. Then, the coming of the Son of Man, who is Jesus. So please, look at your life. See how it hurt[s] everyone around you. And ask the Lord to open your eye[s] before it [is] to[o] late.
The Love of Christ
P.S. my daughter also was gay. It destroy[ed] her life and my grandson.”
McGovern confirmed with NewsChannel 12 that he did give the couple that letter, out of love, and that he did something similar to another lesbian couple in the past.
McGovern said he wrote the letter because he did not approve of the McPhails kissing outside of his restaurant. But the couple denied doing it.
“First of all, we didn’t kiss. We don’t kiss in public. We were holding hands,” said Shawnee McPhail. “Secondly, if I did kiss my wife in public, what married couple would you go to and say, ‘how dare you. You cannot hold hands and you cannot kiss in public therefore you deserve my judgement.'”
What is wrong with these people and why don’t they see how fucked up they are?
Friday Reads: Red State Hell Realm Edition
Posted: January 11, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: ALEC, climate change denial, Red State Banana Republics, voodoo economics 26 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m not sure a lot of you know what it’s like to have a Republican Governor these days implementing the Koch Brothers and ALEC agenda. I thought I’d focus a little bit on that. I hope those of you that live in Red States–like me–and are horrified at what’s coming down the pike in your neck of the woods will share. Yes. I just don’t stop writing about ALEC. I can’t. It’s like watching a train come down the track knowing that all of your friends are bolted right to it.
So, climate change is one of those topics where Republicans love to be deep in denial. What’s it like to be in one of the hottest Red States in the US and have a governor that’s basically ensuring that you’re in the fire or the frying pan? This one is for my birth state of Oklahoma where my Dad grew up during the worst of the dust bowl days. They have one of the dumbest damn Senators on the planet. Here’s the ever quotable and insane Jim Imhofe.
Oklahoma is another state that experienced its warmest year on record. The average temperature in the Sooner State was 63 degrees. The USDA today declared a drought disaster in 76 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties.
When it comes to climate change denial, Republican senator James Inhofe takes the top prize for outrageous statements. His anti-environmental stances are even more dangerous because Inhofe serves as the ranking member of the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and was its chairman from 2003 to 2007.
In a 2003 Senate speech, Inhofe said that “catastrophic global warming is a hoax.” Last year, Inhofe stated on a Christian radio show that the Bible refutes climate change, saying “God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
Down here in Louisiana, we’re mired in a recession and have had our public health and education systems gutted to the point that the accrediting institution for LSU is asking if any one’s in charge of the system. So, what’s that freak of nature Governor Bobby Jindal up to? He wants to eliminate our state income taxes and corporate taxes. I have no idea how a got stuck in a Pinochet-like hell realm but here I am.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is proposing the complete elimination of income and corporate taxes in the state, and says he wants to replace the revenue by increasing sales taxes.
The Times-Picayune reported that Jindal is in the process of fleshing out the tax reform proposal, the goal of which, according to a statement from the Governor’s office and given to the paper, “is to eliminate all personal income tax and all corporate income tax in a revenue neutral manner. We want to keep the sales tax as low and flat as possible.”
“Eliminating personal income taxes will put more money back into the pockets of Louisiana families and will change a complex tax code into a more simple system that will make Louisiana more attractive to companies who want to invest here and create jobs,” Jindal says in the statement.
“Tax reform will remove administrative burdens from families and small businesses and improve Louisiana’s business prospects; create more business investment opportunities with increased job growth; and raise the state’s profile in national business rankings,” the statement continues.
“The bottom line is that for too long, Louisiana’s workers and small businesses have suffered from having a state tax structure that is too complex and that holds back economic prosperity. It’s time to change that so people can keep more of their own money and foster an environment where businesses want to invest and create good-paying jobs.”
everything but basic food. Hasn’t this mean, bug-eyed man found enough policies that punish the poor already? Those of us that have to actually buy something do not keep more of our income if we’re paying regressive consumption taxes.Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott has rejected the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. And now he’s in hot water for apparently inflating the cost of the expansion to Floridians in order to justify his decision.
The website Health News Florida reported Tuesday that Scott was warned in letters by the state legislature’s top economist and budget analyst that his administration’s figure — that the expansion would cost the state $26 billion over 10 years — was false.
