Friday, August 31, 2012 4:52:29 AM
Highlights from Prayer Rally For America's Future
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/focus-family-kicks-off-rnc-prayer-rally-americas-future
Highlights from pre-RNC prayer rally with Michele Bachmann, Rick Scarborough, Jim Garlow, Mat Staver, Pam Olsen and Harry Jackson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSwoQEdyIHw
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Another creationist group plans on building tourist attraction in Kentucky
By God Discussion Reporter
On August 27, 2012 At 1:07 am
Mark Hansel of The Cincinnati Enquirer [ http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120826/NEWS01/308260057/Another-creation-science-attraction-plans-Northern-Kentucky-home ] reports that the Creation Science Hall of Fame will be raising funds so that it can build a brick and mortar facility in northern Kentucky, between Ken Ham's Creation Museum and his fledgling Noah's Ark Theme Park. The Creation Science Hall of Fame is currently a blog and is not affiliated with Ken Ham's creationist enterprises — although it does name Ham as a "living inductee [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/living/ken-ham/ ]."
According to the donations page of New Jersey creationist group's website [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/donations/ ], "It is our intention to construct a brick-and-mortar museum between Answers in Genesis Ark Encounter and The Creation Museum for all to visit, so that the world can see that creation scientists are ready and able to give and answer for what they believe."
The Creation Science Hall of Fame site also carries a "Creation News" thread that contains stories such as how before the biblical flood, "Pre-Flood Water [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/2012/07/19/creation-2/apologetics/pre-flood-water-cycle-and-first-rains/#more-977 ]" shot up like a jet from the earth's crust and did not rain down as water does today; that NASA's Curiosity that landed on Mars proves intelligent design and that if evidence is found that life forms once existed on Mars [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/2012/08/05/creation-2/creation-news/curiosity-machine-and-motive/#more-1064 ], they actually came from Earth " in the same disaster that caused a Global Flood;" and that because of the theory of evolution [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/2012/08/21/creation-2/apologetics/evolution-science-influencing-government/ ], judges and public servants are rewriting the Constitution of the United States and sending the nation down a path of self-destruction.
(c) 2012 GodDiscussion.com
http://www.goddiscussion.com/100578/another-creationist-group-plans-on-moving-tourist-operations-to-kentucky/ [with comments]
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Creation Science Hall Of Fame To Expand With Kentucky Museum
The Creationism Museum in Kentucky depicts humans and dinosaurs living together.
By Drew Guarini
Posted: 08/27/2012 4:04 pm Updated: 08/27/2012 6:28 pm
Creationism is proving to be a lucrative business for those religious Americans who take the Bible's Genesis story literally. There seems to be a growing demand for museums on a mission to debunk evolutionary theory and promote the belief that life was created by God as laid out in Genesis.
The New Jersey group behind the website Creation Science Hall of Fame [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/ ] is putting its efforts into opening a brick and mortar creationist attraction [ http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120826/NEWS01/308260057/Another-creation-science-attraction-plans-Northern-Kentucky-home ] along Interstate 75 in northern Kentucky, according to the Courier-Journal. (Hat tip: FARK [ http://www.fark.com/comments/7290412/Oh-Kentucky-First-you-get-Creation-Museum-then-Ark-Encounter-now-folks-want-to-build-Creation-Science-Hall-of-Fame-there-Do-you-realize-that-even-Florida-Texas-are-starting-to-snicker-behind-your-back ].)
Progress in Kentucky will be determined by how much and how quickly the group can raise capital through donations. Terry Hurlbut, secretary and treasurer of the group, told the Courier-Journal that they're hoping to raise $2 to $3 million to begin construction. Like the group's website, the planned museum will honor those deemed notable believers in creationism, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Samuel F.B. Morse, Louis Pasteur and George Washington Carver.
A recent Gallup poll showed that 46 percent of Americans believe in intelligent design [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/americans-believe-in-creationism_n_1571127.html ], with that belief negatively correlated to education level, and the planned Creation Science Hall of Fame museum is entering a crowded field.
Just 90 miles from the proposed site lies the massive 70,000 square-foot non-profit Creation Museum [ http://creationmuseum.org/ ], featuring depictions of an earth where dinosaurs and humans co-existed. The museum's theory of natural history is largely discounted by every major scientist, academic and expert on record [ http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/prehistoric-time-line/ ].
Answers in Genesis [ http://www.answersingenesis.org/ ], the group behind the Creation Museum, is planning an equally ambitious exhibit named Ark Encounter [ http://arkencounter.com/ ], a Bible-themed amusement park complete with a 500-foot by 80-foot depiction of Noah's ark.
Though the Creation Museum saw a dip in attendance last year to 280,000, down from 404,000 visitors when it opened in 2007, the group was still able to obtain $43 million in tax breaks from the state of Kentucky [ http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/creation-museum-evolves-hoping-add-life-size-ark-170347907.html ] based on projected attendance.
In the same year, nearly $50 million in funding was cut from public education in Kentucky [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/01/23/kentucky-cuts-education-preserves-tax-breaks-for-creationist-theme-park/ ], notes Forbes.
Florida lawmakers have also been kind to creationists. In 2006, they passed property tax exemptions for the Holy Land Experience in Orlando [ http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2009-06-29/business/orl-cfborl-beth-kassab-holy-land-06062909jun29_1_tbn-theme-park-tax-exemption ], where the "world of the Bible comes to life," according to the attraction's website.
Despite these theme parks' non-profit status, some attendees take issue with their entry fees being used for evangelizing purposes [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40725621/ns/travel-destination_travel/t/orlando-theme-park-biblical-proportions/ ]. Others are turned off by the high entry prices in general. While families can go to the Creation Museum and see fake animals at a cost of $30 for adults and $16 for children, they could just as easily go to the nearby Cincinnati Zoo [ http://cincinnatizoo.org/ ] and see real animals for less.
For the Creation Science Hall of Fame, the money-making aspect of the project is on hold for now. Organizers hope to be up and running in five years [ http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/26/4758432/creationism-hall-of-fame-hopes.html ].
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/creation-science-hall-of-fame_n_1833434.html [with comments]
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Creationists plan yet another museum for northern Kentucky
The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
Photograph: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty
Creation Science Hall of Fame plans to honor scientists who further the idea that God created the world 6,000 years ago
Amanda Holpuch
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 August 2012 16.38 EDT
A stretch of interstate in northern Kentucky [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/kentucky ] may soon be the official capital for creationism [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/creationism ] fans across the globe.
Online-only institution the Creation Science Hall of Fame hopes to establish a real-life creationism center located between the Creation Museum [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/06/evidence-creation-museum ] and planned creationism theme park Ark Encounter.
The hall of fame website was launched in February and honors "those who honored God's word as literally written in Genesis." Any scientist who the institution believes furthers the scientifically inaccurate idea that God created the world 6,000 years ago can be included.
"We honor these people, not because we believe everything they say, but because they made critical contributions to creation science and to the explanation of the Genesis story," secretary/treasurer of the hall of fame Terry Hurlbut told the Cincinnati Enquirer [ http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120826/NEWS01/308260057/Another-creation-science-attraction-plans-Northern-Kentucky-home ].
There are several creationism institutions in the US, including another creation museum in Texas and a mobile museum that takes fossil exhibits to churches and schools. The hall of fame would solidify northern Kentucky as the center for creation-tourism.
The Creation Museum opened in May 2007 and was built by Answers in Genesis, the Australian ministry that is also behind Ark Encounter.
Ark Encounter – which would feature a life-size replica of Noah's Ark – was supposed to break ground in Kentucky in 2011, but has been unable to reach its $24.5m fundraising goal.
Creation Science Hall of Fame organizers are asking for between $2m and $3m and would feature biographies, pictures, and artifacts of inductees.
Their website honors 104 deceased male scientists including Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Faraday and Guglielmo Marconi. To explain why these individuals are included, the site excerpts biography information from the book Men of Science, Men of God, written by a man widely recognized as the father of creationism, Henry Morris.
Honorees also include 12 prominent living figures in the creation science field – again all male. The real-life hall of fame would also include artifacts from people listed on the site's honorable mention list, which features 58 male recommendations from website readers and the hall of fame committee.
In a May 2012 Gallup poll 46% [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx ] of Americans said they believe God created humans in the present form.
Update, 11am Wednesday: Founder and president of the Creation Science Hall of Fame, Nick Lally told the Guardian that the hall of fame is an opportunity to honor scientists who are taking a risk by advocating creationist beliefs. "That's why we honor those who honor God's word as literally written in Genesis," Tally said. "Because they do stick their necks out, they do say what their observations are."
Lally, a former public school teacher, said the Creation Science Hall of Fame is also an educational tool for students, especially those that are homeschooled. He hopes the brick and mortar version of the website will be open in the next five years.
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-news-blog/2012/aug/28/creationism-museum-northern-kentucky [with comments]
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I’m all for concentrating the stupid in one place
Posted by PZ Myers on August 28, 2012
Do you remember Terry Hurlbut? Of course not. He’s another boring creationist [ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/06/such-blithe-liars/ ] whose schtick is to claim that creationists really are scientists [ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/31/if-i-had-some-ham-i-could-make/ ] — after all, Isaac Newton was a creationist. He also maintains something called the “Creationist Hall of Fame [ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/20/creationist-kook-defends-his-c/ ]” which lists a lot of legitimate pre-Darwin thinkers and 20th century crackpots. His “Hall of Fame” is just a website, but he dreams big: he wants to put up a real building with…what? I don’t know. Printouts of his articles?
Anyway, the semi-interesting thing he wants to do is build that edifice to idiocy somewhere near the Creation “Museum” [ http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2012/08/28/because-the-world-needs-another-creationist-museum/ ]. It’s a legitimate business plan, I think; the concentration of deluded fools spikes in the vicinity of Answers in Genesis, and that’s his market. AiG has nothing to do with it, though — I wonder if they’d resent someone tapping into their pool of suckers? Or if they’d see it as an addition to their vortex of stupid? It depends on Hurlbut’s ideological purity, I suppose.
© 2012 ScienceBlogs LLC
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/28/im-all-for-concentrating-the-stupid-in-one-place/ [with comments]
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The Republican National Convention: Where Social Darwinism Meets Theocracy
By Joseph A. Palermo
Posted: 08/26/2012 1:14 pm
At the 1988 Republican National Convention, Vice President George H.W. Bush talked about a "kinder and gentler" America. Four years later Patrick Buchanan scared the hell out of the country by declaring a "culture war." In 2000 George W. Bush gave us "compassionate conservatism." The Bush stratagems were cunning responses to focus groups and public opinion polls that show beating up on the poor and the weakest among us can make people feel uncomfortable. In 2012 we can expect more culture war rhetoric, but it will be clouded by the soothing sounds of reasonableness and moderation.
The trick thus far for the Romney-Ryan ticket has been to pretend to want to "save" Medicare even while putting forth Ryan's "voucher" plan [ http://articles.boston.com/2012-08-22/politics/33301729_1_medicare-advantage-current-medicare-recipients-future-medicare-payments ] that would end Medicare, not only "as we know it," but end Medicare period. The lies and distortions about their schemes for privatizing Medicare (which have been swirling around Republican circles for decades) are the 2012 election's equivalent of "kinder and gentler" and "compassionate conservatism": empty slogans designed to beguile voters.
What we'll hear all week at the RNC are expressions of an ideological witch's brew, a fusion of Ayn Rand [ http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/ayn_rand%2C_hugely_popular_author_and_inspiration_to_right-wing_leaders%2C_was_a_big_admirer_of_serial_killer ]'s Social Darwinism with the Reverend Jerry Falwell [ http://www.nndb.com/people/558/000022492/ ]'s vision of an American Theocracy. Rand glorified sociopaths. Falwell believed the Bible foretold a nuclear Armageddon. They've got no choice but to pander to their Christian evangelical base as well as to their corporate overlords; a bone goes to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Perkins_%28politician%29#Family_Research_Council ] while a juicier chunk of meat will go to the Koch brothers [ http://www.kochbrothersexposed.com/ ].
The Romney-Ryan Republicans are giving us Rand's Social Darwinist economic prescriptions, which hold that if an individual lacks the wherewithal to thrive in a "free" capitalist society that person deserves to die in a gutter somewhere, merged with Falwell's social diktats banning abortion (even in cases of rape and incest), gay bashing, a militarized foreign policy, and a continuation of the "War on Drugs."
If they advocated only the Randian side of the equation there at least would be no restrictions on abortion, gays could go their merry way, and everybody could smoke weed. Things like school prayer, the 10 Commandments in public buildings, abstinence-only sex "education" would be laughed out of court. Conversely, if they gave us a truly "Christian" set of governing principles, (as opposed to the Falwell strain), omitting the Randian Social Darwinism, we'd at least get a government that cared a little bit about the poor, took care of the weak, and might not be so quick to go to war.
As it stands, we get the Social Darwinism without the libertarianism, and the religious strictures on individual behavior without the compassion for the poor and the valuing of peace. In other words, we get the worst of both ideologies.
This epistemological schizophrenia is secular yet religious, amoral yet moralizing.
And lo and behold! The Republicans' idée fixe just happens to serve perfectly the interests of the ruling corporate elite in American society! It's a menu of ideas that give the 1 percent everything it wants. (The Supreme Court's ruling [ http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7536905 ] that money equals speech and corporations deserve stronger Constitutional safeguards than people codify this worldview.)
It's as though with every minute of right-wing talk radio, every 24-hour news cycle at Fox, and every spittle of words strung together by Romney, Huckabee, Priebus, Ryan, and the rest of them at the convention, they have set out to prove to the world that power equals knowledge, and the ideas that are the most widely disseminated in any society are those that best serve the narrow class interests of its ruling elite.
It's kind of funny that a tropical storm is heading toward Tampa right when the GOP is kicking off its lovefest. Since about 1900 the American people have looked to the federal government for help when their locales are hit with natural disasters -- you know, the government we're all supposed to despise.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/rnc-romney-ryan_b_1830782.html [with comments]
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Be Careful What You Vote For! Be Very Careful
By Sherman Yellen
Posted: 08/26/2012 4:26 pm
This is a warning/prophecy by an old guy. Having reached the biblical age where I am allowed to offer blessings, spit out curses, and issue wild-eyed prophecies, I have decided to get them all over with in this one all-purpose blog.
I don't think of myself as aged (I was just as cranky at thirty and I still get around pretty good) and my wife hates for me to use that ugly three-letter word -- OLD -- we are both chronic age deniers - but to deny my age at 80 would be like denying global warming during this fetid, never-ending New York summer. It's hot and getting hotter, and I'm old and getting older. I am more than worried, but not about the aging process. I accept the inevitable as I see my friends and contemporaries leave the scene, but what I cannot so easily accept is the inevitability of the Romney/Ryan election. I find that this is the scariest, most dangerous election that America has faced in my lifetime, and I've been around long enough to experience quite a few frightening ones.
Since I have a fair record of losing at the ballot box I have come to understand that my losses were not irreparable. That is until this election. I cast my first vote for Adlai Stevenson who lost to Dwight Eisenhower. As a kid growing up during WWII, I admired Eisenhower as a war hero, but as a young adult I didn't believe that war heroes were the best men to usher in peace and prosperity, and I was charmed by Stevenson's literacy and golden tongue. Frankly, I did not like Ike. Eisenhower proved me wrong. He helped to rebuild the country, proved himself a more than decent president despite his caution during the McCarthy era and surrounding himself with the smear monger Nixon and a few sleazy characters in vicuna coats, he warned about the military industrial complex, and helped in his own slow, cautious way to calm the Cold Wa, made some small progress with Civil Rights, and built a highway system that helped shape this country into a great postwar power. And after Ike I kept losing more than winning at the ballot box. I lost in my second vote against Richard Nixon. I lost in my vote against Ronald Reagan, and I lost and lost and lost again in my vote against George Bush senior and junior. And both the country and me survived our losses. Arguably, not so well after W: Indeed, disastrously so, still we were able to pick ourselves up as best we could, scrape off some of the dirt, smear on some anti-biotic salve, put on a clean bandage, and vote his party out of office.
We now live in a different time since Bush's Supreme Court left us with Citizens United, Karl Rove's political fundraisers, and the Tea Party. Quite simply these people aided by the Koch Industries' billions will try to buy the coming presidential election. And they may well succeed. The polls are close enough to cause a progressive like myself to worry a lot. And people are desperate in these hard economic times resulting from the last Republican recession to forget who caused their troubles, and to seek relief in a new set of rouges with a new set of promises. This time I fear it will be different. Indeed, I know it will be different.
Elections are the best tool we have for gaining a representative government. But they can also be the beginning of an end for the democratic process. Whoever believes that the Muslim Brotherhood will be voted out of power in Egypt should they prove too extreme and bring in a radical Sharia law is hopelessly naïve. Not all totalitarian regimes are brought in by military coups. Some are voted in. Germany in 1932 brought in fascism by electing it (with a little help from the SS murderer/bullies) [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=13127379 and preceding and following].
And now we have the possibility of a Mitt Romney presidency. I am not one of your fair-minded liberals who will give any points to Romney for his past business acumen, his alleged charities, or his former progressivism as Governor of Massachusetts. I find Romney to be a totally new political creature -- the sociopath as a square. He learned nothing from tethering his poor dog to the top of his car and riding full speed ahead to Canada -- and it is America whom he will now tether to his presidency, and the ride will be horrendous for young and old. No bathroom stops while Daddy Mitt is driving. I think he is probably the most dangerous man to run for the presidency in my lifetime, and that includes Nixon. He has lied time and again, distorting his own record while dissembling about the president's Medicare reforms, denying the public the right to examine his taxes and past business practices, and promising to help the elderly and the poor by destroying the very safety net that they are clinging to. Moreover, he is determined to win by hook or crook, forget the hook, there is enough crook in new Voter ID regulations to turn some of the swing states in his directions by denying the vote to minorities. Having no core of his own, the emptiness inside him can and will be filled by those who have bought him his presidency.
The prosperity he promises to the country is the prosperity we now have -- belonging only to that notorious 1%. And the liberties he promises to usher in will be freedom from the very taxes that support a civil society, freedom from Social Security which only spoils the elderly, freedom from Medicare and Medicaid, freedom from pollution controls, freedom from freedom itself in the case of women's bodies and minority rights. These amazing vouchers he so loves that promise to replace everything from SS, Medicare, Public Education, are a gift that will not stop giving -- to insurance cronies and educational profiteers. All of it is clear and out there, nothing is hidden from view, and to deny it and pretend that the etch-a-sketch will move him towards the center while the Koch brothers and the far right wing control that Romney toy is preposterous. This is the man who mocks President Obama for stating the obvious, that nobody succeeds on their own without the help of a functioning government. Perhaps he is one of the few who can say that because he did not need the government, all he needed was his rich father's success to start him on the road to a good education (with time out for a little gay bashing as he cut off the hair of a kid he held down). The lesson then as now, "Conform or we will force you to do so." Inside every bully is that totalitarian instinct waiting to take power.
Having voted Romney/Ryan into office with their disastrous foreign policy moves (trust me that war with Iran and Syria is going to happen under Romney -- so sayeth the Prophet) and with the country thrown into a greater poverty with the total destruction of trade unions and the outsourcing of any decent jobs, and with women's rights and gay rights rescinded, it should seem easy to vote Romney out in four more years with an energized, enraged populace. No way. He will be a war president who can and will assume war powers. That little thing called martial law can make civil liberties disappear in a nano-second. Immigrants will be regarded as a national security danger, and all protestors will be called traitors during the never-ending war. Forget your voting ID. Every citizen will need a national ID card that carries with it their political allegiance and enough information to control their lives. The freedom that is promised is the freedom from freedom.
The drone society that we see in that old Fritz Lang movie Metropolis, a German film that preceded the rise of fascism and WWII, is a warning of what can happen here. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis famously wrote in the 1930s that when fascism came to America it would not be wearing jackboots but would come in a very American shape. He was referring to the demagoguery of a Huey Long, not the Babbitry of a Mitt Romney, but Lewis knew that the denial of our rights would emanate from the ordinary, not the ranting, raging, dictator.
I will probably not be around to know if my prophecy of a Romney-ruled dystopian America will come true. I hope it is only my fantasy caused by my fear and loathing for these men with their shape-shifting characters and indecent policies. But I have a seven-year-old granddaughter, and a pair of four-year-old twin grandchildren who will be here. I love them beyond anything in my life -- save my wife of sixty years -- and for their sakes I do not believe that we can risk the Romney/Ryan presidency -- for as my wise old mother used to say, "If you dance with the devil, the devil calls the tune."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sherman-yellen/be-careful-what-you-vote-_b_1831147.html [with comments]
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Ryan, Rand and 'Altruism'
By Michael Brenner
Posted: 08/27/2012 10:13 am
Ayn Rand -- of Fountainhead / Atlas Shrugged fame -- hasn't been in the news since one of her prize disciples, Alan Greenspan, proclaimed her as the inspiration for a way of thinking that brought the world financial system to wrack and ruin. Rand spawned a juvenile creed of unmitigated selfishness that resounded for a while with young egoists who fantasized that they were 'supermen' who should disdain the social ethics that enslaved lesser men. She, and her dogma, has now reemerged as the model for Paul Ryan's inchoate thoughts about the evil of government, the gold standard, and the virtue of getting rich at any cost -- among other brilliant ideas for rescinding the social policies of the 20th century.
The phenomenon's significance lies not in the anthropological curiosity item that is the sociopathic Randian sect. More compelling is its melding with atavistic elements of American tradition into a movement of the disaffected, the deluded self-styled heroes, the status deprived, and the cynical that is endangering the humane decency of the country we have worked to perfect over 225 years.
The sect's component groupings, in their various modulations, having annexed the Republican party, are on the verge of seizing control of the entire federal government. Once in their hands, the levers of power will be used to restore the free-wheeling, government-lite America of the 19th century, only in the economic sphere, where the domination of financial elites will be consolidated. In the social and cultural spheres, they will be used to impose codes of conduct that cripple liberties. The latter was not the ideal of Ayn Rand (she favored unrestricted abortion rights), but rather confirmation of the inescapable destination to which a mutant form of her doctrine leads when all sense of community is denigrated. For one is disparaging humanity thereby.
Alexis de Tocqueville long ago identified the two Achilles heels in American popular democracy that could be our undoing, if we are not alert to the danger: extreme individualism and extreme materialism. Today, we are witnessing that threat as manifest. Those intertwined, mutually reinforcing impulses shape our attitudes and guide our behavior about private affairs and public affairs alike. Together, they have prepared the ground for the successes of the Tea Party, of its willing instrument -- the Republican Party, and of those seekers of power and/or glory who either drive the movement or simply find it in their personal interest to gloss over the unsettling truth about the pathologies that are deforming American ideals.
For narcissism is now the national religion. That is to say, a religion that recognizes only one sovereign power and worships at only one altar -- the all-demanding and all-consuming self. Narcissism is dressed out in a multiplicity of styles -- masquerading as enlightened reform (doing away with the rights of salaried workers and their access to public services, deregulation, privatization); as old time religion (God and his prophet as a spiritual Swiss army knife that justifies prejudice and encourages fearful, sweaty egos in their relentless search for 'meaning'); as family responsibility (looking after the extended Number 1 menaced by those anonymous forces who would steal your comfort and transfer it to the unworthy); as defense of 'Liberty' for true, rugged individualistic Americans whose gun collection is the only thing that stands between freedom and socialists, aliens, terrorists and other assorted hobgoblins imagined by insecure and fevered personalities.
The extent to which a narcissistic perspective on life has permeated our consciousness is evident in the current discourse about 'altruism.' How do we explain something that is counter to common sense? What social influences lead some people some of time to behave in this odd way? Is it religious dicta inscribed in holy books whose lessons have been drummed into us in houses of worship? It may be inborn in mothers sacrificing for their offspring but why should it include 'others' who are natural competitors of their progeny?
This mysterious thing called 'altruism' covers a wide range of behaviors: freely giving away money and goods (i.e. philanthropy); lending a helping hand to strangers; worrying and carrying about groups in society that you have no direct connection with; coming to the assist of the vulnerable who could be viewed as burdens on productive members of society and/or simply the losers in the game of natural selection. These questions today are earnestly debated in serious journals, on the web, in scholarly circles, and in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times -- the ultimate arbiter of upper middle-brow thinking.
The fundamental point is that the question is almost universally considered legitimate and puzzling. For it is widely taken as given that "altruism" is an aberration from the norm. In truth, it indeed has become an aberration in terms of how vast numbers of people relate to their fellows. We have lost track of who we are. We have lost track of human identity as a social being. We have lost track of our evolution as members of communities -- immediate and abstracted. We overlook some elementary facts about ourselves.
Humans have an instinct to bond -- in families, in extended families, in small tribal groupings, in larger tribes. We have a further capacity for empathy that extends beyond those groupings. It doesn't take social learning, much less instruction, to feel the impulse to protect an endangered relation -- or any other member of the species for that matter. In fact, these instincts are readily observable among higher mammals, primates surely and also others, e.g. an elephant herd, a lion pride. Even a rogue elephant, the pachyderm counterpart to the Randites' 'superman,' has been filmed coming to the rescue of a stray baby stalked by predators -- oblivious to the risk he is running of weakening the moral fiber of the elephant community by this unseemly act of altruism. Yet for many, similar behavior among humans is interpreted as requiring a special explanation. They get nothing from the animal kingdom while grasping for convenient verities in the prolix pages of Ayn Rand and the like. Quite apart from nature shows, one can only shudder at the impoverished lives these people must experience. They "dwell in deficiency," to borrow a phrase from the Gnostic gospels.
This narcissism grounded pathology is most widespread in the United States. More qualified variations are surfacing in Western Europe, especially within the copy-cat government of Britain's David Cameron. But only a doctrinaire few over there can contemplate repealing the great advances of the past century that have extended the logic and sentiment of human solidarity to entire countries. Only a few can imagine a society that amends the admonition that "humanity is the ultimate measure of what we do" while embracing a doctrine of all against all with the privileged getting a head start. Only a few can fail to see the connection between implementing a plan of greedy individualism and the reversion of relations among countries to the conflict mode of yesteryear. America, unfortunately, is the trailblazer and pacesetter -- and it is Americans, politicians and journalists and intellectuals, who are having a powerful influence on how the rest of the world thinks about all this.
The developed world, in the second half of the 20th century, achieved something historic; something that only visionaries in an earlier era could have imagined. Societies build on practical principles of mutual obligation and individual dignity enjoying unprecedented domestic tranquility and material well-being. That required acts of intellectual, ethical and politically creativity. Positive inertia kept them going. For the past 30 years or so, that positive inertia has given way to a combination of complacency about of the fruits of our great achievement and disparagement of its mainspring.
Today, especially in the United States, a new class of ambitious strivers are making their mark by destruction -- not by creation. It is an alliance of the powerful and power hungry, the insecure comforted by fanciful nostrums, and the opportunists. The last is a broad, heteroclite assemblage -- in academia, media, politics and the professions. They will have the most to answer for as the project of destruction progresses.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/paul-ryan-ayn-rand_b_1833040.html [with comments]
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Romney’s absurd assertions
By Jonathan Capehart
Posted at 07:45 PM ET, 08/27/2012
The great thing about being at the convention is that you’re in the middle of history in action. The bad thing is that there’s so much going on that you end up missing everything. For instance, the interview Mitt Romney did with Politico. He said two things that were just plain absurd. One involved himself, the other President Obama.
Romney discussed the yawning personality gap between himself and the president, which has Americans viewing Obama as more likeable than Romney. “I know there are some people who do a very good job acting and pretend they’re something they’re not,” Romney told Politico [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80166.html ]. “You get what you see. I am who I am.” And who might that be?
The Post editorial on Sunday [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-a-serious-candidate-please-stand-up/2012/08/24/3701660e-ed19-11e1-9ddc-340d5efb1e9c_story.html ] summed up perfectly why his La Cage Aux Folles [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lupNzpcpDRk (and see http://www.onetermmore.com/video_subtitles.html {via http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79013786 })]-esque pronouncement is absurd.
In the case of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, part of what underlies the unease is an uncertainty about core beliefs. Every politician will change positions over a career; you’d worry if he or she didn’t. But few have covered as much ideological ground as the former Massachusetts governor: on abortion, stem cell research, health-care reform, gun control, immigration, gay rights, climate change and more.
It may seem a small thing, but when a man who’s been hunting twice can blithely say that he’s been a hunter “pretty much all my life,” it makes people wonder what is real. His attacks on primary opponents Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich for revealing even a sliver of pragmatic concern for undocumented immigrants suggested an ethos of winning at any cost and a deficit of principle. The sketchiness of his policy proposals since then only aggravates the concern.
The Romney absurdity involving Obama concerns what he thinks the president was able to get done during his term. “I do believe that people of this country are looking for someone who can get the country growing again with more jobs and more take-home pay, and I think they realize this president had four years to do that,” he told Politico. “.?.?. He got every piece of legislation he wanted passed, and it didn’t work.”
That Obama “got every piece of legislation he wanted passed” will come as news to his administration. Romney rails against the president on job creation, but is mute on Congress’ inaction on the American Jobs Act that the president sent to Capitol Hill almost a year ago. After two years of haranguing Obama with “Where are the jobs?” the GOP leadership suddenly seemed less than interested in his proposal.
But the lack of interest in working with Obama was by design. Thanks to Robert Draper [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/robert-draper-anti-obama-campaign_n_1452899.html ] and Michael Grunwald [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451642326 ] we know that Republicans had it in for Obama before Day 1 [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/republicans-had-it-in-for-obama-before-day-1/2012/08/10/0c96c7c8-e31f-11e1-ae7f-d2a13e249eb2_blog.html ]. At what point will Romney acknowledge Republican complicity in the president’s and the nation’s economic “failure”?
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/romneys-absurd-assertions/2012/08/27/af7fcb28-f09f-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_blog.html [with comments]
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The GOP's Big Lie on Job Creation
By Robert S. McElvaine
Posted: 08/27/2012 9:13 am
The entire Republican case in the election rests on the following claim, being made [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-paul-ryan-takes-on-obama-energy-policies-in-colorado-20120814,0,421223.story ] in varying wordings in the stump speeches of both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan:
"Without a doubt President Obama inherited a difficult situation. Here's the problem: He made it worse!"
The above graph, showing average annual job creation under Democratic and Republican administrations since 1945, with 2009 separated out as a year in which the disastrous level of job loss was plainly the result of the policies under George W. Bush, shows just how wrong that assertion is.
Since the effect of the stimulus and other Obama policies took effect, the level of job creation in his administration has been higher than that under four of the last six Republican presidents.
For the full story, see a piece I did for the New York Times this week:, "Has Obama Made the Job Situation Worse? [ http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/has-obama-made-the-job-situation-worse/ (nexy below)]"
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-s-mcelvaine/the-gops-big-lie-on-job-c_b_1827627.html [with comments]
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Has Obama Made the Job Situation Worse?
By ROBERT MCELVAINE
August 22, 2012, 12:35 am
“Without a doubt President Obama inherited a difficult situation. Here’s the problem. He made it worse,” Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential candidate, has been saying [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-paul-ryan-takes-on-obama-energy-policies-in-colorado-20120814,0,421223.story ] in his stump speech.
Ryan’s statement consists of two parts; the first is gross understatement, the second gross misstatement. It is the misstatement that is the essence of the case Republicans are putting before American voters: That President Obama has made the economy worse. Getting voters to believe that assertion is probably the Republicans’ only hope of winning the election.
In the latest poll [ http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/_Today_Stories_Teases/August_NBC-WSJ_Int_Sched.pdf ] (a Wall Street Journal and NBC News survey released on Tuesday), respondents favor President Obama over Gov. Romney — generally by wide margins — in almost every category other than improving the economy. On “caring about average people,” for example, Obama is favored by an extraordinary margin to 52 percent to 30 percent.
So the argument that President Obama has made the economy worse is not only central to the Republicans’ case, it’s pretty much all they have. But the facts do not support their claims.
The following graph, which I put together using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, traces the annual rate of job creation under Democratic and Republican administrations from Harry Truman to Obama — with 2009 separated out as a year in which any fair-minded person would agree that the “difficult situation” Obama inherited was the main driving force. It dramatically illustrates just how wrong Ryan’s assertion is.
Source: Wall Street Journal, Bureau of Labor Statistics
Republicans who are wondering how Obama could be polling as well as he is with unemployment above 8 percent might want to take a look at this graph. It makes two points very clear.
First, jobs have historically, without exception, been created at a much faster rate under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.
Look at the 64-year period from the start of Harry Truman’s presidency to the end of that of George W. Bush (1945-2009).
During the 28 years of Democratic administrations in that period, 57.5 million new jobs were created, an average of 2.05 million per year.
During the 36 years of Republican administrations in that period, 36.2 million new jobs were created, an average of 1.0 million per year.
The bottom line is that over the 64 years leading up to the inauguration of President Obama, jobs were created more than twice as fast under Democrats as they were under Republicans.
Even a glance at the graph shows that Barack Obama and his policies did not make the “difficult” — disastrous would be a more accurate term — situation he inherited worse.
Here is a second graphic illustration of what has happened in job creation under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It also uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
In the eighteen months from the beginning of 2008 through the middle of 2009, a period fully shaped by the Bush economic program to which Republicans now want to return, (but before the Obama stimulus had a chance to take effect), approximately 7.5 million jobs were lost.
Over the most recent 18 months of the Obama administration, approximately 2.8 million jobs have been added.
That means that the average monthly job loss during the “difficult situation” before Obama’s policies took effect was 417,000. Over the last year-and-a-half, the average monthly job gain has been 155,000.
If Rep. Ryan and Gov. Romney see that as making a bad situation worse, it should tell us something about their “vision.”
Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of history at Millsaps College. His most recent book is the 25th anniversary edition of “The Great Depression [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Depression-America-1929-1941/dp/0812923278 ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/has-obama-made-the-job-situation-worse/ [with comments]
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U.S. Annual Income Fell More During Recovery Than Recession: Study [GRAPHS]
By Harry Bradford
Posted: 08/24/2012 1:53 pm Updated: 08/24/2012 4:50 pm
We may technically be in a recovery, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
Median annual income has declined 4.8 percent [ http://www.sentierresearch.com/paypalpurchase.html ] from $53,508 to $50,964 since the recovery technically began in June 2009 , according to a new study from Sentier Research. That's nearly double the 2.6 percent drop during the recession.
One especially hard-hit group: Americans aged 55 to 64, who saw their annual income drop nearly 10 percent. But African-Americans have felt the pain the most during the recovery as their incomes declined 11 percent.
“Based on our data, almost every group is worse off now than it was three years ago,” Gordon Green, co-author of the report, wrote in a press release.
Household median income has fallen since the recovery:
However, there are some groups that have actually been faring better since the beginning of the recovery; Americans over 65 saw their income levels rise. And though recent trends may be disheartening, Americans' incomes have been increasing over the past 50 years [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/big-income-losses-for-those-near-retirement/ ], the NYT points out.
Still, another recent report has shown that America's middle class has been shrinking since 2008 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/22/middle-class-lost-decade_n_1822661.html ]. A poll taken that year found that 53 percent of Americans considered themselves in the middle class. Now only 49 percent do.
