Monday Reads: Women as Political Footballs

Good Morning!

It never ceases to amaze me how women, their bodies, and their most intimate moments can be co-opted by male politicians.  It makes me want to sing a rousing chorus of “You don’t FUCKING own me!”. I’m not sure how we became political footballs, but I sure feel like my privacy and the privacy of every woman in the country has become a source of intense male interest.  The absolutely salacious way that the male-dominated press and republican party are going after Hillary’s most personal emails is just one example of how the current patriarchy feels they have a right to view anything of ours and control it.  Like James Carville said recently  Hillary Clinton ‘Didn’t Want Louie Gohmert Rifling Through Her E-Mails’.  Who would?

 Longtime Clinton ally James Carville said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account might have been about more than convenience.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Carville defended Clinton, saying her e-mail practices were legal. But, he added, she may also have had prying Republican eyes in mind when she chose to do business through a private e-mail server.

“I suspect she didn’t want Louie Gohmert rifling though her e-mails, which seems to me to be a kind of reasonable position for someone to take,” Carville said.

Jeb Bush released some emails but, low and behold!  None of them are about what he was up to when he was getting in the way of Terry Schiavo’s right to die.  It was all information that was basically political propaganda and ‘forward facing’.  Remember when we got to see Mitt Romney’s taxes?  Neither do I.

As part of presidential hopeful Jeb Bush’s quest to counteract his last name, he released a trove of purportedly personal emails in the name of “transparency.” That’s nice, but utterly symbolic: The emails he released were from a public-facing account that he used primarily to communicate with random constituents, not to actually govern. It’s as though he released his spam inbox and proclaimed it as a window into his soul. If Bush really wants to make a statement, he’ll give us the data that actually matters.

In addition to being filled with personally identifiable information that his constituents sent to him in the hopes of resolving their various troubles with state agencies, Jeb Bush’s big noble email dump is completely misleading. “In the spirit of transparency,” Bush states on his newwebsite, “I am posting the emails of my governorship here.” But all that he’s made available is the contents of one email account—jeb@jeb.org. That domain was registered via GoDaddy in 1997 and is owned by his political campaign operation—it is unaffiliated with the state of Florida or the office of governor (his official account was like some variant of[name]@eog.state.fl.us). The emails the public has been given are as much “the emails of [his] governorship” as my ancient live.com inbox would be “the emails of my Gawker job.” It’s a ploy.

The state of womanhood in the US is being significantly diminished. DAILY.  There is no obsession on the real issues that make women’s lives miserable.  There are only more side distractions that basically put in more intrusions in to our moral and legal personhood.

Early last week, while the political world was waiting for Hillary Clinton to address the moral, diplomatic, and technological questions posed by her e-mail habits, the United Nations issued a report asserting that more than one in three women experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetimes. One in ten females under the age of twenty is subjected to “forced sexual acts.” In more than thirty countries, it is not illegal for men to beat their wives. In the United States, eighty-three per cent of girls between twelve and sixteen confront sexual harassment in school. Even the earnest bureaucrats of the U.N., who tend to favor euphemism and skip over cruelties like honor killings and “corrective rape,” could not help but label the rate and the variety of mayhem regularly exacted upon half of humankind as “alarmingly high.”

The report went on to say that female political representation, while creeping higher, is still depressingly low––not least in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, the United States. The parliaments of South Africa, Ecuador, Finland, Senegal, Sweden, Cuba, Belgium, and Rwanda are all more than forty per cent female. The percentage of members in the U.S. House of Representatives who are women is eighteen. And, since it will soon be political high season on cable TV and at the town halls and diners of Iowa and New Hampshire, it bears repeating that no woman has ever been the President of the United States.
It was hard not to think of this status report on the condition of women in the twenty-first century while Hillary Clinton stepped into the lights before an agitated crowd of reporters at the U.N. last Tuesday. A large tapestry of “Guernica” hung behind her, and she looked no happier in that setting than the tormented figures in Picasso’s image of civil war. And yet contrition was not in her plans. Instead, she chose a familiar course, offering explanations that were by turns petulant and pretzelled. Asked about the way she chose to deal with federal guidelines on e-mail when she was the Secretary of State, she said, “I opted for convenience.” Clinton’s further explanations were so familiar, such a ride in the Wayback Machine, that you had to wonder, Why do I suddenly feel twenty years younger yet thoroughly exhausted?

