Democracy In Distress: Conservatives

Showing posts with label Conservatives. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Shutdown Blues & The Promise of Reform in 2014

Yes, it’s been quiet here, as I warned it would be after the election. There may be another post on that later.

Shutdown. Blah, blah… All the stuff from the webs. Been posting a ton of stuff on the Facebook page about this…

But this is where we may see some change in the future. Maybe things needed to get this bad in D.C. before real change in Congress was possible.

First, a little about how this happened, in my eyes, at least.

The Tea Partiers who are pushing this are concerned about jobs, this is a job retention strategy. Their jobs, yes, self-preservation, yes, but that’s what it is.

The districts that elected them want to see some action against Obama and Obama care is about the only real policy / legislation they can find true fault with. If they don’t do what they are doing, a lot of these radicals will be voted out and replaced with another round of amateurs who will flounder in futility as badly as the current crop of self proclaimed patriots.

Now, yes. Anger against the GOP over this fiasco may cost some Republicans from more balanced, moderate districts their jobs in 2014, but it won’t be the far, far right minority.

This may be enough to toss the House back to the Dems, which may actually lead to a functioning Congress for a while.

But it doesn’t fix the problem. The real problem is the procedural rules in both houses. These arcane and, often, insane rules emerged over decades as one party or the other struggled against the domination of the other.

A silver lining to come out of all of this may be that rules reform could be a real winning campaign issue in 2014. Usually, when the minority party comes into power, they, for many reasons, leave this stuff.

However, I think candidate that campaign on reform could really do well in 2014, which may or may not lead to reform actually happening, but let’s cross one bridge at a time here. For the GOP, this may be a critical strategy. Yeah, my party broke the country, but I want to fix it. Depending on how bad things get, this may be the only strategy they have.

If this comes to pass, then this current fiasco may lead to some really positive change down the road. And it really will take a disaster to make such change possible. But maybe it will be worth it, in the long run.

For there to be any hope of reform, though, things are going to have to get a lot worse first. If this stalemate is resolved soon, and if we end up not defaulting on our debts, then the electorate will have forgotten these events 13 months from now. Sad but true.

And make no mistake, this is exactly why this is happening right now.

I am not rooting for disaster. But, if it comes, then this will be my happy thought as I rummage through the dumpsters trying to keep the boys fed.

Friday, June 22, 2012

God, Politics, Education, & Evolution: Some recent articles

It has been a while since I‘ve posted. Life has been busy and the election is in it’s early summer slump. Even the barbs Romney and Obama are throwing at each other feel weak and half-hearted… But maybe that is just me. Maybe I am just weak and half hearted about the election right now. I am sure that I’ll get more fired up as we get further into the VP selection process and closer into the conventions.

Anyway, here’s a collection of recent articles on religion, politics and education from AlterNet…

As America Grows More Polarized, Conservatives Increasingly Reject Science and Rational Thought | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet:

In the 30 years since Gallup started asking people whether they believe humans evolved, evolved under the guidance of God, or were created fully formed by God, the percentage of people adhering to the creationist view has actually gone up slightly over time, and now stands at 46 percent of the population. This is just the tip of the iceberg of a growing problem of public rejection of science. At the same time, there’s been a steady rise in people who believe that humanity evolved without any supernatural guidance, and now stands at 15 percent. What this seeming conflict suggests is that the issue is getting more polarized, as people feel they either have to pick Team Evolution or Team Creationism.

…

The Tea Party has only intensified social pressure on conservative-leaning Americans to shun anything perceived as irreligious or academic. Science has always had a political edge to it, but the culture wars ramped up by the Tea Party have taken the problem to a whole new level.

…

According to a study published in American Sociological Review, since 1974, conservative trust in science has been in a free-fall, declining 25 percent. In 1974, conservatives were the most pro-science group, higher than liberals and moderates. Now they’re the least pro-science group of all, with liberals showing the most trust in science.

…

Any liberal who focuses on economic issues should pay close attention, because in many ways, the war on science is a war on the most vulnerable among us.

The public’s resistance to evolution might not seem like a big deal at first, since the main result of conservative activism is that high school biology programs give up teaching evolution, while universities retain their evidence-based curriculum. In fact, Kevin Drum argued in Mother Jones that creationism in schools didn’t really matter because, “knowledge of evolution adds only slightly to a 10th-grade understanding of biology.”

The problem with that is that someone who doesn’t get proper education early tends to lag behind for the rest of their educational career, and the 10th-grader who doesn’t get real biology courses will often be too far behind her better-educated peers in college to even consider a career in science. How many potential doctors and scientists are being lost because they didn’t have the economic advantage of going to a private school that did provide a proper education, but instead went to a public school that dished out creationist propaganda?

As PZ Myers argued, the poor public education in science means that a shrinking portion of the American public is going into careers in science. Americans from working class backgrounds who go into these careers are far more likely to use their education and career contacts to return to their communities and improve the economic and health conditions back home. But with these declining numbers of American scientists, that possibility is being shut down.

The public’s rejection of global warming is even more dangerous for working class and poor people. It’s well-understood that poorer people bear the brunt of environmental destruction, since they can’t afford to move out of polluted areas that are linked to health issues like asthma and cancer.

What Is Wrong With Our Education System? Almost Half the Population Doesn't Accept Evolution | Belief | AlterNet:

My brilliant husband, a sociologist and political theorist, refuses to get upset about the poll. It’s quite annoying, actually. He thinks questions like these primarily elicit affirmations of identity, not literal convictions; declaring your belief in creationism is another way of saying you’re a good Christian. That does rather beg the question of what a good Christian is, and why so many think it means refusing to use the brains God gave you. And yes, as you may have suspected, according to the Pew Research Center, evangelicals are far more likely than those of other faiths to hold creationist views; just 24 percent of them believe in evolution. Mormons come in even lower, at 22 percent, although official church doctrine has no problem with evolution.

…rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.

…

Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and practicing Catholic who is a leading voice against creationism, agrees with Princehouse. “Science education has been remarkably ineffective,” he told me. “Those of us in the scientific community who are religious have a tremendous amount of work to do in the faith community.” Why bother? “There’s a potential for great harm when nearly half the population rejects the central organizing principle of the biological sciences. It’s useful for us as a species to understand that we are a recent appearance on this planet and that 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct.” Evangelical parents may care less that their children learn science than that they avoid going to hell, but Miller points out that many of the major challenges facing the nation—and the world—are scientific in nature: climate change and energy policy, for instance. “To have a near majority essentially rejecting the scientific method is very troubling,” he says. And to have solidly grounded science waved away as political and theological propaganda could not come at a worse time. “Sea-level rise” is a “left-wing term,” said Virginia state legislator Chris Stolle, a Republican, successfully urging its replacement in a state-commissioned study by the expression “recurrent flooding.”

The Truth About Religion in America: The Founders Loathed Superstition and We Were Never a Christian Nation | Belief | AlterNet:

One counterfeit idea that circulates with frustrating stubbornness is the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. It’s one of the Christian Right’s mantras and a favorite talking point for televangelists, religious bloggers, born-again authors and lobbyists, and pulpit preachers.

…

Unlike some of the wackier positions taken by evangelicals—think Rapture—the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation has gone relatively mainstream. This is the case largely because the media-savvy Christian Right is good at getting across its message. A 2007 First Amendment Center poll revealed that 65 percent of Americans believe the founders intended the United States “to be a Christian nation”; over half of us think that this intention is actually spelled out somewhere in the Constitution.

…

So the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is widespread. In the currency of ideas, it’s the ubiquitous penny. But like an actual penny, it doesn’t have a lot of value. That so many people think it does is largely because they don’t stop to consider what “founded as a Christian nation” might signify. Presumably the intended meaning is something like this: Christian principles are the bedrock of both our political system and founding documents because our founders were themselves Christians. Although wordier, this reformulation is just as perplexing because it’s not clear what’s meant by the term founders. Just who are we talking about here?

…

Americans in the late colonial and early republic years were often caught in a worldview clash between Christianity on the one hand and the Enlightenment on the other. Some reacted by clinging to their Christian faith and blasting Enlightenment “infidelity” with jeremiads, while others, as Jonathan Edwards grumbled in 1773, “wholly cast off the Christian religion and are professed infidels.” College students at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, King’s (present day Columbia), William and Mary, and Dartmouth gleefully embraced, at least for a while, the Enlightenment’s anti-biblical religion of Deism. In the 1790s, thanks largely to the efforts of Deist crusader Elihu Palmer, militant Deism—which rejected miracles, revelation, the authority of Scripture, and the divinity of Jesus—enjoyed a spurt of rather astounding popularity. But many people who lived at the founding of the nation tried to steer a middle course that combined, even if awkwardly at times, elements from both Christian and Enlightenment worldviews. This made for any number of nuanced possibilities when it came to Christian commitment, all of them much more complex than the Christian Right would prefer to acknowledge.

…

The Founding Fathers weren’t all Christian. Some, of course, were: Patrick Henry (Episcopalian), John Hancock (Congregationalist), John Jay (Episcopalian), and Sam Adams (Congregationalist), for example, were all devout and pretty conventional Christians. But the big players in the founding of the United States—such men as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and probably Alexander Hamilton—weren’t. Each of them was much more comfortable with a deistic understanding of God than a Christian one. For them, the deity was an impersonal First Cause who created a rationally patterned natural order and who was best worshiped through the exercise of reason and virtue. Most of them may have admired the ethical teachings of Jesus (although Paine conspicuously did not), but all of them loathed and rejected the priestcraft and superstition they associated with Christianity.

Despite this, the Christian Right insists on adopting these men (aside from Paine) as Christian founders. The usual justification is that each of them (again, except Paine) belonged to an established Christian denomination. But as we’ve already seen, formal membership by itself wasn’t then (or now) a fail-safe measure of an individual’s religious beliefs.

…

None of the founders, for example, used conventional Christian language when writing or speaking about God. Instead, the terms they favored—Supreme Architect, Author of Nature, First Cause, Nature’s God, Superattending Power—were unmistakably deistic. (One of the Christian Right’s most telling blind spots is its failure to pick up on the founders’ obviously non-Christian nomenclature.) Another indicator of their lack of conventional Christian commitment is the fact that while all of them had been baptized as infants, an initiation that of course made them nominally Christian, none who were members of denominations that offered the sacrament of Confirmation sought it as adults. Moreover, they generally did not take Communion when it was offered, nor did they typically involve themselves in church activities. Even when they did, it was no clear signal that they were orthodox Christians. George Washington, for example, served on the vestry in several Episcopalian parishes. But he avoided Confirmation and Communion, never used give-away Christian terms such as Lord or Redeemer, and rarely even referred to Jesus by name. Finally, none of them gave the slightest hint in their personal letters or diaries that they considered themselves committed Christians.

The obvious conclusion is that it’s a stretch to call the leading founders “Christians,” particularly of the evangelical sort. Most of them may not have been contemptuously anti-Christian (although Paine certainly was, with Jefferson a close second), but neither did they have much use for Christianity. They had so little regard for its central tenets, in fact, that they couldn’t square it with their consciences to salt their public statements with even an occasional Christian phrase. In this way they displayed an integrity that few vote-hungry politicians in our day feel moved to emulate. Revealingly, only a handful of their contemporaries seemed particularly bothered by their obvious indifference to Christianity, and those who made a big deal of it generally did so more for political reasons—as when Federalists attacked the “infidel” Jefferson in the presidential elections of 1800 and 1804—than from any sense of outraged orthodoxy. Then as now, what pretended to be a religious battle was often a political one.