Scott’s aide reportedly said, in emails obtained by HNF, that the figure was based on the assumption that the federal government — which is tasked with paying for the vast majority of each state’s Medicaid expansion for the first decade — would not fulfill its promise.
But after the report was published and caused a stir, including scathing criticism from Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL), Scott said through a spokeswoman that his Agency for Health Care Administration would consider alternate cost estimates.
“AHCA’s report concluded that adding people to Medicaid under the new law would cost Florida $26 billion over 10 years,” said Scott’s aide Melissa Sellers. “Others have asked AHCA to use different assumptions to calculate different cost estimates. We look forward to reviewing those cost estimates as well.”
Castor accused Scott — a former hospital executive who rose to national prominence in 2009 while campaigning against the ACA — of deliberately deceiving Floridians.
“Not only did Gov. Scott manufacture flawed cost estimates, but it appears he had been advised that the numbers were flawed and used them anyway,” Castor said in a statement. “Florida Legislative Appropriations staff advised the governor’s office that the numbers were misleading, but it appears that the governor ignored it. … Clearly this was not a mistake. Knowing that the numbers are wrong and using them anyway is.”
The Scott administration’s Medicaid figures were disputed by multiple nonpartisan analyses.
Both Jindal and Scott have lifted their agendas directly from ALEC. Wisconsin is another state being driven into developing nation status by rogue legislation designed to enrich the wealthy. Here’s a list of bills to watch for in that state.
Wisconsin’s 2011-2012 legislative session saw the introduction of 32 bills or budget provisions reflecting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation — including Governor Scott Walker’s contentious attack on public sector collective bargaining, voter ID legislation, and bills that make it harder for Americans to hold corporations accountable when their products injure or kill — and 19 of those proposals became law.
What pieces of the ALEC playbook might be on the agenda for the 2013-2014 session, which began this week?
One of my favorite Louisiana Bloggers –Professor Robert Mann–has read and reported on the “snake oil” agenda of ALEC and how it’s impacted the economic viability of the states I grew up in. This study comes from the state of Iowa where I spent most of my grade school days and where my dad was a small town Ford dealer. Here’s a great synopsis that discusses how that trickle-down, voodoo economics is bad for state economies. I’ve written many times about the Laffer curve and its absurd hypothesis which has been refuted by study-after-study. This should be just one more nail in the voodoo economics coffin.
That scrutiny comes in the form of a November 2012 report by the Good Jobs First and Iowa Policy Project, “Selling Snake Oil to the States: The American Legislative Exchange Council’s Flawed Prescriptions for Prosperity.” The report, written by Greg LeRoy and Philip Mattera, concludes:
A hard look at the actual data finds that the Alec-Laffer recommendations not only fail to predict positive results for state economies—the policies they endorse actually forecast worse state outcomes for job creation and paychecks. That is, states that were rated higher on ALEC’s Economic Outlook Ranking in 2007, based on 15 “fiscal and regulatory policy variables,” have actually been doing worse economically in the years since, while the less a state conformed with ALEC policies the better off it was.
Read the report for yourself. It’s a treasure-trove of evidence debunking the whole wacky supply-side economic theories that have governed the Republican Party for the past 30 years. But here are a few helpful excerpts that are particularly relevant to those of us who live in states, like Louisiana, with governors totally beholden to the corporate interests that are selling this economic snake oil.
ALEC-Laffer claim that lowering state and local taxes produces much greater job growth; in actuality, such taxes are such a tiny cost factor for businesses, and come with higher taxes on others or lower quality public services, that such a strategy fails
ALEC-Laffer claim that a low top personal income tax rate is a key to small business success; in actuality, property and sales taxes—ignored by ALEC-Laffer—are far more important issues
ALEC-Laffer claim that high top personal income tax rates and the presence of estate and inheritance taxes cause large-scale out-migration of high-income individuals; in reality, migration has little to do with taxes, and there is no plausible case for state estate taxes affecting job-creating investment
The ALEC report asserts that state tax rates in many instances approach “Laffer Curve” territory, where tax cuts would actually increase tax revenue; in reality, tax cuts reduce revenue and result in the defunding of public goods such as education and infrastructure, which really do matter for economic development
A remarkable finding in the Iowa Policy Project report, stated a few paragraphs above, is worth repeating: states that swallowed ALEC’s economic snake oil have done worse than state that did not.