That’s not the only thing waiting on old white men to intrude.  The nomination of the first black woman to be appointed US Attorney General–Loretta Lynch–languishes while Mitch McConnell pitches a fit that victims of Sex trafficking might be able to use recovery funds for an abortion.  Do we get any more intrusive than that?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday said he plans to hold up attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch’s confirmation until the Senate passes a now-controversial human trafficking bill.

“This will have an impact on the timing of considering a new attorney general,” McConnell told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” “I had hoped to turn to her next week, but if we can’t finish the trafficking bill, she will be put off again.”

Democrats are now holding up the trafficking bill, which glided through the judiciary committee, after they noticed an abortion provision embedded in the bill that would prevent victims of human trafficking from using restitution funds to pay for an abortion.

“We have to finish the human trafficking bill,” McConnell said. “The Loretta Lynch nomination comes next.”

A vote on Lynch’s nomination was slated to take place this coming week, more than two weeks after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Lynch’s nomination.

Democrats have pointed out that Lynch’s nomination has been held up in the Senate longer than any U.S. attorney general nominee in three decades.

President Barack Obama nominated Lynch to lead the Justice Department in November, but Lynch’s committee hearing didn’t come until after Republicans took control of the Senate.

The No. 3 Senate Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer responded to McConnell’s threat on Sunday, calling on Republicans to “stop dragging their feet” on Lynch’s nomination.

“For months and months, Republicans have failed to move forward with‎ her nomination using any excuse they can, except for any credible objection to her nomination itself,” Schumer said in a statement. “Loretta Lynch, and the American people, don’t deserve this. At a time when terrorists from ISIS to Al-Shabaab threaten the United States, the nominee to be attorney general deserves an up or down vote.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, said McConnell’s argument that the Senate first needs to pass the trafficking bill amounts to a “hollow excuse.”

We continue to get stories from white male republican men that are actually passing laws that show no understanding of women’s bodies, fetal or human development, or the concept that women are moral agents perfectly capable of making decisions without the injection of any one’s pet religious myth. They continue to say that women who become pregnant by rape should just accept “god’s gift”.

A Republican state lawmaker in West Virginia said on Thursday that while rape is horrible, it’s “beautiful” that a child could be produced in the attack.

According to Huffington Post, Charleston Gazette reporter David Gutman was on the scene when Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R) said, “Obviously rape is awful,” but “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this.”

Kurcaba made the remarks during a House of Delegates discussion of a law outlawing all abortions in the state after 20 weeks’ gestation. At 20 weeks, anti-choice activists and lawmakers allege, a fetus can feel pain and is therefore too viable to abort.

The bill was passed by West Virginia Republicans in 2014, but vetoed by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. Now the state GOP has revived the bill and voted to remove an exception for victims of rape and incest.

This kind of mentality leads to the idea that white men can basically do what ever they want to with women and children.  We are all chattel to be tossed about as they will.  Remember the story of the Arkansas official that ‘rehomed’ and abused two small girls to a rapist after deciding they were possessed and too unruly? Republicans are defending him.

A pair of Arkansas Republicans have stepped up to the plate to defend an embattled state lawmaker accused of “rehoming” his adopted daughters to a rapist, using Facebook to attack the media coverage of their colleague.