…

In the Constitution, no mention whatsoever of God is made except in the document’s date (“Done ... in the year of our Lord ...”), an inexplicable oversight if its framers intended it to lay the foundation for a Christian nation. The Declaration of Independence does use religious language, but the religion is obviously Deism rather than Christianity. God is referred to as “Nature’s God,” the “Creator” of the physical “Laws of Nature” in addition to the “unalienable [moral] Rights” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To interpret the document as even suggestively Christian is sheer fantasy or worse. On the contrary, both it and the Constitution clearly serve as precedents for the famous passage in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli—one which the Christian Right loves to hate—which affirms that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” The treaty, which sealed a routine diplomatic agreement between the U.S. and the Muslim state of Tripolitania, was unanimously ratified by the Senate and publicly endorsed and signed by President John Adams. That it was passed without debate or dissent attests to the fact that neither the president nor senators found its denial of a Christian foundation to the nation objectionable.

from tag Evolution

Democracy In Distress: What do Republicans have against science anyway?

from tag Religion

Democracy In Distress: Suburban Eschatology Part Two - September 12th, 2010: 30 Mosques, 30 Days

from tag Tea

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from tag History

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Monday, April 23, 2012

The war on women & Santorum’s choice

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

As for this last image, on Facebook I wrote:

There is truth here. Not that these men are necessarily misogynists, they probably are not. But their campaign strategies are geared towards solidifying support of demographic groups who will actually vote for them, and in the general election the majority of women will vote Dem pretty much no matter what these fools do, so pissing them off really doesn't change the game for them at all.

Appealing to Non-College Educated White Males, however, the GOP's most dominant demographic, is a huge part of their game plan. The more heavily they dominate this segment of society, the more they can alienate these fellows from the democrats and Obama, the greater their chances of victory in the primaries and in November.

Being worried about what women think is a losing game for them, there is no reason for them to care what they think at all.

Since then, Romney has wrapped up the nomination. This came a little earlier than I thought it would. I actually suspected that Santorum would not give up until the convention, allowing the GOP as much of a chance as possible to try to get out of nominating Romney.

However, I think Santorum had a real moment of clarity leading to his withdrawal from the race. Brace yourselves, I am actually going to say something nice about this fellow.

I do suspect that staying in the race as long as humanly possible was Santorum's plan. I think, on the Friday before he dropped out, that he had every intention of still being in the race a week later.

I believe there were two factors that made him change his mind.

One, of course, was the fact that he was apparently looking at an embarrassing loss in his home state of Pennsylvania.

Santorum as the GOP’s next frontrunner

At this point in his campaign, politically, I think he should have been looking more towards the future than any real chance of being sworn in as president in 2013. Of course, he still had a long shot at widening the cracks between Romney and the, quite frankly, bigoted far right wing of the Republican Party to create some convention drama and an even longer shot at still derailing Romney’s nomination, either becoming the nominee himself or creating the possibility of another candidate stepping into the role.

But the odds of creating any of these scenarios were shrinking fast. Getting shellacked in Pennsylvania would have lowered the odds even further.

And I don’t think his eye should even have been on the nomination this year, at least for the last couple months. He should have been looking at 2016 or 2020, depending on Romney’s fate this fall. For Santorum, staying in the race as long as possible should have been all about positioning himself for the future. The longer he hung in there, collecting headlines if not delegates, he was building a solid foundation for a future run at the Presidency.

The GOP has a track record of elevating those who make a good showing one year to frontrunner status the next. Santorum’s campaign, for the last month or two, could have been following a John McCain strategy.

In 2000, McCain stayed in the race far past the point where Bush had locked up the nomination and was rewarded with front runner status for almost the entire duration of the 2008 Republican primaries, fairly easily wrapping up the nomination his next time out. Of course, he managed to stay in the race that year without becoming a joke.

In 2008, the McCain role was played not by Romney, but by Huckabee. However, since Huckabee decided, early, to sit this one out, Romney slid into the 2nd place role this year and, like McCain in 2008, has now completed a fairly easy primary season and secured the nomination without too much fuss or muss.

Let’s face it, the GOP primaries this year were not a close thing. Romney owned them. Most of the noise about any real competition this year was just that, noise from the media trying to keep a blowout interesting through the end of the fourth quarter. This is not to say that what competition there was wasn’t interesting, it was, and it revealed a lot about the nature of the GOP and its different demographic elements, but the race itself was not a close one at all.

If Santorum really wants to be president, he has a real chance at becoming the GOP front runner the next time around. Like McCain and Romney, he needs to spend the next four to eight years quietly organizing and he can, pretty much, claim early frontrunner status the next time around. Especially if the far right continues to dominate the party like it has, which is almost inevitable if Obama wins re-election.

However, this future front runner status depends on Santorum maintaining his credibility this year.

By pulling out when he did, the former Senator is ending on a relative high note, while he is still seen as a strong candidate. The story, however, could have changed if he stayed in the race and suffered an embarrassing loss in his home state.

So far, the humiliating 17 point loss of his Senate seat has remained out of the national press, for the most part, and has been forgotten by almost everyone.

After another brutal home state loss, I suspect that his past political failures would enter into the national conversation and the story would change from his relatively successful presidential campaign this year to his repeated failings as a candidate for political office.

In other words, the press about his campaign would turn from being mostly positive to mostly negative. By getting out now, as I said, he ends this year’s run on a high note and 2012 becomes a bright spot on his resume, not a hurdle to be overcome in the future.