But these two recent reports aren't the only ones with gloomy news about Americans' earnings. In 2010, the annual median wage fell to its lowest level since 1999 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/20/us-incomes-falling-as-optimism-reaches-10-year-low_n_1022118.html ] at $26,364, according to David Cay Johnston at Reuters. Real wages also fell last year [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/31/wages-2011-record-corporate-profits_n_1244297.html ], even as corporate profits reached record highs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Income has fallen especially for certain demographics:
(Hat tip: Los Angeles Times [ http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-household-income-fell-during-economic-recovery-study-finds-20120823,0,6601675.story ])
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/24/us-annual-income-recovery-recession_n_1828127.html [with comments]
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The United States In 2012: A Status Update For The Country
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER
Posted: 08/25/2012 12:46 pm Updated: 08/26/2012 1:15 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) — We're heavier in pounds and hotter by degrees than Americans of old. We're starting to snub our noses at distant suburbs after generations of burbs in our blood. Our roads and bridges are kind of a mess. There are many more poor, and that's almost sure to get worse.
The oddly American obsession with picking up and moving on — "this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance," as Alexis de Tocqueville noted nearly 200 years ago — has given way to the un-American activity of going nowhere. But check back tomorrow.
Such swirling changes are not fodder for a State of the Union speech, but they are part of the state of the union nonetheless, on the eve of the Republican National Convention that convenes briefly Monday with the full schedule starting Tuesday, and the Democratic convention that follows it a week later. The country that President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are vying to lead for the next four years is not quite the same as the one four years ago, not nearly the same as the one further back in time.
Our taste for McMansions, for example, has slightly soured in recent years in favor of more affordable abodes.
We, like, speak differently than our forebears, new twists on the same tongue. LOL.
Soldiers are flowing home from the wars; this is almost what peace looks like.
A paint-by-the-numbers portrait:
WHERE WE LIVE
Like much else, where we live is shaped by how — or whether — we make a living. But larger forces than that seem to be at work in determining Americans' chosen places.
U.S. cities and closely surrounding areas are experiencing more growth than farther-off suburbs for the first time in at least 20 years. The cost and bother of commuting are part of the reason. The average commuter spends over 30 hours stuck in traffic per year, says the Texas Transportation Institute, up from 14 hours in 1982. That's the time spent going nowhere or at a crawl.
As well, city life is becoming the choice of more young and old people, as the attractions and convenience rival the long-held American dream of affordable home ownership, which usually means farther out.
Meantime, the historic migration of Southern blacks to the North has reversed, with black populations rising in Southern cities and suburbs, especially among the more affluent.
But the overarching recent development in where we live is that we aren't moving much at all.
Mobility is the lowest it's been in the 60 years it has been tracked by the Census Bureau, with only 11.6 percent of the nation's population moving in the past year. That's just over half the level in 1951, the biggest year for Americans on the move, 21.2 percent. More adult children are living with parents because of economic hardship, fewer older people are able to retire to sunny climes and the housing bust further contributed to locking the restless in place.
Average home size dropped 5 percent from 2007 to 2010, to a little under 2,400 square feet. It's still a far cry from the 750-square-foot, one-story, 2-bedroom Levittown prototypes that sparked the suburban boom and brought modest homes within reach of the masses after World War II.
Though they paved paradise and put up housing lots, the U.S. remains heavily treed. One-third of its land area is forested, a proportion that has been stable since the beginning of the past century. But after the devastation of American chestnuts that grew by the billions in Eastern forests and of the elms that gave so many towns an Elm Street, today's forests and urban greenery are not the same as in the past.
Meantime asphalt and iron have fallen into disrepair: Nearly one in four of the country's 605,086 bridges is rated deficient.
HOW WE COMMUNICATE
Until World War II in residential areas and well beyond in rural America, telephone party lines were common. If you wanted to make a phone call, you had to wait for Velma down the road to finish gossiping on the same line, interrupt the chitchat to ask her to hang up — or just cover the speaker and eavesdrop on the juicy details. (Velma was a popular name from the 1890s through the 1930s, then no more). In party-line days, a major technological advance came when Ma Bell developed distinct rings for different homes on the line, so everyone didn't pick up each time the phone jangled.
These days, the dedicated landline that took over from the party line is itself fading, as Americans' favorite gadget, the cellphone, spreads in numbers and smarts.
The number of people with wireless only and no traditional landline phone has grown fourfold since 2005, the government estimates. In 2005, less 8 percent of adults lived in households with only wireless telephones. Now it's more than 32 percent. Nearly nine in 10 adults own a cell.
The day Obama's Democratic convention opened in 2008, Facebook announced its 100 millionth user, a benchmark it actually took longer to reach than its now-overshadowed rival, Myspace. Facebook is closing in on its billionth user, sitting with Twitter as kings of the social-media mountain until something else knocks them off.
WHO WE ARE
Fatter. The average woman has gained 18 pounds since 1990, to 160 pounds; the average man is up 16 pounds, to 196, Gallup found.
Poorer as a whole, but richer than during the recession. The value of people's homes, stocks and all other assets stood at $62.9 trillion in March, the latest count, down from $66 trillion before the economy tanked but up from $51.3 trillion at the downturn's depths.
Indebted, but perhaps not up to the eyeballs. Credit card debt has declined about 14 percent since 2008. Americans also have less mortgage debt, but more student debt and auto loans. The savings rate, meantime, climbed to 4.2 percent last year, a big improvement from 1.5 percent in 2005. But then there is the government. It is indebted past the eyeballs.
Hotter: The period from July 2011 to June 2012 was the warmest 12-month stretch on record. Altogether, the contiguous states posted an annual all-season average temperature of 56 degrees in that period, which is 3.3 degrees hotter than either of the years that Obama and Romney were born. The hottest calendar year on record for the U.S. is 1998, at 55.08 degrees, but that may not last this year's swelter and lack of winter. Most of the past 15 years have been among the steamiest on the books, and all 15 were hotter than Romney's birth year, 1947, and Obama's, 1961.
More numerous. The U.S. has 314 million people. The country surpassed 200 million in 1968 and 300 million in 2006.
More diverse. For the first time, more than half the children born in the U.S. are racial or ethnic minorities, and by 2040 or several years after, non-Hispanic whites are expected to become a minority of the population. Along with this trend has come a historic jump in interracial marriages, which now make up an estimated 8.4 percent of marriages, up from 3.2 percent in 1980.
Addicted to texting. Cellphone users sent an average of 13 text messages a day in December 2008, double the number from a year earlier, the government said. More recently, Pew researchers found the average teen sent more than 64 texts a day.
Older. Between 2000 and 2010, the population of people aged 45 to 64 grew by close to one-third as the baby boom generation and those behind it grayed. That has helped to push the median age to 37.2 — half the population younger than that, half over.
A lot of those young people are named Sophia, the top girl's name for the first time, and Jacob, No. 1 choice for boys for the past 13 years. So long Mary and James, the dominant names over 100 years.
WHAT WE THINK:
On the issues of the day, the economy has no near rival atop the list of concerns. Pocketbook matters often rule but Americans were heavily focused on war in the early going of the last campaign. As the recession deepened, though, and now with troops coming home, it's been the economy plain and simple — the issue ranked important by more than 9 in 10 respondents to an AP-GfK poll out this past week.
About half of us approve of the job Obama is doing, the poll found. About half disapprove. Voters are about evenly split on the race, and among those who lean to one man or the other, very few are open to changing their minds. Obama's years-ago vision of a nation of united states soaring above the divisions of red states and blue states seems a pipe dream in a fractious time.
The sharp lines and stagnant views are evident in public opinion on gun laws, abortion, health care, taxes and the federal budget deficit — on which polling has long shown wide divergence. The Pew Research Center reports that partisan polarization on basic policy questions is at its highest point in 25 years.
One exception has been support for gay marriage. In May of 2008 as Obama was wrapping up the Democratic nomination, just 40 percent of Americans told Gallup's pollsters same-sex marriages should be recognized by the law as valid. This May, 50 percent said yes to the same question, the most striking shift in social attitudes during Obama's presidency. Still, more than 30 states have passed measures against it and it's frequently a losing issue at the ballot box. There are no united states on this question.
Polarization doesn't stop at politics or policy, either. It appears to be embedded in personal relationships. A pre-convention Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll found Democrats and Republicans tend to be surrounded by fellow partisans — two-thirds of their friends and family share their party leanings.
Many of us belong to tribes tinted red or blue.
WHAT WE EARN
Few could have seen it coming back when Bill Clinton was scrambling to salvage his presidency from the Monica Lewinsky business, but his later years in office are starting to look like one of the economy's golden ages. Unemployment was low, the government miraculously took in what it spent and the stock market marched steadily upward, at least until the bubble burst.
Household income peaked in 1999, at $53,252 in today's dollars, and has declined since, to $49,445 in 2010. That puts households back to where they were in the mid-1990s.
But an even bigger rewind to an earlier time seems to be happening with the poor.
In July, The Associated Press found a broad consensus among economists and scholars that the official poverty rate is on track to reach its highest level in nearly half a century, erasing distinct — if modest — gains from the 1960s "war on poverty" that expanded the safety net with the introduction of Medicaid, Medicare and other social welfare programs.
The wealth gap between younger and older has grown into an unprecedented divide. Older people always have more net worth than younger adults on average, but now those 65 and over have 47 times more than adults under 35. It used to be only 10 times more, a quarter-century ago.
Overall, the value of goods and services produced in the country has returned to pre-recession levels, though with 5 million fewer people working. That makes the U.S. more productive and competitive. But when combined with meager income gains during that time, it also suggests we're working harder for roughly the same pay.
WHAT WE PAY
Housing prices have dropped by a striking 34 percent since late 2006. That's good if — only if — you're buying.
Tuition is up 15 percent at four-year public universities and almost 10 percent at private four-year institutions from 2008 to 2010.
Gas? It's a rollercoaster. The U.S. saw 91 cents a gallon only 13 years ago, during Clinton's presidency. The average price hit $2 in May 2004, $4 in June 2008, then plunged before that year's election, spiked and rollercoastered along, sitting now at $3.74 a gallon.
In 2008, workers paid an average of $3,354 for a year's worth of job-based health insurance, more than double their cost from nine years earlier, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported. In 2011, that average grew to $4,129. Not only did premiums rise, but many more workers were picking up the first $1,000 or more of health care costs as deductibles grew and employers shifted more health costs to employees.
WHO WE WERE
Norman Rockwell's America may have come and gone, if it ever existed, but the much younger nation de Tocqueville, the French philosopher, saw in his 1830s travels is still recognizable in its older age. For all the new colors, bold strokes of the past still show.
Want some age-old perspective on why Republicans fought Obama's health care law up to the Supreme Court this year? De Tocqueville wrote: "There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one."
Both a scold and admirer, he found Americans obsessed with money, tending to "move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts," quick to form agitating associations, reveling in an "always moving scene," loving change because it "seems to give birth only to miracles," and apt to rise from their stitched-from-many-nations roots to light up the world.
You'll hear lots about change if you tune into the conventions. To be seen: whether we still believe in miracles.
Associated Press writers Jennifer C. Kerr, Seth Borenstein and Hope Yen, and Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/25/america-2012-status_n_1830159.html [with comments]
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For GOP, Pitfalls In Ignoring Poor
By Peter S. Goodman
Posted: 08/27/2012 12:01 am
Almost a decade ago, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney delivered a State of the Commonwealth address in which he struck a now familiar pose. Here was the tough-minded leader come to deliver fiscal discipline. Yet even as he proposed substantial budget cuts, he included a rhetorical nod that now stands out as a reminder of how much he and his party have changed.
"When it comes to caring for the poor, the disabled and the elderly," Romney said [ http://myclob.pbworks.com/w/page/21957797/Governor%20Mitt%20Romney%27s%202003%20State%20of%20the%20Commonwealth%20Address ], "Massachusetts is one of the most generous states in the nation. And despite facing the worst fiscal crisis in a generation, we will stay one of the most generous."
Lest you are tempted to brush this off as an anomalous quote from a then-moderate governor of the state that produced Ted Kennedy, consider Ronald Reagan's words [ http://www.nationalcenter.org/ReaganConvention1980.html ] as he accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1980. Tucked into a speech mostly devoted to pledges to trim the government, he added this: "We Republicans believe it is essential that we maintain both the forward momentum of economic growth and the strength of the safety net beneath those in society who need help."
We are unlikely to hear similar words from Romney this week as he takes the podium at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., to accept his own nomination for the presidency. Not unless he is inclined to risk being hauled from the stage by the mob of ideological extremists who have captured his party.
In the modern-day Republican camp -- a tribe that would have cast out Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and even Reagan as namby-pamby liberals -- disdain for the poor is embraced as a virtue, a signifier that sentimentality will not get in the way of dismantling the social safety net.
People who depend upon the aid of the government via food stamps, unemployment checks and mortgage relief are typically written off as parasites and losers. (Meanwhile, corporations that depend upon government largess for bailouts and subsidies are celebrated as paragons of free enterprise, but that's another matter.)
Romney's lexicon has simply been excised of words like "generosity" when it comes to the poor, along with other problematic nouns such as "Massachusetts," "health care," "diplomacy," and "Cayman."
But as the party faithful gather for the coronation, it is nonetheless worth listening to hear what, if anything, they have to say about poor and vulnerable Americans, because the poor and vulnerable constitute a rapidly growing slice of the population.
Republicans can ignore them, demean them, work around them or punish them, but in any scenario poor Americans and close-to-poor Americans are not going away anytime soon.
Back in early 2003, when Romney promised continued generosity for the poor of Massachusetts, his state had an unemployment rate of 5.7 percent. The nation he is vying to lead today has an unemployment rate above 8 percent. Add in people who are working part-time jobs because they can't find full-time positions and people who have given up looking altogether and the so-called underemployment rate swells to 15 percent.
Some 46 million people -- more than 15 percent of the nation -- are officially poor. Tens of millions of formerly middle-class families are threatened [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/13/suburban-povertys-dramati_n_1007332.html ] with joining their ranks. Food banks, unemployment offices and homeless shelters from California [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/silicon-valley-poverty-homeless_n_1302348.html ] to Florida [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/07/foreclosures-florida_n_1132735.html ] are crammed full of people who, for the first time in their lives, are there asking for help.
Some 85 percent of self-identified middle-class Americans complain that maintaining their standard of living today is more difficult than it was a decade ago, according to a study released last week [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/22/middle-class-lost-decade_n_1822661.html ] by the Pew Research Center. Far from an illusory sense of trouble, such sentiment reflects a grim reality: The last decade saw mean family incomes drop for Americans of nearly every income group, the first such decline since the end of the great post-World War II economic expansion, Pew noted.
The hit to household wealth has been even greater, Pew found. Among those with middle incomes, wealth plunged by 28 percent, from nearly $130,000 to just above $93,000. Among those with lower incomes, the relative drop in wealth was even worse -- a cratering of 45 percent, from about $18,000 to $10,000.
You can parse the data however you like. You can apportion blame as suits your story -- the Bush tax cuts, the wanton embrace of taxpayer-supported gambling on Wall Street, outsourcing, the rise of China, Obama's feckless economic policies, Republican obstructionism. But the ending looks like this: Millions of people who used to have enough savings to get them through a rough patch don't anymore, making them extremely vulnerable.
No matter what happens now, regardless of who lives in the White House next year, tens of millions of Americans are going to face difficulty finding work, paying their bills, supporting their children and securing health care. They are going to need help.
Romney knows this, but that may now be irrelevant. He and his running mate, Paul Ryan -- who plays a fiscal conservative on the stump while handing out tax cuts to rich people -- have branded themselves the guys who will take an axe to government spending. If they win, they will be beholden to those who wrote the checks to engineer their victory -- mostly major corporations and their executives, who are keen on paying as little in taxes as possible. They have promised to gut the safety net. Walking that back would be both politically dangerous and arithmetically impossible, given their tax cut promises.
Romney and Ryan are running a campaign centered on turning out their base in abundant numbers while depressing turnout among likely Obama supporters, with barriers at polling places [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/gop-voter-id-data-voter_n_1773142.html ] (impeding low-income and minority voters), and a relentless stream of cynical television advertising that seems designed to disgust and exhaust all but the hardiest citizens.
Disparaging the poor and vowing to take apart the social safety net may turn out to be good politics for the Republicans this time, because it appeals to those inclined to see Obama as a champion of big government. For middle-class people threatened with downward mobility, rejecting government as a source of wasted expenditure is a natural impulse. This is how we got President Reagan: Wage growth had been stagnating and many people needed more cash, making tax cuts compelling.
But the Republican gimmick of promising prosperity through tax cuts while handing most of the loot to the wealthy can only work for so long. Most Americans get how this story played out during the splendiferous reign of George W. Bush.
As more middle-class families suffer growing proximity to poverty, Republicans will face greater electoral risks in ignoring the needs of people who require help. More than merely heartless, this strategy will widen the distance between Republicans and the experiences of Americans who used to feel secure and don't anymore.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/republicans-poor-mitt-romney-paul-ryan_b_1825205.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Benefited From Government Bailout: Report
Mitt Romney benefited from a government bailout of Bain & Co., a Rolling Stone article says.
By Mark Gongloff
Posted: 08/30/2012 1:48 pm Updated: 08/30/2012 5:42 pm
If you happen to see Mitt Romney talking about his time at Bain Capital, keep this in mind: The government helped him build that.
The question of who built this or that particular business is one of the tentpoles of the entire Republican National Convention [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/2012-republican-national-convention ], at which Romney will be speaking Thursday night, accepting his party's nomination to run for president.
It's a riff on a mangling of some words President Obama once spoke [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-ZO7XOpwa8 ], which, if edited in a certain way [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/08/28/_you_didn_t_build_that_but_you_sure_did_edit_it.html ], seem to suggest that Obama thinks people who built businesses didn't really build them -- that Big Government did instead.
The funny thing about this meme is that many of the people [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/steven-cohen-screen-machine_n_1842995.html ] saying they did build their businesses [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/sher-valenzuela-parody-site_n_1834207.html ] in fact got a bit of government help [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/phil-archuletta-gop-convention_n_1838173.html ] along the way.
And one person who has gotten quite a lot of government help with his business over the years has been Mitt Romney.
The latest example comes from Rolling Stone, which in its Sept. 13 issue tells how the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. ended up footing a bill of at least $10 million in bailing out Bain & Co. [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-federal-bailout-that-saved-mitt-romney-20120829 (next below)], the consulting firm that spawned the private-equity firm Bain Capital. The story is based partly on documents the magazine received under the Freedom of Information Act [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/mitt-romneys-federal-bailout-the-documents-20120829 ]. It will probably get a lot less attention than Matt Taibbi's cover opus on Romney in the same issue [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829 ], but is no less interesting.
Bain & Co. got into deep financial trouble in the late 1980s, partly because the founding partners of Bain Capital had stripped it of cash and saddled it with debt. But since the personal reputation of Romney was so tied to the fate of the Bain & Co, he jumped back into the company in 1990, after six years as CEO of Bain Capital.
In that time, he refused to let the company simply slip into bankruptcy, RS claims, reportedly inspiring a frustrated Goldman Sachs banker to tell Romney to "go fuck" himself.
Ultimately, Romney managed to convince Bain's creditors to take a steep discount on Bain debt, using a threat to pay Bain executives big bonuses that would have stripped it of the cash it had left, leaving creditors with next to nothing, according to Rolling Stone.
One of those creditors was the FDIC, which had taken over a bank that loaned money to Bain. The FDIC ended up collecting about $14 million of the $30 million Bain owed it, according to the magazine. Taxpayers didn't foot the bill for this, FDIC banks did, but RS points out that those costs were in turn probably absorbed by bank customers in the form of higher fees.
If this reed feels a little too thin to beat Romney very aggressively with, then there are plenty [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113 (twelfth item at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75782089 and preceding and following)] of other examples [ http://swampland.time.com/2012/02/15/mitt-romney-took-advantage-of-government-subsidies-at-bain/ ] of companies owned [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/romney-solyndra-bain-subsidies ] by Bain Capital benefiting [ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/21/romney%E2%80%99s_record_as_a_crony_capitalist/ ] from government tax credits and subsidies. Bloomberg news detailed several of these back in June [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-06/romney-critical-of-government-aid-that-helped-bain-profit.html (first item at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76443615 and preceding and following)], writing:
The public-private agreements, which began in the first decade of Romney’s tenure as CEO, show that government played a supporting role in establishing Bain as among the nation’s most successful private equity firms and enabling him to accumulate a fortune his campaign says could reach $250 million.
Despite this largesse, Bloomberg pointed out, Romney in a March 19 speech decried the government's “endless subsidies and credits intended to shape behavior in our economic society." Including economic behavior that makes him money, apparently.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/mitt-romney-bain-bailout_n_1843601.html [with comments]
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The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney
JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GettyImages
Government documents prove the candidate's mythology is just that
By Tim Dickinson
August 29, 2012 7:00 AM ET
Mitt Romney likes to say he won't "apologize" for his success in business. But what he never says is "thank you" – to the American people – for the federal bailout of Bain & Company that made so much of his outsize wealth possible.
According to the candidate's mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."
In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.
With his selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has made fiscal stewardship the centerpiece of his campaign. A banner at MittRomney.com declared, "We have a moral responsibility not to spend more than we take in." Romney also opposed the federal bailout for Detroit automakers, famously arguing that the industry should be forced into bankruptcy. Government bailouts, he insists, are "the wrong way to go."
But the FDIC documents on the Bain deal – which were heavily redacted by the firm prior to release – show that as a wealthy businessman, Romney was willing to go to extremes to secure a federal bailout to serve his own interests. He had a lot at stake, both financially and politically. Had Bain & Company collapsed, insiders say, it would have dealt a grave setback to Bain Capital, where Romney went on to build a personal fortune valued at as much as $250 million. It would also have short-circuited his political career before it began, tagging Romney as a failed businessman unable to rescue his own firm.
"None of us wanted to see Bain be the laughingstock of the business world," recalls a longtime Romney lieutenant who asked not to be identified. "But Mitt's reputation was on the line."
The trouble began in 1984, when Bain & Company spun off Bain Capital to engage in leveraged buyouts and put Romney in charge of the new operation. To free up money to invest in the new business, founder Bill Bain and his partners cashed out much of their stock in the consulting firm – leaving it saddled with about $200 million in debt. (Romney, though not a founder, reportedly profited from the deal.) "People will tell you that Bill raped the place clean, was greedy, didn't know when to stop," a former Bain consultant later conceded. "Did they take too much out of the firm? You bet."
The FDIC documents make clear what happened next: "Soon after the founders sold their equity," analysts reported, "business began to drop off." First came scandal: In the late 1980s, a Bain consultant became a key figure in an illegal stock manipulation scheme in London. The firm's reputation took a hit, and it fired 10 percent of its consulting force. By the time the 1989 recession began, Bain & Company found itself going broke fast. Cash flows weren't enough to service the debt imposed by the founders, and the firm could barely make payroll. In a panic, Bill Bain tapped Romney, his longtime protégé, to take the reins.
In Romney's own retelling, he casts himself as a selfless and loyal company man. "There was no upside," he told his cheerleading biographer Hugh Hewitt in 2007. "There was no particular reason to do it other than a sense of obligation and duty to an organization that had done great things for me."
In fact, Romney had a direct stake in the survival of Bain & Company: He had been working to build the Bain brand his entire career, and felt he had to save the firm at all costs. After all, Bain sold top-dollar strategic advice to big businesses about how to protect themselves from going bust. If Bain & Company went bankrupt, recalls the Romney deputy, "anyone associated with them would have looked clownish." Indeed, when a banker from Goldman Sachs urged Bain to consider bankruptcy as the obvious solution to the firm's woes, Romney's desperation began to show. He flatly refused to discuss it – and in the ensuing argument, one witness says, Romney almost ended up in a brawl when the Goldman banker advised him to "go fuck yourself." For the sake of Romney's career and fortune, bankruptcy was simply not an option – no matter who got screwed in the process.
According to the government records obtained by Rolling Stone, Bain & Company "defaulted on its debt obligations" at nearly the same time that "W. Mitt Romney . . . stepped in as managing director (and later chief executive) in 1990 and led the financial restructuring intended to get the firm back on track."
Romney moved decisively, and his early efforts appeared promising. He persuaded the founders to return $25 million of the cash they had raided from Bain & Company and forgive $75 million in debt, in return for protection from most future liabilities. Romney then consolidated Bain's massive debts into a single, binding loan agreement with four banks, which received liens on Bain's assets and agreed to delay repayments on the firm's debts for two years. The federal government also signed off on the deal, since the FDIC had recently taken control of a bank that was owed $30.6 million by Bain. Romney assured creditors that the restructuring would enable Bain to "operate normally, compensate its professionals competitively" and, ultimately, pay off its debts.
Almost as soon as the FDIC agreed to the loan restructuring, however, Romney's rescue plan began to fall apart. "The company realized early on that it would be unable to hit its revenue targets or manage the debt structure," the documents reveal. By the spring of 1992, Bain's decline was perilous: "If Bain goes into default," one analyst warned the FDIC, "the bank group will need to decide whether to force Bain into bankruptcy."
With his rescue plan a bust, Romney was forced to slink back to the banks to negotiate a new round of debt relief. There was only one catch: Even though Bain & Company was deep in debt and sinking fast, the firm was actually flush with cash – most of it from the looted money that Bill Bain and other partners had given back. "Liquidity is strong based on the significant cash balance which Bain is carrying," one federal document reads.
Under normal circumstances, such ample reserves would have made liquidating Bain an attractive option: Creditors could simply divvy up the stockpiled cash and be done with the troubled firm. But Bain had inserted a poison pill in its loan agreement with the banks: Instead of being required to use its cash to pay back the firm's creditors, the money could be pocketed by Bain executives in the form of fat bonuses – starting with VPs making $200,000 and up. "The company can deplete its cash balances by making officer-bonus payments," the FDIC lamented, "and still be in compliance with the loan documents."
What's more, the bonus loophole gave Romney a perverse form of leverage: If the banks and the FDIC didn't give in to his demands and forgive much of Bain's debts, Romney would raid the firm's coffers, pushing it into the very bankruptcy that the loan agreement had been intended to avert. The losers in this game would not only be Bain's creditors – including the federal government – but the firm's nearly 1,000 employees worldwide.
In March 1992, according to the FDIC documents, Romney approached the banks and played the bonus card. Allow Bain to pay off its debt at a deep discount, he demanded – just 35 cents on the dollar. Otherwise, the "majority" of the firm's "excess cash" would "be available for the bonus pool to its officers at a vice president level and above."
The next month, when the banks balked at the deal, Romney decided to prove he wasn't bluffing. "As the bank group did not accept the proposal from Bain," the records show, "Bain's senior management has decided to go forth with the distribution of bonuses." (Bain's lawyers redacted the amount of the executive payouts, and the Romney campaign refused to comment on whether Romney himself received a bonus.)
Romney's decision to place executive compensation over fiscal responsibility immediately put Bain on the ropes. By that July, FDIC analysts reported, Bain had so little money left that "the company will actually run out of cash and default on the existing debt structure" as early as 1995. If that happened, Bain employees and American consumers would take the hit – an alternative that analysts considered "catastrophic."
But Romney didn't dole out all of Bain's cash as bonuses right away. According to a record from May 1992, he set aside some of the money to put one last squeeze on the firm's creditors. Romney now demanded that the banks and the government agree to a deal that was even less favorable than the last – to retire Bain's debts "at a price up to but not exceeding 30 cents on the dollar."
The FDIC considered finding a buyer to take over its loans to Bain, but analysts concluded that "Bain has no value as a going concern." And the government wasn't likely to get much out of Bain if it allowed the firm to go bankrupt: The loan agreement engineered by Romney had left the FDIC "virtually unsecured" on the $30.6 million it was owed by Bain. "Once bonuses are paid," the analysts warned, "all members of the bank group believe this company will dissolve during 1993."
About the only assets left would be Bain's office equipment. The records show FDIC analysts pathetically attempting to assess the value of such items, including an HP LaserJet printer, before concluding that most of the gear was so old that the government's "portion of any liquidation proceeds would be negligible."
How had Romney scored such a favorable deal at the FDIC's expense? It didn't hurt that he had close ties to the agency – the kind of "crony capitalism" he now decries. A month before he closed the 1991 loan agreement, Romney promoted a former FDIC bank examiner to become a senior executive at Bain. He also had pull at the top: FDIC chairman Bill Seidman, who had served as finance chair for Romney's father when he ran for president in 1968.
The federal documents also reveal that, contrary to Romney's claim that he returned full time to Bain Capital in 1992, he remained involved in bailout negotiations to the very end. In a letter dated March 23rd, 1993, Romney reassured creditors that his latest scheme would return Bain & Company to "long-term financial stability." That same month, Romney once again threatened to "pay out maximum bonus distributions" to top executives unless much of Bain's debt was erased.
In the end, the government surrendered. At the time, The Boston Globe cited bankers dismissing the bailout as "relatively routine" – but the federal documents reveal it was anything but. The FDIC agreed to accept nearly $5 million in cash to retire $15 million in Bain's debt – an immediate government bailout of $10 million. All told, the FDIC estimated it would recoup just $14 million of the $30 million that Romney's firm owed the government.
It was a raw deal – but Romney's threat to loot his own firm had left the government with no other choice. If the FDIC had pushed Bain into bankruptcy, the records reveal, the agency would have recouped just $3.56 million from the firm.
The Romney campaign refused to respond to questions for this article; a spokeswoman said only that "Mitt Romney turned around Bain & Company by getting all parties to come to the table and make difficult decisions." But while taxpayers did not finance the bailout, the debt forgiven by the government was booked as a loss to the FDIC – and then recouped through higher insurance premiums from banks. And banks, of course, are notorious for finding ways to pass their costs along to customers, usually in the form of higher fees. Thanks to the nature of the market, in other words, the bailout negotiated by Romney ultimately wound up being paid by the American people.
Even as consumers took a loss, however, a small group of investors wound up getting a good deal in the bailout. Bain Capital – the very firm that had triggered the crisis in the first place – walked away with $4 million. That was the fee it charged Bain & Company for loaning the consulting firm the services of its chief executive – one Willard Mitt Romney.
This story is from the September 13, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.
*
Related
Mitt Romney's Federal Bailout: The Documents
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/mitt-romneys-federal-bailout-the-documents-20120829
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829
Right-Wing Billionaires Behind Mitt Romney
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/right-wing-billionaires-behind-mitt-romney-20120524 [and see (first item at) (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76512619 and preceding and following]
How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109 [at (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69085167 and preceding and following]
*
Copyright ©2012 Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-federal-bailout-that-saved-mitt-romney-20120829 [with comments]
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Companies Desperately Fleeing Super-Low U.S. Tax Rates: Report
US companies are constantly complaining about their tax rates, which are the lowest in 40 years.
By Mark Gongloff
Posted: 08/29/2012 1:50 pm Updated: 08/29/2012 3:27 pm
Taxes: If you only read the Wall Street Journal, you might think they are the biggest problem in America right now.
The WSJ, for example, has run two news stories in the past two days about companies straining against the bonds of outrageously high U.S. corporate tax rates.
On Tuesday, the WSJ wrote that U.S. manufacturers want lower tax rates [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443324404577593050498878564.html ], citing a study by the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy that declares U.S. manufacturers have a "typical marginal effective tax rate" of 35.6 percent, the highest in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
On Wednesday, the WSJ had a story about a handful of companies that have just had enough [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444230504577615232602107536.html ] of all this egregious taxation and are abandoning America for countries that will tax them less. This story asserted that the U.S. has an overall corporate tax rate of 35 percent, the highest among developed nations, this time without bothering to give a source. It takes the additional step of noting that Ireland's tax rate is 12.5 percent -- even stupid little Ireland has a lower tax rate than the U.S., gah, the story says (I am paraphrasing).
First, about that "typical marginal effective tax rate" in the Tuesday story about manufacturers -- it's not a real tax rate. It's designed to measure the attractiveness of investing in a country. Unfortunately, the WSJ doesn't link to the study it cites, and the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy could not identify the source for the 35.6 percent number. The school did publish a paper in 2011, which calculated a 2010 marginal effective tax rate [ https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://policyschool.ucalgary.ca/sites/default/files/research/83countryreport.pdf ] for U.S. manufacturers of 32.7 percent. That rate may have changed a bit because of inflation, but probably not by much.
In any event, this "marginal effective tax rate" number shouldn't be compared to actual tax rates, because it's really designed to be a measure of incentives for business investment, taking tax rates mandated by law and adjusting them for stuff like depreciation allowances.
Update: Extraordinarily boring mystery solved: The School of Public Policy has done more investigation and discovered the 35.6 percent number comes from a presentation it recently made on Capitol Hill. There's no link. What's more, that number is the METR for all industries, not just for manufacturing, which is 33.9 percent. The school says it made a mistake and gave the WSJ the wrong number. Anyway, as I said, these METR numbers are apples, other tax rates are oranges.
In any event, big numbers like these -- let's just go with 35 percent -- have brought this over-taxation meme dangerously close to becoming accepted Conventional Wisdom. Even President Obama, apparently engaging in a rare new form of socialism, has proposed lowering the corporate tax rate [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/10/obama-corporate-tax-rate_n_1269738.html ] to 28 percent from 35 percent.
The small hitch in that plan, as The Huffington Post's Alexander Eichler pointed out, is that U.S. companies actually already pay much less than 28 percent in corporate taxes [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/22/obama-corporate-tax-breaks_n_1293512.html ].
The trouble here is in how you define the corporate tax rate. The rate cited on Wednesday by the WSJ is based on an OECD measure of statutory tax rates [ http://www.oecd.org/tax/taxpolicyanalysis/oecdtaxdatabase.htm#C_CorporateCaptial ]. These are the rates the laws of the land prescribe, but companies manage to find ways to skirt those laws, between loopholes and various tax subsidies.
In fact, the two companies profiled in Wednesday's WSJ story each paid less than 35 percent in taxes when based in the U.S. One company, Aon, paid 28 percent, on average, over the past five years before fleeing to the U.K. The other, Ensco, paid 19 percent in 2009, before it left the U.S. for the U.K., where it now pays a 10.5 percent rate.
The 10 most profitable companies in the U.S., including Apple and Exxon Mobil, paid an average tax rate of just 9 percent [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/most-profitable-corporations-tax-rate_n_1746817.html ] last year, according to a study by the site NerdWallet [ http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/markets/2012/corporate-taxes-only-9-percent/ ].
If you want to get technical about it, many large companies essentially turn a profit on taxes, according to a recent Citizens for Tax Justice study [ http://www.ctj.org/pdf/notax2012.pdf ].
And even as Obama was coming up with his proposal to cut corporate tax rates, the Congressional Budget Office pointed out that corporate tax receipts as a percentage of corporate profits tumbled to just 12.1 percent in fiscal 2011, the lowest rate since 1972 [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/03/418171/corporate-taxes-40-year-low/ ].
Obama has proposed closing some of the loopholes that let companies pay lower rates than 28 percent, which is one reason businesses aren't exactly throwing parades over his plan to lower the statutory rate. In fact, one company mentioned in the WSJ story, Rowan Cos., says it is leaving the U.S. because of its fear of loophole shrinkage.
The problem here is that tax rates will never be low enough for any companies. Some of the same companies that pay no taxes are among those complaining most loudly about taxes [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/20/558931/corporation-that-paid-nothing-in-taxes-for-four-years-tells-congress-it-pays-too-much-in-taxes/ ].