On Wednesday, the Arkansas Democratic Party called upon Rep. Justin Harris (R) to resign following revelations that he and his wife made the “unilateral decision to move two of his adopted daughters into another family’s home” where one of the girls was sexually assaulted. The call for his resignation comes following a week of stories reported by the Arkansas Times, — which originally broke the story — containing interviews with Department of Children and Families staffers, previous foster parents, and baby sitters, saying Harris and his wife mistreated the two girls and have lied to the press about their dealings with the DCFS.

All of this comes right in focus with the move to tell these folks that Black Lives Matter too so that overwhelmingly white male police departments do not use deadly force every time they see a black person. It also goes with the idea of driving out immigrants and Republican politicians telling the LBGT community that any potential gay marriage will “offend them.”  It’s not about any one else’s right to live their life.  It’s all about the privileged white male and his right to force the rest of us to conform to his control.  We are all in this struggle together.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a potential Republican presidential candidate, is a self-described libertarian, a position that usually indicates positive feelings on LGBT rights — but Paul showed in a Friday interview that that’s not the case for him.

When Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier asked Paul about his position on same-sex marriage, the senator responded, “I’m for traditional marriage. I think marriage is between a man and a woman. Ultimately, we could have fixed this a long time ago if we just allowed contracts between adults. We didn’t have to call it marriage, which offends myself and a lot of people.”

Having some form of contract rather than state-licensed marriage would give same-sex couples “equivalency before the law” and “would have solved a lot of these problems, and it may be where we’re still headed,” Paul continued.

The degree to which these white Republican Men want to control and determine other people’s lives offends me.

This is an open thread.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Friday Reads: Are Republicans Re-fighting the Civil War for the South this Time?

Good Morning!

We may not all be taking up arms right now,  but, I think a very good argument can be made that the success of Nixon’s Southern Strategy has basically aligned right wing loons in a manner where we are refighting the civil war with the political party that actually won the war for the North back in the day.  Fully 15 nullification bills were forwarded in a variety of state legislatures dealing with everything from federal gun bills to issues dealing with health insurance. 

It was a big week for the nullification movement, with more than 15 bills moving forward, including an Arizona bill to shut down a critical enforcement mechanism for the Affordable Care Act and Virginia bills that would help bring down a recently-revealed nationwide license-plate tracking program.

An Arizona house panel voted 5-1 to pass HB2643 – a bill that would prohibit the Arizona Department of Insurance (DOI) from investigating or enforcing any violations of federally mandated health insurance requirements. This would be extremely problematic for the feds. Since they don’t have a health insurance enforcement agency, passage would mean that no one would investigate claims of violating the federal act.

The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that the federal DEA has been tracking the location of millions of drivers – without suspicion of any crime. They get access to much of this location data from state-operated Automated License Plate Readers. In Virginia, both Houses passed bills that would restrict the use of these ALPRs and block the transfer of their data to the federal government for general surveillance. As the Tenth Amendment Center’s Mike Maharrey put it, “No data means no national tracking program.” The two Virginia chambers are currently working out some technical differences in the bill and it should be off to the Governor’s desk soon.

Also in Arizona, bills to block federal gun control, executive orders, and new EPA rules moved forward. In North Dakota, an industrial hemp farming bill passed its first step by a 13-0 vote. And in Utah, the state house voted 71-1 to pass the Right to Try Act – a bill that would effectively nullify in practice some FDA restrictions on terminally-ill patients.

Some of the most famous nullification statements this year have come from religious kooks like Mike Huckabee who insists that states can ignore Marriage Rights for GLBT even if the Supreme Court upholds them.

When the Tea Party wave arrived in 2010, it swept away much of the Republican Party’s existing structure, and instituted a more populist approach. But as waves tend to do, it left some even older debris in its wake. “Nullification,” the theory that states can invalidate federal laws that they deem unconstitutional, had its heyday in the slavery debate that preceded the Civil War, but it has found new currency since 2010.