Santorum’s Priorities

All of these considerations set aside, I still suspect that Santorum was in the race for the long run this year, until the weekend before he dropped out.

He was still seen as being a factor in this year’s nomination process, his campaign was still receiving decent press, though it was starting to turn a little negative as Pennsylvania approached, and, let’s face it, a part of me really wonders if Candidate Santorum is really savvy enough to consider the arguments I made above in defense of his campaign to this point and how it poses him for a future run for the nomination.

If there was ever a candidate to stay in the race far past the point of respectability, ruining his reputation and future in a blind run towards an unreachable finish line, it would seem to be the former Senator. This would be a move right out of his playbook, blind self-immolation.

Though I am sure his campaign advisors saw what I saw for the last couple of months and have been talking to the former Senator quite a bit about how long to stay in and when to drop out. In fact, I would strongly suspect that these voices in his ears were whispering that, in order to position himself properly for the next campaign, that he should drop out before the Pennsylvania contest.

And I am pretty sure that Santorum was ignoring these voices until his daughter was hospitalized the weekend before he dropped out.

That weekend, I bet, Rick got in touch not only with some big doses of reality but that he also took a long look at his priorities in life.

Whether or not he really believed that he still had a shot at the Presidency this year, I do not know, but even a rock would be having doubts by that point. But I think he was still having fun. I think, whether or not he believed he still had a chance, that he was enjoying the spotlight that was shining not only on himself but also on his (crazy, crazy, terrible, awful, horrible) political beliefs.

And, of course, inspiring national conversations about beliefs that are important to oneself would be a difficult role for anyone to walk away from. I suspect that as long as he was inspiring these conversations that Santorum wasn’t going anywhere, even if staying in the race eventually cost him his own political future.

Until his daughter’s hospitalization, I don’t think Santorum would have dropped out of the race until his campaign faded from the spotlight, until it resembled something like Newt Gingrich’s, and then I think he’d probably stay in the race until the money completely ran out or even longer, until, like Newt, he could sit there with his toe still in the pond while doing very little active campaigning.

But that takes a lot of time and effort and I am sure that even Santorum was beginning to see that his 2012 run was over. It is one thing to be taking time away from one’s family and an ill child when one has a real shot at the White House, it is quite another to take that time for what amounts to little more than political noisemaking and rabblerousing.

I think Santorum made a very healthy choice here for himself and his family. I applaud him for it. Sure, I wanted the man out of the race. Amusing (and infuriating) as he was, any chance he has at ever reaching the Oval Office needs to be shut down as soon as possible. But I also am glad to see him (or anyone) putting his family first like this.

Yet my applause are a little bitter sweet here. By making a great choice as a human and a father he has also, accidently, made a great political move. I would be very surprised if we are not dealing with frontrunner Santorum the next time out, and that is not a good thing for America at all.

I see his exit as coming about through the following process…

My advisors keep telling me that it is getting close to the time where I should walk away, but I am not there yet myself. Wait, I need to be with my family now. Oh, okay guys, let’s schedule a press event. Why are my advisors so happy? I though we were admitting defeat and going home? Why are they so happy about losing? Why are they chanting “2016… 2016… 2016…”? Boy, that volunteer has a cute butt, I wonder if he works out? Holy cow, I’ve got to go pray now!

Okay. I tried to keep those sorts of jabs out of this post. But I couldn’t resist just one.

See you the next time around, Rick. Though I can’t say that I look forward to it.

Facebook, Snip.it, & Pinterest

Yeah, it’s been way too long since I posted here. I’ve been throwing a lot of links up on Facebook, Snip.it, and Pinterest, but I have not had any time at all to write for the last several weeks.

Follow me on those sites for more content between my posts, and from the links I share, you can get a pretty good idea of what is distressing our democracy on an almost daily basis.

from tag Romney

from tag Newt

from tag Republican

from tag Santorum

from tag Health

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Sunday, February 19, 2012

Code Speak: Politics, bigotry, & the problem with Santorum

Before the Florida primary, I mistakenly believed that Rick Santorum was done.

Can’t we just be done with him? Please?

The Anyone But Romney camp has got them selves into a pickle… They have to decide between the walking contradiction of Newt Gingrich and Santorum, whose issues as a general election candidate may be just as awkward, but in a very different way...

Republicans and the Culture Wars: Why It Won't Work This Year - The Daily Beast:
Then there’s Rick Santorum, who, by all rights, should dominate the values battlefield. He’s got the loving wife, the passel of kids, the goofy-dad vibe. And, let’s face it, the man has never met a policy issue he didn’t see through the prism of family values. Tax reform? Regulatory reform? Deficit spending? As Rick tells it, the first step toward addressing any of these problems is to reinstate the ban on sodomy.

On pure piety points, no one can beat Rick. We’re talking here about a guy who has said he would use the presidential bully pulpit to warn of how contraception tempts even married couples to get busy in ways contrary to God’s will. This, of course, is part of the problem. Opposing abortion is one thing. Opposing contraception even among married folks doesn’t make Rick seem like a paragon of moral virtue so much as a refugee from the 16th century.

This excerpt touches on the real problem with Santorum without actually landing on it. It is not Santorum’s beliefs that are necessarily troubling to the far right, it is the way he communicates them. He either has made a decision at some point in his career to ignore the generally accepted code speak of the conservative social agenda, or he just doesn’t understand it.

If the former, then this is, perhaps, a bold though politically difficult approach to campaigning for him. If the latter, then he may be too stupid to be president. Not that that has stopped voters before.

What do I mean by code speak? Well, on gay rights, instead of calling them “special rights,” he focuses instead on the idea that homosexuality is a sin. Sure, a lot of non-politicians focus on the Biblical rather than the political points of this issue, but usually those are not people running in statewide elections, let alone wanting to run in a national general election.

