Showing posts tagged politics
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Again, since it is apparently difficult for some people to understand: We are not talking about going into churches and demanding people take birth control when they don’t want to. We’re not talking about going into churches at all, for that matter. We’re talking about large employers, colleges and hospitals, and stating that their religious beliefs do not trump employment laws or the rights of their employees, many of whom are not even of the religion in question. Want to form a church? You can believe whatever you want, and act however you want. Oppress women, be bigoted against brown people, whatever floats your ark. Want to be an employer? Then certain rules apply. You have to provide a minimum wage, you can’t chain people to their workstations, you have to have sufficient bathrooms, and if you provide them healthcare you have to provide it in a non-discriminatory fashion to both men and women, and without religious dogma attached. It’s a simple concept. A college is not a church. A hospital is not a church. Putting a big cross outside doesn’t allow you to treat your employees however you want regardless of the law, and America is very roundly screwed if that ever becomes the case.
Hunter, Employer birth-control ‘exemptions’ are a phony issue
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Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense. We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference—like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right. Americans know it’s not right. They know that this generation’s success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to their country’s future, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel that same sense of shared responsibility. That’s how we’ll reduce our deficit. That’s an America built to last.
President Obama, 2012 State of the Union address
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Paul was on his way to Washington, D.C. to speak at the “March for Life,” because of course his deep-seated libertarian, “hands off, government” principles don’t apply to women.

Yep.

(by Laura Clawson)

“Apparently, Mitt Romney’s job creation record includes hiring somebody to rope off a perimeter around him to keep the riffraff away.” Hilarious comment by Jed Lewison Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters View high resolution

“Apparently, Mitt Romney’s job creation record includes hiring somebody to rope off a perimeter around him to keep the riffraff away.”

Hilarious comment by Jed Lewison
Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters

This scares the shit out of me. Makes me realize how little young people actually pay attention (well, not like older people do either). Too many people are either 1) being hoodwinked by Paul’s one or two semi-sane policies 2) actually agree with all of his bat-shit crazy ideas. Not sure which is worse… (Graphic by NY Times)

This scares the shit out of me. Makes me realize how little young people actually pay attention (well, not like older people do either).

Too many people are either 1) being hoodwinked by Paul’s one or two semi-sane policies 2) actually agree with all of his bat-shit crazy ideas.

Not sure which is worse…

(Graphic by NY Times)

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It would be heartening if some prominent Democrats, presidential candidates even, would say what Ron Paul is saying (mostly) about U.S. imperialism, what he is saying (mostly) about the War on Some Drugs™, what he is saying (mostly) about civil liberties. In those arenas, the nation would be well served if he were broadly emulated.

But only by ignoring all his other odious points of view, offensive, disgusting, hate-filled points of view, can Ron Paul be defended. To ignore those is to condone racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, 1%erism, anti-environmentalism, victim-blaming, social safety net-shredding and conspiracy-mongering. If he makes it tougher for the Republicans to focus on their final choice for a presidential nominee, if he becomes a spoiler, huzzah to that. But anybody on the left who thinks he would be a worthy candidate for our side is afflicted with a serious case of tunnel vision.
Timothy Lange (Meteor Blades), at Daily Kos
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It reeks of a philosophy that ranks achieving “balance” as being more important than reporting the facts.
Paul Krugman, on Politifact’s lie claiming the Democratic opposition to the Republican health care “plan” was itself a lie.

“The attorney general will weigh in on the partisan debate over race and ballot access in a speech assessing new state laws that critics say restrict voting rights.”

— NY Times (possibly Charlie Savage, though it’s only in the home page blurb, so might not have been actually written by him*), Holder Speech to Criticize Restrictive Voting Laws

Dear Times, critics don’t say these laws restrict voting rights, they definitively do. Laws that say you cannot vote unless X or Y or Z restrict voting rights. Period. This “debate” is about whether these restrictions are legal or illegal, but either way, they are restrictions.

* The article lede itself uses a much more acceptable “new laws in several states that civil rights advocates say are meant to dampen minority participation in the national elections next year” which speaks towards intent, and therefore can use the weasely “so-and-so says” structure.

dwineman: The woman who may or may not have been a ballerina may or may not have enjoyed the officer’s compliment. There’s no way to tell. But consider her situation. In the next few minutes, she would likely be given the following choice: a) submit to having nude photos of her body taken by individuals in another room; b) submit to having her private parts touched by a stranger; or c) miss her flight, be detained, have a) and b) as well as d) through m) happen anyway, and maybe also get sued for eleven thousand dollars. That is what we call a major fucking power imbalance. In that context, even the slightest hint of a sexual approach on the part of a TSO could be considered not just harassment but assault. You’re saying, basically, “pretend to flirt with me, or my gender-appropriate equivalent over here might have to get rough with your tender bits.” So there’s a nonzero chance that instead of feeling flattered, she felt forced to make bedroom eyes at a creep to avoid being finger-raped. If you’re part of a government that compares itself favorably to the Taliban, you have no business taking that chance. The only acceptable demeanor for a TSA officer toward a passenger, especially when the TSO is male and the passenger is female, is abject humility. No one made you take a job where you clinically deprive innocent people of their dignity under threat of force. You signed up for that, and I expect to see the apology on your face at all times. I expect to hear it in your voice; I expect to smell it in your goddamned sweat. And I expect you to wear that apology long after your disgusting daily routine is finally found unconstitutional and your hideous organization is disbanded and its leaders imprisoned. I expect you to wear that apology not because it makes up for all the years you helped ruin America — which it doesn’t — but because it’s simply the bare minimum standard of behavior someone in your position must meet in order to call himself a human being. p.s. By the way, my standard response upon refusing to participate in as much of the TSA’s theatrical terror (thereby forcing them to manhandle me) is abject silence, with the most complete look of contempt I can muster. As Dan says, being “as privileged as privileged gets” means I don’t have to suffer the worst of it. But it sure as hell doesn’t mean I like that others do.