Nobody really enjoys paying taxes, and it's only natural -- maybe even a duty to shareholders -- for companies to constantly try to pay less. But we've got to call them out when they try to snow us with fake numbers.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/corporate-tax-rate-us-2012_n_1839693.html [with comments]
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One Man Against The Wall Street Lobby
By Simon Johnson
Posted: 08/25/2012 6:15 pm
Two diametrically opposed views of Wall Street and the dangers posed by global megabanks came more clearly into focus last week. On the one hand, William B. Harrison, Jr. -- former chairman of JP Morgan Chase -- argued in the New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/dont-break-up-the-big-banks.html ] that today's massive banks are an essential part of a well-functioning market economy, and not at all helped by implicit government subsidies.
On the other hand, there is a new powerful voice who knows how big banks really work and who is willing to tell the truth in great and convincing detail. Jeff Connaughton -- a former senior political adviser who has worked both for and against powerful Wall Street interests over the years -- has just published a page-turning memoir that is also a damning critique [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/why-does-wall-street-always-win/ ] of how Wall Street operates, the political capture of Washington, and our collective failure to reform finance in the past four years. The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins [ http://jeffconnaughton.com/the-payoff-why-wall-street-always-wins/purchase/ ], is the perfect antidote to disinformation put about by global megabanks and their friends.
Specifically, Mr. Harrison makes six related arguments regarding why we should not break up our largest banks. Each of these is clearly and directly refuted by Mr. Connaughton's experience and the evidence he presents.
First, Mr. Harrison claims that megabanks are the natural outgrowth of requests from customers, rather than the result of extraordinary resources spent on lobbying over the past 30 years. Mr. Connaughton's book contains all you need to know -- and more than you can stomach -- about the realities of how the influence industry has worked diligently to build and defend megabanks. The people who really wanted the banks to become bigger were the executives in charge of those organizations -- like Mr. Harrison. They spent a lot of money to make this happen.
Second, Mr. Harrison takes the view that global megabanks at their current scale provide some special services that cannot be otherwise provided by smaller financial institutions.
As Mr. Connaughton points out -- including in a new blog post [ http://jeffconnaughton.com/mr-harrison-defends-his-mega-creation/ ] -- there are no economies of scale or scope in banks with over $100 billion of total assets. Our largest banks, properly measured, now have balance sheets between $2 trillion and $4 trillion. Plenty of people have attempted to show megabanks produce some magic for broader economy-wide productivity or multinational nonfinancial firms, but there is simply no evidence. Again, read Mr. Connaughton's book for more detail -- or look at my book with James Kwak on this topic, "13 Bankers [ http://13bankers.com/ ]".
Third, Mr. Harrison claims "large global institutions have often proved more resilient than others because their diversified business model ensures that losses in one part of the enterprise can be cushioned by revenues in other parts."
Mr. Connaughton's book reminds us, with some eloquence, that Citigroup and Bank of America -- the largest U.S. financial institutions in 2008 -- would have failed if it were not for the government bailouts that they received. As a matter of simple historical fact, the "more resilient" in Mr. Harrison's version of history is exactly the same as observing that those banks were seen by officials as "too big to fail." Their resilience came solely from support provided by the government and the Federal Reserve.
Fourth, Mr. Harrison denies that very large banks receive any implicit government subsidies. To support this view, Mr. Harrison suggests we should compare borrowing costs across financial and nonfinancial firms that share a similar bond rating (e.g., AA); he points out that the interest rate paid by financial firms in this comparison is higher. But the interest rate at which a company borrows depends not just on the risk of default, but also on the "recovery value" in the case of default (i.e., how much do creditors end up with after the company has been wound down). If you think you will recover less when I default, you should charge me a higher risk premium -- and thus a higher interest rate.
Mr. Harrison compares apples (finance) with oranges (nonfinance) -- and fails to mention that the recovery rate in the latter case is much higher. How much will investors recover in the case of Lehman, for example -- perhaps 25 cents after more than four years? For most nonfinancial companies, default does not by itself result in a big reduction in value (the deadweight costs for bankruptcy of such firms in the US are quite small); large financial firms are quite different (the deadweight bankruptcy costs are typically huge). Mr. Harrison's proposed comparison is simply uninformative -- you need to look at comparisons within the financial sector.
The right comparison is the funding cost of financial firms with and without implicit government support. The funding advantage for those perceived as Too Big To Fail is estimated to be between 25 and 75 basis points; most people close to the issue think it is at least 50 basis points. The idea that megabanks do not get huge, implicit subsides is simply priceless -- again, read Mr. Connaughton's account to see the lengths to which the banks will go to ensure these subsidies are kept in place.
Fifth, Mr. Harrison says that "complexity can be an antidote to risk, rather than a cause of it". On the contrary, the evidence suggests that management has consistently lost control over financial institutions with hundreds of thousands of employees in 50-100 countries. Think about the scandals of this summer: Barclays and Libor; HSBC or Standard Chartered and money laundering; and the severe breakdown of risk management at JP Morgan Chase. In each case, executives claim they did not know what was going on. The very largest banks have become too big to manage.
Sixth, Mr. Harrison claims regulators are not cowed by banks. The Payoff is all about how lobbying really works -- and how legislators and regulators are brought to heel. Money brings influence and influence is used to make more money. It is not about "cowing" anyone; it is about persuading them that you are right and should be allowed to do exactly what you want to do, even though your arguments are completely specious. Mr. Harrison's op ed is a nice example of the genre.
Some regulators have started to stand up to big banks on some issues, and this should be encouraged. But overall, Wall Street prevails on all the major issues, and most top officials at Treasury and the Federal Reserve are only too happy to cooperate.
Mr. Harrison makes strong claims. All of his arguments are demonstrably false. If you think Mr. Harrison and the other defenders of megabanks have even the slightest veneer of plausibility, you must read Jeff Connaughton's book.
Simon Johnson is the co-author of White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters To You [ http://whitehouseburning.com/ ], available from April 3rd. This post is cross-posted [ http://baselinescenario.com/2012/08/25/one-man-against-the-wall-street-lobby/ (with comments)] from The Baseline Scenario [ http://baselinescenario.com/ ].
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. |
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johnson/jeff-connaughton-the-payoff_b_1830566.html [with comments]
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How the Republicans Built It
Editorial
Published: August 28, 2012
It was a day late, but the Republicans’ parade of truth-twisting, distortions and plain falsehoods arrived on the podium of their national convention on Tuesday. Following in the footsteps of Mitt Romney’s campaign, rarely have so many convention speeches been based on such shaky foundations.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, in the keynote speech, angrily demanded that the American people learn the hard truths about the two parties, but like most of those at the microphone, he failed to supply any. He said his state needed his austere discipline of slashed budgets, canceled public projects and broken public unions, but did not mention that New Jersey now has a higher unemployment rate [ http://www.politifact.com/new-jersey/article/2012/aug/26/chris-christies-comeback-scorecard/ ] than when he took over, and never had the revenue boom he promised from tax cuts.
“We believe in telling our seniors the truth about our overburdened entitlements,” he said, but his party has consistently refused to come clean about its real plans to undo Medicare and Medicaid. “Mitt Romney will tell us the hard truths we need to hear to put us back on a path to growth,” he said, but Mr. Romney has consistently refused to tell the truth about his tax plan, his budget plan, and his health care plan.
It was appropriate that “We built it,” the needling slogan of the evening, was painted on the side of the convention hall. Speaker after speaker alluded to the phrase in an entire day based on the thinnest of reeds — a poorly phrased remark by the president, deliberately taken out of context. President Obama was making the obvious point that all businesses rely to some extent on the work and services of government. But Mr. Romney has twisted it to suggest that Mr. Obama believes all businesses are creatures of the government, and so the convention had to parrot the line.
“We need a president who will say to a small businesswoman: Congratulations, we applaud your success, you did make that happen, you did build that,” said Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia. “Big government didn’t build America; you built America!”
That was far from the only piece of nonsense on the menu, only the most frequently repeated one. Conventions are always full of cheap applause lines and over-the-top attacks, but it was startling to hear how many speakers in Tampa considered it acceptable to make points that had no basis in reality.
Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, for example, boasted of the booming economy in his state, never mentioning that he and Mr. Romney opposed the auto bailout that has played an outsized role in the state’s recovery. (Apparently Mr. Obama’s destructive economic policies do not apply everywhere.)
Andy Barr, a Congressional candidate in Kentucky, made the particularly egregious charge that the president was conducting “a war on coal,” ruthlessly attacking an industry and thousands of struggling miners.
He was apparently referring to the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions and prevent power-plant pollution from drifting through the East Coast states. The country desperately needs to reduce its reliance on coal, which is far more polluting than natural gas, but that goal gets harder to achieve every time someone like Mr. Barr makes it out to be an attack on a way of life.
Considering how Mr. Romney has conducted his campaign so far, most recently his blatantly false advertising accusing Mr. Obama of gutting the work requirement on welfare, it is probably not surprising that the convention he leads would follow a similar path.
Voters looking for a few nuggets of truth would not have found them in Tampa on Tuesday.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/opinion/how-the-republicans-built-it.html [with comments]
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Major Republican Speakers Avoid Two Words: "Tea Party"
TAMPA, FL - AUGUST 28: Senate Republican Candidate, Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz speaks during the Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum on August 28, 2012 in Tampa, Florida. Today is the first full session of the RNC after the start was delayed due to Tropical Storm Isaac.
Image by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Not a single prime time mention of the movement after two days of the Republican National Convention. Not Romney's crowd?
Rosie Gray, BuzzFeed Staff
Posted Aug 30, 2012 2:06pm EDT
TAMPA, Fla. — The "Tea Party" brand — which energized and even seemed to overtake the Republican Party in 2010 — has been virtually invisible at this Republican National Convention.
Not a single one of the 38 speakers during the convention's key prime time hours has even mentioned the phrase, according to an examination of their transcripts — a sign both of Romney's own distance from the movement and that polls have suggested that voters view the movement negatively.
One major speaker, Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz, did allude to the Tea Party directly, though he referred to it only as a "great awakening":
Since 2010, something extraordinary has been happening, something that has dumbfounded the chattering class.
“It began here in Florida in 2010. In Utah, Kentucky, Pennsylvania. “Was repeated this summer in Indiana. Nebraska. Wisconsin. “And this past month, in the Lone Star State, Texas.
“What is happening all across America is a Great Awakening.
“A response to career politicians in both parties who’ve gotten us into this mess.
“This national movement is fueled by what unites us: a love of liberty, a belief in the unlimited potential of free men and women."
Senator Rand Paul, another Tea Party favorite, didn't mention it at all.
It's a striking absence for a movement that has grown from a series of protests to a legitimate faction of the Republican Party, with many representatives in Congress and in state governments.
The Romney campaign approves all of the remarks ahead of time and oversees the choice of speakers. A Romney spokeswoman didn't respond to a request for comment about the absence of Tea Party mentions.
Copyright © 2012 BuzzFeed, Inc.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/major-republican-speakers-avoid-two-words-tea-pa [with comments]
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Rand Paul Says Paul Ryan's Budget Is 'Too Tepid' On Eve Of Paul's Convention Speech
08/29/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/rand-paul-paul-ryan-budget_n_1840121.html [with comments] [and see "Rand Paul's Biggest Applause Line: Never Trade Liberty For Security", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/rand-paul-rnc-speech_n_1841610.html ; and as for that, just to note, he's only part-way and selectively there on those points, and then there's e.g. his having recently sponsored a Fetal Personhood Amendment to that latest go-round on flood insurance ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/26/rand-paul-fetal-personhood-flood-insurance_n_1628128.html {with comments})]
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Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan
Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan delivers the keynote address to the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZipUINVXIc [also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ajbHd7OD2U ] [text at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/paul-ryan-speech-text_n_1829354.html (with comments)]
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Mitt Romney Suggests Obama Welfare Waivers Are A Tactic To 'Shore Up His Base'
08/27/2012 12:49 pm
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney escalated his attacks on President Barack Obama's welfare waivers Monday, suggesting that welfare recipients make up President Barack Obama's political "base."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/mitt-romney-welfare-waivers_n_1832871.html [with comments]
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Obama Goes After Neil Newhouse, Mitt Romney Pollster, Over Controversial Comment
By Melissa Jeltsen
Posted: 08/29/2012 11:16 pm Updated: 08/29/2012 11:40 pm
At a campaign event on Wednesday, President Barack Obama latched onto remarks made by Neil Newhouse, a pollster for Mitt Romney [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/23/mitt-romney-_n_1836139.html ], who said this week the Republican presidential candidate's campaign would not "be dictated by fact-checkers."
Speaking to a crowd in Virginia, Obama brought up the Romney camp's sustained attacks [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/obama-welfare-romney_n_1773301.html ] on his welfare waiver policy. The ads have been widely panned for being factually inaccurate [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120822/us-romney-welfare-strategy/ ].
"I mean, somebody was challenging one of their ads -- they made it up -- about work and welfare. And every outlet said, this is just not true. And they were asked about it and they said -- one of their campaign people said, we won't have the fact-checkers dictate our campaign," Obama said. "We will not let the truth get in the way."
Obama was referencing comments Newhouse made [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/23/mitt-romney-_n_1836139.html ] at a panel organized by ABC News on Tuesday.
Romney's campaign has said that its ads attacking Obama over welfare have been its most effective to date [id.]. Whether they are truthful is another matter. Romney insists they are [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/mitt-romney-welfare-waivers_n_1832871.html ].
On Monday, Obama addressed Romney's claim that he had "gutted" work requirements for welfare recipients in a surprise appearance in the White House Briefing Room [id.].
"Everybody who's looked at this says what Gov. Romney's saying is absolutely wrong," Obama said. "They can run the campaign that they want, but the truth of the matter is you can't just make stuff up."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/obama-neil-newhouse_n_1841647.html [with comments]
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John Kasich: 'We Have To Convince African Americans That They Can Start & Own Businesses'
08/29/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/john-kasich-african-americans_n_1840366.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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CNN Camerawoman: Peanut-Throwing Incident At Republican Convention A 'Wake-Up Call'
At the Republican National Convention, a CNN camerawoman was pelted with peanuts by two attendees who said "this is how we feed animals" on Tuesday, August 28, 20112. The convention organizers denounced the incident as "deplorable."
(Gene Demby/Huffington Post)
By Gene Demby
Posted: 08/30/2012 1:42 pm Updated: 08/30/2012 7:31 pm
The CNN camerawoman who was pelted with peanuts by attendees [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/republican-cnn-attack-animal-peanuts-racist_n_1838249.html ] at the Republican National Convention said that the incident was disheartening, and that it should serve as a wake-up call to black people.
"I hate that it happened, but I'm not surprised at all," Patricia Carroll said to Journal-isms [ http://mije.org/richardprince/cnn-camerawoman-not-surprised-peanut-throwing#Carroll ]. "This is Florida, and I'm from the Deep South. You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don't think I should do."
On Tuesday, two attendees were removed from the arena after they threw peanuts at Carroll, while saying to her, "This is how we feed the animals [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/republican-cnn-attack-animal-peanuts-racist_n_1838249.html ]."
The convention's organizers condemned the incident [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/29/two-people-removed-from-rnc-after-taunting-black-camera-operator/ ], saying, "Two attendees tonight exhibited deplorable behavior. Their conduct was inexcusable and unacceptable. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated."
The incident was first made public by Current TV's David Shuster in a tweet Tuesday night.
David Shuster
@DavidShuster
GOP attendee ejected for throwing nuts at African American CNN camera woman + saying "This is how we feed animals." @TakeActionNews #TAN
28 Aug 12
Carroll went on:
"I can't change these people's hearts and minds," Carroll added. "No, it doesn't feel good. But I know who I am. I'm a proud black woman. A lot of black people are upset. This should be a wake-up call to black people. ... People were living in euphoria for a while. People think we're gone further than we have."
She noted that there weren't many black women at the convention. The whiteness of the Republican convention has been noted by many commentators, and has spawned the facetious Twitter hashtag #negrospotting [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/rnc-black-republicans_n_1842597.html ].
Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, told The Huffington Post on Thursday that in 2008, there were only 36 black delegates of the 2,000 in attendance, and that the GOP needed to do a better job of welcoming people of color.
"The proof is in the numbers," Steele said.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/cnn-camerawoman-peanuts-rnc_n_1843576.html [with comments]
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Team Romney White-Vote Push: ‘This Is the Last Time Anyone Will Try to Do This’
May I have this dance?
By Jonathan Chait
8/27/12 at 8:07 AM
A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/politics/obama-needs-80-of-minority-vote-to-win-2012-presidential-election-20120824 ] outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded [ http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/how_groups_voted/voted_88.html ] over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.
I wrote a long story [ http://nymag.com/news/features/gop-primary-chait-2012-3/ ] last February arguing that the Republican Party had grown intensely conscious of both the inescapable gravity of the long-term relative decline of the white population, and the short-term window of opportunity opened for the party by the economic crisis. I think we’re continuing to see the GOP operate under an integrated political and policy strategy constructed on this premise. This is their last, best chance to win an election in the party’s current demographic and ideological form. Future generations of GOP politicians will have to appeal to nonwhite voters who hold far more liberal views [ http://nbclatino.com/2012/08/13/vp-nominee-ryans-policies-to-the-right-of-most-latino-voters-polls-show/ ] about the role of government than does the party’s current base.
The “2012 or never” hypothesis helps explain why a series of Republican candidates, first in the House and most recently at the presidential candidate level, have taken the politically risky step of openly declaring themselves for Paul Ryan’s radical blueprint. Romney’s campaign has been floating word of late [ http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/romney-james-polk.html ] that it sees a potential presidency as following the mold of James K. Polk — fulfilling dramatic policy change, and leaving after a single term. “Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s controversial budget and entitlement reforms,” reports the Huffington Post’s Jonathan Ward. “Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost politically in order to achieve it.” David Leonhardt [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/sunday-review/romneys-first-100-days.html ] floats a similar sketch, plausibly outlining how Romney could transform the shape of American government by using a Senate procedure that circumvents the filibuster to quickly lock in large regressive tax cuts and repeal of health insurance subsidies to tens of millions of Americans.
Blowing up the welfare state and affecting the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history is a politically tricky project (hence Romney's belief that he may need to forego a second term). Hence the Romney campaign's clear plan to suture off its slowly declining but still potent base. Romney’s political-policy theme is an unmistakable appeal to identity politics. On Medicare, Romney is putting himself forward as the candidate who will outspend Obama, at least when it comes to benefits for people 55 years old and up. Romney will restore the $700 billion in Medicare budget cuts imposed by Obama to its rightful owners — people who are currently old.
He will cut subsidies to the non-elderly people who would get insurance through Obamacare — a program that, Romney’s ads remind [ http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/romney-and-ryan-wage-generational-warfare.html ] older voters, is “NOT FOR YOU.” Romney’s repeated ads on welfare, blaring the brazen lie that Obama has repealed the welfare work requirement, hammer home the same theme. The purpose is to portray Obama as diverting resources from us to them.
In their heart of hearts, Romney and Ryan would probably prefer a more sweeping, across-the-board assault on the welfare state. But the immense popularity of the largest, middle-class social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security force them into the divide-and-conquer gambit. They can promise to hold their disproportionately old, white base harmless and impose the entire brunt of their ambitious downsizing of government on young, poor, and disproportionately nonwhite Democratic constituencies.
There’s no moral or policy rationale for Romney’s proposal to increase social safety net spending on current retirees while cutting Pell Grants, Medicaid, children’s health insurance, and food stamps to shreds [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3767 ]. The nonwhite share of the electorate is increasing fast enough that the political math of this sort of gambit will grow completely impossible — there will simply be, from the right-wing perspective, too many of them and not enough us. But there may be just enough us to pull out one more win, and thus the Republican determination to make such a win as consequential as possible.
Copyright © 2012 New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/2012-or-never-for-gops-white-base.html [with comments]
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The Myth of an Affirmative-Action President
Obama for America
Why, I wonder, do so many people question how Barack Obama got where he is, while no one asks the same about Mitt Romney?
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Aug 29 2012, 10:18 AM ET
El presidente, reporting from Tampa, catches this from Karl Rove [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/karl-rove-on-the-defection-of-white-democrats/261642/ ]:
Speaking of which, if you watch the video, you'll see that while Rove didn't venture a theory for why whites have moved away from Obama in Indiana, he did propose one for a similar dynamic in North Carolina. There, he said, in 2008 "New South independents" (meaning, I think, white independents) who were "racial moderates, economic conservatives" had supported Obama in the belief that "this will be really good for the country -- let's put the issue of race behind us." But now they are disappointed in Obama because he's "done a lousy job on the economy, and he's not a fiscal conservative." This analysis tells a story that Obama was elected, in the first place, because of his race, but that whites now think this was a failed experiment. The echo is pretty hard to miss: We gave a guy a boost he didn't entirely deserve in order to correct a historic wrong; too bad he wasn't up to it. Are white voters ready to conclude that Obama is an affirmative-action president?
It's a familiar echo which goes all the way back to calls for Obama's college transcripts. What Republicans have yet to come to terms with is that Obama -- race aside -- is a formidable politician. You hear echoes of the early days of the integration of black athletes into the sports world, when white racists would contort themselves trying to understand how, exactly, someone like Jack Johnson had prevailed. It's very hard for Rove and his allies to get their heads around the fact that they got thumped in 2008 by an Ivy League black dude from Hawaii. Some scheme must be afoot.
But there's also something else -- the frame of skepticism is, as always, framed around Obama, not around Romney. No one wonders what advantages accrued to Mitt Romney, a man who spent his early life ensconced in the preserve of malignant and absolutist affirmative action that was metropolitan Detroit [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/the-other-detroit/308403/ ]. Romney's Detroit (like most of the country) prohibited black people from the best jobs, the best schools, the best neighborhoods, and the best of everything else. The exclusive Detroit Golf Club, a short walk from one of Romney's childhood homes, didn't integrate until 1986. No one is skeptical of Mitt Romney because of the broader systemic advantages he enjoyed, advantages erected largely to ensure that this country would ever be run by men who looked like him.
This kind of skepticism -- racism at its most common -- is in the air. It surrounds us, and upon this willful ignorance, Americans demand proof of Barack Obama's existence. The better of us attempt to contest such demands with facts. But the contest itself indulges racism. To truly get to the meat of the thing we must understand why some questions are asked and some are not. Why some standards are aggressively enforced and others are not. It would be nice to believe that voter ID laws [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/rep-john-lewis-make-some-noise-on-new-voting-restrictions/261549/ ] are primarily about the desire for a more secure democracy. But I fear that such flattery will get us nowhere.
There's more on this in my September piece, "Fear of a Black President [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/?single_page=true (at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78915505 and preceding and following)]."
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/the-myth-of-an-affirmative-action-president/261697/ [with comments]
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GOP Anti-Porn Plank Added To Draft Platform By Republican Committee
By Nick Wing
Posted: 08/27/2012 2:15 pm Updated: 08/27/2012 2:40 pm
The GOP platform committee has included a plank in this year's draft document calling for "vigorous" enforcement of anti-pornography laws.
In a press release Monday from Morality in Media, a faith-based non-profit, President Patrick Trueman, a former anti-porn prosecutor, calls the current distribution of pornography "a violation of current federal law" and lauds Republicans for approving [ http://reason.com/blog/2012/08/27/morality-in-media-says-the-new-republica ] stricter new wording:
The new language replaces previous platform wording, which only opposed child pornography. It will now read, "Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced." Trueman noted that current federal obscenity laws not only prohibit distribution of hardcore pornography on the Internet but also on hotel/motel TV, on cable/satellite TV, and in retail shops.
In an interview with The Huffington Post's Jen Bendery [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/republican-convention-2012_n_1823525.html?utm_hp_ref=politics#31_gop-against-pornography ], Trueman said youth access to pornography amounted to "a major, major problem," and even caused males in their twenties to develop "porn-induced sexual dysfunction."
"It's the Viagra problem for guys in their 20s," Trueman said. Young males are now spending "10 to 12 years looking at porn on the Internet and masturbating to it, so when they are getting married, they are dysfunctional sexually because their brain maps are changed. They enjoy what they've been doing for 10 to 12 years. Normal sex is not something that gets them excited."
The broader regulation, submitted by Family Research Council president and Louisiana RNC delegate Tony Perkins, also echoes [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/mitt-romney-porn_n_1446654.html ] GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's position on the issue during his previous campaign for the White House.
"I wanna make sure that every new computer sold in this country after I'm president has installed on it a filter to block all pornography and that parents can click that filter to make sure their kids don't see that kinda stuff coming in on their computer," Romney said at a campaign stop in Iowa in 2007.
In February, Romney lent support to a similar effort [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/02/15/426391/romney-anti-porn-pledge-ignores-contribution-pornographer/ ] in response to a Morality in Media questionnaire about cracking down on pornographers.
The Daily Caller reported earlier this year [ http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/18/romney-campaign-quietly-promised-vigorous-porn-crackdown-reagan-prosecutor-says/ ] that Trueman, who served in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, had received an assurance from Romney’s campaign that the former Massachusetts governor would “vigorously” prosecute pornographers if elected president.
For more controversial planks [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/republican-platform-2012_n_1831907.html ] added to the Republican Party platform this year, click through the slideshow below.
[slideshow embedded]
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/gop-anti-porn-plank-platform_n_1833840.html [with additional videos beginning with "Santorum Vows War on Porn" embedded, and comments]
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Amish Beard-Cutting Attacks: Hate Crime Trial Of Sam Mullet Sr., 15 Others Begins
Samuel Mullet Sr. [not pictured] and fifteen other people charged with hate crimes for forcibly cutting the beards of members of the Amish community are going on trial in Ohio this week.
By JOHN SEEWER
08/27/12 06:08 PM ET
CLEVELAND — Prosecutors will begin laying out their case Tuesday against 16 people charged with federal hate crimes in hair-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in Ohio.
A jury was seated Monday for what's expected to be at least a two-week trial for members of a breakaway Amish group from eastern Ohio, including its 66-year-old leader and four of his children.
Prosecutors have said the suspects forcibly cut the beards and hair of Amish men and the hair of women or tried to cover up the five attacks between September and November. Authorities say the attacks were motivated by religious differences.
Sam Mullet Sr. and 15 other Amish men and women are charged with hate crimes, which were filed under a law that makes an attack a federal crime if it was committed because of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or disability.
Other charges include conspiracy, evidence tampering and obstruction of justice. Some of the defendants face prison terms of 20 years or more if convicted.
The defendants say the government shouldn't intrude on what they call internal church disciplinary matters not involving anti-Amish bias. They've denied the charges and rejected plea bargain offers carrying sentences of two to three years in prison instead of possible sentences of 20 years or more.
Defense attorneys on Monday asked potential jurors whether they view the Amish differently because of how they dress or because of their unique religion. They also were asked how much contact they've had with the Amish. One man said he had grown up near an Amish settlement.
"They look different, but they are still American citizens and deserve a fair trial," said attorney Dean Carro, who represents defendant Lester Miller.
The men on trial wore suspenders in court and had long beards while the women wore long dresses and white bonnets.
All but one of the defendants is related to Samuel Mullet Sr.
The hair-cuttings, Mullet said last fall, were a response to continuous criticism he'd received from other Amish religious leaders about him being too strict, including excommunicating and shunning people in his own group. Mullet has said he didn't order the hair-cuttings but didn't stop anyone from carrying it out. He also has defended what he thinks is his right to punish people who break church laws.
Mullet's attorney, Ed Bryan, told potential jurors he was concerned about pre-trial publicity and asked jurors whether they'd be able to judge the defendants fairly.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/amish-beard-cutting-attacks-ohio-trial_n_1833189.html [with comments]
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Amish beard-cutting trial attracts international attention, pitting law of God vs. law of man
Sam Mullet Sr. speaks at his farm in Bergholz last year. He is expected to go to trial on conspiracy and hate crimes charges today.
Amy Sancetta, Associated Press file
Amish women enter the federal courthouse in Cleveland today for the beginning of the trial of 16 Amish defendants -- 10 men with full beards, six women in white bonnets -- who are on trial on charges related to a series of beard- and hair-cutting attacks against fellow Amish men and women last year.
Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer
By James F. McCarty, The Plain Dealer
Published: Monday, August 27, 2012, 6:00 AM Updated: Monday, August 27, 2012, 8:59 AM
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The law of God will collide with the law of man this week in a crowded federal courtroom in Cleveland, where 16 Amish defendants -- 10 men with full beards, six women in white bonnets -- will stand trial on charges related to a series of beard- and hair-cutting attacks against fellow Amish men and women last year.
And the world will be watching.
The case has attracted national and international attention, in part because of public curiosity about the normally reclusive and peaceful Amish community, and because of the peculiar nature of the alleged crimes.
Interest also has been heightened by the fact that the federal government rather than a local prosecutor brought the charges. The case is the first in Ohio to make use of a landmark 2009 federal law that expanded government powers to prosecute hate crimes.
Then there is the prospect of witnesses providing salacious testimony about an Amish bishop providing sexual counseling for married women while forcing other members of his flock to sleep in chicken coops.
Jury selection begins today and the trial is expected to run for three weeks before U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster.
View full sizeMarvin Fong, The Plain DealerAmish women enter the federal courthouse in Cleveland today for the beginning of the trial of 16 Amish defendants -- 10 men with full beards, six women in white bonnets -- who are on trial on charges related to a series of beard- and hair-cutting attacks against fellow Amish men and women last year.
The defendants include an Amish bishop, 66-year-old Samuel Mullet Sr., and 15 of his followers, who broke away from the placid Holmes County Amish community 17 years ago and established a new clan of about 125 members near the hamlet of Bergholz in the verdant hills and valleys of Jefferson County.
Mullet's devoted followers revere him as a modern day Moses who rules his flock with a righteous, iron fist, according to court documents and interviews with neighbors. The father of 18 children, he also is a multi-millionaire who has received more than $2 million for oil fracking rights to his 800-acre farm.
In Mullet's world, the word of God provided the imprimatur for him and his followers to punish enemies as he saw fit. That included cutting their beards and hair -- a humiliation more dreaded in the Amish religion than being "beaten black-and-blue," one of the victims said.
"The beard for Amish men is a symbol of their adult manhood," said Donald Kraybill in an interview last year with National Public Radio. Kraybill is a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and an Amish expert who is scheduled to testify for the prosecution at the Mullet trial.
"So to cut their beard is an assault on not only their personal identity but also on their religious identity and their religious faith," Kraybill said.
In the eyes of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office, Mullet and his followers are a band of renegades waging hate crime attacks motivated by cruelty and retaliation against their enemies. Cutting beards and head hair causes "disfigurement" -- an essential element of a hate crime, according to prosecutors.
But what federal prosecutors call hate crimes, punishable by life in prison, Mullet calls an exercise of his religious freedom. God's will allowed him to mete out punishment as he saw fit, he said, giving him the power to shame and punish people who ostracized the Bergholz clan and who defied his laws.
Mullet denies having ordered the beard-cutting attacks, "but I didn't tell them not to," he said according to an FBI affidavit quoting an Associated Press story.
"You have your laws on the road and the town -- if somebody doesn't obey them you punish the people," Mullet said in the affidavit. "But I'm not allowed to punish the church people? I just let them run over me? If every family would do just as they pleased, what kind of church would we have?"
Mullet's bishopric also gave him the authority to discipline church members who misbehaved by forcing them to sleep in a chicken coop for days on end, and the power to engage in sexual relations with married women to "cleanse them of the devil," according to an FBI affidavit.
Although Judge Polster has banned prosecutors from calling the Bergholz clan a cult during the trial, the prosecutors have made it clear they believe the word applies to Mullet's zealous followers. They cite the tremendous authority Mullet exerts over members of his Amish sect, and have included veiled references to David Koresh and Jim Jones in court papers.
"The government's greatest concern remains the defendant's ability, upon release, to retreat into his 800-acre spread, surrounded by his family members and devoted followers ... and resist law enforcement efforts to ensure his appearance at trial," Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Getz wrote.
"The evidence has demonstrated that this defendant and his followers have not embraced the traditional Amish principles of non-violence and forgiveness. The possibility of a violent encounter, this time with law enforcement, should not be readily dismissed," Getz wrote.
Those concerns were fueled by Mullet's own words after three of his son's were arrested for beard-cutting attacks last October. In a secretly recorded phone call from the Holmes County Jail, Lester Mullet told his father he was concerned his children might be taken from him.
"Samuel Mullet Sr. responded that somebody will 'get killed' before that happened," according to an FBI transcript of the conversation.
Mullet's lawyer scoffs at the prosecution's portrayal of his client.
"They're trying to create this perception he's something he's not," said defense attorney Edward Bryan. "He's not a wacky cult leader. He's a decent, hardworking, caring man."
But in 2005, eight families -- including one of Mullet's sons -- chose to break away and move to Amish enclaves in different counties rather that submit themselves to Mullet's strict and sometimes violent discipline.
Mullet responded by shunning, and later excommunicating, all members of the departed families from the church. After a conclave of 300 mainstream Amish church leaders met in Pennsylvania to address Mullet's practices, a seven-member committee investigated and overturned Mullet's excommunication orders.
That decision infuriated Mullet, and launched the beard- and hair-cutting attacks -- some of which were directed at members of the Amish investigation committee, according to an FBI affidavit.
Some of the victims were elderly. Several were wounded and bloodied with the eight-inch horse mane-cutting shears, according to the affidavit. When one of the victims pleaded with the men and women not to cut his beard, he wondered how Amish Christians devoted to peace and brotherhood could wage such an attack on a fellow church member.
"We are not Christians," Johnny Mullet, one of Sam's sons, responded, according to the FBI.
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Previous stories
Aug. 17: Prosecutors say jury should hear Amish leader's sexual activities with his followers
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/08/prosecutors_say_jury_should_he.html
June 1: Trumbull County minister supporting Amish beard-cutting suspects accuses U.S. marshals of intimidation
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/06/trumbull_county_minister_accus.html
May 24: Amish beard-cutting suspect loses bid for release from jail
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/05/federal_judge_calls_accused_am.html
May 17: Ex-clergyman familiar with Amish community has online petition seeking release of Sam Mullet from prison
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/05/ex-clergyman_familiar_with_ami.html
April 28: Amish beard-cutting defendant has taxpayer-subsidized lawyer despite millions in the bank, prosecutors say
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/04/federal_prosecutors_say_amish.html
More about Sam Mullet
http://topics.cleveland.com/tag/sam+mullet/index.html
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© 2012 Cleveland Live LLC
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/08/amish_beard-cutting_trial_attr.html [with comments]
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Abortion access in a post-Roe world
Posted by Sarah Kliff on August 27, 2012 at 12:15 pm
The Republican platform spends a lot of time on abortion, calling for extending personhood rights [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/24/did-republicans-actually-endorse-a-full-abortion-ban-maybe-not/ ] to “unborn children” and arguing that terminating a pregnancy threatens [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/23/gop-platform-abortion-is-bad-for-womens-health-and-well-being/ ] a woman’s health and well-being.
There is one key issue that the platform is silent on: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. While Gov. Mitt Romney calls for the decision to be overturned [ http://www.mittromney.com/issues/values ], the Republican party does not endorse that stance.
A new working paper [ http://www.nber.org/papers/w18338.pdf ] from Theodore Joyce, Yuxiu Zhang and Ruoding Tan helps explain why. The paper explores what would change about abortion access if Roe were to be overturned and the issue of legal abortion returned to the states.
Women would face more obstacles to terminate a pregnancy; the average distance traveled by women obtaining abortions would increase 157 miles among 31 states expected to outlaw the procedure.
Overturning Roe, however, would by no means eliminate abortion. Even in a situation where 31 states banned legal abortion, the national abortion rate would only fall 14.9 percent.