Likewise, the new contraception debate (really, have we drifted that far to the right?)…

Instead of talking about the economics of health care, or even the questionable argument about religious freedom for faith-based organizations, Santorum, in the past, hit a straight moral line drive with the argument that contraception was bad for families. Of course, this was before the debate raised like an oily sludge to the surface of the election cycle, and at the time he said that he was not in favor of legislating this brand of morality, but times and political climates can and do change…

This sort of right wing code speak becomes very troubling to me when the President is being discussed. I know the issues that most on the right have with Obama have nothing to do with his race, but… All the claims about the President being a Muslim, a non-native citizen, and even a socialist… In a different day and age, how many of the people making so much noise about these non-issues wouldn’t bother? Instead, thirty plus years ago, they would just be making noise about getting the black man out of the White House.

Not everyone, don’t get me wrong. But I am sure that some percentage of those making these sorts of arguments about the President are just using these non-issues as code speak about his race.

While I disagree with Santorum at a fundamental level on just about every issue and take exception to almost every word that comes out of his mouth, at least he is not that kind of slime. I have no doubt that his issues with Obama have a lot more to do with wanting his job than with the color of the President’s skin.

The bigoted, racist kind of slime out there who do have that problem should be worried, though, because Santorum does not play their game and, in the unlikely event that he secures the GOP nomination, his inability to use proper conservative code speak will slay any chances at victory in November.

Only by using code speak to portray religious and moral beliefs as legitimate political issues can one who seems to believe that birth control is a refuge for loose women with low morals succeed in gaining acceptance outside of the far right conservative primaries.

Of course, Santorum’s failure to grasp the necessity of right wing code speak is not his only problem, beyond failing to understand how to discuss social issues, he really doesn’t seem to understand which aspects of these issues really engage people in the first place:

But it’s not just that the senator’s positions are out of touch with the mainstream electorate (a mere 8 percent of Americans think birth control is immoral; 84 percent of U.S. Catholics think you can use it and still be a good Catholic). It’s that the guy is simultaneously too pious and too pathetic.

Take his views on gay rights. Plenty of people object to gay marriage, but Santorum has long come across as a bit of a clown on the entire subject of homosexuality. It’s some combination of his whiny manner and his slightly-too-colorful blatherings about how “sodomy” is kinda like polygamy or incest but not quite so bad as man-on-dog action. With that kind of commentary, small wonder Dan Savage decided to execute his devastating lexical takedown of the senator.

Perhaps saddest of all, when things get uncomfortable, Santorum crumbles. Pressed recently about a section of his 2005 book, It Takes a Family, that laments “radical feminists” undermining the family by pushing women to work outside the home, the senator pleaded ignorance and claimed the bit had been written by his wife.

To be sure, this whole Serious Candidate business is new to Santorum.

Here’s to crumbling and blaming it on your wife. That sells really well in the heartland.

The problem the rest of us will have if Santorum became president should resolve itself any time now. I am just surprised he’s made it this far.

But not really. I still am not convinced that the GOP can bring itself to nominate a Mormon, er… I mean someone who flip flops on all the issues they hold dear while being responsible for the rough draft of the “anti-American” and “Socialist” Obama death panel plan.

Unfortunately, the only other sane choice they had this year was another, lesser known Mormon, er… I mean someone who endorsed the President’s anti-Amercian, Nazi Communist agenda by actually working for the guy. Ambassador to China or closet communist?

Huntsman's failure to launch and the Anyone But Romney crusade, it surely couldn’t have anything to do with faith, could it? I am sure that for most primary voters, the politics do come first. Unfortunately, I am sure that there are a few out there who obscure their true feelings with political code phrases.

A skill Santorum seems to lack.

from tag Newt

Democracy In Distress: Newt, NASA, & the Moon

from tag Conservatives

Democracy In Distress: What do Republicans have against science anyway?

from tag Tea

from tag Health

from tag Santorum

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Sunday, February 12, 2012

Conservative voters: Poorly informed with low IQs & voting against their own best interests?

I was just going to throw this link up onto Snip.it & Pinterest, but I really felt some words were necessary here.

First of all, I have known some very intelligent people who have conservative political views. Not only are they smart, but their political views are smart as well. Their arguments are usually well developed, informed, and are very intelligent, based on legitimate facts, figures and historical interpretations.

Quite often I disagree with them, but this is because we subscribe to some different historical and philosophical interpretations. However, when we debate, I hope both of us walk away better informed than when we started.

These debates usually change no minds, but they can actually make each of our arguments stronger, because through a well-informed conversation on an issue, we both learn some new facts and figures, holes are punched in our weaker arguments, and we have to find support for fuzzy truths we may have thrown out in haste or drop those imperfect arguments from our repertoire. In the end, each side can make a better informed decision on the point being discussed and, hopefully, takes away stronger arguments in defense of our views.

But what about right and wrong? What about winning? Well, in intelligent debates, we are usually arguing sane problems and issues that have multiple, legitimate, intelligent solutions. There usually is not a right answer or a wrong answer. Or they are very complex problems that require the best ideas from both the right and the left to be adequately resolved.

Of course, I am not talking about racism, prejudice, discrimination, or science. I usually find that intelligent conservatives and I pretty much share the same views here. Because we are not stupid or ignorant.

Which brings us to this…

Conservatism Thrives on Low Intelligence and Poor Information | | AlterNet:

…Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly "different" others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the "critical pathway" from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to "rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order" and "emphasise the maintenance of the status quo".

Pausing for a second… I do not equate conservative ideology with intolerance, necessarily. Social conservatism, perhaps, but not conservatism in general.

