Thursday Reads: Let’s Get Real Here!!

Good Morning!

I must be a political junkie because I certainly have the elections of fall 2014 on my mind. Democrats appear to be gaining some ground. I just can’t help but wonder how far right of bat shit crazy the Republican Party will go because it certainly seems that it’s gone far off the rails these days.  It seems odd that the party whose roots came from the civil war and the fight to preserve the union while ending slavery has switched to the party of sedition and oppression.

The problem is that so many billionaire donors–in a system that favors billionaire donors–have made sure that only those willing to sell their souls to them will get money.  It is also clear that only those pols that will sell their souls to the misogynistic, homophobic, religious crazies in this country will get the grass roots support.

How much more of this can the country take? Are the Republicans sounding a swan song or a death trumpet for our democracy? It is clear that the Republican Party has now established itself on a white identity that doesn’t even include all the white people in this country. Republicans are losing ground with Asians and Hispanics each election cycle. It isn’t because they don’t agree with some of their economic or even social positions.  It’s the racism, the xenophobia, the religious exclusivity, the homophobia, the misogyny, the anti-science bent, and the general tendency to hate all things not white and male. Larry Bartels at the WaPo:

A working paper by Alexander Kuo, Neil Malhotra and (my Vanderbilt colleague) Cecilia Hyunjung Mo examines the basis of growing Democratic identification among Asian Americans. Among other analyses, they report the results of an experiment in which Asian American college students were randomly subjected to a seemingly incidental but carefully staged “microaggression”—having their U.S. citizenship questioned by the experimenter. This minor but socially charged interaction boosted Democratic partisanship by 13 percentage points,  a remarkable shift. (The corresponding effect among white students was only three percentage points.)

Asian Americans who experienced the insensitive questioning were also “more likely to view Republicans generally as closed-minded and ignorant” and to express more negative feelings toward them — despite the fact that Republicans were never mentioned by the experimenter or connected to the microagression. Thus, the authors’ findings “suggest that Asian Americans associate feelings of social exclusion based on their ethnic background with the Republican Party.”

Those folks are not homogeneous in that they have the same interests, aspirations, or even religions.  However, they all feel that there is a key demographic of white people that reject their claim to the identity of America and the American Dream.  I can’t help but wonder if the rest of the country is watching those states run by republicans and wondering wtf is going on?  Right now, in Baton Rouge,  our legislature is debating making one particular version of the bible the state book and what to do with alcohol infused ice cream. Why just this week I learned that Phyliss Schlafly thinks all women should be glad that men make more money because it makes women head straight for the altar.

Now three days later, a prominent member of the Republican movement further undermined the party’s campaign to appeal to women voters by suggesting that the current pay gap isn’t wide enough. In an op-ed published by the Christian Post, Phyllis Schlafly — the founder of the Eagle Forum — maintained that increasing the pay gap will help women find suitable husbands:

Another fact is the influence of hypergamy, which means that women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.

While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.

Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.

Obviously, I’m not saying women won’t date or marry a lower-earning men, only that they probably prefer not to. If a higher-earning man is not available, many women are more likely not to marry at all. […]

The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.

Schlafly has long been crusader for “traditional values” within conservative movement and the Republican party, serving as a member of the National GOP Platform Committee as recently as 2012 and as a delegate to the National Convention. Her Eagle Forum PAC has also donated thousands to prominent Republicans like Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and Ted Cruz.

Then, I found out that nullification can work downwards as well as upwards if you want to improve the lives of working people.  Big government is good as long as it’s used to stamp out the local efforts to improve people’s lives.

At a time when many states and cities are working at passing minimum wage increases, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) has gone in the opposite direction and signed a law banning cities from passing higher wages. The bill also bans them from enacting paid sick days or vacation requirements.

The law will stymie the efforts of activists in Oklahoma City, where a labor federation has led the push on a petition to raise the city’s minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. The state’s current minimum has been set at the federal level of $7.25. In 2012, 64,000 workers in the state earned $7.25 an hour or less, making up 7.2 percent of all hourly workers, a larger share than the 4.7 percent figure for the country as a whole.