The expectation is that, in a post-Roe world, the more liberal states, like New York and California, would continue to offer legal access — just as they did prior to the Roe decision. Most of the south and large swaths of the Midwest, however, would likely ban the procedure.
Women in those states would likely still seek abortion services in states where they were accessible. That’s what happened pre-Roe in a state like Michigan, where abortion was illegal. Women traveled out of state and, as a result, had 7.6 abortions per 1,000 women performed in New York state.
These researchers combed through the state abortion laws to understand what travel distances would look like in a post-Roe scenario. They modeled one “extreme” situation, where 31 states outlaw the procedure, as well as a more moderate version, with 17 states passing bans. Then, they modeled how far away the closest abortion provider would be for women in each of these states.
In both, the distance women in states with abortion bans increases — an average of 157 miles in the more extreme situation and 69 miles in the moderate one. There would be huge variation in expected distance traveled, as you can see in the map below.
Texas women would face the longest travel distances, with the average woman traveling 452 miles to terminate a pregnancy. The situation would be decidedly different in Pennsylvania. It would also be expected to ban abortion but, since it’s bordered by more liberal states, women would only travel an average of 42 miles.
This paper also looked at what would happen to the national abortion rate should Roe be reversed and finds that, in the extreme situation mapped above, it would drop by 14.9 percent. If only 17 states banned the procedure, traveling to obtain an abortion would become even easier, and the rate would drop 6 percent.
Even in the most extreme situation – one where 46 states ban abortion and only four allow legal access – the abortion rate only falls by 29 percent.
That helps explains why a number of antiabortion advocates don’t actually favor overturning Roe: It would still allow for states to legalize abortion and, as this paper suggests, not get anywhere close to eliminating the procedure. Tellingly, the Republican platform does not call for the repeal of Roe.
James Bopp, who drafted the Republican platform on abortion [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/24/did-republicans-actually-endorse-a-full-abortion-ban-maybe-not/ ], is one prominent figure who does not like the idea of returning abortion rights to the states for this exact reason. “That puts us back to California and New York having very high abortion rates,” he told me last week. “That’s something I would totally oppose.”
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/27/abortion-access-in-a-post-roe-world/ [with comments]
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"Legitimate Rape" Issue is Romney Policy, Not Akin's
Monday, 27 August 2012
"Ironically, it is the implementation of Mitt Romney's abortion policy," says the American Right To Life research director Darrell Birkey, "that would require determining whether or not there was a 'legitimate' rape."
"Missouri's U.S. Senate Candidate Todd Akin advocates the personhood position of killing no child, regardless of whether or not her father was a criminal," says ARTL Action president Jefferson George. "However, Mitt Romney himself wrote an op-ed recently in National Review saying that he opposes abortion but not for 'instances of rape'. So it is not Akin, but Mitt Romney, whose unworkable policy would require determining whether there was a 'legitimate' rape."
Agreeing with American Right To Life is the longtime vice president of the nation's first-ever "right to life" group. "Mitt Romney's criticism of congressman Akin was self-condemning," said Colorado Right To Life's Leslie Hanks. As campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said, "Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan disagree with Mr. Akin's statement, and a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape." Hanks added, "So the Romney campaign admits that their own policy, unless it's just phony, requires some kind of determination of rape. They're the 'legitimate rape' team."
American Right To Life agrees with Rep. Akin that he "used the wrong words in the wrong way." Birkey points out that, "Perhaps without realizing it, Todd repeated the Ron Paul-ism that was said to Piers Morgan on CNN earlier this year about legitimate rape. With a similar view to Romney's, Paul put it even worse, and called it an 'honest' rape. Likewise, Mitt Romney's policy means that if a woman was actually raped, then he would not oppose her killing the child."
"The new Republican-In-Name-Only GOP is reduced to being the conservatives who want to save social programs created by liberals," said George, head of the 527 group. "And Todd Akin could become the awkward hero from Missouri if he brings his actions in line with his principles and refrains from voting for bills, like H.R. 3, that authorize the use of tax dollars to kill the very children that we believe Aiken wants to protect."
American Right To Life's website concludes, "Finally, Romney's unworkable 'rape exception' violates the God-given right to life."
© 2012 MELODIKA.net
http://www.melodika.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=371230&Itemid=54
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Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Says Rape Is Rape — But There Can Be ‘More Forcible Rape’
By Josh Israel on Aug 28, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (R) denounced comments by Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) last week that “legitimate rape [ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/19/711991/gop-senate-candidate-victims-of-legitimate-rape-wont-become-pregnant/ ]” rarely leads to pregnancy, calling his remarks “disgusting.” “Rape is a rape,” she noted, “I don’t know how you can categorize it.” But, as Gawker notes [ http://gawker.com/5938496/wisconsin-lt-governor-rebecca-kleefisch-some-rapes-are-more-equal-than-others ], when told that Paul Ryan co-sponsored a bill with Akin [ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/19/712251/how-todd-akin-and-paul-ryan-partnered-to-redefine-rape/ ] to redefine rape, Kleefisch immediately backtracked, saying “Well, I think there is a way to have a more forcible rape, the same way there are different types of assault.”
Watch the video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3usq2UGeCI ]:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/28/760771/wisconsin-lg-says-rape-is-rape/ [with comment]
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What the *#@% Is Wrong With Republican Men?!
Illustration by Dress Code.
Source Photos: John Giustina / Getty images (shirt & tie); Rubberball / Getty Images (Blonde Hair); Fotosearch / Getty Images (Suit); Emmanuel Dunand, AFP / Getty Images (Romney); John Adkisson / Getty Images (Ryan)
It's not just Akin. By pushing some of the most invasive state policies in modern history, the men of the GOP are driving their party off a cliff.
Kathleen Parker
Aug 27, 2012 1:00 AM EDT
Blame it on the “idea cloud”—that cumulus cartoon bubble that dumps the same idea on diverse populations at once. Alternatively, blame Todd Akin, the Missouri congressman and Senate candidate who infamously asserted that “legitimate rape” victims don’t often get pregnant because the female reproductive system has a way of shutting itself down under such circumstances.
Whatever the prompt, millions of Americans simultaneously have been slapping their foreheads and exclaiming: “What the *#@% is wrong with Republicans?!”
To be fair, we can stipulate that Akin is sui generis, occupying a realm of nitwittery uniquely his own. Taken in isolation, his comments might have been only a blip in the news cycle. But his timing was, shall we say, immaculate, coinciding with GOP platform committee meetings and Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate. The platform includes one of Ryan’s signature issues—a human life amendment to the Constitution that could preclude abortion even for rape or incest. And Ryan, in addition to being the party’s budget genie, happens to have coauthored with Akin legislation seeking to redefine rape as “forcible” (as opposed to statutory) as a way of limiting public spending on abortion.
The human life amendment is actually a relic, having been part of the platform since 1984, but the platform also includes new language for the first time declaring abortion bad for a woman’s “health and well-being.” It is certainly bad for some women, but also certainly not for all. Who exactly is making this determination for womankind?
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Video [embedded]
In the wake of Akin's controversial comments, Mitt Romney said he's good for women.
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In any case, a storm more perfect than Isaac (it seems impossible to discuss Republicans in non-biblical terms) has formed to the benefit of Democrats—and not just the metaphorical kind. That hallelujah chorus you hear is coming from David Axelrod’s Chicago office, where he and other campaign strategists were seen performing grand jetés in celebration of their good fortune. What more delicious manna than the opportunity to conjoin in the public’s mind the idiocy of Akin, who weirdly serves on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and Romney’s sixth son, Ryan. Such a GOP twofer can only be a gift from You Know Who.
Alas, Akin’s comments were not in isolation. They followed a year of explosive events and remarks involving Republican lawmakers and leaders—and the women they seek to “protect.” A one-man firing squad, Akin simply provided the exclamation point at the end of a Faulknerian paragraph of Republican offenses, from laws attempting to require transvaginal probes for women seeking abortion to promises to defund Planned Parenthood to Rush Limbaugh’s calling law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” when she testified about the need for insurance coverage for contraception. Agree or not with her argument, powerful men shouldn’t call young women sluts for attempting to participate in a grown-up debate about health care. Agree or not with a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy, elected officials shouldn’t parse the definition of rape as “legitimate” or otherwise. For the record, the bill to redefine rape as “forcible” had 227 Republican cosponsors.
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Reality Check
“77% of Americans believe birth control shouldn’t be part of the national political debate.”—Bloomberg National Poll
Conservative Donor Foster Friess:
‘Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The Gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.’—MSNBC
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The cumulative effect of these episodes, combined with Democrats’ carefully crafted GOP “war on women” narrative, have boxed Republicans into a corner of stubborn self-defeat. Hackneyed and contrived as this “war” is, there’s a reason it has gained traction. “Because it’s true,” says Margaret Hoover, a leading voice in the young conservative movement, CNN contributor, gay-marriage advocate, and author of American Individualism—a call to arms for her great-grandfather Herbert Hoover’s rugged individualism tempered with a community spirit suitable for the millennial generation.
Opting for a vernacular expression of her frustration, Hoover queries: “What the (*#@%) is wrong? What has happened within the party infrastructure that has malfunctioned so desperately, so that this minority of representatives are in such positions of power that are so out of step with the majority of Republicans?”
There is something wrong with the Republican Party, the survival of which demands more than a few moments of self-examination and reflection. I wouldn’t use the word “stupid,” though it is tempting. Suicidal seems more apt. The GOP, through its platform, its purity tests, pledges, and its emphasis on social issues that divide rather than unite, has shot itself in the foot, eaten said foot, and still managed to stampede to the edge of the precipice. Is extinction in its DNA?
Maine Sen. Susan Collins pulled her car off a rural road in her home state to give full expression to her own dismay at her party’s death spiral. She points to a series of problems, ranging from the absence of women in leadership positions, which sends a bad message to women—“role models matter”—to the party’s illogical emphasis on divisive issues when they should be focused on Republican strengths.
“It seems like we’ve been thrown back decades into debates most everyday people think were settled years ago. This doesn’t mean we’re disrespectful to people who hold a different point of view, but the platform seems designed to alienate a lot of moderate women. I don’t get it.”
Comments like Akin’s aren’t only embarrassing, but they divert attention and allow Democrats to change the subject. Collins is chauvinistic on her party’s economic plans, but dumbfounded by certain suicidal moves. “Tone deaf” is how she describes the 31 Senate Republicans who voted against refunding the “Violence Against Women Act,” which has been renewed for years without controversy.
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Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK): “I join many Alaskans in finding Rep. Todd Akin’s comments incredibly offensive and I strongly encourage him to step aside… I can’t believe a guy running for the U.S. Senate but also a current congressman would make this kind of statement.”
Sen. Olympia Snow (R-ME): “Such extreme and ill-informed comments are particularly offensive to victims of sexual assault… [the comments were] repugnant and outlandish.”
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“We just hand these issues to Democrats on a silver platter and they’re clapping their hands with delight. They can’t believe this! And instead we’re not focusing where my party has by far the better plans, the better approach, where President Obama has utterly failed.”
When the conversation shifts to abortion and contraception (contraception!), women begin to fear that their rights are in jeopardy. “They’re not,” says Collins, one of the party’s staunch pro-choice voices. This view is widely shared within Republican circles. Roe v. Wade isn’t going anywhere, the consensus seems to be. But fellow Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, who is retiring after more than 30 years in office, isn’t so sure.
“Don’t underestimate the force of those views,” she says. “At one point I would have thought so, too, but now I wouldn’t minimize it.”
“At one point” refers to the mid-1980s, when Snowe organized Republican women in the Congress (there was only Nancy Kassebaum in the Senate) to meet with then-president Ronald Reagan to discuss women’s concerns. “Can you imagine that happening with a Republican president today,” she says.
Times—and things—have changed. Abortion is still front and center, yet women’s concerns, like men’s, are more centered than ever on the economy and jobs. Snowe, having just returned from a tour of the Eurozone, fears we are on the brink of disaster, tethered as we are to Europe. She urges Romney to distance himself from some of his party’s extreme positions and forcefully convey that the economy is the central issue—and that frankly we’re in a crisis.
“He’s got to reiterate that. This campaign is about the future of our economy and the future of our country ... Social issues are the Achilles’ heel of our party, but the economy is the Achilles’ heel of the Obama administration.”
“We should be sitting pretty,” says Collins, who is equally grim about the future. Instead of focusing on economic policies and pounding messages of renewal that appeal to all people, social conservatives push issues that relatively few care about at the moment. You have to have food on the table, after all, before you can start contemplating the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. Arguments that social issues fire up the base are fine to a point, but as Collins points out, “I keep reminding them that not everybody’s base is the same and presumably we want to control the Senate. We can’t do that without winning seats in states like Maine.”
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Abortion
75% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in cases of rape or incest.—Gallup 2011
From the proposed GOP platform:
‘We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.’—as reported by CNN
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Former first lady Laura Bush has often told me that nations can’t survive without the full equality and participation of its women, which at a minimum should allow for differences of opinion. Does the Republican Party really think it is a nation apart, exempt from this obvious truth? Polling figures provide at least part of the answer.
A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that Obama still leads Romney among women by 51 percent to 41 percent. The gap is even greater among other demographics: African-Americans favor Obama 94 percent to 0; Latinos by 2 to 1; and voters under 35 by 52 percent to 41 percent. How long will the party of white males survive once the women (and gays and blacks and Hispanics) have left for more hospitable environs? Exactly who is left for the GOP?
Even among pro-life Americans, there is little support for the social agenda being pushed by the Republican Party’s leadership, with pro-life voters overwhelmingly holding the belief that abortion is ultimately the woman’s choice. According to a 2008 poll conducted by American Viewpoint for Republican Majority for Choice, 66 percent of self-described pro-life voters said abortion should be the choice of the woman and not the government.
More broadly, 52 percent of all Americans think abortion should be legal under certain circumstances, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in May. Furthermore, it seems people may be tiring of this whole conversation. A Bloomberg National Poll done earlier this year found that a full 77 percent believe that birth control shouldn’t be part of the national political debate.
Finally, even though the May Gallup Poll indicates that more Americans are becoming pro-life, which is surely a positive development, this doesn’t translate to mean that they support government policies further restricting abortion. In fact, at no point does a majority favor limiting access to abortion as the Republican Party seems committed to doing.
Even so, states have been busy in these vineyards. In the past two years, states have introduced a total of 2,000 reproductive health provisions, mostly restrictions, according to Planned Parenthood. While 12 states require verbal counseling or written materials before an abortion to include information on ultrasound services, both Texas and Louisiana mandate that an abortion provider perform an ultrasound (not necessarily invasive) on any woman seeking an abortion and also that the provider show and describe the ultrasound image.
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Same-Sex Marriage
54% of American adults say gay marriage is morally acceptable.—Gallup 2012
Mitt Romney: ‘I think from the beginning of my poliitcal career, I’ve made it very clear that I believe marriage should be a relationship between a man and a woman.’
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Twenty-six states require that a woman seeking an abortion wait some period of time—usually 24 hours—but Utah requires 72 hours.
This is not to suggest that the only thing contributing to the expanding gender gap is the GOP’s position on reproductive issues. Not for one instant do I equate the pro-life position with being anti-female. Heaven forbid we should live in a world where no one struggles with the termination of a pregnancy. This is not a ridiculous conversation. It is, however, an often poorly executed one.
Style matters. Empathy counts. And many women—even those sympathetic to these issues—feel that Republican men aren’t listening to them, or are off on some crusade that has nothing to do with them. Raymond Arroyo, news director and lead anchor of Eternal World Television Network, may have put a finger on part of the GOP’s women problem:
“If the GOP has a ‘problem,’ it may be that their principles usually supersede their communications skills. What I mean by that is they often launch into well-intended initiatives (a virtue) giving little thought to messaging or style,” he told me by email. Perhaps an unfamiliar name to non-Catholics, Arroyo is a familiar voice to 250 million households worldwide who tune into his live news show, The World Over, on EWTN, the Global Catholic Network. “The fact is,” he says, “people are either receptive or hostile to a message based on their first impressions of the messenger. If they are repelled by a politician’s style, the message will never be heard. So many conservative pols—good as they are, smart as they are—consider things like style and presentation to be superfluous to their work, so they give it no thought.”
To whom, then, are these Republicans talking? Apparently not to women, whom they treat not as equals but as totemic and unknowable. Which is to say, they don’t “get” women. As such, they risk losing not only independents and moderates, whose votes they desperately need come November. They also risk losing their own women, who want very much to cast a ballot for smaller government, reduced deficits, and a confident, job-producing business environment, but don’t want to belong to a club that seems aggressively hostile to women and whose members can’t keep their mouths shut about issues that only reinforce the notion the Republicans are intolerant and rigid.
“I’m upset,” says Hoover, and she’s not alone.
It is noteworthy that so many Republican men are focused on women’s reproduction and issues of the hearth, while veteran Republican women leaders are riveted on the economy and jobs. Could it be that the liberal goal of reversing sex roles finally is manifesting, most vividly within the party least likely to have advanced the cause of evolution? If only men could get pregnant, then we’d really have a rollicking debate. If only ...
Meanwhile, Romney had better speak often and with conviction about his own disagreement with some of his party’s platform, or the anti-woman narrative will become so entrenched that the 2012 GOP may go down in history as having sacrificed the nation’s economy to protect the rights of human embryos. He will have to speak loudly, too, if he is to be heard over the iconic women the Democratic Party has assembled for its own convention stage—from the famous Ms. Fluke to the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL. The 2012 election seems to have devolved from a debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes to “The Clash of the Embryos.” Perhaps the math is just too hard for either party.
How tragically ironic that the party of small government and individual liberty may have orchestrated its own defeat by insisting on some of the most invasive state policies in the history of man. Perhaps it is time for a new kind of history.
With reporting by Eliza Shapiro.
*
Related
America’s Abortion Rights: A History
http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/08/23/roe-v-wade-to-planned-parenthood-the-history-of-abortion-rights-in-america-photos.html
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© 2012 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/26/what-s-wrong-with-the-republican-party.html [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/26/what-s-wrong-with-the-republican-party.html ] [with comments]
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'Modern Family' Is Ann Romney's Favorite TV Show, But Creator Steve Levitan Pushes Back On Gay Marriage (VIDEO)
Ann Romney's favorite TV show is "Modern Family."
[ http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/71542839.html (with comments)]
[ http://gawker.com/5938856/ann-romney-says-her-favorite-show-is-modern-family-showrunner-steve-levitan-responds-she-can-officiate-at-mitch-and-cams-wedding (with comments)]
By Alex Moaba
Posted: 08/28/2012 4:41 pm Updated: 08/29/2012 4:42 pm
Ann Romney's favorite TV show may be "Modern Family [ http://www.etonline.com/news/124532_Michelle_Obama_and_Ann_Romney_s_Presidential_Campaign_Trail_Fashion/index.html ]," which features committed gay couple Cam and Mitch. But the show's co-creator isn't a fan of the Romneys' position on marriage equality.
After Romney revealed that she enjoys the Emmy-winning ABC comedy in a video interview with The Insider [ http://www.etonline.com/news/124532_Michelle_Obama_and_Ann_Romney_s_Presidential_Campaign_Trail_Fashion/index.html ], Steve Levitan took to Twitter to make the potential First Lady an offer that made it clear he doesn't agree with her husband's stance on gay marriage.
Steve Levitan
@SteveLevitan
Thrilled Ann Romney says ModFam is her favorite show. We'll offer her the role of officiant at Mitch & Cam's wedding. As soon as it's legal.
28 Aug 12
Although Mitt Romney claimed to be a bigger proponent of gay rights than Ted Kennedy in his 1994 Massachusetts Senate race, he has said throughout the presidential campaign that he does not support gay marriage [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/12/mitt-romney-liberty-university-speech_n_1511621.html ]. In a June speech at Liberty University, he affirmed that he believes that, "Marriage is between one man and one woman."
The Romneys are also members of the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints, which raised tens of millions of dollars to support Proposition 8 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/02/8-the-mormon-proposition_n_597500.html ], the 2008 California Ballot measure that outlawed gay marriage in that state. The Romneys' 2010 tax return [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/23/mitt-romney-mormon-church_n_1825565.html ] indicates that the couple has tithed $4.13 million to the church over the past 2 years, and have also given over $4.7 million in the past ten years through the family's trust, the Tyler Charitable Foundation.
In 2002, The Boston Globe reported that Mrs. Romney signed a petition to ban gay marriage and domestic partnership rights [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/16/mitt-romney-gay-rights_n_1521647.html ] in Massachusetts.
The Obamas have also listed "Modern Family" [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/14/president-obama-loves-boardwalk-empire_n_1147992.html ] among their favorite family shows. In a 2010 interview with People Magazine, President Obama said that, "For the girls and me, 'Modern Family,' that's our favorite show." Obama came out in support of gay marriage [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/09/obama-gay-marriage-interview-robin-roberts-abc-news_n_1503311.html ] in a June interview with Robin Roberts after months of "evolving" on the issue. He has not pursued any legislative agenda to bring about that change.
Levitan's response is similar to Rage Against The Machine frontman Tom Morello's reaction to hearing that Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan considers RATM to be his favorite band. Morello wrote in Rolling Stone [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/17/tom-morello-paul-ryan-rage-against-the-machine_n_1795607.html ] that Ryan is "the embodiment of the machine that our music rages against."
Check out Ann Romney'a statement about "Modern Family" at the end of the video below.
[video embedded]
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/modern-family-ann-romney_n_1837171.html [with comments]
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Cardinal Timothy Dolan asks candidates to sign civility pledge
By David Gibson, Religion News Service
Aug. 28, 2012
NEW YORK -- Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who sparked controversy by agreeing to deliver the closing blessing at the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., this week, on Monday drew further attention to his political role by asking both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama to sign a civility pledge promoted by a leading conservative Catholic activist.
The archbishop of New York wrote to Romney and Obama and their running mates, Paul Ryan and Joe Biden, asking them to sign the "Civility in America" pledge developed by Carl Anderson, head of the powerful Knights of Columbus and a man with long-standing ties to the Republican Party.
Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the most prominent Catholic churchman in America, said he wanted the candidates to forgo personal attacks and "remain focused on the critical issues facing our nation."
Neither Dolan nor the Knights of Columbus pledge specifies which issues they meant. But Anderson, supreme knight of the organization, has been a vocal supporter of the bishops' campaign against the administration's controversial birth control health insurance mandate. The Knights have also donated millions of dollars to efforts against legalizing same-sex marriage.
For years, Anderson has blasted Obama and Biden, who is Catholic, for their support for abortion rights. Just last week in the conservative journal National Review, Anderson penned a blistering critique of Obama for what he said was the president's decision "to make unrestricted access to abortion a key component of his campaign."
Anderson is a veteran GOP operative. He spent several years working for Jesse Helms, the late North Carolina senator and ardent culture warrior, before going to work in the Reagan White House. Anderson has influential allies among conservatives in the Vatican and the hierarchy, and the Knights of Columbus can deploy huge sums for -- or against -- causes they support or oppose.
In closing his letter to the candidates, Dolan promises that if the candidates sign he will "be most happy to be able to convey to Carl Anderson and to the 1.8 million members of the Knights of Columbus, that you have chosen to support this valuable effort."
Dolan has become increasingly active and visible as the presidential campaign gears up. His decision to deliver the benediction at the GOP convention Thursday night immediately following Romney's official nomination was met with sharp rebukes from many who say his appearance will formalize what was seen as the hierarchy's growing embrace of the Republican ticket.
Whether either of the candidates will sign Anderson's pledge is unclear. Dolan's plea comes after a prominent evangelical, Rick Warren, canceled plans for a "civil forum" appearance at his Southern California church by both presidential candidates, saying the nasty political atmosphere had ruined the opportunity.
Sources in both the Romney and Obama campaigns said that in fact neither candidate was planning to attend Warren's forum. Both campaigns are targeting Catholics in the November election.
Copyright © The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company
http://ncronline.org/news/politics/cardinal-timothy-dolan-asks-candidates-sign-civility-pledge [with comments]
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In bipartisan move, U.S. archbishop to pray for Democrats, too
Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan holds up a foam finger promoting ''A Fortnight for Freedom'' conference sponsored by the Catholic church, following a afternoon session during the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Annual Spring Assembly in Atlanta, Georgia, June 13, 2012
Credit: Reuters/Tami Chappell
By Daniel Trotta
NEW YORK | Tue Aug 28, 2012 2:21pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Roman Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan will deliver the closing prayer at the Democratic National Convention as well as this week's Republican meeting, in a sign of bipartisanship after Dolan had taken a role opposing the White House on policy matters.
Dolan, the archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, last week accepted an invitation to deliver the closing prayer at the Republican National Convention on Thursday in Tampa, Florida.
His office announced on Tuesday he would do the same for the Democrats in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 6.
Political analysts see many Catholics as "swing voters" who can be swayed to vote for either party, making Dolan welcome at both conventions.
"It was made clear to the Democratic convention organizers, as it was to the Republicans, that the cardinal was coming solely as a pastor, only to pray, not to endorse any party, platform or candidate," Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the New York archdiocese, said in a statement.
Dolan has become an increasingly influential political figure in the United States and a champion for conservatives, especially since he challenged President Barack Obama in February over a federal health insurance provision that required Catholic institutions such as universities and hospitals to cover birth control.
On Monday Dolan said he wanted Obama and Mitt Romney, who will get the Republican presidential nomination at the party's convention, to sign a "civility pledge" to ensure they would not make personal attacks during the campaign and instead concentrate on substantive issues.
In February U.S. bishops, led by Dolan, had pressed Obama to exempt religious employers from a federal mandate that all health insurance plans offer free birth control.
Obama agreed to modify the mandate so religious employers would not have to pay for contraceptive coverage directly. That satisfied some Catholic groups but the bishops wanted the mandate repealed entirely.
Energized by the battle, Catholic bishops announced their intention to rally Americans against a long list of government measures they said intruded on religious liberty.
After a conference meeting a year ago, Dolan declared religious freedom "is now increasingly and in unprecedented ways under assault in America."
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta)
Copyright 2012 Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/28/us-usa-campaign-catholics-idUSBRE87R0QQ20120828 [no comments yet]
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A Plagiarist’s Rant Against Birth Control
By MIGUEL SYJUCO
Published: August 29, 2012
WHILE anatomically illiterate politicians in America babble about “legitimate rape [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/rape/overview.html ],” a Filipino legislator opposed to birth control [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/birth-control-and-family-planning/overview.html ] has been shedding crocodile tears in Parliament and plagiarizing speeches to bolster the case against reproductive rights.
On Aug. 13, the Senate majority leader, Tito Sotto, wept while addressing his assembled peers. The former actor told the Senate that birth-control pills, used by his wife in 1974, had led to the death of their newborn son a year later. The emotional scene shut down the day’s debate. It was the latest obstruction to passing a reproductive health law that has languished for 14 years.
Proponents of the reproductive health bill say it will address poverty, women’s rights, infant and maternal mortality, and overpopulation in a poor nation crowded with 94 million people. Though contraceptives are currently available, the general population can’t afford them. The bill seeks to offer natural and artificial birth-control options, reproductive health care and sex education in public schools.
Opponents, like Mr. Sotto and the powerful Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, say contraception [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/birth-control-and-family-planning/overview.html ] is akin to abortion [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/surgery/abortion/overview.html ]. They claim the bill is an elitist and foreign conspiracy to corrupt a country in which 80 percent of the population is Catholic. They fear the erosion of family values, state intrusion on religious freedom, tacit approval of promiscuity and side effects of oral contraceptives.
Two days later, news that Mr. Sotto had plagiarized his speech spilled across blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Careful readers proved that he’d copied [ http://raissarobles.com/2012/08/16/did-sen-sotto-copy-from-4-bloggers/ ] and pasted, without citation, large portions from as many as at least five online sources. Among them were the writings of Sarah Pope, who blogs as “the Healthy Home Economist [ http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/ ]”; a New York University Web site [ http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/newsletter/articles/gandhi_debate.html ] on the notable birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger; and an American activist named Janice Formichella, writing for Feminists for Choice [ http://feministsforchoice.com/gandhis-birth-control-of-choice.htm ]. What’s more, the senator twisted their words for his own purposes.
Mr. Sotto forcefully denied responsibility rather than confessing and offering an apology. When Ms. Pope blogged her dismay at being plagiarized, the senator declared on Filipino TV: “Why would I quote from a blogger? She’s just a blogger.” His chief of staff, Hector Villacorta, told reporters [ http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/255890/plagiarism-common-practice-ok-in-senate-says-sottos-aide ] that blogs aren’t copyrighted, governments are exempt from copyright laws, and parliamentary immunity [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/immune-response/overview.html ] protects the senator. Besides, the Philippines “plagiarized the U.S. Constitution,” he said. “Even our image was copied from God. We are all plagiarists.”
God, it seems, is also on Mr. Sotto’s side.
Among the senator’s allies is the conference of bishops, which has declared “open war” on the reproductive health bill, saying it will create “an abortion generation.” Despite separation of church and state, these bishops fancy themselves as Filipinos’ moral conscience. Their credibility has been mixed, however. Archbishop Socrates Villegas has warned that “contraception is corruption,” but an investigation last year showed that bishops accepted privileges and gifts [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14143031 ], including S.U.V.’s, from the previous presidential administration.
The church has tried to recover power by re-emphasizing its role in society. Last year, it succeeded in banning a McDonald’s commercial showing a little boy and girl flirting cutely over French fries. It also shut down an art exhibit it deemed “sacrilegious” and warned that Lady Gaga’s Manila concert was akin to “devil worship.” The bishops have even threatened President Benigno S. Aquino [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/benigno_s_aquino_iii/index.html ] III with excommunication, and 190 university professors with heresy, for their stance on the pending bill.
This “open war,” along with intellectual dishonesty of Mr. Sotto’s variety, have undermined any genuine discussion of reproductive rights. The bill is backed by anti-poverty groups, community and women’s organizations, President Aquino himself, and 70 percent of Filipinos [ http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=833739 ]. But its fate remains tenuous. How could this be?
The answer lies in the system that grants Mr. Sotto impunity. Plagiarism may have toppled a Hungarian president [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/world/europe/hungarian-president-pal-schmitt-resigns-amid-plagiarism-scandal.html ], a German defense minister [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/16/german-defence-minister-plagiarism-accusation ] and a Romanian education minister [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/world/europe/romania-plagiarism-scandal-ensnares-prime-minister.html ], but it’s no big deal [ http://opinion.inquirer.net/35572/copycats ] amid the entrenched corruption of the Philippines.
Recent clear-cut plagiarism cases failed to lead to punishment for a literary icon who lifted passages from a sportswriter, a top editorial writer who stole from a young reporter and the chairman of a university’s board of trustees who copied from Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Conan O’Brien for a commencement speech. Even Supreme Court Justice Mariano del Castillo [ http://www.manilatimes.net/index.php/news/top-stories/17213-del-castillo-admits-to-plagiarism-but-refuses-to-call-it-criminal-act ] was breezily exonerated by his peers after he plagiarized from three sources and reversed their meaning in his decision against elderly Filipinas seeking reparations for sexual enslavement under the Japanese during World War II.
In all likelihood, Mr. Sotto will similarly escape unscathed without so much as censure from the Senate.
Politicians in the Philippines regularly manage to get away with greater sins. Even the Manila area’s notorious annual flooding is a result of the irresponsibility of those in charge, which has led to shortsighted urban planning, disregard for zoning laws and insufficient cooperation between the metropolis’s 17 city halls. Such chronic lack of accountability is part of the reason the Philippines ranked 129th out of 182 in Transparency International’s 2011 corruption index — alongside Syria and Honduras.
Indeed, Mr. Sotto continues his defiance. He has cast himself as “a victim of cyber-bullying” and backed a proposed law that aims to “regulate” blogs, as his supporters cheer his pluck against academics and intellectuals. He happily misrepresents research studies, avoids mentioning their outdated vintage and likens maternal mortality statistics to Nazi propaganda [ http://rp1.abs-cbnnews.com/-depth/08/15/12/sotto-likens-11-moms-dying-nazi-propaganda ]. He also refuses to explain how his wife’s oral contraceptive killed their son in 1975, when that pill wasn’t even on the market until 1978 [ http://manilastandardtoday.com/2012/08/18/sotto-voce/ ] and was released in Asia only in 1985.
But in the Philippines, the facts may never matter — especially when power and religion are involved. A speech cobbled off the Internet, speculation about a dead baby and a melodramatic crying fit in the Senate, sadly, ring true enough.
Miguel Syjuco [ http://us.macmillan.com/author/miguelsyjuco ], a Filipino writer, is the author of the novel “Ilustrado [ http://www.amazon.com/Ilustrado-A-Novel-Miguel-Syjuco/dp/0374174784 ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/opinion/in-the-philippines-a-rant-against-birth-control.html
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Petition launched to save ‘world’s worst’ restoration
The images show the original version of the painting Ecce Homo (L) by 19th-century painter Elias Garcia Martinez, the deteriorated version (C) and the restored version by an elderly woman in Spain.
AFP
Agence France-Presse 10:00 am | Monday, August 27th, 2012
MADRID–Ironic art fans have launched a petition to save the “world’s worst restoration”: a retouched, century-old church painting of Christ that has become an international joke.
Cecilia Gimenez, described as being in her 80s, has won global fame with her horribly botched impromptu attempt to restore an oil painting of Christ crowned with thorns, his sorrowful gaze raised to heaven.
The “restored” painting looks like a pale monkey’s face surrounded by fur, with mishapen eyes and nose, and a crooked smudge for a mouth, a style some wits have compared to Picasso’s.
Titled “Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man), the original was painted in oil in 1910 directly onto a column in the Iglesia del Santuario de Misericordia church in Borja, northeastern Spain.
It was showing its age as the paint deteriorated over the years.
But the “restored” version has provided grist for an explosion of jokes across the world this week.
Online commentators in Spain inserted the faces of King Juan Carlos or Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy into their own, digital versions of the restored painting.
More than 5,000 people have now signed an online petition to halt the town’s plan to return the painting to its pre-restoration glory.
The restoration “reveals a subtle criticism of the Church’s creationist theories while questioning a resurgence of new idols,” says the petition launched by a user on http://www.change.org , comparing the retouched painting to the work of Goya, Munch and Modigliani.
Gimenez herself said she had been patching up the painting for years, with the church’s knowledge.
“The priest knew,” the elderly, neatly dressed lady in spectacles told public television TVE.
“Everyone who came in could see me painting.”
Despite the derisive coverage, with some media calling it worst restoration in history, Gimenez said she was an accomplished artist. “I had a four-room exhibition — I sold 40 paintings,” Gimenez said.
The church painting was no masterpiece, completed in two hours by a local man, Elias Garcia Martinez, just over a century ago.
But the original artist’s granddaughter, Teresa Garcia, was unimpressed by the brushed-up version.
“Until now the only thing she had touched was the tunic,” Garcia told TVE.
“The problem is that now she has meddled with the head and, clearly, she has destroyed the painting.”
The town hall has not yet decided whether to sue over the botch job, which was performed a month ago. “It would be different if it was vandalism,” said the town councillor for culture, Juan Maria de Ojeda.
“She did it with the best faith in the world,” the restorer’s sister, Esperanza Gimenez Zueco, told daily newspaper El Mundo.
“She just wanted to give it a bit of color.”