It seems as if a narrow path is being walked here, almost but not quite defining conservatism as racist and intolerant. That may be problematic. Further, if these sorts are drawn to the conservative ideology, does that mean conservative ideology is intolerant? Or does it become intolerant because of the influx of these intolerant people with low IQs? In the end, does it matter even matter where the causes and effects lay? Or has it become a self-perpetuating cycle with the chickens shitting all over the eggs they are laying, beyond any identification of cause and effect?

Blah. From here the article climbs up onto more solid ground… The problem lies not with a lack of intelligent conservatives, but with the way the intelligent conservatives have been pandering to their side’s “basest, stupidest impulses.”

This is not to suggest that all conservatives are stupid. There are some very clever people in government, advising politicians, running thinktanks and writing for newspapers, who have acquired power and influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.
But what we now see among their parties – however intelligent their guiding spirits may be – is the abandonment of any pretence of high-minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won't drown in it. Whether they are promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that man-made climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy, or that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.
…
…"the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today". The Republican party, with its "prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science" is appealing to what he calls the "low-information voter", or the "misinformation voter". While most office holders probably don't believe the "reactionary and paranoid claptrap" they peddle, "they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base".

This is troubling in so many ways. But this is why so many poor Americans are fervent Republicans while many of the policies and practices of the GOP act against their own best interests at worst, or have little to do with any issues really effecting the poor at best.

Even more troubling:

In the UK, “the Guardian reported that recipients of disability benefits, scapegoated by the government as scroungers, blamed for the deficit, now find themselves subject to a new level of hostility and threats from other people.”

And even worse, and heading towards my real point here:

These are the perfect conditions for a billionaires' feeding frenzy. Any party elected by misinformed, suggestible voters becomes a vehicle for undisclosed interests. A tax break for the 1% is dressed up as freedom for the 99%. The regulation that prevents big banks and corporations exploiting us becomes an assault on the working man and woman. Those of us who discuss man-made climate change are cast as elitists by people who happily embrace the claims of Lord Monckton, Lord Lawson or thinktanks funded by ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers: now the authentic voices of the working class.

Many of the policies that benefit corporations are acutely harmful to the poor. Tax policy? Maybe, maybe not, but the minimum wage? Expensive workplace safety regulations? Even more costly environmental protection regulations?

The people arguing for deregulation will never live where the water supply has been poisoned by carcinogens, so why should they worry? Guess who gets to live there? The people voting for the conservative candidates who argue that such regulations kill jobs.

The real issue is not the IQ of the voters. I know for a fact that many of the loudest voices on the left should be locked in small rooms and only allowed to talk to rocks. Both sides have these people.

But what is so disturbing to me is how so many on the right so callously prey upon the ignorance of many in their voting base.

Perhaps this is my own prejudice, but what I see so often is the left saying, vote for us and we’ll keep the plant next door to your house from killing you while the right says, vote for us, and we’ll keep the left from putting job killing regulations on the plant next door to you and who really believes in all that science stuff, anyway, that says arsenic is bad for you? Jobs and superbabies! You can have it all!

I used the photo of the class warfare sign at the top of this post because I feel that this really is class warfare. It is an act of class warfare for the right to use these tactics on their own supporters.

The right says we cannot have a discussion about income inequality, because that is class warfare and an attack on the capitalist principles of the American Dream. Those on the right who would actually benefit from having this discussion, those who desperately feel the worsening ache of the dying American Dream every day, turn angry, fearful eyes towards those on the left who are fighting for them, away from those on the right who are actually stealing access to the American Dream from the vast majority of the country’s citizens in the first place.

And that, beyond being reprehensible, is just plain frightening.

from tag Conservatives

Democracy In Distress: What do Republicans have against science anyway?

from tag Ugly

Democracy In Distress: A dysfunctional system goes Super… And fails.

from tag Climate

Democracy In Distress: Climate Change

from tag Fear

from tag Ignorance

from tag Rights

from tag Incompetence

from tag Warfare

(more..)

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Ronald Reagan and Obama both said the same thing about taxes for the wealthy

Yes. Then again, Reagan would be way too liberal for the Republican Party these days. And Nixon would be burned at the stake as a liberal, transgendered, freak of nature, hippie, pagan, dirt eater... Eisenhower? We can't even go there. This is a family show. Sometimes.

Thanks to Aleshia on Facebook for spotting this clip.

This is not our grandparents' Republican Party...

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Who funds the U.S. government: Comparison Chart - Total Reported Income Vs. Total Income Taxes Paid (2007)

Yes, this is a chart we do not see much of at the Occupy protests.

But who can afford to fund the government? The fact of the matter is that, while the top 25% earners in the country pay 86.6% of the taxes, a percentage that drives conservative wild, just asking the bottom 75% to "pay their fair share" is not a workable solution.

While it sounds good on paper, at the end of the day, the bottom 75% can't afford it. Small percentage changes in the tax rate for most Americans have a dramatic effect on their day to day lives, much more so than it does for the wealthiest members of society.

And at a certain point, taxes become uncollectable. Are we really going to ask someone to choose between paying their tax bill and putting food on the table for their children? Those are taxes that won't get paid and then we'll be sending good money after bad trying to collect and prosecute those damn, poor and lazy tax evaders that are not pulling their weight in society.

And if we are asking the average American to give more of their money to the government instead of spending their money in the free market, how are the top 25% going to keep earning their money? Raising prices to compensate for smaller sales? Double tapping the purchasing power of the average American and driving the economy even further into the darkness?

Blah... Too burned out for a thoughtful, well written argument on this topic today, but I did want to look into the facts and to offer a couple splintered fragments of my humble opinion..