dwineman:

The woman who may or may not have been a ballerina may or may not have enjoyed the officer’s compliment. There’s no way to tell. But consider her situation. In the next few minutes, she would likely be given the following choice: a) submit to having nude photos of her body taken by individuals in another room; b) submit to having her private parts touched by a stranger; or c) miss her flight, be detained, have a) and b) as well as d) through m) happen anyway, and maybe also get sued for eleven thousand dollars. That is what we call a major fucking power imbalance. In that context, even the slightest hint of a sexual approach on the part of a TSO could be considered not just harassment but assault. You’re saying, basically, “pretend to flirt with me, or my gender-appropriate equivalent over here might have to get rough with your tender bits.” So there’s a nonzero chance that instead of feeling flattered, she felt forced to make bedroom eyes at a creep to avoid being finger-raped.

If you’re part of a government that compares itself favorably to the Taliban, you have no business taking that chance. The only acceptable demeanor for a TSA officer toward a passenger, especially when the TSO is male and the passenger is female, is abject humility. No one made you take a job where you clinically deprive innocent people of their dignity under threat of force. You signed up for that, and I expect to see the apology on your face at all times. I expect to hear it in your voice; I expect to smell it in your goddamned sweat. And I expect you to wear that apology long after your disgusting daily routine is finally found unconstitutional and your hideous organization is disbanded and its leaders imprisoned. I expect you to wear that apology not because it makes up for all the years you helped ruin America — which it doesn’t — but because it’s simply the bare minimum standard of behavior someone in your position must meet in order to call himself a human being.

p.s. By the way, my standard response upon refusing to participate in as much of the TSA’s theatrical terror (thereby forcing them to manhandle me) is abject silence, with the most complete look of contempt I can muster. As Dan says, being “as privileged as privileged gets” means I don’t have to suffer the worst of it. But it sure as hell doesn’t mean I like that others do.

(Reblogged from dwineman)

The Rebirth of Social Darwinism

robertreich:

What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

It was an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise, but few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom. Robber barons like the financier Jay Gould, the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, controlled much of American industry; the gap between rich and poor had turned into a chasm; urban slums festered; women couldn’t vote and black Americans were subject to Jim Crow; and the lackeys of rich literally deposited sacks of money on desks of pliant legislators.

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin to America and twisted him into a theory to fit the times.

Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner’s writings but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the 19th century.

To Sumner and his followers, life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive – and through this struggle societies became stronger over time. A correlate of this principle was that government should do little or nothing to help those in need because that would interfere with natural selection.

Listen to today’s Republican debates and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. “Civilization has a simple choice,” Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It’s either “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest,” or “not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.”

Sound familiar?

Newt Gingrich not only echoes Sumner’s thoughts but mimics Sumner’s reputed arrogance. Gingrich says we must reward “entrepreneurs” (by which he means anyone who has made a pile of money) and warns us not to “coddle” people in need. He opposes extending unemployment insurance because, he says,  ”I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing.”

Sumner, likewise, warned against handouts to people he termed “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Mitt Romney doesn’t want the government to do much of anything about unemployment. And he’s dead set against raising taxes on millionaires, relying on the standard Republican rationale millionaires create jobs.

Here’s Sumner, more than a century ago: “Millionaires are the product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done… It is because they are thus selected that wealth aggregates under their hands – both their own and that intrusted to them … They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society.” Although they live in luxury, “the bargain is a good one for society.”

Other Republican hopefuls also fit Sumner’s mold. Ron Paul, who favors repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan, was asked at a Republican debate in September what medical response he’d recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma. Paul’s response: “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.” The Republican crowd cheered.

In other words, if the young man died for lack of health insurance, he was responsible. Survival of the fittest.

Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest.” It was, he insisted “the working out of a law of nature and of God.”

Social Darwinism also undermined all efforts at the time to build a nation of broadly-based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.

Not until the twentieth century did America reject Social Darwinism. We created the large middle class that became the core of our economy and democracy. We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward through no fault of their own. We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods – public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health – that made us all better off.

In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on his or her own in a competitive contest for survival.

But make no mistake: If one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, and if regressive Republicans take over the House or Senate, or both, Social Darwinism is back.

(Reblogged from robertreich)