. . . actual results are the opposite of the ALEC claim. The more a state’s policies mirrored the ALEC low-tax/regressive taxation/limited government agenda, the lower the median family income; this is true for every year from 2007 through 2011. . . . The relationship is not only negative each year, it also became worse over time: the better a state did on the ALEC Outlook Ranking, the more family income declined from 2007 to 2011. . . . The more a state followed the Alec-Laffer policies, the higher its poverty rate, every year from 2007 to 2011.
And what do Fisher and Mattera prescribe in lieu of the ALEC snake oil? Well, they advise against slashing income taxes to spur small business job growth, explaining
Income taxes, on the other hand, are low or nonexistent in the early years of a business when it is showing losses; they are payable only to the extent that a business has gotten off the ground and is generating a profit, and even then will often remain low, or nonexistent, for years as the early losses are carried forward. Clearly if a state wants to encourage entrepreneurship and help really small businesses, it should shift taxes from sales and property to income. But Rich States, Poor States would have us do the reverse. It’s another example of how ALEC and Laffer are fixated on progressivity (which most affects high-income individuals and larger corporations) and will employ any argument, valid or not, against it.
For those interested in learning what really does spur economic growth in states, the authors of the Iowa Policy Project study note that there exists “a large volume of research investigating this question over the past 40 years.” And what is the conclusion of these studies?
The preponderance of the evidence from many dozens of studies over a period of 30 years or more is that business tax cuts, if they could be enacted without cutting public spending, have some positive growth effect on state economic growth, but that this effect is quite small. These statistically controlled policy experiments are in effect holding all else equal. It is important to understand what this means. The research does not imply that a 10 percent cut in taxes on business that is paid for by cutting 10 percent of the state budget would produce 3 percent growth. Such a balanced budget policy (and states of course must balance their budgets) might well produce no growth at all, especially in the long run, because budget cuts necessarily mean cuts in state and local services essential to the functioning of the economy. As [Professor Timothy] Bartik himself has said: “[A]n economic development policy of business tax cuts may fail to increase jobs in a state or metropolitan area if it leads to a deterioration of public services to business. An economic development policy of tax increases may succeed in increasing jobs if it significantly improves public services to business.”
The authors’ conclusion is fairly simple and impressively substantiated in their report: ALEC’s snake oil does little more than provide “a recipe for economic inequality and declining incomes for most citizens and for depriving state and local governments of the revenue needed to maintain public infrastructure and education systems that are the underpinnings of long-term economic growth.”
That’s also a very nice summary of Jindal’s failed approach to government.
What really makes this so shameful is that these Banana Republic-style agendas are being subsidized by Blue States. There are very few economically viable Red States in our country. They could not exist on their own as they are in worse shape than countries like Greece. They stymie policy at the national level and continue to subsidize their backward growth agendas with federal monies. However, they are not beyond complaining about government spending will sucking it in like a big ol’ black hole.
Palazzo is one of 67 House Republicans to have voted against the federal flood insurance expansion; many of those said that the funds need to be offset by cuts to other areas of the federal budget. Think Progress reported that 37 of the dissenting members had previously backed federal disaster aid for their home states. Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), the House Republican Conference vice chairwoman, told HuffPost in a statement that she voted against the flood insurance money due to concerns about the long-term debt of the flood program and a need to protect flood insurance funding for Kansas residents.
It’s amazing to me that so many folks living in the states where I’ve spent most of my life do not wake up and smell the cafe au lait and the feed lots! I’ve always found the scent of both very hard to miss.
Meanwhile, red districts and states continually send us the likes of Michelle Bachmann with their conspiracy theories and insane outlook on life. Bachmann’s silly ass is right back in a seat on the intelligence committee despite the very clear threat she has brought to he life of US public servants.. She also introduce the first HR that once again seeks to overturn the HCRA. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan has just introduced another “Personhood” HR. This is what we get from these Red State Whackadoodles.