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

The Daily Show: Scorn in the USA - Occupy Wall Street Protests, Tea Party Protests, & Hypocritical Conservative Sensitivities

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Go Republicans! Another case of keeping millions unemployed to put one man out of work

Hint: Much of what we say about you pulling this crap is meant as a joke, not as a suggestion.

This...

Americans, unlike the Senate, approve of Obama’s jobs bill, poll says | The Ticket - Yahoo! News:

Senate Republicans Tuesday may have blocked President Obama's jobs bill, but a new poll suggests that's not what a majority of Americans want.
Nearly two-thirds of the respondents to a survey from NBC/Wall Street Journal voiced their approval when pollsters were told them the details of the president's "American Jobs Act"-- including that it would cut payroll taxes, fund new road construction, and extend unemployment benefits. NBC reports that 63 percent of respondents said they favored the bill, with just 32 percent opposing it. 'via Blog this'

...reminds me of this...

PS: I stole the second one from here: http://www.republicanjobcreation.com It is worth a look.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Freaks and, uh, more freaks... Republicans in 2012

A few excerpts below, but this one is really worth a read. Don't know if it makes me laugh or cry or both. One of the worst pitfalls of modern American politics is the pervading feeling among the majority of voters that we are left choosing between the lesser of two evils. Unless a miracle happens, 2012 will be no different for most voters.

While I have yet, in my voting life, to actually pull the elephant lever for President, I always root for them to have a serious, competent candidate for the job. I would argue this happened in 1992 (in hind sight), 1996, and (questionably) in 2008. While this current freak show of a Republican field might be "good" for the Democrats a year from now, it is BAD for our country.

And, make no mistake, my money says that Herman Cain will get the nomination before Romney. The primary voters will vote black before Mormon. That is the dirty little not-so-secret secret of the 2012 election so far. And if he does get the nomination, expect many on the wacko right to stay home in November.

Who knows, maybe Huntsman can pull it together? I do not know too much about him yet, but he seems the least vile of the bunch. Romney wasn't too bad until his swerve to the far right, past the nicely trimmed lawns of Conservative Lane into the tall razor wire fences surrounding the armed compounds in Crazy Town. Unfortunately, Huntsman also suffers from Romney's small L.D.S. problem.

Blah...

The GOP's sad, intolerant 2012 field - Yahoo! News: "At the weekend's Values Voters Summit, Republican presidential candidates and conservative kingmakers proved that bigotry is among their chief values

There's a good reason for the otherwise inexplicable reality that in most surveys President Obama, despite his currently desiccated job approval ratings, leads all but one of his Republican rivals — and even against him, the president nonetheless runs neck and neck.

And there's a deeper reason, beyond the inchoate, predictable, and perennial yearning to find an alternative, why so many of the GOP's smartest strategists and most prodigious fundraisers fought so hard to broaden their field of candidates. They sought someone else, anyone both serious and authentic — from Indiana's diminutive but economically literate Gov. Mitch Daniels, who once committed the conservative capital offense of contemplating a tax increase, to New Jersey's blunt, at times bullying, and comprehensively heavyweight Gov. Chris Christie, who believes in the heresy of global warming.

What's unfolding in the Republican arena is not a campaign but a spectacle that repels mainstream voters and rejects or infects mainstream conservative candidates.

...

Huntsman, as Tish Durkin argued, has qualities that ought to recommend him — among them, that: "He's not Romney... He's not crazy... He's not swearing on a stack of Bibles." Yet these very qualities are disqualifying in today's Republican Party. Huntsman doesn't want, or can't get, a séance with Donald Trump, who's become the grinning Joker of today's GOP. And Huntsman won't get a second look or a second chance — not this time around.

Instead the party marches to the tin drums of ideological extremism and angry fantasy, while its stiff and fragile frontrunner compliantly frog-marches to the right. Mitt Romney isn't setting the pace; he's trying to do just enough to placate a party where crazy now flourishes in many forms."

...

There's persistent resistance to Romney — on the shameful ground of religious bigotry and on the defensible ground of doubts about his sincerity, his personality, and his principles. The result: The extremism and pratfalls of his opponents, which should benefit the Mitt-man by making him seem relatively sensible and reasonable, have generated a miasma that's enveloping the Romney campaign. Not only has he toed a bright right line on social issues; he's adopted the GOP habit of fact-free argument — almost certainly the easy reaction of someone who's already treated his public life as record-free.

...

Even in an economy where the congressional GOP has intentionally and successfully stalled jobs and growth, the party's nominee may prove to be as vulnerable as the Christie-imploring Republicans calculated. It's clear that the president won't let 2012 be cast as a referendum; he's now setting out the basic choice: Who's on your side? Romney will call this class warfare, but people are coming to understand that we've already had a decade of class warfare — against the middle-class. That's what Occupy Wall Street is all about. And that's why Barack Obama should and will go the next step — and week after week, month after month, challenge Wall Street and vested interests across the board.

Mitt Romney will be ill-prepared for this contest. He will enter the general election burdened by the craziness to which he's had to kowtow. The primaries are also stripping away the strands of his already threadbare character. And they're leaving him on the wrong side of the great dividing line of 2012 — for the privileged, not ordinary people."

'via Blog this'

Sunday, October 09, 2011

Comic: The Church of Fiscal Conservatism by Barry Deutsch & Rachel Swirsky

Friday, October 07, 2011

Lewis Black on 2012 Candidates, Obama, and visiting Occupy Wall Street

Actually, I am in complete agreement with him on Obama. Someone who speaks in paragraphs was definitely all I was expecting out of his presidency (the system is too rigid for real change on the pace most people were hoping for), so I am much less disappointed than many on the left.

Anyway, I love Black. His host, much less so, but she doesn't talk too much.

Lewis Black Live at Occupy Wall Street from Turnstyle Video on Vimeo.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

What do Republicans have against science anyway?