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Also read:
Elderly woman botches ‘restoration’ of Christ painting
http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/63602/elderly-woman-botches-restoration-of-christ-painting
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Copyright 2012 Agence France-Presse
http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/63612/petition-launched-to-save-worlds-worst-restoration [with comment]
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Published on Aug 27, 2012 by RWWBlog
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/focus-family-kicks-off-rnc-prayer-rally-americas-future
Highlights from pre-RNC prayer rally with Michele Bachmann, Rick Scarborough, Jim Garlow, Mat Staver, Pam Olsen and Harry Jackson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSwoQEdyIHw
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Another creationist group plans on building tourist attraction in Kentucky
By God Discussion Reporter
On August 27, 2012 At 1:07 am
Mark Hansel of The Cincinnati Enquirer [ http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120826/NEWS01/308260057/Another-creation-science-attraction-plans-Northern-Kentucky-home ] reports that the Creation Science Hall of Fame will be raising funds so that it can build a brick and mortar facility in northern Kentucky, between Ken Ham's Creation Museum and his fledgling Noah's Ark Theme Park. The Creation Science Hall of Fame is currently a blog and is not affiliated with Ken Ham's creationist enterprises — although it does name Ham as a "living inductee [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/living/ken-ham/ ]."
According to the donations page of New Jersey creationist group's website [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/donations/ ], "It is our intention to construct a brick-and-mortar museum between Answers in Genesis Ark Encounter and The Creation Museum for all to visit, so that the world can see that creation scientists are ready and able to give and answer for what they believe."
The Creation Science Hall of Fame site also carries a "Creation News" thread that contains stories such as how before the biblical flood, "Pre-Flood Water [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/2012/07/19/creation-2/apologetics/pre-flood-water-cycle-and-first-rains/#more-977 ]" shot up like a jet from the earth's crust and did not rain down as water does today; that NASA's Curiosity that landed on Mars proves intelligent design and that if evidence is found that life forms once existed on Mars [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/2012/08/05/creation-2/creation-news/curiosity-machine-and-motive/#more-1064 ], they actually came from Earth " in the same disaster that caused a Global Flood;" and that because of the theory of evolution [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/2012/08/21/creation-2/apologetics/evolution-science-influencing-government/ ], judges and public servants are rewriting the Constitution of the United States and sending the nation down a path of self-destruction.
(c) 2012 GodDiscussion.com
http://www.goddiscussion.com/100578/another-creationist-group-plans-on-moving-tourist-operations-to-kentucky/ [with comments]
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Creation Science Hall Of Fame To Expand With Kentucky Museum
The Creationism Museum in Kentucky depicts humans and dinosaurs living together.
By Drew Guarini
Posted: 08/27/2012 4:04 pm Updated: 08/27/2012 6:28 pm
Creationism is proving to be a lucrative business for those religious Americans who take the Bible's Genesis story literally. There seems to be a growing demand for museums on a mission to debunk evolutionary theory and promote the belief that life was created by God as laid out in Genesis.
The New Jersey group behind the website Creation Science Hall of Fame [ http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/ ] is putting its efforts into opening a brick and mortar creationist attraction [ http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120826/NEWS01/308260057/Another-creation-science-attraction-plans-Northern-Kentucky-home ] along Interstate 75 in northern Kentucky, according to the Courier-Journal. (Hat tip: FARK [ http://www.fark.com/comments/7290412/Oh-Kentucky-First-you-get-Creation-Museum-then-Ark-Encounter-now-folks-want-to-build-Creation-Science-Hall-of-Fame-there-Do-you-realize-that-even-Florida-Texas-are-starting-to-snicker-behind-your-back ].)
Progress in Kentucky will be determined by how much and how quickly the group can raise capital through donations. Terry Hurlbut, secretary and treasurer of the group, told the Courier-Journal that they're hoping to raise $2 to $3 million to begin construction. Like the group's website, the planned museum will honor those deemed notable believers in creationism, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Samuel F.B. Morse, Louis Pasteur and George Washington Carver.
A recent Gallup poll showed that 46 percent of Americans believe in intelligent design [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/americans-believe-in-creationism_n_1571127.html ], with that belief negatively correlated to education level, and the planned Creation Science Hall of Fame museum is entering a crowded field.
Just 90 miles from the proposed site lies the massive 70,000 square-foot non-profit Creation Museum [ http://creationmuseum.org/ ], featuring depictions of an earth where dinosaurs and humans co-existed. The museum's theory of natural history is largely discounted by every major scientist, academic and expert on record [ http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/prehistoric-time-line/ ].
Answers in Genesis [ http://www.answersingenesis.org/ ], the group behind the Creation Museum, is planning an equally ambitious exhibit named Ark Encounter [ http://arkencounter.com/ ], a Bible-themed amusement park complete with a 500-foot by 80-foot depiction of Noah's ark.
Though the Creation Museum saw a dip in attendance last year to 280,000, down from 404,000 visitors when it opened in 2007, the group was still able to obtain $43 million in tax breaks from the state of Kentucky [ http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/creation-museum-evolves-hoping-add-life-size-ark-170347907.html ] based on projected attendance.
In the same year, nearly $50 million in funding was cut from public education in Kentucky [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/01/23/kentucky-cuts-education-preserves-tax-breaks-for-creationist-theme-park/ ], notes Forbes.
Florida lawmakers have also been kind to creationists. In 2006, they passed property tax exemptions for the Holy Land Experience in Orlando [ http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2009-06-29/business/orl-cfborl-beth-kassab-holy-land-06062909jun29_1_tbn-theme-park-tax-exemption ], where the "world of the Bible comes to life," according to the attraction's website.
Despite these theme parks' non-profit status, some attendees take issue with their entry fees being used for evangelizing purposes [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40725621/ns/travel-destination_travel/t/orlando-theme-park-biblical-proportions/ ]. Others are turned off by the high entry prices in general. While families can go to the Creation Museum and see fake animals at a cost of $30 for adults and $16 for children, they could just as easily go to the nearby Cincinnati Zoo [ http://cincinnatizoo.org/ ] and see real animals for less.
For the Creation Science Hall of Fame, the money-making aspect of the project is on hold for now. Organizers hope to be up and running in five years [ http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/26/4758432/creationism-hall-of-fame-hopes.html ].
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/creation-science-hall-of-fame_n_1833434.html [with comments]
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Creationists plan yet another museum for northern Kentucky
The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
Photograph: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty
Creation Science Hall of Fame plans to honor scientists who further the idea that God created the world 6,000 years ago
Amanda Holpuch
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 August 2012 16.38 EDT
A stretch of interstate in northern Kentucky [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/kentucky ] may soon be the official capital for creationism [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/creationism ] fans across the globe.
Online-only institution the Creation Science Hall of Fame hopes to establish a real-life creationism center located between the Creation Museum [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/06/evidence-creation-museum ] and planned creationism theme park Ark Encounter.
The hall of fame website was launched in February and honors "those who honored God's word as literally written in Genesis." Any scientist who the institution believes furthers the scientifically inaccurate idea that God created the world 6,000 years ago can be included.
"We honor these people, not because we believe everything they say, but because they made critical contributions to creation science and to the explanation of the Genesis story," secretary/treasurer of the hall of fame Terry Hurlbut told the Cincinnati Enquirer [ http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120826/NEWS01/308260057/Another-creation-science-attraction-plans-Northern-Kentucky-home ].
There are several creationism institutions in the US, including another creation museum in Texas and a mobile museum that takes fossil exhibits to churches and schools. The hall of fame would solidify northern Kentucky as the center for creation-tourism.
The Creation Museum opened in May 2007 and was built by Answers in Genesis, the Australian ministry that is also behind Ark Encounter.
Ark Encounter – which would feature a life-size replica of Noah's Ark – was supposed to break ground in Kentucky in 2011, but has been unable to reach its $24.5m fundraising goal.
Creation Science Hall of Fame organizers are asking for between $2m and $3m and would feature biographies, pictures, and artifacts of inductees.
Their website honors 104 deceased male scientists including Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Faraday and Guglielmo Marconi. To explain why these individuals are included, the site excerpts biography information from the book Men of Science, Men of God, written by a man widely recognized as the father of creationism, Henry Morris.
Honorees also include 12 prominent living figures in the creation science field – again all male. The real-life hall of fame would also include artifacts from people listed on the site's honorable mention list, which features 58 male recommendations from website readers and the hall of fame committee.
In a May 2012 Gallup poll 46% [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx ] of Americans said they believe God created humans in the present form.
Update, 11am Wednesday: Founder and president of the Creation Science Hall of Fame, Nick Lally told the Guardian that the hall of fame is an opportunity to honor scientists who are taking a risk by advocating creationist beliefs. "That's why we honor those who honor God's word as literally written in Genesis," Tally said. "Because they do stick their necks out, they do say what their observations are."
Lally, a former public school teacher, said the Creation Science Hall of Fame is also an educational tool for students, especially those that are homeschooled. He hopes the brick and mortar version of the website will be open in the next five years.
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-news-blog/2012/aug/28/creationism-museum-northern-kentucky [with comments]
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I’m all for concentrating the stupid in one place
Posted by PZ Myers on August 28, 2012
Do you remember Terry Hurlbut? Of course not. He’s another boring creationist [ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/06/such-blithe-liars/ ] whose schtick is to claim that creationists really are scientists [ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/31/if-i-had-some-ham-i-could-make/ ] — after all, Isaac Newton was a creationist. He also maintains something called the “Creationist Hall of Fame [ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/20/creationist-kook-defends-his-c/ ]” which lists a lot of legitimate pre-Darwin thinkers and 20th century crackpots. His “Hall of Fame” is just a website, but he dreams big: he wants to put up a real building with…what? I don’t know. Printouts of his articles?
Anyway, the semi-interesting thing he wants to do is build that edifice to idiocy somewhere near the Creation “Museum” [ http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2012/08/28/because-the-world-needs-another-creationist-museum/ ]. It’s a legitimate business plan, I think; the concentration of deluded fools spikes in the vicinity of Answers in Genesis, and that’s his market. AiG has nothing to do with it, though — I wonder if they’d resent someone tapping into their pool of suckers? Or if they’d see it as an addition to their vortex of stupid? It depends on Hurlbut’s ideological purity, I suppose.
© 2012 ScienceBlogs LLC
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/28/im-all-for-concentrating-the-stupid-in-one-place/ [with comments]
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The Republican National Convention: Where Social Darwinism Meets Theocracy
By Joseph A. Palermo
Posted: 08/26/2012 1:14 pm
At the 1988 Republican National Convention, Vice President George H.W. Bush talked about a "kinder and gentler" America. Four years later Patrick Buchanan scared the hell out of the country by declaring a "culture war." In 2000 George W. Bush gave us "compassionate conservatism." The Bush stratagems were cunning responses to focus groups and public opinion polls that show beating up on the poor and the weakest among us can make people feel uncomfortable. In 2012 we can expect more culture war rhetoric, but it will be clouded by the soothing sounds of reasonableness and moderation.
The trick thus far for the Romney-Ryan ticket has been to pretend to want to "save" Medicare even while putting forth Ryan's "voucher" plan [ http://articles.boston.com/2012-08-22/politics/33301729_1_medicare-advantage-current-medicare-recipients-future-medicare-payments ] that would end Medicare, not only "as we know it," but end Medicare period. The lies and distortions about their schemes for privatizing Medicare (which have been swirling around Republican circles for decades) are the 2012 election's equivalent of "kinder and gentler" and "compassionate conservatism": empty slogans designed to beguile voters.
What we'll hear all week at the RNC are expressions of an ideological witch's brew, a fusion of Ayn Rand [ http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/ayn_rand%2C_hugely_popular_author_and_inspiration_to_right-wing_leaders%2C_was_a_big_admirer_of_serial_killer ]'s Social Darwinism with the Reverend Jerry Falwell [ http://www.nndb.com/people/558/000022492/ ]'s vision of an American Theocracy. Rand glorified sociopaths. Falwell believed the Bible foretold a nuclear Armageddon. They've got no choice but to pander to their Christian evangelical base as well as to their corporate overlords; a bone goes to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Perkins_%28politician%29#Family_Research_Council ] while a juicier chunk of meat will go to the Koch brothers [ http://www.kochbrothersexposed.com/ ].
The Romney-Ryan Republicans are giving us Rand's Social Darwinist economic prescriptions, which hold that if an individual lacks the wherewithal to thrive in a "free" capitalist society that person deserves to die in a gutter somewhere, merged with Falwell's social diktats banning abortion (even in cases of rape and incest), gay bashing, a militarized foreign policy, and a continuation of the "War on Drugs."
If they advocated only the Randian side of the equation there at least would be no restrictions on abortion, gays could go their merry way, and everybody could smoke weed. Things like school prayer, the 10 Commandments in public buildings, abstinence-only sex "education" would be laughed out of court. Conversely, if they gave us a truly "Christian" set of governing principles, (as opposed to the Falwell strain), omitting the Randian Social Darwinism, we'd at least get a government that cared a little bit about the poor, took care of the weak, and might not be so quick to go to war.
As it stands, we get the Social Darwinism without the libertarianism, and the religious strictures on individual behavior without the compassion for the poor and the valuing of peace. In other words, we get the worst of both ideologies.
This epistemological schizophrenia is secular yet religious, amoral yet moralizing.
And lo and behold! The Republicans' idée fixe just happens to serve perfectly the interests of the ruling corporate elite in American society! It's a menu of ideas that give the 1 percent everything it wants. (The Supreme Court's ruling [ http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7536905 ] that money equals speech and corporations deserve stronger Constitutional safeguards than people codify this worldview.)
It's as though with every minute of right-wing talk radio, every 24-hour news cycle at Fox, and every spittle of words strung together by Romney, Huckabee, Priebus, Ryan, and the rest of them at the convention, they have set out to prove to the world that power equals knowledge, and the ideas that are the most widely disseminated in any society are those that best serve the narrow class interests of its ruling elite.
It's kind of funny that a tropical storm is heading toward Tampa right when the GOP is kicking off its lovefest. Since about 1900 the American people have looked to the federal government for help when their locales are hit with natural disasters -- you know, the government we're all supposed to despise.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/rnc-romney-ryan_b_1830782.html [with comments]
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Be Careful What You Vote For! Be Very Careful
By Sherman Yellen
Posted: 08/26/2012 4:26 pm
This is a warning/prophecy by an old guy. Having reached the biblical age where I am allowed to offer blessings, spit out curses, and issue wild-eyed prophecies, I have decided to get them all over with in this one all-purpose blog.
I don't think of myself as aged (I was just as cranky at thirty and I still get around pretty good) and my wife hates for me to use that ugly three-letter word -- OLD -- we are both chronic age deniers - but to deny my age at 80 would be like denying global warming during this fetid, never-ending New York summer. It's hot and getting hotter, and I'm old and getting older. I am more than worried, but not about the aging process. I accept the inevitable as I see my friends and contemporaries leave the scene, but what I cannot so easily accept is the inevitability of the Romney/Ryan election. I find that this is the scariest, most dangerous election that America has faced in my lifetime, and I've been around long enough to experience quite a few frightening ones.
Since I have a fair record of losing at the ballot box I have come to understand that my losses were not irreparable. That is until this election. I cast my first vote for Adlai Stevenson who lost to Dwight Eisenhower. As a kid growing up during WWII, I admired Eisenhower as a war hero, but as a young adult I didn't believe that war heroes were the best men to usher in peace and prosperity, and I was charmed by Stevenson's literacy and golden tongue. Frankly, I did not like Ike. Eisenhower proved me wrong. He helped to rebuild the country, proved himself a more than decent president despite his caution during the McCarthy era and surrounding himself with the smear monger Nixon and a few sleazy characters in vicuna coats, he warned about the military industrial complex, and helped in his own slow, cautious way to calm the Cold Wa, made some small progress with Civil Rights, and built a highway system that helped shape this country into a great postwar power. And after Ike I kept losing more than winning at the ballot box. I lost in my second vote against Richard Nixon. I lost in my vote against Ronald Reagan, and I lost and lost and lost again in my vote against George Bush senior and junior. And both the country and me survived our losses. Arguably, not so well after W: Indeed, disastrously so, still we were able to pick ourselves up as best we could, scrape off some of the dirt, smear on some anti-biotic salve, put on a clean bandage, and vote his party out of office.
We now live in a different time since Bush's Supreme Court left us with Citizens United, Karl Rove's political fundraisers, and the Tea Party. Quite simply these people aided by the Koch Industries' billions will try to buy the coming presidential election. And they may well succeed. The polls are close enough to cause a progressive like myself to worry a lot. And people are desperate in these hard economic times resulting from the last Republican recession to forget who caused their troubles, and to seek relief in a new set of rouges with a new set of promises. This time I fear it will be different. Indeed, I know it will be different.
Elections are the best tool we have for gaining a representative government. But they can also be the beginning of an end for the democratic process. Whoever believes that the Muslim Brotherhood will be voted out of power in Egypt should they prove too extreme and bring in a radical Sharia law is hopelessly naïve. Not all totalitarian regimes are brought in by military coups. Some are voted in. Germany in 1932 brought in fascism by electing it (with a little help from the SS murderer/bullies) [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=13127379 and preceding and following].
And now we have the possibility of a Mitt Romney presidency. I am not one of your fair-minded liberals who will give any points to Romney for his past business acumen, his alleged charities, or his former progressivism as Governor of Massachusetts. I find Romney to be a totally new political creature -- the sociopath as a square. He learned nothing from tethering his poor dog to the top of his car and riding full speed ahead to Canada -- and it is America whom he will now tether to his presidency, and the ride will be horrendous for young and old. No bathroom stops while Daddy Mitt is driving. I think he is probably the most dangerous man to run for the presidency in my lifetime, and that includes Nixon. He has lied time and again, distorting his own record while dissembling about the president's Medicare reforms, denying the public the right to examine his taxes and past business practices, and promising to help the elderly and the poor by destroying the very safety net that they are clinging to. Moreover, he is determined to win by hook or crook, forget the hook, there is enough crook in new Voter ID regulations to turn some of the swing states in his directions by denying the vote to minorities. Having no core of his own, the emptiness inside him can and will be filled by those who have bought him his presidency.
The prosperity he promises to the country is the prosperity we now have -- belonging only to that notorious 1%. And the liberties he promises to usher in will be freedom from the very taxes that support a civil society, freedom from Social Security which only spoils the elderly, freedom from Medicare and Medicaid, freedom from pollution controls, freedom from freedom itself in the case of women's bodies and minority rights. These amazing vouchers he so loves that promise to replace everything from SS, Medicare, Public Education, are a gift that will not stop giving -- to insurance cronies and educational profiteers. All of it is clear and out there, nothing is hidden from view, and to deny it and pretend that the etch-a-sketch will move him towards the center while the Koch brothers and the far right wing control that Romney toy is preposterous. This is the man who mocks President Obama for stating the obvious, that nobody succeeds on their own without the help of a functioning government. Perhaps he is one of the few who can say that because he did not need the government, all he needed was his rich father's success to start him on the road to a good education (with time out for a little gay bashing as he cut off the hair of a kid he held down). The lesson then as now, "Conform or we will force you to do so." Inside every bully is that totalitarian instinct waiting to take power.
Having voted Romney/Ryan into office with their disastrous foreign policy moves (trust me that war with Iran and Syria is going to happen under Romney -- so sayeth the Prophet) and with the country thrown into a greater poverty with the total destruction of trade unions and the outsourcing of any decent jobs, and with women's rights and gay rights rescinded, it should seem easy to vote Romney out in four more years with an energized, enraged populace. No way. He will be a war president who can and will assume war powers. That little thing called martial law can make civil liberties disappear in a nano-second. Immigrants will be regarded as a national security danger, and all protestors will be called traitors during the never-ending war. Forget your voting ID. Every citizen will need a national ID card that carries with it their political allegiance and enough information to control their lives. The freedom that is promised is the freedom from freedom.
The drone society that we see in that old Fritz Lang movie Metropolis, a German film that preceded the rise of fascism and WWII, is a warning of what can happen here. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis famously wrote in the 1930s that when fascism came to America it would not be wearing jackboots but would come in a very American shape. He was referring to the demagoguery of a Huey Long, not the Babbitry of a Mitt Romney, but Lewis knew that the denial of our rights would emanate from the ordinary, not the ranting, raging, dictator.
I will probably not be around to know if my prophecy of a Romney-ruled dystopian America will come true. I hope it is only my fantasy caused by my fear and loathing for these men with their shape-shifting characters and indecent policies. But I have a seven-year-old granddaughter, and a pair of four-year-old twin grandchildren who will be here. I love them beyond anything in my life -- save my wife of sixty years -- and for their sakes I do not believe that we can risk the Romney/Ryan presidency -- for as my wise old mother used to say, "If you dance with the devil, the devil calls the tune."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sherman-yellen/be-careful-what-you-vote-_b_1831147.html [with comments]
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Ryan, Rand and 'Altruism'
By Michael Brenner
Posted: 08/27/2012 10:13 am
Ayn Rand -- of Fountainhead / Atlas Shrugged fame -- hasn't been in the news since one of her prize disciples, Alan Greenspan, proclaimed her as the inspiration for a way of thinking that brought the world financial system to wrack and ruin. Rand spawned a juvenile creed of unmitigated selfishness that resounded for a while with young egoists who fantasized that they were 'supermen' who should disdain the social ethics that enslaved lesser men. She, and her dogma, has now reemerged as the model for Paul Ryan's inchoate thoughts about the evil of government, the gold standard, and the virtue of getting rich at any cost -- among other brilliant ideas for rescinding the social policies of the 20th century.
The phenomenon's significance lies not in the anthropological curiosity item that is the sociopathic Randian sect. More compelling is its melding with atavistic elements of American tradition into a movement of the disaffected, the deluded self-styled heroes, the status deprived, and the cynical that is endangering the humane decency of the country we have worked to perfect over 225 years.
The sect's component groupings, in their various modulations, having annexed the Republican party, are on the verge of seizing control of the entire federal government. Once in their hands, the levers of power will be used to restore the free-wheeling, government-lite America of the 19th century, only in the economic sphere, where the domination of financial elites will be consolidated. In the social and cultural spheres, they will be used to impose codes of conduct that cripple liberties. The latter was not the ideal of Ayn Rand (she favored unrestricted abortion rights), but rather confirmation of the inescapable destination to which a mutant form of her doctrine leads when all sense of community is denigrated. For one is disparaging humanity thereby.
Alexis de Tocqueville long ago identified the two Achilles heels in American popular democracy that could be our undoing, if we are not alert to the danger: extreme individualism and extreme materialism. Today, we are witnessing that threat as manifest. Those intertwined, mutually reinforcing impulses shape our attitudes and guide our behavior about private affairs and public affairs alike. Together, they have prepared the ground for the successes of the Tea Party, of its willing instrument -- the Republican Party, and of those seekers of power and/or glory who either drive the movement or simply find it in their personal interest to gloss over the unsettling truth about the pathologies that are deforming American ideals.
For narcissism is now the national religion. That is to say, a religion that recognizes only one sovereign power and worships at only one altar -- the all-demanding and all-consuming self. Narcissism is dressed out in a multiplicity of styles -- masquerading as enlightened reform (doing away with the rights of salaried workers and their access to public services, deregulation, privatization); as old time religion (God and his prophet as a spiritual Swiss army knife that justifies prejudice and encourages fearful, sweaty egos in their relentless search for 'meaning'); as family responsibility (looking after the extended Number 1 menaced by those anonymous forces who would steal your comfort and transfer it to the unworthy); as defense of 'Liberty' for true, rugged individualistic Americans whose gun collection is the only thing that stands between freedom and socialists, aliens, terrorists and other assorted hobgoblins imagined by insecure and fevered personalities.
The extent to which a narcissistic perspective on life has permeated our consciousness is evident in the current discourse about 'altruism.' How do we explain something that is counter to common sense? What social influences lead some people some of time to behave in this odd way? Is it religious dicta inscribed in holy books whose lessons have been drummed into us in houses of worship? It may be inborn in mothers sacrificing for their offspring but why should it include 'others' who are natural competitors of their progeny?
This mysterious thing called 'altruism' covers a wide range of behaviors: freely giving away money and goods (i.e. philanthropy); lending a helping hand to strangers; worrying and carrying about groups in society that you have no direct connection with; coming to the assist of the vulnerable who could be viewed as burdens on productive members of society and/or simply the losers in the game of natural selection. These questions today are earnestly debated in serious journals, on the web, in scholarly circles, and in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times -- the ultimate arbiter of upper middle-brow thinking.
The fundamental point is that the question is almost universally considered legitimate and puzzling. For it is widely taken as given that "altruism" is an aberration from the norm. In truth, it indeed has become an aberration in terms of how vast numbers of people relate to their fellows. We have lost track of who we are. We have lost track of human identity as a social being. We have lost track of our evolution as members of communities -- immediate and abstracted. We overlook some elementary facts about ourselves.
Humans have an instinct to bond -- in families, in extended families, in small tribal groupings, in larger tribes. We have a further capacity for empathy that extends beyond those groupings. It doesn't take social learning, much less instruction, to feel the impulse to protect an endangered relation -- or any other member of the species for that matter. In fact, these instincts are readily observable among higher mammals, primates surely and also others, e.g. an elephant herd, a lion pride. Even a rogue elephant, the pachyderm counterpart to the Randites' 'superman,' has been filmed coming to the rescue of a stray baby stalked by predators -- oblivious to the risk he is running of weakening the moral fiber of the elephant community by this unseemly act of altruism. Yet for many, similar behavior among humans is interpreted as requiring a special explanation. They get nothing from the animal kingdom while grasping for convenient verities in the prolix pages of Ayn Rand and the like. Quite apart from nature shows, one can only shudder at the impoverished lives these people must experience. They "dwell in deficiency," to borrow a phrase from the Gnostic gospels.
This narcissism grounded pathology is most widespread in the United States. More qualified variations are surfacing in Western Europe, especially within the copy-cat government of Britain's David Cameron. But only a doctrinaire few over there can contemplate repealing the great advances of the past century that have extended the logic and sentiment of human solidarity to entire countries. Only a few can imagine a society that amends the admonition that "humanity is the ultimate measure of what we do" while embracing a doctrine of all against all with the privileged getting a head start. Only a few can fail to see the connection between implementing a plan of greedy individualism and the reversion of relations among countries to the conflict mode of yesteryear. America, unfortunately, is the trailblazer and pacesetter -- and it is Americans, politicians and journalists and intellectuals, who are having a powerful influence on how the rest of the world thinks about all this.
The developed world, in the second half of the 20th century, achieved something historic; something that only visionaries in an earlier era could have imagined. Societies build on practical principles of mutual obligation and individual dignity enjoying unprecedented domestic tranquility and material well-being. That required acts of intellectual, ethical and politically creativity. Positive inertia kept them going. For the past 30 years or so, that positive inertia has given way to a combination of complacency about of the fruits of our great achievement and disparagement of its mainspring.
Today, especially in the United States, a new class of ambitious strivers are making their mark by destruction -- not by creation. It is an alliance of the powerful and power hungry, the insecure comforted by fanciful nostrums, and the opportunists. The last is a broad, heteroclite assemblage -- in academia, media, politics and the professions. They will have the most to answer for as the project of destruction progresses.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/paul-ryan-ayn-rand_b_1833040.html [with comments]
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Romney’s absurd assertions
By Jonathan Capehart
Posted at 07:45 PM ET, 08/27/2012
The great thing about being at the convention is that you’re in the middle of history in action. The bad thing is that there’s so much going on that you end up missing everything. For instance, the interview Mitt Romney did with Politico. He said two things that were just plain absurd. One involved himself, the other President Obama.
Romney discussed the yawning personality gap between himself and the president, which has Americans viewing Obama as more likeable than Romney. “I know there are some people who do a very good job acting and pretend they’re something they’re not,” Romney told Politico [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80166.html ]. “You get what you see. I am who I am.” And who might that be?
The Post editorial on Sunday [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-a-serious-candidate-please-stand-up/2012/08/24/3701660e-ed19-11e1-9ddc-340d5efb1e9c_story.html ] summed up perfectly why his La Cage Aux Folles [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lupNzpcpDRk (and see http://www.onetermmore.com/video_subtitles.html {via http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79013786 })]-esque pronouncement is absurd.
In the case of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, part of what underlies the unease is an uncertainty about core beliefs. Every politician will change positions over a career; you’d worry if he or she didn’t. But few have covered as much ideological ground as the former Massachusetts governor: on abortion, stem cell research, health-care reform, gun control, immigration, gay rights, climate change and more.
It may seem a small thing, but when a man who’s been hunting twice can blithely say that he’s been a hunter “pretty much all my life,” it makes people wonder what is real. His attacks on primary opponents Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich for revealing even a sliver of pragmatic concern for undocumented immigrants suggested an ethos of winning at any cost and a deficit of principle. The sketchiness of his policy proposals since then only aggravates the concern.
The Romney absurdity involving Obama concerns what he thinks the president was able to get done during his term. “I do believe that people of this country are looking for someone who can get the country growing again with more jobs and more take-home pay, and I think they realize this president had four years to do that,” he told Politico. “.?.?. He got every piece of legislation he wanted passed, and it didn’t work.”
That Obama “got every piece of legislation he wanted passed” will come as news to his administration. Romney rails against the president on job creation, but is mute on Congress’ inaction on the American Jobs Act that the president sent to Capitol Hill almost a year ago. After two years of haranguing Obama with “Where are the jobs?” the GOP leadership suddenly seemed less than interested in his proposal.
But the lack of interest in working with Obama was by design. Thanks to Robert Draper [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/robert-draper-anti-obama-campaign_n_1452899.html ] and Michael Grunwald [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451642326 ] we know that Republicans had it in for Obama before Day 1 [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/republicans-had-it-in-for-obama-before-day-1/2012/08/10/0c96c7c8-e31f-11e1-ae7f-d2a13e249eb2_blog.html ]. At what point will Romney acknowledge Republican complicity in the president’s and the nation’s economic “failure”?
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/romneys-absurd-assertions/2012/08/27/af7fcb28-f09f-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_blog.html [with comments]
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The GOP's Big Lie on Job Creation
By Robert S. McElvaine
Posted: 08/27/2012 9:13 am
The entire Republican case in the election rests on the following claim, being made [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-paul-ryan-takes-on-obama-energy-policies-in-colorado-20120814,0,421223.story ] in varying wordings in the stump speeches of both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan:
"Without a doubt President Obama inherited a difficult situation. Here's the problem: He made it worse!"
The above graph, showing average annual job creation under Democratic and Republican administrations since 1945, with 2009 separated out as a year in which the disastrous level of job loss was plainly the result of the policies under George W. Bush, shows just how wrong that assertion is.
Since the effect of the stimulus and other Obama policies took effect, the level of job creation in his administration has been higher than that under four of the last six Republican presidents.
For the full story, see a piece I did for the New York Times this week:, "Has Obama Made the Job Situation Worse? [ http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/has-obama-made-the-job-situation-worse/ (nexy below)]"
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-s-mcelvaine/the-gops-big-lie-on-job-c_b_1827627.html [with comments]
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Has Obama Made the Job Situation Worse?
By ROBERT MCELVAINE
August 22, 2012, 12:35 am
“Without a doubt President Obama inherited a difficult situation. Here’s the problem. He made it worse,” Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential candidate, has been saying [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-paul-ryan-takes-on-obama-energy-policies-in-colorado-20120814,0,421223.story ] in his stump speech.
Ryan’s statement consists of two parts; the first is gross understatement, the second gross misstatement. It is the misstatement that is the essence of the case Republicans are putting before American voters: That President Obama has made the economy worse. Getting voters to believe that assertion is probably the Republicans’ only hope of winning the election.
In the latest poll [ http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/_Today_Stories_Teases/August_NBC-WSJ_Int_Sched.pdf ] (a Wall Street Journal and NBC News survey released on Tuesday), respondents favor President Obama over Gov. Romney — generally by wide margins — in almost every category other than improving the economy. On “caring about average people,” for example, Obama is favored by an extraordinary margin to 52 percent to 30 percent.
So the argument that President Obama has made the economy worse is not only central to the Republicans’ case, it’s pretty much all they have. But the facts do not support their claims.
The following graph, which I put together using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, traces the annual rate of job creation under Democratic and Republican administrations from Harry Truman to Obama — with 2009 separated out as a year in which any fair-minded person would agree that the “difficult situation” Obama inherited was the main driving force. It dramatically illustrates just how wrong Ryan’s assertion is.
Source: Wall Street Journal, Bureau of Labor Statistics
Republicans who are wondering how Obama could be polling as well as he is with unemployment above 8 percent might want to take a look at this graph. It makes two points very clear.
First, jobs have historically, without exception, been created at a much faster rate under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.
Look at the 64-year period from the start of Harry Truman’s presidency to the end of that of George W. Bush (1945-2009).
During the 28 years of Democratic administrations in that period, 57.5 million new jobs were created, an average of 2.05 million per year.
During the 36 years of Republican administrations in that period, 36.2 million new jobs were created, an average of 1.0 million per year.
The bottom line is that over the 64 years leading up to the inauguration of President Obama, jobs were created more than twice as fast under Democrats as they were under Republicans.
Even a glance at the graph shows that Barack Obama and his policies did not make the “difficult” — disastrous would be a more accurate term — situation he inherited worse.
Here is a second graphic illustration of what has happened in job creation under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It also uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
In the eighteen months from the beginning of 2008 through the middle of 2009, a period fully shaped by the Bush economic program to which Republicans now want to return, (but before the Obama stimulus had a chance to take effect), approximately 7.5 million jobs were lost.
Over the most recent 18 months of the Obama administration, approximately 2.8 million jobs have been added.
That means that the average monthly job loss during the “difficult situation” before Obama’s policies took effect was 417,000. Over the last year-and-a-half, the average monthly job gain has been 155,000.
If Rep. Ryan and Gov. Romney see that as making a bad situation worse, it should tell us something about their “vision.”
Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of history at Millsaps College. His most recent book is the 25th anniversary edition of “The Great Depression [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Depression-America-1929-1941/dp/0812923278 ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/has-obama-made-the-job-situation-worse/ [with comments]
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U.S. Annual Income Fell More During Recovery Than Recession: Study [GRAPHS]
By Harry Bradford
Posted: 08/24/2012 1:53 pm Updated: 08/24/2012 4:50 pm
We may technically be in a recovery, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
Median annual income has declined 4.8 percent [ http://www.sentierresearch.com/paypalpurchase.html ] from $53,508 to $50,964 since the recovery technically began in June 2009 , according to a new study from Sentier Research. That's nearly double the 2.6 percent drop during the recession.
One especially hard-hit group: Americans aged 55 to 64, who saw their annual income drop nearly 10 percent. But African-Americans have felt the pain the most during the recovery as their incomes declined 11 percent.
“Based on our data, almost every group is worse off now than it was three years ago,” Gordon Green, co-author of the report, wrote in a press release.
Household median income has fallen since the recovery:
However, there are some groups that have actually been faring better since the beginning of the recovery; Americans over 65 saw their income levels rise. And though recent trends may be disheartening, Americans' incomes have been increasing over the past 50 years [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/big-income-losses-for-those-near-retirement/ ], the NYT points out.
Still, another recent report has shown that America's middle class has been shrinking since 2008 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/22/middle-class-lost-decade_n_1822661.html ]. A poll taken that year found that 53 percent of Americans considered themselves in the middle class. Now only 49 percent do.