It’s amazing to me how these people continually waste our money and time while wrecking our economy with completely rogue and disproved ideology. It’s clear that the ALEC agenda is all about plumping us turkeys up for their corporate feasts.
So, I’ve written way too much and ranted way too long. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Appointments Like Us
Posted: January 10, 2013 Filed under: Barack Obama | Tags: diversity, lack of diversity in Obama's cabinet 7 CommentsAs BB pointed out in this morning’s reads, there is a distinct lack of diversity showing up in Obama’s cabinet appointments. It would be easy for me to drag out the old MS magazine cover showing Obama as the new vision of Feminism for ridicule. I could also send out a few calls 
for Romney’s binders filled with women. But, the original picture and the visual of all those white guys and the leg of Valerie Jarret still just seems to be the best representation of the bigger problem.
Today, the president appointed the 4th white male in a row to what are considered the top cabinet positions. Obama’s second term is the result of an election that showed the decreasing representation of white men in the populace. It’s obviously not trickling up to the positions of power and voices that will be heard, be counted, and will matter when setting policy. I’m wondering what white man will become chief of staff at this point.
The topic of diversity in the Obama administration was also raised by the press. Jay Carney–white male–parried questions from the front row of the self-serving and pleased White House Press Corps. Btw, they are all white men too. But, it’s not just the women that have noticed that the advisers on major economic policies and issues on deck for the next four years seem to come from that same old boys groups. Don’t the people that vote for you get a seat at your table? Aren’t we among the powerful and qualified now?
“The first black president,” MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing began, “and he’s getting questions about diversity. Are these questions fair? Are you concerned?”
Rangel replied that he is concerned and the questions about a lack of diversity in the White House are fair.
“It’s embarrassing as hell,” Rangel said. “We were very hard on Mitt Romney – with his women binder, and a variety of things – and, I kind of think there’s no excuse when it’s the second term.”
Rangel said that there could be “the Harvard problem” at work in this instance. He said that women and minorities simply do not have the access to high ranking officials in Washington and, thus, are rarely promoted to positions of authority.
That said, Rangel thought that, after four years, there was no excuse for the president to not have a qualified stable of minorities and women to promote to high ranking posts in the White House.
“He’s had four years to work the bench, to work the second team, so that – in the second term – these people should be just as experienced as any other American,” Rangel concluded.
The conversation has already become uncivil as seen on Morning Joe this morning.
The issue of diversity took up the entire segment, but started to grow contentious when the BBC’s Katty Kay sought to downplay the lack of diversity in Obama’s cabinet while noting that Mitt Romney‘s “binders full of women” comment resonated because it reinforced the “1950s” attitude some perceived him having toward women.
“This is what’s wrong with political reporting,” Scarborough charged. The left took a “faux pas” and blew it up — but in Obama’s case, they’re talking about “something that matters.” Actual cabinet positions. That led to some back-and-forth between the two, who plainly disagreed.
As the segment went on, Brzezinski noted that Susan Rice could have been another woman in Obama’s cabinet had Republicans not “routed” her out. “Talk about old guys being completely chauvinistic jerks,” she remarked, as Scarborough noted David Axelrod‘s assertion that Rice hadn’t been considered for the Secretary of State position. Brzezinski countered that the president’s policies speak to his commitment to women’s issues.
Still, the show went on… until Scarborough’s joking around proved to be too much for Brzezinski who told him, “You’re being chauvinistic right now.” She can make personal attacks, Scarborough retorted, but “you’ve got a president you worship on this show every day.” Yet she “savaged” Romney. Had the president been Republican, she’d have been upset about the issue, he argued.
“You really — knowing me and seeing me work around here for five years — you want to call me a chauvinist on television?” Scarborough asked, with Brzezinski replying that she wasn’t calling him that.
“I said the way you’re acting is chauvinistic,” she responded, “especially the way you were handling this conversation. It’s not funny.”
Irin Carmon at Salon also writes about Obama’s White House: Still white, overwhelmingly male saying that “The stale sameness of the president’s second-term Cabinet picks belies the administration’s rhetoric on diversity.” BB included this link this morning and it was a compelling read and worth repeating.