The theory has never been validated by a federal court, yet some Republican officeholders have suggested states can nullify laws, including Senator Joni Ernst, who gave the GOP rebuttal to the State of the Union. Missouri legislatorspassed a bill that would have nullified all federal gun laws and prohibited their enforcement. My colleague James Fallows has described efforts by Republicans in Congress to block duly passed laws—refusing to confirm any director of an agency established by an act of Congress, for example—as a new form of nullification.

Now Mike Huckabee seems to be opening up a new front. The Supreme Court last week agreed to hear a case on whether same-sex-marriage bans are unconstitutional. There’s no such thing as a sure bet with the Court, but many watchers on both sides of the issue believe the justices will strike down the bans. Some conservatives seem resigned to the fact that the fight is lost; not Huckabee.

There are actually 200 nullification laws sitting out there now.   The movement is generally one that surrounds so-called State Rights or the 10th Amendment.  It’s been used to justify everything from slavery to ignoring marijuana prohibitions so the modern nullification “movement” is an odd combination of Tea Party radicals and dudebro Libertarians.  It was also used to support Jim Crow laws in the 1950s so it has a very weird history.

Besides a renewed interest in nullification, there are some radical things going on in the U.S. Senate above and beyond that possible violation of the Logan Law by those 47 Republican idiot Senators.  For example, the treatment of US Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch is basically an unprecedented attack on the Presidency mostly coming from Republicans who don’t like the executive orders on immigration.

But what we’re seeing here is a tendency among many conservatives to cast pretty much every argument between the branches as the ultimate test of whether Republicans are willing to do what it takes to rescue the republic from Obama lawlessness.

Hawkings notes that it’s remarkable that the battle over Lynch is no longer viewed as remarkable, despite being extraordinary by historical standards. I’d only add: It’s also remarkable that the hyping of so many of these fights — into a litmus test of GOP resolve to save the country from Obama tyranny and ruin — is no longer viewed as remarkable.

This statement basically is on an article from Roll Call by David Hawkings that covers the historic aspects of Republican Rage against Obama in terms of blocking even the most mundane function of governing.

For essentially the first two centuries under our Constitution, senators afforded the president free rein to stock his Cabinet as he chose, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. Getting over the “advice and consent” hurdle was about proving competence for public service, demonstrating good manners and keeping your moral nose clean.

It would not have been newsworthy at all — let alone a rationale for disqualification — for an attorney general nominee to take the same position as the president who nominated her in a balance of powers battle with Congress. (In fact, it would have been much more problematic for a nominee to openly break with the president in such a dispute.)

And yet in the past three decades, a new standard has been taking hold so firmly it’s no longer generating much notice. At least once every presidential term, the party out of the White House campaigns to bury at least one nominee for a senior executive branch post — almost entirely by complaining about their differing ideologies. (At the start of George W. Bush’s presidency, the conservative John Ashcroft survived one such experience at the hands of the Democrats by winning confirmation despite 42 “no” votes, the record for opposition to a successful attorney general nominee.)

This time, there’s been an important additional twist: The single biggest reason Republicans oppose Lynch is that she disagrees with them on a single matter of public policy. They say her sticking up for the president’s immigration executive orders reveals one of two larger problems: that she won’t steer Justice in some fundamentally new and centrist direction (as if that was ever going to happen) and she can’t be counted on for the independence an attorney general sometimes needs to pursue the rule of law over the pull of politics.

Three GOP senators rejected these arguments and supported her in the Judiciary Committee:Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona. So far her only other declared Republican backer is Susan Collins of Maine, who voted the way Obama wanted more than any other member of her caucus last year — 74 percent of the time, according to CQ Roll Call’s most recent annual votes studies. (All those details will be available for subscribers Friday on CQ.com.)

It’s like the Republicans refuse to believe the results of the last two Presidential Elections.  The outrage continues as former, future, and current Republican Presidential contenders say things that border on treason and basically sound like racist fools.  Rudy Giuliana thinks Obama should be more like Bill Cosby.  I don’t have to remind you about Bill Cosby’s behavior or his habit of lecturing down black people on their lives.