But these two recent reports aren't the only ones with gloomy news about Americans' earnings. In 2010, the annual median wage fell to its lowest level since 1999 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/20/us-incomes-falling-as-optimism-reaches-10-year-low_n_1022118.html ] at $26,364, according to David Cay Johnston at Reuters. Real wages also fell last year [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/31/wages-2011-record-corporate-profits_n_1244297.html ], even as corporate profits reached record highs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Income has fallen especially for certain demographics:
(Hat tip: Los Angeles Times [ http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-household-income-fell-during-economic-recovery-study-finds-20120823,0,6601675.story ])
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/24/us-annual-income-recovery-recession_n_1828127.html [with comments]
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The United States In 2012: A Status Update For The Country
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER
Posted: 08/25/2012 12:46 pm Updated: 08/26/2012 1:15 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) — We're heavier in pounds and hotter by degrees than Americans of old. We're starting to snub our noses at distant suburbs after generations of burbs in our blood. Our roads and bridges are kind of a mess. There are many more poor, and that's almost sure to get worse.
The oddly American obsession with picking up and moving on — "this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance," as Alexis de Tocqueville noted nearly 200 years ago — has given way to the un-American activity of going nowhere. But check back tomorrow.
Such swirling changes are not fodder for a State of the Union speech, but they are part of the state of the union nonetheless, on the eve of the Republican National Convention that convenes briefly Monday with the full schedule starting Tuesday, and the Democratic convention that follows it a week later. The country that President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are vying to lead for the next four years is not quite the same as the one four years ago, not nearly the same as the one further back in time.
Our taste for McMansions, for example, has slightly soured in recent years in favor of more affordable abodes.
We, like, speak differently than our forebears, new twists on the same tongue. LOL.
Soldiers are flowing home from the wars; this is almost what peace looks like.
A paint-by-the-numbers portrait:
WHERE WE LIVE
Like much else, where we live is shaped by how — or whether — we make a living. But larger forces than that seem to be at work in determining Americans' chosen places.
U.S. cities and closely surrounding areas are experiencing more growth than farther-off suburbs for the first time in at least 20 years. The cost and bother of commuting are part of the reason. The average commuter spends over 30 hours stuck in traffic per year, says the Texas Transportation Institute, up from 14 hours in 1982. That's the time spent going nowhere or at a crawl.
As well, city life is becoming the choice of more young and old people, as the attractions and convenience rival the long-held American dream of affordable home ownership, which usually means farther out.
Meantime, the historic migration of Southern blacks to the North has reversed, with black populations rising in Southern cities and suburbs, especially among the more affluent.
But the overarching recent development in where we live is that we aren't moving much at all.
Mobility is the lowest it's been in the 60 years it has been tracked by the Census Bureau, with only 11.6 percent of the nation's population moving in the past year. That's just over half the level in 1951, the biggest year for Americans on the move, 21.2 percent. More adult children are living with parents because of economic hardship, fewer older people are able to retire to sunny climes and the housing bust further contributed to locking the restless in place.
Average home size dropped 5 percent from 2007 to 2010, to a little under 2,400 square feet. It's still a far cry from the 750-square-foot, one-story, 2-bedroom Levittown prototypes that sparked the suburban boom and brought modest homes within reach of the masses after World War II.
Though they paved paradise and put up housing lots, the U.S. remains heavily treed. One-third of its land area is forested, a proportion that has been stable since the beginning of the past century. But after the devastation of American chestnuts that grew by the billions in Eastern forests and of the elms that gave so many towns an Elm Street, today's forests and urban greenery are not the same as in the past.
Meantime asphalt and iron have fallen into disrepair: Nearly one in four of the country's 605,086 bridges is rated deficient.
HOW WE COMMUNICATE
Until World War II in residential areas and well beyond in rural America, telephone party lines were common. If you wanted to make a phone call, you had to wait for Velma down the road to finish gossiping on the same line, interrupt the chitchat to ask her to hang up — or just cover the speaker and eavesdrop on the juicy details. (Velma was a popular name from the 1890s through the 1930s, then no more). In party-line days, a major technological advance came when Ma Bell developed distinct rings for different homes on the line, so everyone didn't pick up each time the phone jangled.
These days, the dedicated landline that took over from the party line is itself fading, as Americans' favorite gadget, the cellphone, spreads in numbers and smarts.
The number of people with wireless only and no traditional landline phone has grown fourfold since 2005, the government estimates. In 2005, less 8 percent of adults lived in households with only wireless telephones. Now it's more than 32 percent. Nearly nine in 10 adults own a cell.
The day Obama's Democratic convention opened in 2008, Facebook announced its 100 millionth user, a benchmark it actually took longer to reach than its now-overshadowed rival, Myspace. Facebook is closing in on its billionth user, sitting with Twitter as kings of the social-media mountain until something else knocks them off.
WHO WE ARE
Fatter. The average woman has gained 18 pounds since 1990, to 160 pounds; the average man is up 16 pounds, to 196, Gallup found.
Poorer as a whole, but richer than during the recession. The value of people's homes, stocks and all other assets stood at $62.9 trillion in March, the latest count, down from $66 trillion before the economy tanked but up from $51.3 trillion at the downturn's depths.
Indebted, but perhaps not up to the eyeballs. Credit card debt has declined about 14 percent since 2008. Americans also have less mortgage debt, but more student debt and auto loans. The savings rate, meantime, climbed to 4.2 percent last year, a big improvement from 1.5 percent in 2005. But then there is the government. It is indebted past the eyeballs.
Hotter: The period from July 2011 to June 2012 was the warmest 12-month stretch on record. Altogether, the contiguous states posted an annual all-season average temperature of 56 degrees in that period, which is 3.3 degrees hotter than either of the years that Obama and Romney were born. The hottest calendar year on record for the U.S. is 1998, at 55.08 degrees, but that may not last this year's swelter and lack of winter. Most of the past 15 years have been among the steamiest on the books, and all 15 were hotter than Romney's birth year, 1947, and Obama's, 1961.
More numerous. The U.S. has 314 million people. The country surpassed 200 million in 1968 and 300 million in 2006.
More diverse. For the first time, more than half the children born in the U.S. are racial or ethnic minorities, and by 2040 or several years after, non-Hispanic whites are expected to become a minority of the population. Along with this trend has come a historic jump in interracial marriages, which now make up an estimated 8.4 percent of marriages, up from 3.2 percent in 1980.
Addicted to texting. Cellphone users sent an average of 13 text messages a day in December 2008, double the number from a year earlier, the government said. More recently, Pew researchers found the average teen sent more than 64 texts a day.
Older. Between 2000 and 2010, the population of people aged 45 to 64 grew by close to one-third as the baby boom generation and those behind it grayed. That has helped to push the median age to 37.2 — half the population younger than that, half over.
A lot of those young people are named Sophia, the top girl's name for the first time, and Jacob, No. 1 choice for boys for the past 13 years. So long Mary and James, the dominant names over 100 years.
WHAT WE THINK:
On the issues of the day, the economy has no near rival atop the list of concerns. Pocketbook matters often rule but Americans were heavily focused on war in the early going of the last campaign. As the recession deepened, though, and now with troops coming home, it's been the economy plain and simple — the issue ranked important by more than 9 in 10 respondents to an AP-GfK poll out this past week.
About half of us approve of the job Obama is doing, the poll found. About half disapprove. Voters are about evenly split on the race, and among those who lean to one man or the other, very few are open to changing their minds. Obama's years-ago vision of a nation of united states soaring above the divisions of red states and blue states seems a pipe dream in a fractious time.
The sharp lines and stagnant views are evident in public opinion on gun laws, abortion, health care, taxes and the federal budget deficit — on which polling has long shown wide divergence. The Pew Research Center reports that partisan polarization on basic policy questions is at its highest point in 25 years.
One exception has been support for gay marriage. In May of 2008 as Obama was wrapping up the Democratic nomination, just 40 percent of Americans told Gallup's pollsters same-sex marriages should be recognized by the law as valid. This May, 50 percent said yes to the same question, the most striking shift in social attitudes during Obama's presidency. Still, more than 30 states have passed measures against it and it's frequently a losing issue at the ballot box. There are no united states on this question.
Polarization doesn't stop at politics or policy, either. It appears to be embedded in personal relationships. A pre-convention Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll found Democrats and Republicans tend to be surrounded by fellow partisans — two-thirds of their friends and family share their party leanings.
Many of us belong to tribes tinted red or blue.
WHAT WE EARN
Few could have seen it coming back when Bill Clinton was scrambling to salvage his presidency from the Monica Lewinsky business, but his later years in office are starting to look like one of the economy's golden ages. Unemployment was low, the government miraculously took in what it spent and the stock market marched steadily upward, at least until the bubble burst.
Household income peaked in 1999, at $53,252 in today's dollars, and has declined since, to $49,445 in 2010. That puts households back to where they were in the mid-1990s.
But an even bigger rewind to an earlier time seems to be happening with the poor.
In July, The Associated Press found a broad consensus among economists and scholars that the official poverty rate is on track to reach its highest level in nearly half a century, erasing distinct — if modest — gains from the 1960s "war on poverty" that expanded the safety net with the introduction of Medicaid, Medicare and other social welfare programs.
The wealth gap between younger and older has grown into an unprecedented divide. Older people always have more net worth than younger adults on average, but now those 65 and over have 47 times more than adults under 35. It used to be only 10 times more, a quarter-century ago.
Overall, the value of goods and services produced in the country has returned to pre-recession levels, though with 5 million fewer people working. That makes the U.S. more productive and competitive. But when combined with meager income gains during that time, it also suggests we're working harder for roughly the same pay.
WHAT WE PAY
Housing prices have dropped by a striking 34 percent since late 2006. That's good if — only if — you're buying.
Tuition is up 15 percent at four-year public universities and almost 10 percent at private four-year institutions from 2008 to 2010.
Gas? It's a rollercoaster. The U.S. saw 91 cents a gallon only 13 years ago, during Clinton's presidency. The average price hit $2 in May 2004, $4 in June 2008, then plunged before that year's election, spiked and rollercoastered along, sitting now at $3.74 a gallon.
In 2008, workers paid an average of $3,354 for a year's worth of job-based health insurance, more than double their cost from nine years earlier, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported. In 2011, that average grew to $4,129. Not only did premiums rise, but many more workers were picking up the first $1,000 or more of health care costs as deductibles grew and employers shifted more health costs to employees.
WHO WE WERE
Norman Rockwell's America may have come and gone, if it ever existed, but the much younger nation de Tocqueville, the French philosopher, saw in his 1830s travels is still recognizable in its older age. For all the new colors, bold strokes of the past still show.
Want some age-old perspective on why Republicans fought Obama's health care law up to the Supreme Court this year? De Tocqueville wrote: "There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one."
Both a scold and admirer, he found Americans obsessed with money, tending to "move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts," quick to form agitating associations, reveling in an "always moving scene," loving change because it "seems to give birth only to miracles," and apt to rise from their stitched-from-many-nations roots to light up the world.
You'll hear lots about change if you tune into the conventions. To be seen: whether we still believe in miracles.
Associated Press writers Jennifer C. Kerr, Seth Borenstein and Hope Yen, and Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/25/america-2012-status_n_1830159.html [with comments]
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For GOP, Pitfalls In Ignoring Poor
By Peter S. Goodman
Posted: 08/27/2012 12:01 am
Almost a decade ago, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney delivered a State of the Commonwealth address in which he struck a now familiar pose. Here was the tough-minded leader come to deliver fiscal discipline. Yet even as he proposed substantial budget cuts, he included a rhetorical nod that now stands out as a reminder of how much he and his party have changed.
"When it comes to caring for the poor, the disabled and the elderly," Romney said [ http://myclob.pbworks.com/w/page/21957797/Governor%20Mitt%20Romney%27s%202003%20State%20of%20the%20Commonwealth%20Address ], "Massachusetts is one of the most generous states in the nation. And despite facing the worst fiscal crisis in a generation, we will stay one of the most generous."
Lest you are tempted to brush this off as an anomalous quote from a then-moderate governor of the state that produced Ted Kennedy, consider Ronald Reagan's words [ http://www.nationalcenter.org/ReaganConvention1980.html ] as he accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1980. Tucked into a speech mostly devoted to pledges to trim the government, he added this: "We Republicans believe it is essential that we maintain both the forward momentum of economic growth and the strength of the safety net beneath those in society who need help."
We are unlikely to hear similar words from Romney this week as he takes the podium at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., to accept his own nomination for the presidency. Not unless he is inclined to risk being hauled from the stage by the mob of ideological extremists who have captured his party.
In the modern-day Republican camp -- a tribe that would have cast out Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and even Reagan as namby-pamby liberals -- disdain for the poor is embraced as a virtue, a signifier that sentimentality will not get in the way of dismantling the social safety net.
People who depend upon the aid of the government via food stamps, unemployment checks and mortgage relief are typically written off as parasites and losers. (Meanwhile, corporations that depend upon government largess for bailouts and subsidies are celebrated as paragons of free enterprise, but that's another matter.)
Romney's lexicon has simply been excised of words like "generosity" when it comes to the poor, along with other problematic nouns such as "Massachusetts," "health care," "diplomacy," and "Cayman."
But as the party faithful gather for the coronation, it is nonetheless worth listening to hear what, if anything, they have to say about poor and vulnerable Americans, because the poor and vulnerable constitute a rapidly growing slice of the population.
Republicans can ignore them, demean them, work around them or punish them, but in any scenario poor Americans and close-to-poor Americans are not going away anytime soon.
Back in early 2003, when Romney promised continued generosity for the poor of Massachusetts, his state had an unemployment rate of 5.7 percent. The nation he is vying to lead today has an unemployment rate above 8 percent. Add in people who are working part-time jobs because they can't find full-time positions and people who have given up looking altogether and the so-called underemployment rate swells to 15 percent.
Some 46 million people -- more than 15 percent of the nation -- are officially poor. Tens of millions of formerly middle-class families are threatened [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/13/suburban-povertys-dramati_n_1007332.html ] with joining their ranks. Food banks, unemployment offices and homeless shelters from California [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/silicon-valley-poverty-homeless_n_1302348.html ] to Florida [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/07/foreclosures-florida_n_1132735.html ] are crammed full of people who, for the first time in their lives, are there asking for help.
Some 85 percent of self-identified middle-class Americans complain that maintaining their standard of living today is more difficult than it was a decade ago, according to a study released last week [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/22/middle-class-lost-decade_n_1822661.html ] by the Pew Research Center. Far from an illusory sense of trouble, such sentiment reflects a grim reality: The last decade saw mean family incomes drop for Americans of nearly every income group, the first such decline since the end of the great post-World War II economic expansion, Pew noted.
The hit to household wealth has been even greater, Pew found. Among those with middle incomes, wealth plunged by 28 percent, from nearly $130,000 to just above $93,000. Among those with lower incomes, the relative drop in wealth was even worse -- a cratering of 45 percent, from about $18,000 to $10,000.
You can parse the data however you like. You can apportion blame as suits your story -- the Bush tax cuts, the wanton embrace of taxpayer-supported gambling on Wall Street, outsourcing, the rise of China, Obama's feckless economic policies, Republican obstructionism. But the ending looks like this: Millions of people who used to have enough savings to get them through a rough patch don't anymore, making them extremely vulnerable.
No matter what happens now, regardless of who lives in the White House next year, tens of millions of Americans are going to face difficulty finding work, paying their bills, supporting their children and securing health care. They are going to need help.
Romney knows this, but that may now be irrelevant. He and his running mate, Paul Ryan -- who plays a fiscal conservative on the stump while handing out tax cuts to rich people -- have branded themselves the guys who will take an axe to government spending. If they win, they will be beholden to those who wrote the checks to engineer their victory -- mostly major corporations and their executives, who are keen on paying as little in taxes as possible. They have promised to gut the safety net. Walking that back would be both politically dangerous and arithmetically impossible, given their tax cut promises.
Romney and Ryan are running a campaign centered on turning out their base in abundant numbers while depressing turnout among likely Obama supporters, with barriers at polling places [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/gop-voter-id-data-voter_n_1773142.html ] (impeding low-income and minority voters), and a relentless stream of cynical television advertising that seems designed to disgust and exhaust all but the hardiest citizens.
Disparaging the poor and vowing to take apart the social safety net may turn out to be good politics for the Republicans this time, because it appeals to those inclined to see Obama as a champion of big government. For middle-class people threatened with downward mobility, rejecting government as a source of wasted expenditure is a natural impulse. This is how we got President Reagan: Wage growth had been stagnating and many people needed more cash, making tax cuts compelling.
But the Republican gimmick of promising prosperity through tax cuts while handing most of the loot to the wealthy can only work for so long. Most Americans get how this story played out during the splendiferous reign of George W. Bush.
As more middle-class families suffer growing proximity to poverty, Republicans will face greater electoral risks in ignoring the needs of people who require help. More than merely heartless, this strategy will widen the distance between Republicans and the experiences of Americans who used to feel secure and don't anymore.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/republicans-poor-mitt-romney-paul-ryan_b_1825205.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Benefited From Government Bailout: Report
Mitt Romney benefited from a government bailout of Bain & Co., a Rolling Stone article says.
By Mark Gongloff
Posted: 08/30/2012 1:48 pm Updated: 08/30/2012 5:42 pm
If you happen to see Mitt Romney talking about his time at Bain Capital, keep this in mind: The government helped him build that.
The question of who built this or that particular business is one of the tentpoles of the entire Republican National Convention [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/2012-republican-national-convention ], at which Romney will be speaking Thursday night, accepting his party's nomination to run for president.
It's a riff on a mangling of some words President Obama once spoke [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-ZO7XOpwa8 ], which, if edited in a certain way [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/08/28/_you_didn_t_build_that_but_you_sure_did_edit_it.html ], seem to suggest that Obama thinks people who built businesses didn't really build them -- that Big Government did instead.
The funny thing about this meme is that many of the people [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/steven-cohen-screen-machine_n_1842995.html ] saying they did build their businesses [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/sher-valenzuela-parody-site_n_1834207.html ] in fact got a bit of government help [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/phil-archuletta-gop-convention_n_1838173.html ] along the way.
And one person who has gotten quite a lot of government help with his business over the years has been Mitt Romney.
The latest example comes from Rolling Stone, which in its Sept. 13 issue tells how the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. ended up footing a bill of at least $10 million in bailing out Bain & Co. [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-federal-bailout-that-saved-mitt-romney-20120829 (next below)], the consulting firm that spawned the private-equity firm Bain Capital. The story is based partly on documents the magazine received under the Freedom of Information Act [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/mitt-romneys-federal-bailout-the-documents-20120829 ]. It will probably get a lot less attention than Matt Taibbi's cover opus on Romney in the same issue [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829 ], but is no less interesting.
Bain & Co. got into deep financial trouble in the late 1980s, partly because the founding partners of Bain Capital had stripped it of cash and saddled it with debt. But since the personal reputation of Romney was so tied to the fate of the Bain & Co, he jumped back into the company in 1990, after six years as CEO of Bain Capital.
In that time, he refused to let the company simply slip into bankruptcy, RS claims, reportedly inspiring a frustrated Goldman Sachs banker to tell Romney to "go fuck" himself.
Ultimately, Romney managed to convince Bain's creditors to take a steep discount on Bain debt, using a threat to pay Bain executives big bonuses that would have stripped it of the cash it had left, leaving creditors with next to nothing, according to Rolling Stone.
One of those creditors was the FDIC, which had taken over a bank that loaned money to Bain. The FDIC ended up collecting about $14 million of the $30 million Bain owed it, according to the magazine. Taxpayers didn't foot the bill for this, FDIC banks did, but RS points out that those costs were in turn probably absorbed by bank customers in the form of higher fees.
If this reed feels a little too thin to beat Romney very aggressively with, then there are plenty [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113 (twelfth item at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75782089 and preceding and following)] of other examples [ http://swampland.time.com/2012/02/15/mitt-romney-took-advantage-of-government-subsidies-at-bain/ ] of companies owned [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/romney-solyndra-bain-subsidies ] by Bain Capital benefiting [ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/21/romney%E2%80%99s_record_as_a_crony_capitalist/ ] from government tax credits and subsidies. Bloomberg news detailed several of these back in June [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-06/romney-critical-of-government-aid-that-helped-bain-profit.html (first item at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76443615 and preceding and following)], writing:
The public-private agreements, which began in the first decade of Romney’s tenure as CEO, show that government played a supporting role in establishing Bain as among the nation’s most successful private equity firms and enabling him to accumulate a fortune his campaign says could reach $250 million.
Despite this largesse, Bloomberg pointed out, Romney in a March 19 speech decried the government's “endless subsidies and credits intended to shape behavior in our economic society." Including economic behavior that makes him money, apparently.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/mitt-romney-bain-bailout_n_1843601.html [with comments]
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The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney
JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GettyImages
Government documents prove the candidate's mythology is just that
By Tim Dickinson
August 29, 2012 7:00 AM ET
Mitt Romney likes to say he won't "apologize" for his success in business. But what he never says is "thank you" – to the American people – for the federal bailout of Bain & Company that made so much of his outsize wealth possible.
According to the candidate's mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."
In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.
With his selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has made fiscal stewardship the centerpiece of his campaign. A banner at MittRomney.com declared, "We have a moral responsibility not to spend more than we take in." Romney also opposed the federal bailout for Detroit automakers, famously arguing that the industry should be forced into bankruptcy. Government bailouts, he insists, are "the wrong way to go."
But the FDIC documents on the Bain deal – which were heavily redacted by the firm prior to release – show that as a wealthy businessman, Romney was willing to go to extremes to secure a federal bailout to serve his own interests. He had a lot at stake, both financially and politically. Had Bain & Company collapsed, insiders say, it would have dealt a grave setback to Bain Capital, where Romney went on to build a personal fortune valued at as much as $250 million. It would also have short-circuited his political career before it began, tagging Romney as a failed businessman unable to rescue his own firm.
"None of us wanted to see Bain be the laughingstock of the business world," recalls a longtime Romney lieutenant who asked not to be identified. "But Mitt's reputation was on the line."
The trouble began in 1984, when Bain & Company spun off Bain Capital to engage in leveraged buyouts and put Romney in charge of the new operation. To free up money to invest in the new business, founder Bill Bain and his partners cashed out much of their stock in the consulting firm – leaving it saddled with about $200 million in debt. (Romney, though not a founder, reportedly profited from the deal.) "People will tell you that Bill raped the place clean, was greedy, didn't know when to stop," a former Bain consultant later conceded. "Did they take too much out of the firm? You bet."
The FDIC documents make clear what happened next: "Soon after the founders sold their equity," analysts reported, "business began to drop off." First came scandal: In the late 1980s, a Bain consultant became a key figure in an illegal stock manipulation scheme in London. The firm's reputation took a hit, and it fired 10 percent of its consulting force. By the time the 1989 recession began, Bain & Company found itself going broke fast. Cash flows weren't enough to service the debt imposed by the founders, and the firm could barely make payroll. In a panic, Bill Bain tapped Romney, his longtime protégé, to take the reins.
In Romney's own retelling, he casts himself as a selfless and loyal company man. "There was no upside," he told his cheerleading biographer Hugh Hewitt in 2007. "There was no particular reason to do it other than a sense of obligation and duty to an organization that had done great things for me."
In fact, Romney had a direct stake in the survival of Bain & Company: He had been working to build the Bain brand his entire career, and felt he had to save the firm at all costs. After all, Bain sold top-dollar strategic advice to big businesses about how to protect themselves from going bust. If Bain & Company went bankrupt, recalls the Romney deputy, "anyone associated with them would have looked clownish." Indeed, when a banker from Goldman Sachs urged Bain to consider bankruptcy as the obvious solution to the firm's woes, Romney's desperation began to show. He flatly refused to discuss it – and in the ensuing argument, one witness says, Romney almost ended up in a brawl when the Goldman banker advised him to "go fuck yourself." For the sake of Romney's career and fortune, bankruptcy was simply not an option – no matter who got screwed in the process.
According to the government records obtained by Rolling Stone, Bain & Company "defaulted on its debt obligations" at nearly the same time that "W. Mitt Romney . . . stepped in as managing director (and later chief executive) in 1990 and led the financial restructuring intended to get the firm back on track."
Romney moved decisively, and his early efforts appeared promising. He persuaded the founders to return $25 million of the cash they had raided from Bain & Company and forgive $75 million in debt, in return for protection from most future liabilities. Romney then consolidated Bain's massive debts into a single, binding loan agreement with four banks, which received liens on Bain's assets and agreed to delay repayments on the firm's debts for two years. The federal government also signed off on the deal, since the FDIC had recently taken control of a bank that was owed $30.6 million by Bain. Romney assured creditors that the restructuring would enable Bain to "operate normally, compensate its professionals competitively" and, ultimately, pay off its debts.
Almost as soon as the FDIC agreed to the loan restructuring, however, Romney's rescue plan began to fall apart. "The company realized early on that it would be unable to hit its revenue targets or manage the debt structure," the documents reveal. By the spring of 1992, Bain's decline was perilous: "If Bain goes into default," one analyst warned the FDIC, "the bank group will need to decide whether to force Bain into bankruptcy."
With his rescue plan a bust, Romney was forced to slink back to the banks to negotiate a new round of debt relief. There was only one catch: Even though Bain & Company was deep in debt and sinking fast, the firm was actually flush with cash – most of it from the looted money that Bill Bain and other partners had given back. "Liquidity is strong based on the significant cash balance which Bain is carrying," one federal document reads.
Under normal circumstances, such ample reserves would have made liquidating Bain an attractive option: Creditors could simply divvy up the stockpiled cash and be done with the troubled firm. But Bain had inserted a poison pill in its loan agreement with the banks: Instead of being required to use its cash to pay back the firm's creditors, the money could be pocketed by Bain executives in the form of fat bonuses – starting with VPs making $200,000 and up. "The company can deplete its cash balances by making officer-bonus payments," the FDIC lamented, "and still be in compliance with the loan documents."
What's more, the bonus loophole gave Romney a perverse form of leverage: If the banks and the FDIC didn't give in to his demands and forgive much of Bain's debts, Romney would raid the firm's coffers, pushing it into the very bankruptcy that the loan agreement had been intended to avert. The losers in this game would not only be Bain's creditors – including the federal government – but the firm's nearly 1,000 employees worldwide.
In March 1992, according to the FDIC documents, Romney approached the banks and played the bonus card. Allow Bain to pay off its debt at a deep discount, he demanded – just 35 cents on the dollar. Otherwise, the "majority" of the firm's "excess cash" would "be available for the bonus pool to its officers at a vice president level and above."
The next month, when the banks balked at the deal, Romney decided to prove he wasn't bluffing. "As the bank group did not accept the proposal from Bain," the records show, "Bain's senior management has decided to go forth with the distribution of bonuses." (Bain's lawyers redacted the amount of the executive payouts, and the Romney campaign refused to comment on whether Romney himself received a bonus.)
Romney's decision to place executive compensation over fiscal responsibility immediately put Bain on the ropes. By that July, FDIC analysts reported, Bain had so little money left that "the company will actually run out of cash and default on the existing debt structure" as early as 1995. If that happened, Bain employees and American consumers would take the hit – an alternative that analysts considered "catastrophic."
But Romney didn't dole out all of Bain's cash as bonuses right away. According to a record from May 1992, he set aside some of the money to put one last squeeze on the firm's creditors. Romney now demanded that the banks and the government agree to a deal that was even less favorable than the last – to retire Bain's debts "at a price up to but not exceeding 30 cents on the dollar."
The FDIC considered finding a buyer to take over its loans to Bain, but analysts concluded that "Bain has no value as a going concern." And the government wasn't likely to get much out of Bain if it allowed the firm to go bankrupt: The loan agreement engineered by Romney had left the FDIC "virtually unsecured" on the $30.6 million it was owed by Bain. "Once bonuses are paid," the analysts warned, "all members of the bank group believe this company will dissolve during 1993."
About the only assets left would be Bain's office equipment. The records show FDIC analysts pathetically attempting to assess the value of such items, including an HP LaserJet printer, before concluding that most of the gear was so old that the government's "portion of any liquidation proceeds would be negligible."
How had Romney scored such a favorable deal at the FDIC's expense? It didn't hurt that he had close ties to the agency – the kind of "crony capitalism" he now decries. A month before he closed the 1991 loan agreement, Romney promoted a former FDIC bank examiner to become a senior executive at Bain. He also had pull at the top: FDIC chairman Bill Seidman, who had served as finance chair for Romney's father when he ran for president in 1968.
The federal documents also reveal that, contrary to Romney's claim that he returned full time to Bain Capital in 1992, he remained involved in bailout negotiations to the very end. In a letter dated March 23rd, 1993, Romney reassured creditors that his latest scheme would return Bain & Company to "long-term financial stability." That same month, Romney once again threatened to "pay out maximum bonus distributions" to top executives unless much of Bain's debt was erased.
In the end, the government surrendered. At the time, The Boston Globe cited bankers dismissing the bailout as "relatively routine" – but the federal documents reveal it was anything but. The FDIC agreed to accept nearly $5 million in cash to retire $15 million in Bain's debt – an immediate government bailout of $10 million. All told, the FDIC estimated it would recoup just $14 million of the $30 million that Romney's firm owed the government.
It was a raw deal – but Romney's threat to loot his own firm had left the government with no other choice. If the FDIC had pushed Bain into bankruptcy, the records reveal, the agency would have recouped just $3.56 million from the firm.
The Romney campaign refused to respond to questions for this article; a spokeswoman said only that "Mitt Romney turned around Bain & Company by getting all parties to come to the table and make difficult decisions." But while taxpayers did not finance the bailout, the debt forgiven by the government was booked as a loss to the FDIC – and then recouped through higher insurance premiums from banks. And banks, of course, are notorious for finding ways to pass their costs along to customers, usually in the form of higher fees. Thanks to the nature of the market, in other words, the bailout negotiated by Romney ultimately wound up being paid by the American people.
Even as consumers took a loss, however, a small group of investors wound up getting a good deal in the bailout. Bain Capital – the very firm that had triggered the crisis in the first place – walked away with $4 million. That was the fee it charged Bain & Company for loaning the consulting firm the services of its chief executive – one Willard Mitt Romney.
This story is from the September 13, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.
*
Related
Mitt Romney's Federal Bailout: The Documents
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/mitt-romneys-federal-bailout-the-documents-20120829
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829
Right-Wing Billionaires Behind Mitt Romney
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/right-wing-billionaires-behind-mitt-romney-20120524 [and see (first item at) (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76512619 and preceding and following]
How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109 [at (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69085167 and preceding and following]
*
Copyright ©2012 Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-federal-bailout-that-saved-mitt-romney-20120829 [with comments]
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Companies Desperately Fleeing Super-Low U.S. Tax Rates: Report
US companies are constantly complaining about their tax rates, which are the lowest in 40 years.
By Mark Gongloff
Posted: 08/29/2012 1:50 pm Updated: 08/29/2012 3:27 pm
Taxes: If you only read the Wall Street Journal, you might think they are the biggest problem in America right now.
The WSJ, for example, has run two news stories in the past two days about companies straining against the bonds of outrageously high U.S. corporate tax rates.
On Tuesday, the WSJ wrote that U.S. manufacturers want lower tax rates [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443324404577593050498878564.html ], citing a study by the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy that declares U.S. manufacturers have a "typical marginal effective tax rate" of 35.6 percent, the highest in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
On Wednesday, the WSJ had a story about a handful of companies that have just had enough [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444230504577615232602107536.html ] of all this egregious taxation and are abandoning America for countries that will tax them less. This story asserted that the U.S. has an overall corporate tax rate of 35 percent, the highest among developed nations, this time without bothering to give a source. It takes the additional step of noting that Ireland's tax rate is 12.5 percent -- even stupid little Ireland has a lower tax rate than the U.S., gah, the story says (I am paraphrasing).
First, about that "typical marginal effective tax rate" in the Tuesday story about manufacturers -- it's not a real tax rate. It's designed to measure the attractiveness of investing in a country. Unfortunately, the WSJ doesn't link to the study it cites, and the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy could not identify the source for the 35.6 percent number. The school did publish a paper in 2011, which calculated a 2010 marginal effective tax rate [ https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://policyschool.ucalgary.ca/sites/default/files/research/83countryreport.pdf ] for U.S. manufacturers of 32.7 percent. That rate may have changed a bit because of inflation, but probably not by much.
In any event, this "marginal effective tax rate" number shouldn't be compared to actual tax rates, because it's really designed to be a measure of incentives for business investment, taking tax rates mandated by law and adjusting them for stuff like depreciation allowances.
Update: Extraordinarily boring mystery solved: The School of Public Policy has done more investigation and discovered the 35.6 percent number comes from a presentation it recently made on Capitol Hill. There's no link. What's more, that number is the METR for all industries, not just for manufacturing, which is 33.9 percent. The school says it made a mistake and gave the WSJ the wrong number. Anyway, as I said, these METR numbers are apples, other tax rates are oranges.
In any event, big numbers like these -- let's just go with 35 percent -- have brought this over-taxation meme dangerously close to becoming accepted Conventional Wisdom. Even President Obama, apparently engaging in a rare new form of socialism, has proposed lowering the corporate tax rate [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/10/obama-corporate-tax-rate_n_1269738.html ] to 28 percent from 35 percent.
The small hitch in that plan, as The Huffington Post's Alexander Eichler pointed out, is that U.S. companies actually already pay much less than 28 percent in corporate taxes [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/22/obama-corporate-tax-breaks_n_1293512.html ].
The trouble here is in how you define the corporate tax rate. The rate cited on Wednesday by the WSJ is based on an OECD measure of statutory tax rates [ http://www.oecd.org/tax/taxpolicyanalysis/oecdtaxdatabase.htm#C_CorporateCaptial ]. These are the rates the laws of the land prescribe, but companies manage to find ways to skirt those laws, between loopholes and various tax subsidies.
In fact, the two companies profiled in Wednesday's WSJ story each paid less than 35 percent in taxes when based in the U.S. One company, Aon, paid 28 percent, on average, over the past five years before fleeing to the U.K. The other, Ensco, paid 19 percent in 2009, before it left the U.S. for the U.K., where it now pays a 10.5 percent rate.
The 10 most profitable companies in the U.S., including Apple and Exxon Mobil, paid an average tax rate of just 9 percent [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/most-profitable-corporations-tax-rate_n_1746817.html ] last year, according to a study by the site NerdWallet [ http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/markets/2012/corporate-taxes-only-9-percent/ ].
If you want to get technical about it, many large companies essentially turn a profit on taxes, according to a recent Citizens for Tax Justice study [ http://www.ctj.org/pdf/notax2012.pdf ].
And even as Obama was coming up with his proposal to cut corporate tax rates, the Congressional Budget Office pointed out that corporate tax receipts as a percentage of corporate profits tumbled to just 12.1 percent in fiscal 2011, the lowest rate since 1972 [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/03/418171/corporate-taxes-40-year-low/ ].
Obama has proposed closing some of the loopholes that let companies pay lower rates than 28 percent, which is one reason businesses aren't exactly throwing parades over his plan to lower the statutory rate. In fact, one company mentioned in the WSJ story, Rowan Cos., says it is leaving the U.S. because of its fear of loophole shrinkage.
The problem here is that tax rates will never be low enough for any companies. Some of the same companies that pay no taxes are among those complaining most loudly about taxes [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/20/558931/corporation-that-paid-nothing-in-taxes-for-four-years-tells-congress-it-pays-too-much-in-taxes/ ].