Today on TV, I’ve watched Joe Biden take point on gun violence just shortly after taking the lead on the latest rounds of negotiations on the budget, tax, and spending deals. Yet, look at whose lives are overwhelmingly impacted by gun violence or by cuts in government spending and obsessive tax cutting for rich people? Is it folks like Biden? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few voices at that bargaining table that realize what’s at stake? There has to be more to policy making that putting Washington DC insiders and power players at the head of the table. There are many qualified women and minorities that have come in through the ranks of the state department, the pentagon, the treasury, and many businesses. The most feared person by Wall Street this days is grandmother and Senator Elizabeth Warren. The two people most involved with gun violence prevention laws have been victims of violence or close to victims of gun violence themselves. That would be Senator Dianne Feinstein and Long Island Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy. They’ve been on top of the gun violence issue since starting out in federally elected positions. How about any black member of congress representing an urban district? Couldn’t they have a place at the table along with Joe Biden instead of being shuttled in for an interview with the likes of the NRA lobbyist?
Andrea Mitchell points out that Obama’s Cabinet is Deja Vu all over again. New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen appeared on the program calling the appointments disappointing.
On Thursday, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen called the lack of women among the new appointees “disappointing.” Shaheen, whose state elected the nation’s first all-female delegation in November–-with two female senators, a female governor, and two congresswomen–appeared on Andrea Mitchell Reports Thursday to discuss the new White House cabinet and the importance of women in government.
“I would hope the president would follow New Hampshire’s lead,” Shaheen told Mitchell, pointing to the fact that women account for half of the population of the United States. “He still has an opportunity,” she added. “He has places where he could appoint women, and I hope he’ll take a look and do that.”
As for Jack Lew’s soon-to-be-open post as chief of staff, the front runners are Denis McDonough and Ron Klain. McDonough, a current Obama advisor, and Klain, a former chief of staff to vice President Biden, are also white men. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, one of the few women in the president’s cabinet, announced her resignation on Wednesday, leaving the White House with even fewer X chromosomes. This is not just a public relations problem for President Obama and his staff. According to Shaheen, it is a problem for democracy.
“We have different life experiences,” Shaheen told Andrea Mitchell. “We need a government that looks like America, so we can address the concerns that we hear from across the spectrum.”
It’s good that we’re at least getting some air time on this issue. However, I really doubt it will do much good. I guess we’ll see what happens with the next few appointments. I should add that women’s groups shouldn’t be the only one’s complaining here. I wonder if we’ll begin to see some folks offer up some binders full of Hispanics, African Americans, and other minorities too. Oddly enough, as I published this, I just got an action email from NOW with the topic being “Where are the Women?” It’s probably better put to ask where are the people that look like all of us who voted for you?
Thursday Reads: Flu Epidemic, Obama’s Boy’s Club, and Other News
Posted: January 10, 2013 Filed under: abortion rights, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, fetus fetishists, health, morning reads, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: anti-LGBT prejudice, Ed Markey, influenza, Jimi Hendrix, lack of diversity in Obama's cabinet, Paul Ryan, Rachel Maddow, Rev. Louie Giglio, Shell Oil, Victor Frankl 32 Comments
Good Morning!!
I have a nasty cold, so if I don’t make a lot of sense this morning, please try to make allowances. I just hope I don’t get the flu. Mayor Menino declared a public health emergency in Boston yesterday because there have been 700 confirmed cases of flu in the city. This morning The Daily Beast reports that there is a “major influenza epidemic taking hold across the country.”
New York City and much of the U.S. are a week or two into a major influenza epidemic. Boston declared a public-health emergency Wednesday after reporting four deaths, and North Carolina is seeing its biggest number of cases in a decade. To place the problem into graphic, corporate terms, the charts sent around to compare this year’s activity against that of other years have required re-scaling to accommodate the scary red line going up and up.
Public health officials are telling people it’s not too late to get a flu shot, but according to this article, this year’s vaccine may not be working so well.