Fallin said she signed the bill out of the worry that higher local minimum wages “would drive businesses to other communities and states, and would raise prices for consumers.” She also argued that “most minimum wage workers are young, single people working part-time or entry level jobs” and that “many are high school or college students living with their parents in middle-class families.” She warned that increasing the minimum wage “would require businesses to fire many of those part-time workers” and harm job creation.

But that’s not what the typical American minimum wage worker looks like. Nearly 90 percent of workers who would be impacted by an increase in the wage are older than 20, while the average age is 35. More than a quarter have children to support. More than half work full time, and 44 percent have at least some college education, while half a million minimum wage workers are college graduates.

Meanwhile, experts have analyzed state minimum wage increases over two decades and found that even at times of high unemployment, there is no clear evidence that the hikes affected job creation. Five other studies have come to the same conclusion. The same has held true for the city of San Francisco, where employment grew by more than 5 percent after it passed a higher minimum wage while nearby counties experienced declines.

Oklahoma is not the only state to pass a blanket ban on raising the wage. Wisconsin lawmakers recently considered doing the same, and Kansas Governor Sam Brownback (R)signed a law that prevents local governments from requiring contractors to pay higher wages last year. According to Paul Sonn, general counsel and program director at the National Employment Law Project, a handful of mostly Republican-leaning states passed these kinds of bans about a decade ago, including Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, and Texas. But the states that are the most likely to see campaigns to raise minimum wages are not the ones that are likely to pass similar bans, he told ThinkProgress.

 And of course, we still have so much to discuss about the continual obsession with blastulas, and zygotes, and fetuses that are no where near viability. 

What is it about abortion that gives it such political staying power? One obvious answer it is that for opponents it is an issue of life and death. For pro-choice women, it is a question of personal autonomy and bodily integrity.

Take a look at the history of the fight for women’s rights, as argued by the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon. In her 1989 book, “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State,” MacKinnon wrote, “male dominance is perhaps the most pervasive and tenacious system of power in history.” The goal of the feminist project, she argued six years earlier, “is to uncover and claim as valid the experience of women, the major content of which is the devalidation of women’s experience.”

Lisa Tuttle, in the “Encyclopedia of Feminism,” described reproductive freedom “as a basic human right, it includes the right to abortion and birth control, but implies much more. To be realized, reproductive freedom must include not only woman’s right to choose childbirth, abortion, sterilization or birth control, but also her right to make those choices freely, without pressure from individual men, doctors, governmental or religious authorities. It is a key issue for women, since without it the other freedoms we appear to have, such as the right to education, jobs and equal pay, may prove illusory.”

These thoughts are by no means the opinions of women only. In an effort to explore the politics of abortion rights I contacted a disparate group of contemporary experts.

While none of these theorists could be categorized as politically correct – if anything, some have been accused of just the opposite — all see the anti-abortion movement as driven in part by the determined effort to control the reproductive rights of women.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is no stranger tocriticism from feminists. In his book “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,” Pinker wrote: “Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.”

When I asked Pinker in an email about abortion, however, his response was very much in line with the thinking of feminist theorists.

Abortion may “touch on a characteristic male obsession: controlling the sexuality of women,” he said, noting that in most traditional societies “a woman’s male relatives, and then her husband, will try to control her sexuality in a variety of ways: veils, wigs, clothing, chaperones, segregation by sex, chastity belts, engagement rings, terms of address (‘Mrs. John Smith’), ceremonies (as when a father gives away the bride to her husband), and laws that make a woman the property of her husband.”

These efforts, Pinker said, are driven, in part, by fears of “paternity uncertainty”: “The ultimate evolutionary reason is presumably to guarantee paternity, since a cuckolded man is in the worst imaginable evolutionary scenario: investing in the child, and hence the genes, of a rival man.”

Along similar lines, John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, who specializes in the study of how “biological variations mitigate the way in which individuals respond to politically relevant environmental occurrences,” argues that reproduction is both a core political issue and a core evolutionary issue.