Just when you thought Rudy Giuliani couldn’t get crazier, the former NYC mayor blamed Obama for the brutal beatdown at a Brooklyn McDonalds —and said the president should be more like Bill Cosby.

Obama is ignoring “enormous amounts of crime” committed by African-Americans, Giuliani said Thursday. And he said President Obama is to blame for the brawl inside a McDonald’s in Brooklyn as well as the shooting of two cops in Ferguson because of the anti-police “tone” coming from the White House.

The former mayor, speaking on AM970 radio this morning, was asked what he thought about a number of disturbing issues in the news.

Host John Gambling asked for Giuliani’s take on the vicious McDonald’s fight, the recent police shootings in Ferguson and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton getting booed Thursday at a City Council hearing by protesters.

“It all starts at the top. It’s the tone that’s set by the President,” Giuliani said.

He added he just returned from a multi-city trip overseas and the United States is constantly derided there as a “racist state.”

“It is the obligation of the President to explain … that our police are the best in the world,” said Giuliani.

He also said Obama should have used his “bully pulpit” to stop protests in Ferguson over the summer, but didn’t.

The behavior of the Ferguson Police Department has been outrageous leading the recent resignation of its Chief and an extended document history of racism just put out by the US Justice Department.  The history of racism in police departments like the NYPD and LA are legendary and well document.  Guiliani is clearly losing it.   However, his level of hyperbole is nothing compared to the level of activity by the wingnuts in Washington coming from Southern and outback states as witnessed by the whacko Senator from Arkansas and his basically treasonous antics.  White Male, Southern, neoconfederate anger is driving Republican politics and it is a serious danger, once again, to the State of our Union.  It is being driven by almost a surreal level of paranoia against women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and the GLBT community.

Since Reagan, then, conservatism’s principal issues cannot be extricated from what animated them in the Southern milieu of their birth. The North, if now only a phantom, prefigured the foreign other always at work in the modern conservatism borrowed from the South. Every major issue is argued in terms of persecution and attack. The racial minority is not the oppressed subaltern but a threat, whether physical or fiscal. Liberatory advances for women and LGBT Americans are assaults upon the family. Religious pluralism and fortifications of the wall between church and state evoke biblical accounts of Christian persecution. Deviations from increasingly neoliberal capitalism are described as authoritarian socialism. Relaxation of military aggression, especially under Obama, is even seen as collusion with the enemy.

Broun, a skilled purveyor of a Southern politics of persecution, was an early alarmist, predicting a violently oppressive, explicitly Hitlerian regime just days after President Obama’s election in 2008. Broun’s repeated evocation of Hitler and Stalin would later find its way into the crass iconography of Tea Party protests. The stakes have always been existential to Broun. In an almost mystical ritual, Broun, a born-again Christian, snuck onto the inaugural stage in 2009 to anoint the door through which Obama would pass with holy oil, entreating God to come to the aid of His besieged and cleanse the new president of his tyrannical evil. Broun’s persecution narrative, dismissed by many at the time as hayseed hyperbole, now forms the basis of conservative arguments on nearly every issue. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, likely 2016 presidential candidate whose star is still rising, adopts the “we want our country back” language and eschatological stakes of the Tea Party. Cruz is joined by newcomer Sens. Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Rand Paul to form a conservative insurgency in a chamber historically governed by staid and statesmanlike members.

There is a problem, though, for the GOP in the 2014 and subsequent elections: Once the Fort Sumter-like salvo of superlatives and hyperbole is launched, it is likely impossible to quiet the fear and anger of the party’s base. Broun’s successor to represent the shamed land of Sherman’s path brings his own scorched earth rhetoric, sounding more 1860 than 2014. The presumptive successor, Rev. Jody Hice, whose primary win makes November’s general little more than a formality in the heavily conservative district, speaks uniformly in the language of persecution and insurrection. Like, actual insurrection. Hice regularly demands that Americans be permitted the full means of war — e.g., rockets, missiles, etc. — in order to prepare for an eventual armed conflict with the “secular,” “socialist” state. Hice, an evangelical pastor, is an unapologetic theocrat whose persecution complex pervades the entirety of his apocalyptic politics. Hice makes Broun look cuddly by comparison.