Nobody really enjoys paying taxes, and it's only natural -- maybe even a duty to shareholders -- for companies to constantly try to pay less. But we've got to call them out when they try to snow us with fake numbers.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/corporate-tax-rate-us-2012_n_1839693.html [with comments]
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One Man Against The Wall Street Lobby
By Simon Johnson
Posted: 08/25/2012 6:15 pm
Two diametrically opposed views of Wall Street and the dangers posed by global megabanks came more clearly into focus last week. On the one hand, William B. Harrison, Jr. -- former chairman of JP Morgan Chase -- argued in the New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/dont-break-up-the-big-banks.html ] that today's massive banks are an essential part of a well-functioning market economy, and not at all helped by implicit government subsidies.
On the other hand, there is a new powerful voice who knows how big banks really work and who is willing to tell the truth in great and convincing detail. Jeff Connaughton -- a former senior political adviser who has worked both for and against powerful Wall Street interests over the years -- has just published a page-turning memoir that is also a damning critique [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/why-does-wall-street-always-win/ ] of how Wall Street operates, the political capture of Washington, and our collective failure to reform finance in the past four years. The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins [ http://jeffconnaughton.com/the-payoff-why-wall-street-always-wins/purchase/ ], is the perfect antidote to disinformation put about by global megabanks and their friends.
Specifically, Mr. Harrison makes six related arguments regarding why we should not break up our largest banks. Each of these is clearly and directly refuted by Mr. Connaughton's experience and the evidence he presents.
First, Mr. Harrison claims that megabanks are the natural outgrowth of requests from customers, rather than the result of extraordinary resources spent on lobbying over the past 30 years. Mr. Connaughton's book contains all you need to know -- and more than you can stomach -- about the realities of how the influence industry has worked diligently to build and defend megabanks. The people who really wanted the banks to become bigger were the executives in charge of those organizations -- like Mr. Harrison. They spent a lot of money to make this happen.
Second, Mr. Harrison takes the view that global megabanks at their current scale provide some special services that cannot be otherwise provided by smaller financial institutions.
As Mr. Connaughton points out -- including in a new blog post [ http://jeffconnaughton.com/mr-harrison-defends-his-mega-creation/ ] -- there are no economies of scale or scope in banks with over $100 billion of total assets. Our largest banks, properly measured, now have balance sheets between $2 trillion and $4 trillion. Plenty of people have attempted to show megabanks produce some magic for broader economy-wide productivity or multinational nonfinancial firms, but there is simply no evidence. Again, read Mr. Connaughton's book for more detail -- or look at my book with James Kwak on this topic, "13 Bankers [ http://13bankers.com/ ]".
Third, Mr. Harrison claims "large global institutions have often proved more resilient than others because their diversified business model ensures that losses in one part of the enterprise can be cushioned by revenues in other parts."
Mr. Connaughton's book reminds us, with some eloquence, that Citigroup and Bank of America -- the largest U.S. financial institutions in 2008 -- would have failed if it were not for the government bailouts that they received. As a matter of simple historical fact, the "more resilient" in Mr. Harrison's version of history is exactly the same as observing that those banks were seen by officials as "too big to fail." Their resilience came solely from support provided by the government and the Federal Reserve.
Fourth, Mr. Harrison denies that very large banks receive any implicit government subsidies. To support this view, Mr. Harrison suggests we should compare borrowing costs across financial and nonfinancial firms that share a similar bond rating (e.g., AA); he points out that the interest rate paid by financial firms in this comparison is higher. But the interest rate at which a company borrows depends not just on the risk of default, but also on the "recovery value" in the case of default (i.e., how much do creditors end up with after the company has been wound down). If you think you will recover less when I default, you should charge me a higher risk premium -- and thus a higher interest rate.
Mr. Harrison compares apples (finance) with oranges (nonfinance) -- and fails to mention that the recovery rate in the latter case is much higher. How much will investors recover in the case of Lehman, for example -- perhaps 25 cents after more than four years? For most nonfinancial companies, default does not by itself result in a big reduction in value (the deadweight costs for bankruptcy of such firms in the US are quite small); large financial firms are quite different (the deadweight bankruptcy costs are typically huge). Mr. Harrison's proposed comparison is simply uninformative -- you need to look at comparisons within the financial sector.
The right comparison is the funding cost of financial firms with and without implicit government support. The funding advantage for those perceived as Too Big To Fail is estimated to be between 25 and 75 basis points; most people close to the issue think it is at least 50 basis points. The idea that megabanks do not get huge, implicit subsides is simply priceless -- again, read Mr. Connaughton's account to see the lengths to which the banks will go to ensure these subsidies are kept in place.
Fifth, Mr. Harrison says that "complexity can be an antidote to risk, rather than a cause of it". On the contrary, the evidence suggests that management has consistently lost control over financial institutions with hundreds of thousands of employees in 50-100 countries. Think about the scandals of this summer: Barclays and Libor; HSBC or Standard Chartered and money laundering; and the severe breakdown of risk management at JP Morgan Chase. In each case, executives claim they did not know what was going on. The very largest banks have become too big to manage.
Sixth, Mr. Harrison claims regulators are not cowed by banks. The Payoff is all about how lobbying really works -- and how legislators and regulators are brought to heel. Money brings influence and influence is used to make more money. It is not about "cowing" anyone; it is about persuading them that you are right and should be allowed to do exactly what you want to do, even though your arguments are completely specious. Mr. Harrison's op ed is a nice example of the genre.
Some regulators have started to stand up to big banks on some issues, and this should be encouraged. But overall, Wall Street prevails on all the major issues, and most top officials at Treasury and the Federal Reserve are only too happy to cooperate.
Mr. Harrison makes strong claims. All of his arguments are demonstrably false. If you think Mr. Harrison and the other defenders of megabanks have even the slightest veneer of plausibility, you must read Jeff Connaughton's book.
Simon Johnson is the co-author of White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters To You [ http://whitehouseburning.com/ ], available from April 3rd. This post is cross-posted [ http://baselinescenario.com/2012/08/25/one-man-against-the-wall-street-lobby/ (with comments)] from The Baseline Scenario [ http://baselinescenario.com/ ].
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. |
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johnson/jeff-connaughton-the-payoff_b_1830566.html [with comments]
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How the Republicans Built It
Editorial
Published: August 28, 2012
It was a day late, but the Republicans’ parade of truth-twisting, distortions and plain falsehoods arrived on the podium of their national convention on Tuesday. Following in the footsteps of Mitt Romney’s campaign, rarely have so many convention speeches been based on such shaky foundations.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, in the keynote speech, angrily demanded that the American people learn the hard truths about the two parties, but like most of those at the microphone, he failed to supply any. He said his state needed his austere discipline of slashed budgets, canceled public projects and broken public unions, but did not mention that New Jersey now has a higher unemployment rate [ http://www.politifact.com/new-jersey/article/2012/aug/26/chris-christies-comeback-scorecard/ ] than when he took over, and never had the revenue boom he promised from tax cuts.
“We believe in telling our seniors the truth about our overburdened entitlements,” he said, but his party has consistently refused to come clean about its real plans to undo Medicare and Medicaid. “Mitt Romney will tell us the hard truths we need to hear to put us back on a path to growth,” he said, but Mr. Romney has consistently refused to tell the truth about his tax plan, his budget plan, and his health care plan.
It was appropriate that “We built it,” the needling slogan of the evening, was painted on the side of the convention hall. Speaker after speaker alluded to the phrase in an entire day based on the thinnest of reeds — a poorly phrased remark by the president, deliberately taken out of context. President Obama was making the obvious point that all businesses rely to some extent on the work and services of government. But Mr. Romney has twisted it to suggest that Mr. Obama believes all businesses are creatures of the government, and so the convention had to parrot the line.
“We need a president who will say to a small businesswoman: Congratulations, we applaud your success, you did make that happen, you did build that,” said Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia. “Big government didn’t build America; you built America!”
That was far from the only piece of nonsense on the menu, only the most frequently repeated one. Conventions are always full of cheap applause lines and over-the-top attacks, but it was startling to hear how many speakers in Tampa considered it acceptable to make points that had no basis in reality.
Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, for example, boasted of the booming economy in his state, never mentioning that he and Mr. Romney opposed the auto bailout that has played an outsized role in the state’s recovery. (Apparently Mr. Obama’s destructive economic policies do not apply everywhere.)
Andy Barr, a Congressional candidate in Kentucky, made the particularly egregious charge that the president was conducting “a war on coal,” ruthlessly attacking an industry and thousands of struggling miners.
He was apparently referring to the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions and prevent power-plant pollution from drifting through the East Coast states. The country desperately needs to reduce its reliance on coal, which is far more polluting than natural gas, but that goal gets harder to achieve every time someone like Mr. Barr makes it out to be an attack on a way of life.
Considering how Mr. Romney has conducted his campaign so far, most recently his blatantly false advertising accusing Mr. Obama of gutting the work requirement on welfare, it is probably not surprising that the convention he leads would follow a similar path.
Voters looking for a few nuggets of truth would not have found them in Tampa on Tuesday.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/opinion/how-the-republicans-built-it.html [with comments]
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Major Republican Speakers Avoid Two Words: "Tea Party"
TAMPA, FL - AUGUST 28: Senate Republican Candidate, Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz speaks during the Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum on August 28, 2012 in Tampa, Florida. Today is the first full session of the RNC after the start was delayed due to Tropical Storm Isaac.
Image by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Not a single prime time mention of the movement after two days of the Republican National Convention. Not Romney's crowd?
Rosie Gray, BuzzFeed Staff
Posted Aug 30, 2012 2:06pm EDT
TAMPA, Fla. — The "Tea Party" brand — which energized and even seemed to overtake the Republican Party in 2010 — has been virtually invisible at this Republican National Convention.
Not a single one of the 38 speakers during the convention's key prime time hours has even mentioned the phrase, according to an examination of their transcripts — a sign both of Romney's own distance from the movement and that polls have suggested that voters view the movement negatively.
One major speaker, Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz, did allude to the Tea Party directly, though he referred to it only as a "great awakening":
Since 2010, something extraordinary has been happening, something that has dumbfounded the chattering class.
“It began here in Florida in 2010. In Utah, Kentucky, Pennsylvania. “Was repeated this summer in Indiana. Nebraska. Wisconsin. “And this past month, in the Lone Star State, Texas.
“What is happening all across America is a Great Awakening.
“A response to career politicians in both parties who’ve gotten us into this mess.
“This national movement is fueled by what unites us: a love of liberty, a belief in the unlimited potential of free men and women."
Senator Rand Paul, another Tea Party favorite, didn't mention it at all.
It's a striking absence for a movement that has grown from a series of protests to a legitimate faction of the Republican Party, with many representatives in Congress and in state governments.
The Romney campaign approves all of the remarks ahead of time and oversees the choice of speakers. A Romney spokeswoman didn't respond to a request for comment about the absence of Tea Party mentions.
Copyright © 2012 BuzzFeed, Inc.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/major-republican-speakers-avoid-two-words-tea-pa [with comments]
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Rand Paul Says Paul Ryan's Budget Is 'Too Tepid' On Eve Of Paul's Convention Speech
08/29/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/rand-paul-paul-ryan-budget_n_1840121.html [with comments] [and see "Rand Paul's Biggest Applause Line: Never Trade Liberty For Security", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/rand-paul-rnc-speech_n_1841610.html ; and as for that, just to note, he's only part-way and selectively there on those points, and then there's e.g. his having recently sponsored a Fetal Personhood Amendment to that latest go-round on flood insurance ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/26/rand-paul-fetal-personhood-flood-insurance_n_1628128.html {with comments})]
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Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan
Published on Aug 29, 2012 by gopconvention2012
Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan delivers the keynote address to the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZipUINVXIc [also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ajbHd7OD2U ] [text at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/paul-ryan-speech-text_n_1829354.html (with comments)]
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Mitt Romney Suggests Obama Welfare Waivers Are A Tactic To 'Shore Up His Base'
08/27/2012 12:49 pm
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney escalated his attacks on President Barack Obama's welfare waivers Monday, suggesting that welfare recipients make up President Barack Obama's political "base."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/mitt-romney-welfare-waivers_n_1832871.html [with comments]
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Obama Goes After Neil Newhouse, Mitt Romney Pollster, Over Controversial Comment
By Melissa Jeltsen
Posted: 08/29/2012 11:16 pm Updated: 08/29/2012 11:40 pm
At a campaign event on Wednesday, President Barack Obama latched onto remarks made by Neil Newhouse, a pollster for Mitt Romney [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/23/mitt-romney-_n_1836139.html ], who said this week the Republican presidential candidate's campaign would not "be dictated by fact-checkers."
Speaking to a crowd in Virginia, Obama brought up the Romney camp's sustained attacks [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/obama-welfare-romney_n_1773301.html ] on his welfare waiver policy. The ads have been widely panned for being factually inaccurate [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120822/us-romney-welfare-strategy/ ].
"I mean, somebody was challenging one of their ads -- they made it up -- about work and welfare. And every outlet said, this is just not true. And they were asked about it and they said -- one of their campaign people said, we won't have the fact-checkers dictate our campaign," Obama said. "We will not let the truth get in the way."
Obama was referencing comments Newhouse made [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/23/mitt-romney-_n_1836139.html ] at a panel organized by ABC News on Tuesday.
Romney's campaign has said that its ads attacking Obama over welfare have been its most effective to date [id.]. Whether they are truthful is another matter. Romney insists they are [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/mitt-romney-welfare-waivers_n_1832871.html ].
On Monday, Obama addressed Romney's claim that he had "gutted" work requirements for welfare recipients in a surprise appearance in the White House Briefing Room [id.].
"Everybody who's looked at this says what Gov. Romney's saying is absolutely wrong," Obama said. "They can run the campaign that they want, but the truth of the matter is you can't just make stuff up."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/obama-neil-newhouse_n_1841647.html [with comments]
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John Kasich: 'We Have To Convince African Americans That They Can Start & Own Businesses'
08/29/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/john-kasich-african-americans_n_1840366.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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CNN Camerawoman: Peanut-Throwing Incident At Republican Convention A 'Wake-Up Call'
At the Republican National Convention, a CNN camerawoman was pelted with peanuts by two attendees who said "this is how we feed animals" on Tuesday, August 28, 20112. The convention organizers denounced the incident as "deplorable."
(Gene Demby/Huffington Post)
By Gene Demby
Posted: 08/30/2012 1:42 pm Updated: 08/30/2012 7:31 pm
The CNN camerawoman who was pelted with peanuts by attendees [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/republican-cnn-attack-animal-peanuts-racist_n_1838249.html ] at the Republican National Convention said that the incident was disheartening, and that it should serve as a wake-up call to black people.
"I hate that it happened, but I'm not surprised at all," Patricia Carroll said to Journal-isms [ http://mije.org/richardprince/cnn-camerawoman-not-surprised-peanut-throwing#Carroll ]. "This is Florida, and I'm from the Deep South. You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don't think I should do."
On Tuesday, two attendees were removed from the arena after they threw peanuts at Carroll, while saying to her, "This is how we feed the animals [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/republican-cnn-attack-animal-peanuts-racist_n_1838249.html ]."
The convention's organizers condemned the incident [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/29/two-people-removed-from-rnc-after-taunting-black-camera-operator/ ], saying, "Two attendees tonight exhibited deplorable behavior. Their conduct was inexcusable and unacceptable. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated."
The incident was first made public by Current TV's David Shuster in a tweet Tuesday night.
David Shuster
@DavidShuster
GOP attendee ejected for throwing nuts at African American CNN camera woman + saying "This is how we feed animals." @TakeActionNews #TAN
28 Aug 12
Carroll went on:
"I can't change these people's hearts and minds," Carroll added. "No, it doesn't feel good. But I know who I am. I'm a proud black woman. A lot of black people are upset. This should be a wake-up call to black people. ... People were living in euphoria for a while. People think we're gone further than we have."
She noted that there weren't many black women at the convention. The whiteness of the Republican convention has been noted by many commentators, and has spawned the facetious Twitter hashtag #negrospotting [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/rnc-black-republicans_n_1842597.html ].
Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, told The Huffington Post on Thursday that in 2008, there were only 36 black delegates of the 2,000 in attendance, and that the GOP needed to do a better job of welcoming people of color.
"The proof is in the numbers," Steele said.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/cnn-camerawoman-peanuts-rnc_n_1843576.html [with comments]
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Team Romney White-Vote Push: ‘This Is the Last Time Anyone Will Try to Do This’
May I have this dance?
By Jonathan Chait
8/27/12 at 8:07 AM
A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/politics/obama-needs-80-of-minority-vote-to-win-2012-presidential-election-20120824 ] outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded [ http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/how_groups_voted/voted_88.html ] over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.
I wrote a long story [ http://nymag.com/news/features/gop-primary-chait-2012-3/ ] last February arguing that the Republican Party had grown intensely conscious of both the inescapable gravity of the long-term relative decline of the white population, and the short-term window of opportunity opened for the party by the economic crisis. I think we’re continuing to see the GOP operate under an integrated political and policy strategy constructed on this premise. This is their last, best chance to win an election in the party’s current demographic and ideological form. Future generations of GOP politicians will have to appeal to nonwhite voters who hold far more liberal views [ http://nbclatino.com/2012/08/13/vp-nominee-ryans-policies-to-the-right-of-most-latino-voters-polls-show/ ] about the role of government than does the party’s current base.
The “2012 or never” hypothesis helps explain why a series of Republican candidates, first in the House and most recently at the presidential candidate level, have taken the politically risky step of openly declaring themselves for Paul Ryan’s radical blueprint. Romney’s campaign has been floating word of late [ http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/romney-james-polk.html ] that it sees a potential presidency as following the mold of James K. Polk — fulfilling dramatic policy change, and leaving after a single term. “Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s controversial budget and entitlement reforms,” reports the Huffington Post’s Jonathan Ward. “Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost politically in order to achieve it.” David Leonhardt [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/sunday-review/romneys-first-100-days.html ] floats a similar sketch, plausibly outlining how Romney could transform the shape of American government by using a Senate procedure that circumvents the filibuster to quickly lock in large regressive tax cuts and repeal of health insurance subsidies to tens of millions of Americans.
Blowing up the welfare state and affecting the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history is a politically tricky project (hence Romney's belief that he may need to forego a second term). Hence the Romney campaign's clear plan to suture off its slowly declining but still potent base. Romney’s political-policy theme is an unmistakable appeal to identity politics. On Medicare, Romney is putting himself forward as the candidate who will outspend Obama, at least when it comes to benefits for people 55 years old and up. Romney will restore the $700 billion in Medicare budget cuts imposed by Obama to its rightful owners — people who are currently old.
He will cut subsidies to the non-elderly people who would get insurance through Obamacare — a program that, Romney’s ads remind [ http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/romney-and-ryan-wage-generational-warfare.html ] older voters, is “NOT FOR YOU.” Romney’s repeated ads on welfare, blaring the brazen lie that Obama has repealed the welfare work requirement, hammer home the same theme. The purpose is to portray Obama as diverting resources from us to them.
In their heart of hearts, Romney and Ryan would probably prefer a more sweeping, across-the-board assault on the welfare state. But the immense popularity of the largest, middle-class social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security force them into the divide-and-conquer gambit. They can promise to hold their disproportionately old, white base harmless and impose the entire brunt of their ambitious downsizing of government on young, poor, and disproportionately nonwhite Democratic constituencies.
There’s no moral or policy rationale for Romney’s proposal to increase social safety net spending on current retirees while cutting Pell Grants, Medicaid, children’s health insurance, and food stamps to shreds [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3767 ]. The nonwhite share of the electorate is increasing fast enough that the political math of this sort of gambit will grow completely impossible — there will simply be, from the right-wing perspective, too many of them and not enough us. But there may be just enough us to pull out one more win, and thus the Republican determination to make such a win as consequential as possible.
Copyright © 2012 New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/2012-or-never-for-gops-white-base.html [with comments]
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The Myth of an Affirmative-Action President
Obama for America
Why, I wonder, do so many people question how Barack Obama got where he is, while no one asks the same about Mitt Romney?
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Aug 29 2012, 10:18 AM ET
El presidente, reporting from Tampa, catches this from Karl Rove [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/karl-rove-on-the-defection-of-white-democrats/261642/ ]:
Speaking of which, if you watch the video, you'll see that while Rove didn't venture a theory for why whites have moved away from Obama in Indiana, he did propose one for a similar dynamic in North Carolina. There, he said, in 2008 "New South independents" (meaning, I think, white independents) who were "racial moderates, economic conservatives" had supported Obama in the belief that "this will be really good for the country -- let's put the issue of race behind us." But now they are disappointed in Obama because he's "done a lousy job on the economy, and he's not a fiscal conservative." This analysis tells a story that Obama was elected, in the first place, because of his race, but that whites now think this was a failed experiment. The echo is pretty hard to miss: We gave a guy a boost he didn't entirely deserve in order to correct a historic wrong; too bad he wasn't up to it. Are white voters ready to conclude that Obama is an affirmative-action president?
It's a familiar echo which goes all the way back to calls for Obama's college transcripts. What Republicans have yet to come to terms with is that Obama -- race aside -- is a formidable politician. You hear echoes of the early days of the integration of black athletes into the sports world, when white racists would contort themselves trying to understand how, exactly, someone like Jack Johnson had prevailed. It's very hard for Rove and his allies to get their heads around the fact that they got thumped in 2008 by an Ivy League black dude from Hawaii. Some scheme must be afoot.
But there's also something else -- the frame of skepticism is, as always, framed around Obama, not around Romney. No one wonders what advantages accrued to Mitt Romney, a man who spent his early life ensconced in the preserve of malignant and absolutist affirmative action that was metropolitan Detroit [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/the-other-detroit/308403/ ]. Romney's Detroit (like most of the country) prohibited black people from the best jobs, the best schools, the best neighborhoods, and the best of everything else. The exclusive Detroit Golf Club, a short walk from one of Romney's childhood homes, didn't integrate until 1986. No one is skeptical of Mitt Romney because of the broader systemic advantages he enjoyed, advantages erected largely to ensure that this country would ever be run by men who looked like him.
This kind of skepticism -- racism at its most common -- is in the air. It surrounds us, and upon this willful ignorance, Americans demand proof of Barack Obama's existence. The better of us attempt to contest such demands with facts. But the contest itself indulges racism. To truly get to the meat of the thing we must understand why some questions are asked and some are not. Why some standards are aggressively enforced and others are not. It would be nice to believe that voter ID laws [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/rep-john-lewis-make-some-noise-on-new-voting-restrictions/261549/ ] are primarily about the desire for a more secure democracy. But I fear that such flattery will get us nowhere.
There's more on this in my September piece, "Fear of a Black President [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/?single_page=true (at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78915505 and preceding and following)]."
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/the-myth-of-an-affirmative-action-president/261697/ [with comments]
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GOP Anti-Porn Plank Added To Draft Platform By Republican Committee
By Nick Wing
Posted: 08/27/2012 2:15 pm Updated: 08/27/2012 2:40 pm
The GOP platform committee has included a plank in this year's draft document calling for "vigorous" enforcement of anti-pornography laws.
In a press release Monday from Morality in Media, a faith-based non-profit, President Patrick Trueman, a former anti-porn prosecutor, calls the current distribution of pornography "a violation of current federal law" and lauds Republicans for approving [ http://reason.com/blog/2012/08/27/morality-in-media-says-the-new-republica ] stricter new wording:
The new language replaces previous platform wording, which only opposed child pornography. It will now read, "Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced." Trueman noted that current federal obscenity laws not only prohibit distribution of hardcore pornography on the Internet but also on hotel/motel TV, on cable/satellite TV, and in retail shops.
In an interview with The Huffington Post's Jen Bendery [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/republican-convention-2012_n_1823525.html?utm_hp_ref=politics#31_gop-against-pornography ], Trueman said youth access to pornography amounted to "a major, major problem," and even caused males in their twenties to develop "porn-induced sexual dysfunction."
"It's the Viagra problem for guys in their 20s," Trueman said. Young males are now spending "10 to 12 years looking at porn on the Internet and masturbating to it, so when they are getting married, they are dysfunctional sexually because their brain maps are changed. They enjoy what they've been doing for 10 to 12 years. Normal sex is not something that gets them excited."
The broader regulation, submitted by Family Research Council president and Louisiana RNC delegate Tony Perkins, also echoes [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/mitt-romney-porn_n_1446654.html ] GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's position on the issue during his previous campaign for the White House.
"I wanna make sure that every new computer sold in this country after I'm president has installed on it a filter to block all pornography and that parents can click that filter to make sure their kids don't see that kinda stuff coming in on their computer," Romney said at a campaign stop in Iowa in 2007.
In February, Romney lent support to a similar effort [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/02/15/426391/romney-anti-porn-pledge-ignores-contribution-pornographer/ ] in response to a Morality in Media questionnaire about cracking down on pornographers.
The Daily Caller reported earlier this year [ http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/18/romney-campaign-quietly-promised-vigorous-porn-crackdown-reagan-prosecutor-says/ ] that Trueman, who served in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, had received an assurance from Romney’s campaign that the former Massachusetts governor would “vigorously” prosecute pornographers if elected president.
For more controversial planks [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/republican-platform-2012_n_1831907.html ] added to the Republican Party platform this year, click through the slideshow below.
[slideshow embedded]
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/gop-anti-porn-plank-platform_n_1833840.html [with additional videos beginning with "Santorum Vows War on Porn" embedded, and comments]
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Amish Beard-Cutting Attacks: Hate Crime Trial Of Sam Mullet Sr., 15 Others Begins
Samuel Mullet Sr. [not pictured] and fifteen other people charged with hate crimes for forcibly cutting the beards of members of the Amish community are going on trial in Ohio this week.
By JOHN SEEWER
08/27/12 06:08 PM ET
CLEVELAND — Prosecutors will begin laying out their case Tuesday against 16 people charged with federal hate crimes in hair-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in Ohio.
A jury was seated Monday for what's expected to be at least a two-week trial for members of a breakaway Amish group from eastern Ohio, including its 66-year-old leader and four of his children.
Prosecutors have said the suspects forcibly cut the beards and hair of Amish men and the hair of women or tried to cover up the five attacks between September and November. Authorities say the attacks were motivated by religious differences.
Sam Mullet Sr. and 15 other Amish men and women are charged with hate crimes, which were filed under a law that makes an attack a federal crime if it was committed because of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or disability.
Other charges include conspiracy, evidence tampering and obstruction of justice. Some of the defendants face prison terms of 20 years or more if convicted.
The defendants say the government shouldn't intrude on what they call internal church disciplinary matters not involving anti-Amish bias. They've denied the charges and rejected plea bargain offers carrying sentences of two to three years in prison instead of possible sentences of 20 years or more.
Defense attorneys on Monday asked potential jurors whether they view the Amish differently because of how they dress or because of their unique religion. They also were asked how much contact they've had with the Amish. One man said he had grown up near an Amish settlement.
"They look different, but they are still American citizens and deserve a fair trial," said attorney Dean Carro, who represents defendant Lester Miller.
The men on trial wore suspenders in court and had long beards while the women wore long dresses and white bonnets.
All but one of the defendants is related to Samuel Mullet Sr.
The hair-cuttings, Mullet said last fall, were a response to continuous criticism he'd received from other Amish religious leaders about him being too strict, including excommunicating and shunning people in his own group. Mullet has said he didn't order the hair-cuttings but didn't stop anyone from carrying it out. He also has defended what he thinks is his right to punish people who break church laws.
Mullet's attorney, Ed Bryan, told potential jurors he was concerned about pre-trial publicity and asked jurors whether they'd be able to judge the defendants fairly.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/amish-beard-cutting-attacks-ohio-trial_n_1833189.html [with comments]
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Amish beard-cutting trial attracts international attention, pitting law of God vs. law of man
Sam Mullet Sr. speaks at his farm in Bergholz last year. He is expected to go to trial on conspiracy and hate crimes charges today.
Amy Sancetta, Associated Press file
Amish women enter the federal courthouse in Cleveland today for the beginning of the trial of 16 Amish defendants -- 10 men with full beards, six women in white bonnets -- who are on trial on charges related to a series of beard- and hair-cutting attacks against fellow Amish men and women last year.
Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer
By James F. McCarty, The Plain Dealer
Published: Monday, August 27, 2012, 6:00 AM Updated: Monday, August 27, 2012, 8:59 AM
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The law of God will collide with the law of man this week in a crowded federal courtroom in Cleveland, where 16 Amish defendants -- 10 men with full beards, six women in white bonnets -- will stand trial on charges related to a series of beard- and hair-cutting attacks against fellow Amish men and women last year.
And the world will be watching.
The case has attracted national and international attention, in part because of public curiosity about the normally reclusive and peaceful Amish community, and because of the peculiar nature of the alleged crimes.
Interest also has been heightened by the fact that the federal government rather than a local prosecutor brought the charges. The case is the first in Ohio to make use of a landmark 2009 federal law that expanded government powers to prosecute hate crimes.
Then there is the prospect of witnesses providing salacious testimony about an Amish bishop providing sexual counseling for married women while forcing other members of his flock to sleep in chicken coops.
Jury selection begins today and the trial is expected to run for three weeks before U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster.
View full sizeMarvin Fong, The Plain DealerAmish women enter the federal courthouse in Cleveland today for the beginning of the trial of 16 Amish defendants -- 10 men with full beards, six women in white bonnets -- who are on trial on charges related to a series of beard- and hair-cutting attacks against fellow Amish men and women last year.
The defendants include an Amish bishop, 66-year-old Samuel Mullet Sr., and 15 of his followers, who broke away from the placid Holmes County Amish community 17 years ago and established a new clan of about 125 members near the hamlet of Bergholz in the verdant hills and valleys of Jefferson County.
Mullet's devoted followers revere him as a modern day Moses who rules his flock with a righteous, iron fist, according to court documents and interviews with neighbors. The father of 18 children, he also is a multi-millionaire who has received more than $2 million for oil fracking rights to his 800-acre farm.
In Mullet's world, the word of God provided the imprimatur for him and his followers to punish enemies as he saw fit. That included cutting their beards and hair -- a humiliation more dreaded in the Amish religion than being "beaten black-and-blue," one of the victims said.
"The beard for Amish men is a symbol of their adult manhood," said Donald Kraybill in an interview last year with National Public Radio. Kraybill is a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and an Amish expert who is scheduled to testify for the prosecution at the Mullet trial.
"So to cut their beard is an assault on not only their personal identity but also on their religious identity and their religious faith," Kraybill said.
In the eyes of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office, Mullet and his followers are a band of renegades waging hate crime attacks motivated by cruelty and retaliation against their enemies. Cutting beards and head hair causes "disfigurement" -- an essential element of a hate crime, according to prosecutors.
But what federal prosecutors call hate crimes, punishable by life in prison, Mullet calls an exercise of his religious freedom. God's will allowed him to mete out punishment as he saw fit, he said, giving him the power to shame and punish people who ostracized the Bergholz clan and who defied his laws.
Mullet denies having ordered the beard-cutting attacks, "but I didn't tell them not to," he said according to an FBI affidavit quoting an Associated Press story.
"You have your laws on the road and the town -- if somebody doesn't obey them you punish the people," Mullet said in the affidavit. "But I'm not allowed to punish the church people? I just let them run over me? If every family would do just as they pleased, what kind of church would we have?"
Mullet's bishopric also gave him the authority to discipline church members who misbehaved by forcing them to sleep in a chicken coop for days on end, and the power to engage in sexual relations with married women to "cleanse them of the devil," according to an FBI affidavit.
Although Judge Polster has banned prosecutors from calling the Bergholz clan a cult during the trial, the prosecutors have made it clear they believe the word applies to Mullet's zealous followers. They cite the tremendous authority Mullet exerts over members of his Amish sect, and have included veiled references to David Koresh and Jim Jones in court papers.
"The government's greatest concern remains the defendant's ability, upon release, to retreat into his 800-acre spread, surrounded by his family members and devoted followers ... and resist law enforcement efforts to ensure his appearance at trial," Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Getz wrote.
"The evidence has demonstrated that this defendant and his followers have not embraced the traditional Amish principles of non-violence and forgiveness. The possibility of a violent encounter, this time with law enforcement, should not be readily dismissed," Getz wrote.
Those concerns were fueled by Mullet's own words after three of his son's were arrested for beard-cutting attacks last October. In a secretly recorded phone call from the Holmes County Jail, Lester Mullet told his father he was concerned his children might be taken from him.
"Samuel Mullet Sr. responded that somebody will 'get killed' before that happened," according to an FBI transcript of the conversation.
Mullet's lawyer scoffs at the prosecution's portrayal of his client.
"They're trying to create this perception he's something he's not," said defense attorney Edward Bryan. "He's not a wacky cult leader. He's a decent, hardworking, caring man."
But in 2005, eight families -- including one of Mullet's sons -- chose to break away and move to Amish enclaves in different counties rather that submit themselves to Mullet's strict and sometimes violent discipline.
Mullet responded by shunning, and later excommunicating, all members of the departed families from the church. After a conclave of 300 mainstream Amish church leaders met in Pennsylvania to address Mullet's practices, a seven-member committee investigated and overturned Mullet's excommunication orders.
That decision infuriated Mullet, and launched the beard- and hair-cutting attacks -- some of which were directed at members of the Amish investigation committee, according to an FBI affidavit.
Some of the victims were elderly. Several were wounded and bloodied with the eight-inch horse mane-cutting shears, according to the affidavit. When one of the victims pleaded with the men and women not to cut his beard, he wondered how Amish Christians devoted to peace and brotherhood could wage such an attack on a fellow church member.
"We are not Christians," Johnny Mullet, one of Sam's sons, responded, according to the FBI.
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Previous stories
Aug. 17: Prosecutors say jury should hear Amish leader's sexual activities with his followers
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/08/prosecutors_say_jury_should_he.html
June 1: Trumbull County minister supporting Amish beard-cutting suspects accuses U.S. marshals of intimidation
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/06/trumbull_county_minister_accus.html
May 24: Amish beard-cutting suspect loses bid for release from jail
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/05/federal_judge_calls_accused_am.html
May 17: Ex-clergyman familiar with Amish community has online petition seeking release of Sam Mullet from prison
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/05/ex-clergyman_familiar_with_ami.html
April 28: Amish beard-cutting defendant has taxpayer-subsidized lawyer despite millions in the bank, prosecutors say
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/04/federal_prosecutors_say_amish.html
More about Sam Mullet
http://topics.cleveland.com/tag/sam+mullet/index.html
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© 2012 Cleveland Live LLC
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/08/amish_beard-cutting_trial_attr.html [with comments]
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Abortion access in a post-Roe world
Posted by Sarah Kliff on August 27, 2012 at 12:15 pm
The Republican platform spends a lot of time on abortion, calling for extending personhood rights [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/24/did-republicans-actually-endorse-a-full-abortion-ban-maybe-not/ ] to “unborn children” and arguing that terminating a pregnancy threatens [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/23/gop-platform-abortion-is-bad-for-womens-health-and-well-being/ ] a woman’s health and well-being.
There is one key issue that the platform is silent on: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. While Gov. Mitt Romney calls for the decision to be overturned [ http://www.mittromney.com/issues/values ], the Republican party does not endorse that stance.
A new working paper [ http://www.nber.org/papers/w18338.pdf ] from Theodore Joyce, Yuxiu Zhang and Ruoding Tan helps explain why. The paper explores what would change about abortion access if Roe were to be overturned and the issue of legal abortion returned to the states.
Women would face more obstacles to terminate a pregnancy; the average distance traveled by women obtaining abortions would increase 157 miles among 31 states expected to outlaw the procedure.
Overturning Roe, however, would by no means eliminate abortion. Even in a situation where 31 states banned legal abortion, the national abortion rate would only fall 14.9 percent.