Okay. I got sucked in by another headline. Still transferring files, though, so nothing better to do EXCEPT for getting out and enjoying the gorgeous weather! Probably the last warm day of the fall, so I am keeping this short. We've got nothing but drizzle and gloom on the horizon for the next ten days.

Erasing false balance: the right is more antiscience than the left | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine: "I write quite a bit about how rabidly antiscience the political right in the US has become. From the attacks on science by the Bush Administration (and Newt Gingrich before that) to the political litmus test of needing to denounce evolution and global warming if you’re a candidate, the Republican party has planted its flag firmly in the ground of nonsense. At the bottom of this article is a section called Related Posts that has links to just a handful of the copious examples of this outrageous behavior.

They have also become masters at spinning this, going on the attack against science they don’t like and using the media to sow doubt. One of the most aggravating of these tactics is the one of false equivalency. For example, in a post I might lambaste yet another Republican candidate saying creationism should be taught in schools, and someone in the comments will say, "Well, people on the left are antiscience as well!"
...
And that’s why you need to read an article by my friend Chris Mooney, "Unequivocal: Today’s Right is Overwhelmingly More Anti-Science Than Today’s Left". He lays out just how big this problem is, why the right has gone this way, and why they have solidarity among their candidates.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Chris Mooney | Unequivocal: Today’s Right is Overwhelmingly More Anti-Science Than Today's Left: "Last week, I took to task a really poor USA Today op-ed making the following claim:

"In short, for every anti-science Republican that exists, there is at least one anti-science Democrat. Neither party has a monopoly on scientific illiteracy. Indeed, ignorance has reached epidemic proportions inside the Beltway."

I accused the author, Alex Berezow, of constructing a false equivalence between right and left wing science abuse. The latter does occur sometimes, and I’ve given many examples (ionizing radiation risks, vaccines, GMOs, etc). But it has relatively little mainstream influence today—and can hardly compare with the sweeping denial of huge bodies of knowledge (e.g., all climate science, all evolutionary science) that we see on the right."

'via Blog this'

Here is the quote Plait pulled from Mooney's article: "The chief reason the political right is anti-science is because it contains the Christian Right (and Tea Party, which is kind of the same thing). There is no force in American politics generating anywhere near so much unreality, in science or in other spheres, as this one. It is not just evolution, or the age of the Earth… When it comes to science, it is also anything having anything to do with abortion, reproductive health, and sexuality. Moreover, we are talking here about the willful advancement of dangerous falsehoods, and the clinging to them in the face of all evidence and refutation—because this is about unwavering certainty, and ultimately, about faith."

Full disclosure: I have yet to read the Mooney article. See note above about the weather. But I will.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Elizabeth Warren and Class Warfare

Thank You, Elizabeth Warren!: "Progressives take note: THAT is how it is done. THAT is how you fight back hard, and THAT is how you defeat Fox News talking points. And THAT is why Warren has actually moved AHEAD of the Republican incumbent in this race."

'via Blog this'

Thursday, June 16, 2011

An interesting look at Michele Bachmann

The Michele Bachmann show should be an interesting one through the primaries. I expect she will attack her competition ferociously, but I also suspect that she'll draw as much fire as she dishes out. She probably will not get the nomination in the end, but she may take a few people out with her. Just my hunch. This article provides a pretty decent look at where she stands at the moment as the festivities get rolling.

Can Michele Bachmann broaden her appeal beyond the Tea Party? - Yahoo! News

From the article:

Bachmann, in other words, can be flaky and prone to flights of wild assertion. But usually in ways that endear her to conservatives and drive liberals nuts. The three-term Minnesota congresswoman is a cheerful culture warrior, a pro-life mother of five (plus 23 foster children) whose upbeat lack of concern for political verities -- she delivered her own response to the president's State of the Union address -- has made her a Tea Party favorite. Think Sarah Palin, without the aggrieved victimization.

...

[In the recent debate,] Rather than coming across as a fringe figure, she looked as if she belonged on stage with the other candidates, outshining most of them and comporting herself in a way that seemed plausibly presidential. That's been the challenge that most other Tea Party candidates have failed. Other heroes of the movement, from Sharron Angle to Christine O'Donnell to Rand Paul, have often frightened ordinary voters. But on Monday at least, Bachmann did not.

...

But there is likely to be a limit to how far she can go. For all the attention she draws to herself, she hasn't actually done much in Congress. "She runs on what's wrong, not on what she's accomplished,'' said Jacobs. And several people who have worked for her, including her former chief of staff, have stated that she has no business running for president.

...

Bachmann's history of slip-ups and strange claims makes it a little hard to believe that the woman who shone in the debate is here for the duration. But Republicans are yearning to be excited. They'll make allowances. If Bachmann can keep it together a little longer, this may not be the last surprise she offers.

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Turn Me into a Liberal

I just had an odd idea for a website: turnmeintoaliberal.com.

Each week or so, we'd post a profile of a Bush Voter, from middle of the road swing voters to hardcore theorcratic conservatives, and their reasons for pulling the Elephant Lever in November and then we would use post comments using logic to try and change their mind.

Unfortunately, this would have been better before the election, but we do have the 2006 Congressional Elections coming up quicker than we can blink.

I am not putting this together yet, just sharing the idea. I think it would be good practice for taking the message to Red America.

This idea probably came around because I consider myself a centrist, but things are moving so far to the right in this country that I feel like I am turning into a Liberal myself.

I don't know... it would be amusing. I don't know which would be better, creating fictional Republican profiles or finding real people to submit to our assaults.

Today is Sunday. Douglas Adams wrote about an immortal being who went insane because of Sunday afternoons. But that is a better topic for my personal blog, Rubble.