One alarming possibility is that this year’s vaccine against influenza is not well-matched to the current disease-causing strains. This exposes a significant problem in the modus operandi of influenza vaccine production—it’s mired in techniques and approaches developed before World War II; in fact soldiers from that war were among the first to get this brand of vaccine. Here’s how it works: each year, around February, world experts select from a menu of dozens just three influenza strains—two of flu A andone of flu B—to place into the coming season’s vaccine. More than three would require a shot with too large a volume and might blunt the body’s immune response. Once selected, the three viruses are grown painstakingly, on hen’s eggs (what year is this?) then, after a big enough crop has been raised, the virus is killed and stabilized and sent around for injections—all on the hope that the experts guessed right.
To date, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found strong agreement between the vaccine strains and the current clinical strains, suggesting the vaccine ought to work just fine. But some clinicians have their doubts. This much activity, is the thinking, can only be due to extremely limited protection from vaccine. For some, it feels like 2009 all over again, when the novel flu strain, so-called because it had never previously been seen in people or animals, appeared. That was the year that spring-break revelers from Queens who had gone south of the border brought back an altogether new strain. Because of its novelty, no vaccine was active against it (at least at the start), so we saw the unchecked spread of influenza zipping across the country in no time flat.
So is that happening again? We won’t know until there is more testing of this year’s strains.
President Obama is getting a lot of criticism for turning his “inner circle” into a “boy’s club.” From Tuesday’s NYT:
In an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 29, 11 of President Obama’s top advisers stood before him discussing the heated fiscal negotiations. The 10 visible in a White House photo are men.
In the days since, Mr. Obama has put together a national security team dominated by men, with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts nominated to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as the secretary of state, Chuck Hagel chosen to be the defense secretary and John O. Brennan nominated as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Given the leading contenders for other top jobs, including chief of staff and Treasury secretary, Mr. Obama’s inner circle will continue to be dominated by men well into his second term.
From the White House down the ranks, the Obama administration has compiled a broad appointment record that has significantly exceeded the Bush administration in appointing women but has done no better than the Clinton administration, according to an analysis of personnel data by The New York Times. About 43 percent of Mr. Obama’s appointees have been women, about the same proportion as in the Clinton administration, but up from the roughly one-third appointed by George W. Bush.
The skew was widespread: male appointees under Mr. Obama outnumbered female appointees at 11 of the 15 federal departments, for instance. In some cases, the skew was also deep. At the Departments of Justice, Defense, Veterans Affairs and Energy, male appointees outnumbered female appointees by about two to one.
At Salon, Irin Carmon writes:
Diversity in any sense is something that doesn’t really happen unless you try, and if the Obama administration is trying with its top-level appointments, other priorities have clearly trumped it. This doesn’t have to be because of a conspiracy: A lifetime of seeing almost exclusively white men as authority figures has a way of perpetuating itself, and without much self-examination or effort, people tend to go with a certain comfortable framework. (This is true despite the president being a black man; as anyone who has worked for a woman or a person of color who was the first to stake out a spot on hostile turf can tell you, racism and sexism aren’t exclusively white male phenomena.) But it’s still a problem that needs to be talked about, over and over again, until something changes.
Carmon concludes her post with some excellent questions:
…leadership matters, and here we are with this top-level lineup of too-familiar faces. Hillary Clinton is gone, and we don’t have Sheila Bair, Michele Flournoy or Susan Rice (a pretty good selection given that “pipeline problem”) and another white man is expected to succeed Jack Lew as chief of staff should be become the treasury secretary. The numbers look even worse now that Hilda Solis, a Latina woman, has resigned as secretary of labor.
So here are some follow-up questions: Will John Kerry carry on the legacy of Hillary Clinton in encouraging female leadership and entrepreneurship around the world? Will Chuck Hagel, if confirmed as secretary of defense, fully and fairly implement the progressive changes in the military the administration supports, including the partial expansion of abortion access for service-members and dependents, despite his past opposition? How independent will Lew be from the Wall Street boys’ club’s values and logic? And how will the administration do better on this stuff next time, if it does indeed care about it?
At least Eric Holder’s announcement that he is staying on at Attorney General will keep Obama’s cabinet from being made up of only white men.