The expectation is that, in a post-Roe world, the more liberal states, like New York and California, would continue to offer legal access — just as they did prior to the Roe decision. Most of the south and large swaths of the Midwest, however, would likely ban the procedure.
Women in those states would likely still seek abortion services in states where they were accessible. That’s what happened pre-Roe in a state like Michigan, where abortion was illegal. Women traveled out of state and, as a result, had 7.6 abortions per 1,000 women performed in New York state.
These researchers combed through the state abortion laws to understand what travel distances would look like in a post-Roe scenario. They modeled one “extreme” situation, where 31 states outlaw the procedure, as well as a more moderate version, with 17 states passing bans. Then, they modeled how far away the closest abortion provider would be for women in each of these states.
In both, the distance women in states with abortion bans increases — an average of 157 miles in the more extreme situation and 69 miles in the moderate one. There would be huge variation in expected distance traveled, as you can see in the map below.
Texas women would face the longest travel distances, with the average woman traveling 452 miles to terminate a pregnancy. The situation would be decidedly different in Pennsylvania. It would also be expected to ban abortion but, since it’s bordered by more liberal states, women would only travel an average of 42 miles.
This paper also looked at what would happen to the national abortion rate should Roe be reversed and finds that, in the extreme situation mapped above, it would drop by 14.9 percent. If only 17 states banned the procedure, traveling to obtain an abortion would become even easier, and the rate would drop 6 percent.
Even in the most extreme situation – one where 46 states ban abortion and only four allow legal access – the abortion rate only falls by 29 percent.
That helps explains why a number of antiabortion advocates don’t actually favor overturning Roe: It would still allow for states to legalize abortion and, as this paper suggests, not get anywhere close to eliminating the procedure. Tellingly, the Republican platform does not call for the repeal of Roe.
James Bopp, who drafted the Republican platform on abortion [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/24/did-republicans-actually-endorse-a-full-abortion-ban-maybe-not/ ], is one prominent figure who does not like the idea of returning abortion rights to the states for this exact reason. “That puts us back to California and New York having very high abortion rates,” he told me last week. “That’s something I would totally oppose.”
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/27/abortion-access-in-a-post-roe-world/ [with comments]
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"Legitimate Rape" Issue is Romney Policy, Not Akin's
Monday, 27 August 2012
"Ironically, it is the implementation of Mitt Romney's abortion policy," says the American Right To Life research director Darrell Birkey, "that would require determining whether or not there was a 'legitimate' rape."
"Missouri's U.S. Senate Candidate Todd Akin advocates the personhood position of killing no child, regardless of whether or not her father was a criminal," says ARTL Action president Jefferson George. "However, Mitt Romney himself wrote an op-ed recently in National Review saying that he opposes abortion but not for 'instances of rape'. So it is not Akin, but Mitt Romney, whose unworkable policy would require determining whether there was a 'legitimate' rape."
Agreeing with American Right To Life is the longtime vice president of the nation's first-ever "right to life" group. "Mitt Romney's criticism of congressman Akin was self-condemning," said Colorado Right To Life's Leslie Hanks. As campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said, "Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan disagree with Mr. Akin's statement, and a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape." Hanks added, "So the Romney campaign admits that their own policy, unless it's just phony, requires some kind of determination of rape. They're the 'legitimate rape' team."
American Right To Life agrees with Rep. Akin that he "used the wrong words in the wrong way." Birkey points out that, "Perhaps without realizing it, Todd repeated the Ron Paul-ism that was said to Piers Morgan on CNN earlier this year about legitimate rape. With a similar view to Romney's, Paul put it even worse, and called it an 'honest' rape. Likewise, Mitt Romney's policy means that if a woman was actually raped, then he would not oppose her killing the child."
"The new Republican-In-Name-Only GOP is reduced to being the conservatives who want to save social programs created by liberals," said George, head of the 527 group. "And Todd Akin could become the awkward hero from Missouri if he brings his actions in line with his principles and refrains from voting for bills, like H.R. 3, that authorize the use of tax dollars to kill the very children that we believe Aiken wants to protect."
American Right To Life's website concludes, "Finally, Romney's unworkable 'rape exception' violates the God-given right to life."
© 2012 MELODIKA.net
http://www.melodika.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=371230&Itemid=54
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Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Says Rape Is Rape — But There Can Be ‘More Forcible Rape’
By Josh Israel on Aug 28, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (R) denounced comments by Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) last week that “legitimate rape [ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/19/711991/gop-senate-candidate-victims-of-legitimate-rape-wont-become-pregnant/ ]” rarely leads to pregnancy, calling his remarks “disgusting.” “Rape is a rape,” she noted, “I don’t know how you can categorize it.” But, as Gawker notes [ http://gawker.com/5938496/wisconsin-lt-governor-rebecca-kleefisch-some-rapes-are-more-equal-than-others ], when told that Paul Ryan co-sponsored a bill with Akin [ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/19/712251/how-todd-akin-and-paul-ryan-partnered-to-redefine-rape/ ] to redefine rape, Kleefisch immediately backtracked, saying “Well, I think there is a way to have a more forcible rape, the same way there are different types of assault.”
Watch the video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3usq2UGeCI ]:
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/28/760771/wisconsin-lg-says-rape-is-rape/ [with comment]
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What the *#@% Is Wrong With Republican Men?!
Illustration by Dress Code.
Source Photos: John Giustina / Getty images (shirt & tie); Rubberball / Getty Images (Blonde Hair); Fotosearch / Getty Images (Suit); Emmanuel Dunand, AFP / Getty Images (Romney); John Adkisson / Getty Images (Ryan)
It's not just Akin. By pushing some of the most invasive state policies in modern history, the men of the GOP are driving their party off a cliff.
Kathleen Parker
Aug 27, 2012 1:00 AM EDT
Blame it on the “idea cloud”—that cumulus cartoon bubble that dumps the same idea on diverse populations at once. Alternatively, blame Todd Akin, the Missouri congressman and Senate candidate who infamously asserted that “legitimate rape” victims don’t often get pregnant because the female reproductive system has a way of shutting itself down under such circumstances.
Whatever the prompt, millions of Americans simultaneously have been slapping their foreheads and exclaiming: “What the *#@% is wrong with Republicans?!”
To be fair, we can stipulate that Akin is sui generis, occupying a realm of nitwittery uniquely his own. Taken in isolation, his comments might have been only a blip in the news cycle. But his timing was, shall we say, immaculate, coinciding with GOP platform committee meetings and Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate. The platform includes one of Ryan’s signature issues—a human life amendment to the Constitution that could preclude abortion even for rape or incest. And Ryan, in addition to being the party’s budget genie, happens to have coauthored with Akin legislation seeking to redefine rape as “forcible” (as opposed to statutory) as a way of limiting public spending on abortion.
The human life amendment is actually a relic, having been part of the platform since 1984, but the platform also includes new language for the first time declaring abortion bad for a woman’s “health and well-being.” It is certainly bad for some women, but also certainly not for all. Who exactly is making this determination for womankind?
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Video [embedded]
In the wake of Akin's controversial comments, Mitt Romney said he's good for women.
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In any case, a storm more perfect than Isaac (it seems impossible to discuss Republicans in non-biblical terms) has formed to the benefit of Democrats—and not just the metaphorical kind. That hallelujah chorus you hear is coming from David Axelrod’s Chicago office, where he and other campaign strategists were seen performing grand jetés in celebration of their good fortune. What more delicious manna than the opportunity to conjoin in the public’s mind the idiocy of Akin, who weirdly serves on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and Romney’s sixth son, Ryan. Such a GOP twofer can only be a gift from You Know Who.
Alas, Akin’s comments were not in isolation. They followed a year of explosive events and remarks involving Republican lawmakers and leaders—and the women they seek to “protect.” A one-man firing squad, Akin simply provided the exclamation point at the end of a Faulknerian paragraph of Republican offenses, from laws attempting to require transvaginal probes for women seeking abortion to promises to defund Planned Parenthood to Rush Limbaugh’s calling law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” when she testified about the need for insurance coverage for contraception. Agree or not with her argument, powerful men shouldn’t call young women sluts for attempting to participate in a grown-up debate about health care. Agree or not with a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy, elected officials shouldn’t parse the definition of rape as “legitimate” or otherwise. For the record, the bill to redefine rape as “forcible” had 227 Republican cosponsors.
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Reality Check
“77% of Americans believe birth control shouldn’t be part of the national political debate.”—Bloomberg National Poll
Conservative Donor Foster Friess:
‘Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The Gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.’—MSNBC
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The cumulative effect of these episodes, combined with Democrats’ carefully crafted GOP “war on women” narrative, have boxed Republicans into a corner of stubborn self-defeat. Hackneyed and contrived as this “war” is, there’s a reason it has gained traction. “Because it’s true,” says Margaret Hoover, a leading voice in the young conservative movement, CNN contributor, gay-marriage advocate, and author of American Individualism—a call to arms for her great-grandfather Herbert Hoover’s rugged individualism tempered with a community spirit suitable for the millennial generation.
Opting for a vernacular expression of her frustration, Hoover queries: “What the (*#@%) is wrong? What has happened within the party infrastructure that has malfunctioned so desperately, so that this minority of representatives are in such positions of power that are so out of step with the majority of Republicans?”
There is something wrong with the Republican Party, the survival of which demands more than a few moments of self-examination and reflection. I wouldn’t use the word “stupid,” though it is tempting. Suicidal seems more apt. The GOP, through its platform, its purity tests, pledges, and its emphasis on social issues that divide rather than unite, has shot itself in the foot, eaten said foot, and still managed to stampede to the edge of the precipice. Is extinction in its DNA?
Maine Sen. Susan Collins pulled her car off a rural road in her home state to give full expression to her own dismay at her party’s death spiral. She points to a series of problems, ranging from the absence of women in leadership positions, which sends a bad message to women—“role models matter”—to the party’s illogical emphasis on divisive issues when they should be focused on Republican strengths.
“It seems like we’ve been thrown back decades into debates most everyday people think were settled years ago. This doesn’t mean we’re disrespectful to people who hold a different point of view, but the platform seems designed to alienate a lot of moderate women. I don’t get it.”
Comments like Akin’s aren’t only embarrassing, but they divert attention and allow Democrats to change the subject. Collins is chauvinistic on her party’s economic plans, but dumbfounded by certain suicidal moves. “Tone deaf” is how she describes the 31 Senate Republicans who voted against refunding the “Violence Against Women Act,” which has been renewed for years without controversy.
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Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK): “I join many Alaskans in finding Rep. Todd Akin’s comments incredibly offensive and I strongly encourage him to step aside… I can’t believe a guy running for the U.S. Senate but also a current congressman would make this kind of statement.”
Sen. Olympia Snow (R-ME): “Such extreme and ill-informed comments are particularly offensive to victims of sexual assault… [the comments were] repugnant and outlandish.”
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“We just hand these issues to Democrats on a silver platter and they’re clapping their hands with delight. They can’t believe this! And instead we’re not focusing where my party has by far the better plans, the better approach, where President Obama has utterly failed.”
When the conversation shifts to abortion and contraception (contraception!), women begin to fear that their rights are in jeopardy. “They’re not,” says Collins, one of the party’s staunch pro-choice voices. This view is widely shared within Republican circles. Roe v. Wade isn’t going anywhere, the consensus seems to be. But fellow Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, who is retiring after more than 30 years in office, isn’t so sure.
“Don’t underestimate the force of those views,” she says. “At one point I would have thought so, too, but now I wouldn’t minimize it.”
“At one point” refers to the mid-1980s, when Snowe organized Republican women in the Congress (there was only Nancy Kassebaum in the Senate) to meet with then-president Ronald Reagan to discuss women’s concerns. “Can you imagine that happening with a Republican president today,” she says.
Times—and things—have changed. Abortion is still front and center, yet women’s concerns, like men’s, are more centered than ever on the economy and jobs. Snowe, having just returned from a tour of the Eurozone, fears we are on the brink of disaster, tethered as we are to Europe. She urges Romney to distance himself from some of his party’s extreme positions and forcefully convey that the economy is the central issue—and that frankly we’re in a crisis.
“He’s got to reiterate that. This campaign is about the future of our economy and the future of our country ... Social issues are the Achilles’ heel of our party, but the economy is the Achilles’ heel of the Obama administration.”
“We should be sitting pretty,” says Collins, who is equally grim about the future. Instead of focusing on economic policies and pounding messages of renewal that appeal to all people, social conservatives push issues that relatively few care about at the moment. You have to have food on the table, after all, before you can start contemplating the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. Arguments that social issues fire up the base are fine to a point, but as Collins points out, “I keep reminding them that not everybody’s base is the same and presumably we want to control the Senate. We can’t do that without winning seats in states like Maine.”
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Abortion
75% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in cases of rape or incest.—Gallup 2011
From the proposed GOP platform:
‘We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.’—as reported by CNN
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Former first lady Laura Bush has often told me that nations can’t survive without the full equality and participation of its women, which at a minimum should allow for differences of opinion. Does the Republican Party really think it is a nation apart, exempt from this obvious truth? Polling figures provide at least part of the answer.
A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that Obama still leads Romney among women by 51 percent to 41 percent. The gap is even greater among other demographics: African-Americans favor Obama 94 percent to 0; Latinos by 2 to 1; and voters under 35 by 52 percent to 41 percent. How long will the party of white males survive once the women (and gays and blacks and Hispanics) have left for more hospitable environs? Exactly who is left for the GOP?
Even among pro-life Americans, there is little support for the social agenda being pushed by the Republican Party’s leadership, with pro-life voters overwhelmingly holding the belief that abortion is ultimately the woman’s choice. According to a 2008 poll conducted by American Viewpoint for Republican Majority for Choice, 66 percent of self-described pro-life voters said abortion should be the choice of the woman and not the government.
More broadly, 52 percent of all Americans think abortion should be legal under certain circumstances, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in May. Furthermore, it seems people may be tiring of this whole conversation. A Bloomberg National Poll done earlier this year found that a full 77 percent believe that birth control shouldn’t be part of the national political debate.
Finally, even though the May Gallup Poll indicates that more Americans are becoming pro-life, which is surely a positive development, this doesn’t translate to mean that they support government policies further restricting abortion. In fact, at no point does a majority favor limiting access to abortion as the Republican Party seems committed to doing.
Even so, states have been busy in these vineyards. In the past two years, states have introduced a total of 2,000 reproductive health provisions, mostly restrictions, according to Planned Parenthood. While 12 states require verbal counseling or written materials before an abortion to include information on ultrasound services, both Texas and Louisiana mandate that an abortion provider perform an ultrasound (not necessarily invasive) on any woman seeking an abortion and also that the provider show and describe the ultrasound image.
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Same-Sex Marriage
54% of American adults say gay marriage is morally acceptable.—Gallup 2012
Mitt Romney: ‘I think from the beginning of my poliitcal career, I’ve made it very clear that I believe marriage should be a relationship between a man and a woman.’
*
Twenty-six states require that a woman seeking an abortion wait some period of time—usually 24 hours—but Utah requires 72 hours.
This is not to suggest that the only thing contributing to the expanding gender gap is the GOP’s position on reproductive issues. Not for one instant do I equate the pro-life position with being anti-female. Heaven forbid we should live in a world where no one struggles with the termination of a pregnancy. This is not a ridiculous conversation. It is, however, an often poorly executed one.
Style matters. Empathy counts. And many women—even those sympathetic to these issues—feel that Republican men aren’t listening to them, or are off on some crusade that has nothing to do with them. Raymond Arroyo, news director and lead anchor of Eternal World Television Network, may have put a finger on part of the GOP’s women problem:
“If the GOP has a ‘problem,’ it may be that their principles usually supersede their communications skills. What I mean by that is they often launch into well-intended initiatives (a virtue) giving little thought to messaging or style,” he told me by email. Perhaps an unfamiliar name to non-Catholics, Arroyo is a familiar voice to 250 million households worldwide who tune into his live news show, The World Over, on EWTN, the Global Catholic Network. “The fact is,” he says, “people are either receptive or hostile to a message based on their first impressions of the messenger. If they are repelled by a politician’s style, the message will never be heard. So many conservative pols—good as they are, smart as they are—consider things like style and presentation to be superfluous to their work, so they give it no thought.”
To whom, then, are these Republicans talking? Apparently not to women, whom they treat not as equals but as totemic and unknowable. Which is to say, they don’t “get” women. As such, they risk losing not only independents and moderates, whose votes they desperately need come November. They also risk losing their own women, who want very much to cast a ballot for smaller government, reduced deficits, and a confident, job-producing business environment, but don’t want to belong to a club that seems aggressively hostile to women and whose members can’t keep their mouths shut about issues that only reinforce the notion the Republicans are intolerant and rigid.
“I’m upset,” says Hoover, and she’s not alone.
It is noteworthy that so many Republican men are focused on women’s reproduction and issues of the hearth, while veteran Republican women leaders are riveted on the economy and jobs. Could it be that the liberal goal of reversing sex roles finally is manifesting, most vividly within the party least likely to have advanced the cause of evolution? If only men could get pregnant, then we’d really have a rollicking debate. If only ...
Meanwhile, Romney had better speak often and with conviction about his own disagreement with some of his party’s platform, or the anti-woman narrative will become so entrenched that the 2012 GOP may go down in history as having sacrificed the nation’s economy to protect the rights of human embryos. He will have to speak loudly, too, if he is to be heard over the iconic women the Democratic Party has assembled for its own convention stage—from the famous Ms. Fluke to the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL. The 2012 election seems to have devolved from a debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes to “The Clash of the Embryos.” Perhaps the math is just too hard for either party.
How tragically ironic that the party of small government and individual liberty may have orchestrated its own defeat by insisting on some of the most invasive state policies in the history of man. Perhaps it is time for a new kind of history.
With reporting by Eliza Shapiro.
*
Related
America’s Abortion Rights: A History
http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/08/23/roe-v-wade-to-planned-parenthood-the-history-of-abortion-rights-in-america-photos.html
*
© 2012 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/26/what-s-wrong-with-the-republican-party.html [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/26/what-s-wrong-with-the-republican-party.html ] [with comments]
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'Modern Family' Is Ann Romney's Favorite TV Show, But Creator Steve Levitan Pushes Back On Gay Marriage (VIDEO)
Ann Romney's favorite TV show is "Modern Family."
[ http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/71542839.html (with comments)]
[ http://gawker.com/5938856/ann-romney-says-her-favorite-show-is-modern-family-showrunner-steve-levitan-responds-she-can-officiate-at-mitch-and-cams-wedding (with comments)]
By Alex Moaba
Posted: 08/28/2012 4:41 pm Updated: 08/29/2012 4:42 pm
Ann Romney's favorite TV show may be "Modern Family [ http://www.etonline.com/news/124532_Michelle_Obama_and_Ann_Romney_s_Presidential_Campaign_Trail_Fashion/index.html ]," which features committed gay couple Cam and Mitch. But the show's co-creator isn't a fan of the Romneys' position on marriage equality.
After Romney revealed that she enjoys the Emmy-winning ABC comedy in a video interview with The Insider [ http://www.etonline.com/news/124532_Michelle_Obama_and_Ann_Romney_s_Presidential_Campaign_Trail_Fashion/index.html ], Steve Levitan took to Twitter to make the potential First Lady an offer that made it clear he doesn't agree with her husband's stance on gay marriage.
Steve Levitan
@SteveLevitan
Thrilled Ann Romney says ModFam is her favorite show. We'll offer her the role of officiant at Mitch & Cam's wedding. As soon as it's legal.
28 Aug 12
Although Mitt Romney claimed to be a bigger proponent of gay rights than Ted Kennedy in his 1994 Massachusetts Senate race, he has said throughout the presidential campaign that he does not support gay marriage [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/12/mitt-romney-liberty-university-speech_n_1511621.html ]. In a June speech at Liberty University, he affirmed that he believes that, "Marriage is between one man and one woman."
The Romneys are also members of the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints, which raised tens of millions of dollars to support Proposition 8 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/02/8-the-mormon-proposition_n_597500.html ], the 2008 California Ballot measure that outlawed gay marriage in that state. The Romneys' 2010 tax return [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/23/mitt-romney-mormon-church_n_1825565.html ] indicates that the couple has tithed $4.13 million to the church over the past 2 years, and have also given over $4.7 million in the past ten years through the family's trust, the Tyler Charitable Foundation.
In 2002, The Boston Globe reported that Mrs. Romney signed a petition to ban gay marriage and domestic partnership rights [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/16/mitt-romney-gay-rights_n_1521647.html ] in Massachusetts.
The Obamas have also listed "Modern Family" [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/14/president-obama-loves-boardwalk-empire_n_1147992.html ] among their favorite family shows. In a 2010 interview with People Magazine, President Obama said that, "For the girls and me, 'Modern Family,' that's our favorite show." Obama came out in support of gay marriage [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/09/obama-gay-marriage-interview-robin-roberts-abc-news_n_1503311.html ] in a June interview with Robin Roberts after months of "evolving" on the issue. He has not pursued any legislative agenda to bring about that change.
Levitan's response is similar to Rage Against The Machine frontman Tom Morello's reaction to hearing that Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan considers RATM to be his favorite band. Morello wrote in Rolling Stone [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/17/tom-morello-paul-ryan-rage-against-the-machine_n_1795607.html ] that Ryan is "the embodiment of the machine that our music rages against."
Check out Ann Romney'a statement about "Modern Family" at the end of the video below.
[video embedded]
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/modern-family-ann-romney_n_1837171.html [with comments]
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Cardinal Timothy Dolan asks candidates to sign civility pledge
By David Gibson, Religion News Service
Aug. 28, 2012
NEW YORK -- Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who sparked controversy by agreeing to deliver the closing blessing at the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., this week, on Monday drew further attention to his political role by asking both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama to sign a civility pledge promoted by a leading conservative Catholic activist.
The archbishop of New York wrote to Romney and Obama and their running mates, Paul Ryan and Joe Biden, asking them to sign the "Civility in America" pledge developed by Carl Anderson, head of the powerful Knights of Columbus and a man with long-standing ties to the Republican Party.
Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the most prominent Catholic churchman in America, said he wanted the candidates to forgo personal attacks and "remain focused on the critical issues facing our nation."
Neither Dolan nor the Knights of Columbus pledge specifies which issues they meant. But Anderson, supreme knight of the organization, has been a vocal supporter of the bishops' campaign against the administration's controversial birth control health insurance mandate. The Knights have also donated millions of dollars to efforts against legalizing same-sex marriage.
For years, Anderson has blasted Obama and Biden, who is Catholic, for their support for abortion rights. Just last week in the conservative journal National Review, Anderson penned a blistering critique of Obama for what he said was the president's decision "to make unrestricted access to abortion a key component of his campaign."
Anderson is a veteran GOP operative. He spent several years working for Jesse Helms, the late North Carolina senator and ardent culture warrior, before going to work in the Reagan White House. Anderson has influential allies among conservatives in the Vatican and the hierarchy, and the Knights of Columbus can deploy huge sums for -- or against -- causes they support or oppose.
In closing his letter to the candidates, Dolan promises that if the candidates sign he will "be most happy to be able to convey to Carl Anderson and to the 1.8 million members of the Knights of Columbus, that you have chosen to support this valuable effort."
Dolan has become increasingly active and visible as the presidential campaign gears up. His decision to deliver the benediction at the GOP convention Thursday night immediately following Romney's official nomination was met with sharp rebukes from many who say his appearance will formalize what was seen as the hierarchy's growing embrace of the Republican ticket.
Whether either of the candidates will sign Anderson's pledge is unclear. Dolan's plea comes after a prominent evangelical, Rick Warren, canceled plans for a "civil forum" appearance at his Southern California church by both presidential candidates, saying the nasty political atmosphere had ruined the opportunity.
Sources in both the Romney and Obama campaigns said that in fact neither candidate was planning to attend Warren's forum. Both campaigns are targeting Catholics in the November election.
Copyright © The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company
http://ncronline.org/news/politics/cardinal-timothy-dolan-asks-candidates-sign-civility-pledge [with comments]
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In bipartisan move, U.S. archbishop to pray for Democrats, too
Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan holds up a foam finger promoting ''A Fortnight for Freedom'' conference sponsored by the Catholic church, following a afternoon session during the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Annual Spring Assembly in Atlanta, Georgia, June 13, 2012
Credit: Reuters/Tami Chappell
By Daniel Trotta
NEW YORK | Tue Aug 28, 2012 2:21pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Roman Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan will deliver the closing prayer at the Democratic National Convention as well as this week's Republican meeting, in a sign of bipartisanship after Dolan had taken a role opposing the White House on policy matters.
Dolan, the archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, last week accepted an invitation to deliver the closing prayer at the Republican National Convention on Thursday in Tampa, Florida.
His office announced on Tuesday he would do the same for the Democrats in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 6.
Political analysts see many Catholics as "swing voters" who can be swayed to vote for either party, making Dolan welcome at both conventions.
"It was made clear to the Democratic convention organizers, as it was to the Republicans, that the cardinal was coming solely as a pastor, only to pray, not to endorse any party, platform or candidate," Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the New York archdiocese, said in a statement.
Dolan has become an increasingly influential political figure in the United States and a champion for conservatives, especially since he challenged President Barack Obama in February over a federal health insurance provision that required Catholic institutions such as universities and hospitals to cover birth control.
On Monday Dolan said he wanted Obama and Mitt Romney, who will get the Republican presidential nomination at the party's convention, to sign a "civility pledge" to ensure they would not make personal attacks during the campaign and instead concentrate on substantive issues.
In February U.S. bishops, led by Dolan, had pressed Obama to exempt religious employers from a federal mandate that all health insurance plans offer free birth control.
Obama agreed to modify the mandate so religious employers would not have to pay for contraceptive coverage directly. That satisfied some Catholic groups but the bishops wanted the mandate repealed entirely.
Energized by the battle, Catholic bishops announced their intention to rally Americans against a long list of government measures they said intruded on religious liberty.
After a conference meeting a year ago, Dolan declared religious freedom "is now increasingly and in unprecedented ways under assault in America."
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta)
Copyright 2012 Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/28/us-usa-campaign-catholics-idUSBRE87R0QQ20120828 [no comments yet]
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A Plagiarist’s Rant Against Birth Control
By MIGUEL SYJUCO
Published: August 29, 2012
WHILE anatomically illiterate politicians in America babble about “legitimate rape [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/rape/overview.html ],” a Filipino legislator opposed to birth control [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/birth-control-and-family-planning/overview.html ] has been shedding crocodile tears in Parliament and plagiarizing speeches to bolster the case against reproductive rights.
On Aug. 13, the Senate majority leader, Tito Sotto, wept while addressing his assembled peers. The former actor told the Senate that birth-control pills, used by his wife in 1974, had led to the death of their newborn son a year later. The emotional scene shut down the day’s debate. It was the latest obstruction to passing a reproductive health law that has languished for 14 years.
Proponents of the reproductive health bill say it will address poverty, women’s rights, infant and maternal mortality, and overpopulation in a poor nation crowded with 94 million people. Though contraceptives are currently available, the general population can’t afford them. The bill seeks to offer natural and artificial birth-control options, reproductive health care and sex education in public schools.
Opponents, like Mr. Sotto and the powerful Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, say contraception [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/birth-control-and-family-planning/overview.html ] is akin to abortion [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/surgery/abortion/overview.html ]. They claim the bill is an elitist and foreign conspiracy to corrupt a country in which 80 percent of the population is Catholic. They fear the erosion of family values, state intrusion on religious freedom, tacit approval of promiscuity and side effects of oral contraceptives.
Two days later, news that Mr. Sotto had plagiarized his speech spilled across blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Careful readers proved that he’d copied [ http://raissarobles.com/2012/08/16/did-sen-sotto-copy-from-4-bloggers/ ] and pasted, without citation, large portions from as many as at least five online sources. Among them were the writings of Sarah Pope, who blogs as “the Healthy Home Economist [ http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/ ]”; a New York University Web site [ http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/newsletter/articles/gandhi_debate.html ] on the notable birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger; and an American activist named Janice Formichella, writing for Feminists for Choice [ http://feministsforchoice.com/gandhis-birth-control-of-choice.htm ]. What’s more, the senator twisted their words for his own purposes.
Mr. Sotto forcefully denied responsibility rather than confessing and offering an apology. When Ms. Pope blogged her dismay at being plagiarized, the senator declared on Filipino TV: “Why would I quote from a blogger? She’s just a blogger.” His chief of staff, Hector Villacorta, told reporters [ http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/255890/plagiarism-common-practice-ok-in-senate-says-sottos-aide ] that blogs aren’t copyrighted, governments are exempt from copyright laws, and parliamentary immunity [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/immune-response/overview.html ] protects the senator. Besides, the Philippines “plagiarized the U.S. Constitution,” he said. “Even our image was copied from God. We are all plagiarists.”
God, it seems, is also on Mr. Sotto’s side.
Among the senator’s allies is the conference of bishops, which has declared “open war” on the reproductive health bill, saying it will create “an abortion generation.” Despite separation of church and state, these bishops fancy themselves as Filipinos’ moral conscience. Their credibility has been mixed, however. Archbishop Socrates Villegas has warned that “contraception is corruption,” but an investigation last year showed that bishops accepted privileges and gifts [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14143031 ], including S.U.V.’s, from the previous presidential administration.
The church has tried to recover power by re-emphasizing its role in society. Last year, it succeeded in banning a McDonald’s commercial showing a little boy and girl flirting cutely over French fries. It also shut down an art exhibit it deemed “sacrilegious” and warned that Lady Gaga’s Manila concert was akin to “devil worship.” The bishops have even threatened President Benigno S. Aquino [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/benigno_s_aquino_iii/index.html ] III with excommunication, and 190 university professors with heresy, for their stance on the pending bill.
This “open war,” along with intellectual dishonesty of Mr. Sotto’s variety, have undermined any genuine discussion of reproductive rights. The bill is backed by anti-poverty groups, community and women’s organizations, President Aquino himself, and 70 percent of Filipinos [ http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=833739 ]. But its fate remains tenuous. How could this be?
The answer lies in the system that grants Mr. Sotto impunity. Plagiarism may have toppled a Hungarian president [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/world/europe/hungarian-president-pal-schmitt-resigns-amid-plagiarism-scandal.html ], a German defense minister [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/16/german-defence-minister-plagiarism-accusation ] and a Romanian education minister [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/world/europe/romania-plagiarism-scandal-ensnares-prime-minister.html ], but it’s no big deal [ http://opinion.inquirer.net/35572/copycats ] amid the entrenched corruption of the Philippines.
Recent clear-cut plagiarism cases failed to lead to punishment for a literary icon who lifted passages from a sportswriter, a top editorial writer who stole from a young reporter and the chairman of a university’s board of trustees who copied from Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Conan O’Brien for a commencement speech. Even Supreme Court Justice Mariano del Castillo [ http://www.manilatimes.net/index.php/news/top-stories/17213-del-castillo-admits-to-plagiarism-but-refuses-to-call-it-criminal-act ] was breezily exonerated by his peers after he plagiarized from three sources and reversed their meaning in his decision against elderly Filipinas seeking reparations for sexual enslavement under the Japanese during World War II.
In all likelihood, Mr. Sotto will similarly escape unscathed without so much as censure from the Senate.
Politicians in the Philippines regularly manage to get away with greater sins. Even the Manila area’s notorious annual flooding is a result of the irresponsibility of those in charge, which has led to shortsighted urban planning, disregard for zoning laws and insufficient cooperation between the metropolis’s 17 city halls. Such chronic lack of accountability is part of the reason the Philippines ranked 129th out of 182 in Transparency International’s 2011 corruption index — alongside Syria and Honduras.
Indeed, Mr. Sotto continues his defiance. He has cast himself as “a victim of cyber-bullying” and backed a proposed law that aims to “regulate” blogs, as his supporters cheer his pluck against academics and intellectuals. He happily misrepresents research studies, avoids mentioning their outdated vintage and likens maternal mortality statistics to Nazi propaganda [ http://rp1.abs-cbnnews.com/-depth/08/15/12/sotto-likens-11-moms-dying-nazi-propaganda ]. He also refuses to explain how his wife’s oral contraceptive killed their son in 1975, when that pill wasn’t even on the market until 1978 [ http://manilastandardtoday.com/2012/08/18/sotto-voce/ ] and was released in Asia only in 1985.
But in the Philippines, the facts may never matter — especially when power and religion are involved. A speech cobbled off the Internet, speculation about a dead baby and a melodramatic crying fit in the Senate, sadly, ring true enough.
Miguel Syjuco [ http://us.macmillan.com/author/miguelsyjuco ], a Filipino writer, is the author of the novel “Ilustrado [ http://www.amazon.com/Ilustrado-A-Novel-Miguel-Syjuco/dp/0374174784 ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/opinion/in-the-philippines-a-rant-against-birth-control.html
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Petition launched to save ‘world’s worst’ restoration
The images show the original version of the painting Ecce Homo (L) by 19th-century painter Elias Garcia Martinez, the deteriorated version (C) and the restored version by an elderly woman in Spain.
AFP
Agence France-Presse 10:00 am | Monday, August 27th, 2012
MADRID–Ironic art fans have launched a petition to save the “world’s worst restoration”: a retouched, century-old church painting of Christ that has become an international joke.
Cecilia Gimenez, described as being in her 80s, has won global fame with her horribly botched impromptu attempt to restore an oil painting of Christ crowned with thorns, his sorrowful gaze raised to heaven.
The “restored” painting looks like a pale monkey’s face surrounded by fur, with mishapen eyes and nose, and a crooked smudge for a mouth, a style some wits have compared to Picasso’s.
Titled “Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man), the original was painted in oil in 1910 directly onto a column in the Iglesia del Santuario de Misericordia church in Borja, northeastern Spain.
It was showing its age as the paint deteriorated over the years.
But the “restored” version has provided grist for an explosion of jokes across the world this week.
Online commentators in Spain inserted the faces of King Juan Carlos or Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy into their own, digital versions of the restored painting.
More than 5,000 people have now signed an online petition to halt the town’s plan to return the painting to its pre-restoration glory.
The restoration “reveals a subtle criticism of the Church’s creationist theories while questioning a resurgence of new idols,” says the petition launched by a user on http://www.change.org , comparing the retouched painting to the work of Goya, Munch and Modigliani.
Gimenez herself said she had been patching up the painting for years, with the church’s knowledge.
“The priest knew,” the elderly, neatly dressed lady in spectacles told public television TVE.
“Everyone who came in could see me painting.”
Despite the derisive coverage, with some media calling it worst restoration in history, Gimenez said she was an accomplished artist. “I had a four-room exhibition — I sold 40 paintings,” Gimenez said.
The church painting was no masterpiece, completed in two hours by a local man, Elias Garcia Martinez, just over a century ago.
But the original artist’s granddaughter, Teresa Garcia, was unimpressed by the brushed-up version.
“Until now the only thing she had touched was the tunic,” Garcia told TVE.
“The problem is that now she has meddled with the head and, clearly, she has destroyed the painting.”
The town hall has not yet decided whether to sue over the botch job, which was performed a month ago. “It would be different if it was vandalism,” said the town councillor for culture, Juan Maria de Ojeda.
“She did it with the best faith in the world,” the restorer’s sister, Esperanza Gimenez Zueco, told daily newspaper El Mundo.
“She just wanted to give it a bit of color.”
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Also read:
Elderly woman botches ‘restoration’ of Christ painting
http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/63602/elderly-woman-botches-restoration-of-christ-painting
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Copyright 2012 Agence France-Presse
http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/63612/petition-launched-to-save-worlds-worst-restoration [with comment]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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