Hibbing’s comment focused on themes consistent with Pinker’s: “Those most concerned with security and tradition tend to be politically conservative and those most open to new lifestyles and who are less focused on security will tend toward the political left. Issues of reproduction are likely to be at the core of the conflict between tradition and new lifestyles since these issues are about as basic as they come. Fundamentalism in some parts of the world is often driven by the desire of males to control reproductive opportunities. These issues form the evolutionary core.”

 We have one of the two major political parties showing signs of radical extremism and elements that are truly dangerous, and yet, no one pays attention.  I have written a lot about right wing terrorism and it grieves me to see that we saw yet another predictable incident in Kansas City. I can’t imagine what it feels for the folks who have been following this inside law enforcement and inside groups that truly fear these hate groups.  If you didn’t see this bit from Rachel Maddow, you should.  It sums up a lot of history that we’ve basically ignored since the 1980s.  There are some really dangerous, violent white men out there.

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security concluded a years-long study of right-wing extremism in the U.S. and released a report saying that ultraconservative white nationalists and other extremists pose a much greater threat to U.S. citizens than Islamic terrorists from overseas.

Conservatives like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh pitched a huge tantrum, accusing the Obama administration of staging an anti-conservative pogrom, even though the DHS study was commissioned by the Bush administration. In the end, the full study was never released, and the outcry forced DHS to divert resources away from U.S. extremists.

When authorities raided the apartment of deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, they found stacks of right-wing conspiracy theory newsletters, angry screeds against blacks, Jews and the New World Order.

“How weird is it to have Chechen-speaking Russian immigrant Muslim guys reading 9/11 ‘Truther’ conspiracies and ads for Nazi message boards while also espousing violent jihad and allegedly setting off bombs that killed Americans?” Maddow asked.

According to the New America Foundation, she said, since the 9/11 attacks, 21 people have been killed in the name of Islamic extremism in the U.S., whereas the number of people killed by right-wing extremists stands at 34 after the three deaths in Kansas.

Nevertheless, huge swaths of U.S. policy are dedicated to fighting Islamic terrorism abroad, “But when it comes to the proven and interconnected threat of the armed, American extreme right wing, we’re still treating every attack by them like a surprise, still treating those attackers like a lone wolf, regardless of however many letters you find between them,” regardless of the places where they talk to each other online, “regardless of the tide of evidence that these organizations exist and are operational.”

Why won’t the country at large acknowledge the real threat of right-wing extremism, she asked. “Should that change?”

 There is a huge movement made up of angry, armed, white men that is threatening the health and safety of a huge number of people.  They are not a majority of people and they are not a majority of white men.  But, they are central to maintaining the power structure right now and can run amok in white male privilege and get away with a lot more than any one else would.

At the heart of this murderous continuum are race and xenophobia (a fear of others) and a violent reaction to those fears. To many in the dominant culture, their America is changing. The “browning” of America has evoked a return and acceptance of the murderous continuum. Former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo best expressed this sentiment when he proclaimed: “I want my country back.”

Conceal Carry permits, Stand Your Ground laws and inept prosecutors are creating a climate that provides the Zimmermans and Dunns of the world with a license to kill as long as juries are predisposed to letting them do so.

As the American economy continues to contract and full-time, well-paying jobs become harder to find, the face of poverty in America is changing. The stereotypical “urban” or “black” poor have now become the “suburban” or white poor. According to CBS, “Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures . . . More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line . . . accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation’s destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.”

According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Suburbs are increasingly becoming the address of America’s poor. Suburban poverty across the country grew 53 percent between 2000 and 2010, more than twice the rate of urban poverty . . . ” Many of those newly poor suburbanites are white and many of them are angry, blaming people of color for their misfortunes, instead of directing their ire toward corporate greed, the outsourcing of factory jobs to overseas companies, and governmental policies that favor the wealthy.

 What is truly scary to me, is that this is a celebration of lawlessness. 

Local journalists covering Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s case stress he is no victim and is breaking the law, regardless of conservative media’s sympathy for his defiance of government orders to remove cattle from federal land.