The GOP suffers through an internecine fight that shows little sign of slowing. The party’s internal conflict reached its latest peak in primary battles in two prominent Confederate locales: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s historic loss in the old capital of the Confederacy and Sen. Thad Cochran’s controversial victory in Jefferson Davis’ Mississippi, a state whose flag still bears the Confederate battle emblem. Cantor’s primary defeat would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, but the very fervor stoked by Cantor for what many saw as an eventual run at the speakership metastasized further into an implacable anti-establishment impulse from which even Cantor was not exempt. Cochran, targeted as an establishment senator, had to resort to DEFCON 1 tactics and openly beseech Mississippi’s black Democrats to lift him over Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel, a move that became something of a right-wing Alamo. In a late primary strategy, Jody Hice went public with the assertion that his opponent, a pro-business, establishment candidate, was courting the enemy in what the Hice campaign called a “Mississippi Strategy.”

A sort of Mason-Dixon line has begun to trace its way along the GOP’s internal fissures, threatening the coalition solidified by Reagan and sustained through the Bush presidency. After more than a generation of cultivating a narrative founded on persecution and insurrection, the GOP runs the risk of falling victim to a Maslow’s hammer-type predicament. If all you have is victimhood, all disagreement starts to look like oppression,

Joining the ranks of outspoken neoconfederate haters like Tom Cruz and Ron Paul is Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.  He’s no longer a newbie back bencher.  His #47Traitors letter to the Iranian Government has compelled the press to take a look at his horrid, bullying ways and views.

Hailing from Arkansas, 37-year-old Senator Cotton boasts the title of being the youngest member of the Senate, but he spouts the old warmongering rhetoric of 78-year-old Senator John McCain. From Guantanamo to Iran, food stamps to women’s rights, here are ten reasons why Tom Cotton is a dangerous dude.

You can read the usual hater agenda and rhetoric at that site.  Let’s just say he has issues with just about every one that’s not a white male.

In one of the strangest cases of denial of federal authority, the Catholic Church is now arguing that paying criminal fines to victims of pedophilia priests is a violation of its ‘religious freedom’ and that the federal government has no authority at all over them. WTF?  Clearly, white male patriarchy is fighting back with some of the most reprehensible arguments possible.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee, which owes victims of pedophile priests (including one, Think Progress notes, who was accused of assaulting approximately 200 deaf children) $17 million has decided to put that money into a fund reserved for cemeteries and claims that to pay the victims what they’re owed is a violation of the church’s religious freedom. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Jesus is that he would have likely also placed millions of dollars into an untouchable fund to avoid paying the victims of his followers. It’s just the christly thing to do.

The archdiocese claims that the church has much to do before they pay any victim any money for anything. According to their religious guidelines, the church must maintain any and all burial places and mausoleums in perpetuity lest they fall into disrepair. The Archdiocese has been bankrupt since 2011 and in 2013 a court agreed that they had the right to transfer the money into an account meant for the upkeep of religious burial places, but the seventh circuit court of appeals has issued an important message to the church: Hell naw.

What’s even more heinous than the fact that the church doesn’t want to pay the victims the money they’re owed (and Think Progress points out that the latest appeal isn’t about paying anyone anything, the verdict just means that the money the church is hoarding can’t only be used for cemetaries) is that the “burial places account” wasn’t even created until after the archdiocese was told they needed to pay the victims and that other lawsuits against priests could “go forward.” So they must not have been that worried about mausoleums then? But now, they’re all about them.

 I can only type WTF so many times so that’s my diatribe for the day.  What’s on your reading and blogging list?  Feel free to discuss anything!!!