Obama is also getting hammered for choosing an anti-gay preacher, Rev. Louis Giglio, to give the benediction at the inauguration. From Think Progress, via Alternet:
The Presidential Inauguration Committee announced Tuesday that the President Obama has selected Pastor Louie Giglio of the Georgia-based Passion City Church to deliver the benediction for his second inauguration. In a mid-1990s sermon identified as Giglio’s, available online on a Christian training Web site, he preached rabidly anti-LGBT views. The 54-minute sermon, entitled “In Search of a Standard – Christian Response to Homosexuality,” advocates for dangerous “ex-gay” therapy for gay and lesbian people, references a biblical passage often interpreted to require gay people be executed, and impels Christians to “firmly respond to the aggressive agenda” and prevent the “homosexual lifestyle” from becoming accepted in society.
Read quotes from Giglio’s sermon at the Alternet link.
Buzzfeed notes that the White House hasn’t yet responded to the criticism of the Gigio choice.
The White House on Wednesday was refusing to address comments critical of gay and lesbian people made by Rev. Louie Giglio, who was tapped by President Barack Obama to deliver the benediction prayer at the Jan. 21 inaugural ceremony….
The inaugural invitation is not Giglio’s first interaction with Obama. He also was one of the president’s guests at the White House’s 2012 Easter prayer breakfast, according to the White House pool report from the April 4, 2012 event.
This past November, Giglio served as the convocation speaker at the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University. Although he did not address homosexuality in the speech, he did strongly urge visiting high-school students to attend the college known for its strict policies against homosexual behavior and spoke about the positive influence Falwell has had on his life.
While Giglio did not talk about gay issues directly, he did reference gender roles in a striking way, speaking of a time he started crying very hard. He explained, “I started bawling, I mean, sobbing. Not crying like men cry. I started crying like women cry.” Continuing, he explained what he called the unwritten rules for men who cry, telling the students, “A man never looks at another man that’s crying. That’s the rule.”
If you’ve been watching the Rachel Maddow show recently, you’ve heard about the Shell Oil rig that went aground in Alaska last week. Connie from Orlando sent me a couple of links on Rachel’s interview with Rep. Ed Markey last night on Shell’s lies. From the Maddow Blog: One man’s near miss ecological disaster is another man’s swells. Watch the video here.
Paul Ryan is up to his old tricks. From Laura Bassett at HuffPo: Paul Ryan Cosponsors New Fetal Personhood Bill.
Despite the deep unpopularity of fetal personhood bills in 2012, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has again decided to cosponsor the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a bill that gives full legal rights to human zygotes from the moment of fertilization.
Ryan, who reportedly has 2016 presidential ambitions, had to de-emphasize his opposition to abortion without exceptions during the 2012 election to align his position with presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But this year, Ryan has been tapped as a keynote speaker for the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List’s sixth annual Campaign for Life Gala, and he is re-upping his support for the most extreme anti-abortion legislation in the country.
The personhood bill, first introduced in 2011 by Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) and reintroduced by Broun last week, specifies that a “one-celled human embryo,” even before it implants in the uterus to create a pregnancy, should be granted “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” Similar legislation has been rejected by voters in multiple states, including the socially conservative Mississippi, because legal experts have pointed out that it could outlaw some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization as well as criminalize abortion at all stages.
Broun said in a statement that a zygote’s right to life should be “defended vigorously and at all costs.”
“As a physician, I know that human life begins with fertilization, and I remain committed to ending abortion in all stages of pregnancy,” he said. “I will continue to fight this atrocity on behalf of the unborn, and I hope my colleagues will support me in doing so.”
Of course Republican governors are still trying to limit access to abortion, and the Center for Reproductive Rights has designed a “monitoring tool” that can be downloaded to track what’s happening in the states.
The tool outlines State obligations under international and regional human rights law on a range of reproductive rights issues—freedom from discrimination, contraceptive information and services, safe pregnancy and childbirth, abortion and post-abortion care, comprehensive sexuality education, freedom from violence against women, and HIV/AIDS. The tool then identifies key questions that human rights experts, monitoring bodies, and civil society can use to assess to what extent a State is in compliance with its obligations.
I want to end with something more positive from Emily Esfahani-Smith at The Atlantic about the differences between the pursuit of happiness and the search for meaning: There’s More to Life Than Being Happy. It’s about Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning. I highly recommend it.
And here’s something nice: and unreleased track from Jimi Hendrix, recorded in the late 1960s.
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