Those reporters and editors — some who have been covering the case for 20 years — spoke with Media Mattersand said many of Bundy’s neighbors object to his failure to pay fees to have his cattle graze on the land near Mesquite, NV., when they pay similar fees themselves.

“We have interviewed neighbors and people in and around Mesquite and they have said that he is breaking the law,” said Chuck Meyer, news director at CBS’ KXNT Radio in Las Vegas. “When it comes to the matter of the law, Mr. Bundy is clearly wrong.”

Bundy’s case dates back to 1993, when he stopped paying the fees required of local ranchers who use the federally owned land for their cattle and other animals. Local editors say more than 85 percent of Nevada land is owned by the federal government.

Bundy stopped paying fees on some 100,000 acres of land in 1993 and has defied numerous court orders, claiming the land should be controlled by Nevada and that the federal government has no authority over it.

Last year a federal court ordered Bundy to remove his cattle or they would be confiscated to pay the more than $1 million in fees and fines he’s accumulated. The confiscation began earlier this month, but was halted because the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had “serious concerns about the safety of employees and members of the public” when armed militia showed up to block the takeover.

Despite his lawlessness, Bundy has become a sympathetic figure for many in the right-wing media.

But for local journalists, many who have been reporting on him for decades, that image is very misguided.

“He clearly has captured national attention, among mostly conservative media who have portrayed him as a kind of a property rights, First Amendment, Second Amendment, range war kind of issue,” Meyer noted. “That’s how it has been framed, but the story goes back a lot longer and is pretty cut and dry as far as legal implications have been concerned.”

He added that, “Cliven Bundy and his supporters are engaged in a fight that has already been settled. There are a number of people around these parts who have strong reservations about Bundy’s actions.”

Las Vegas Sun Editorial Page Editor Matt Hufman said depicting Bundy as a victim is wrong.

In what is undoubtedly one of the worst stories I have read in years,  Police in California actually had GPS trackers on two serial killers/rapists who went out then killed women while they were under surveillance. 

Two parolees raped and killed four women while wearing GPS trackers, and there may be more victims, a California police chief said.

Registered sex offenders Franc Cano, 27, and Steven Dean Gordon, 45, were both wearing ankle bracelets when the female victims were assaulted and killed last fall and earlier this year, Anaheim police Chief Raul Quezada said Monday at a news conference. The suspects were arrested on Friday and are each facing four felony counts of special circumstances murder and four felony counts of rape, reportsCBS Los Angeles.

The naked body of Jarrae Nykkole Estepp, 21, was found March 14 on a conveyor belt at an Anaheim trash-sorting plant. Quezada said it was the key to breaking the case, according to CBS Los Angeles. The probe led detectives to connect the two suspects to her slaying, and the disappearance of three women – Josephine Vargas, 34; Kianna Jackson, 20; and Martha Anaya, 28 – who frequented a Santa Ana neighborhood known for drug dealing and prostitution.

The Orange County Register reports that Cano and Gordon were convicted of lewd and lascivious acts on children under 14 years old. As a requirement of the convictions, both were required to wear GPS tracking bracelets.

Authorities at the news conference did not explain how Cano and Gordon allegedly managed to carry out the killings while under GPS supervision, but Quezada said data from the devices “was one of the investigative tools we used to put the case together.”

Our country spends billions of dollars tracking foreign terrorists who practice what is a minority religion in this country, while domestic grown terrorists who follow the majority religion appear to get a pass. Not only do they get a pass, they get enabled by the likes of Schafly and other Republican Politicos and financed by John Birchers like the Koch Brothers who now have a hand picked Supreme Court.

I’m really getting tired of reading and writing about this stuff.  Are there only a few of us that really see the connections here between the nullification efforts and the neoconfederate longings of folks like the Pauls and their droogies?  Are there only a few of us that object to the racism, the homophobia, and the misogyny of these folks?  It doesn’t seem so if you read polls and if you see the demographics.  But, damn, getting rid of the entrenched group that benefits from all the damage they’ve done over the years is just getting more difficult all the time.   I cannot wait to upload a Youtube of myself Dancing On Their GRAVES.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?