Replies to post #187160 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

LIKE and SHARE to tell people what Mitt Romney WON'T tell you http://fb.me/VYuH1n6C



votevets ?@votevets

[StephanieVanbryce]

Pity the Plutocrats

By THOMAS FRANK
October 4, 2012, 9:18 pm

Bethesda, Md.

THESE are the times that try rich men’s patience. Not because this interminable economic crisis threatens to cost them their fortunes, of course, but rather the reverse: that by humiliating so many others, the slump has exposed the mighty to the horrors of criticism. Yes, sour sounds have reached their ears: recrimination, reproof, ridicule, rebellion!

The people have been thinking about how the economy came to collapse in the first place, of the role that great wealth and the deregulation of the financial industry played. And over the years, the unthinkable has happened. People have started to say mean things about billionaires. Even the president has engaged in the “rhetoric of class warfare.” During Wednesday’s debate, for example, this Danton of the Democrats went so far as to say that businesses shouldn’t get tax breaks for moving jobs overseas and even scoffed at that archetypal small-business man, Donald J. Trump.

In hard times they
convince
themselves that
Huey P. Long lurks
just around the
corner.

Rhetoric like this makes the very rich feel very sad. It has sent them on a crusade to restore matters to their rightful place. And in the process they have developed one of the distinctive literary forms of our time: the plutocrat’s j’accuse.

The most famous example is the open letter to the president written last year by the hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman and dissected at length in this week’s New Yorker [ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_freeland ] magazine. In it, Mr. Cooperman blames Mr. Obama (and his “minions”) for “setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as ‘class warfare.’ ” This is serious, this roiling and this tenor-setting, but it is not the only damage the president’s words have done. The “divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf,” Mr. Cooperman continued, “between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them” — meaning, apparently, hedge fund managers like himself.

Other princelings who have made noteworthy contributions to the genre include Ted Leonsis, the owner of several Washington sports teams, who feels that “anyone who has achieved success in terms of rank or fiscal success is being cast as a bad guy in a black hat,” and the casino magnate Steve Wynn, who griped in a famous conference call that the president “keeps making speeches about redistribution.” He said, “We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists.”

Reports have even reached us, via The Wall Street Journal, of a tragic incident last year on the streets of New York in which an unnamed “panhandler” rejected a handout with a spiteful, “You Wall Street fat cats!” Thankfully, the man at whom this imprecation was directed, the chief executive of a venture capital firm, knew whom to blame: President Obama, whose “incendiary message has now reached the streets.”

Nobody likes to be criticized, but one would expect captains of industry, Darwinian tough guys that they are, to have thicker skins. Were Mr. Obama a true incendiary, he might have found a way on Wednesday to mention his opponent’s millions; his work for Bain Capital; or his dismissal, captured on video, of those layabouts who make up 47 percent of the country. Mr. Obama called for ending the tax break for corporate jets, sure, but that’s about it.

In the broad scheme of things, these are excellent times to be a billionaire. Labor is powerless. Taxes are low. The banks that survived the crisis are bigger than ever. So why do the well-to-do whine so? Why do they wring their hands?

For one thing, their criticisms reveal a contemptuous view of their fellow citizens. That all the books and articles on the financial crisis and the recession might have had an effect — that people might see the economic downturn as a reflection on the individuals who were, a few years back, lionized as the economy’s leaders — is inconceivable to the class-war complainers. The public’s attitude, they seem to believe, can have arisen only as a result of propagandizing by Mr. Obama. No American would ever stop respecting his betters unless he was brainwashed into it.

It is also a play for legitimacy. In good times, the very rich compare themselves to the Almighty; in hard times they convince themselves that Huey P. Long lurks just around the corner. History, they fear, will repeat its most sordid chapters unless it is stopped right now, and that’s why they act as if a few mean words wound as hurtfully as any program of, say, antitrust enforcement.

They whine because whining works. One only wishes that if he wins a second term, Barack Obama will give them something to really cry about.


http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/pity-the-plutocrats/

[F6]

Romney captures the God vote at first debate


The first presidential debate: ?Domestic policy was the focus of the debate in Denver.

By Sally Quinn, Published: October 4, 2012

When Mitt Romney mentioned the “Creator” in the debate [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkrwUU_YApE ; http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/2012-presidential-debate-president-obama-and-mitt-romneys-remarks-in-denver-on-oct-3-running-transcript/2012/10/03/24d6eb6e-0d91-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story.html ; http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/romney-obama-debate-could-be-pivot-point-in-campaign/2012/10/03/74fad02c-0d98-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story.html ] Wednesday, he owned it. “We’re all children of the same God,” he said.

That’s about 85 percent of the country he was talking to. That should have been President Obama’s constituency but he let Romney have it as he let Romney have the debate.

Citing the Declaration of Independence, Romney said: “Second, is that line that says we are endowed by our Creator with our rights, I believe we must maintain our commitment to religious tolerance and freedom in this country. That statement also says that we are endowed by our creator with the right to pursue happiness as we choose. I interpret that as, one, making sure that those people who are less fortunate and can’t care for themselves are cared by -- by one another.”

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

An atheist could never get elected dog catcher, much less president. (Democratic Rep. Pete Stark [ http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/heathens/ ] of California is a nontheist but doesn’t talk much about it).

Up until now, the idea of being American and believing in God were synonymous.

When the Republicans tried to take away the flag it took a long time for the Democrats to realize they had been hijacked. For years, Democrats were wary of wearing flag pins for fear of seeming to pander. They finallygot the message.

Now it’s God. The Republicans have claimed God as their own this entire campaign, each candidate trying to out-Christian the other. Even Obama, though 17 percent of registered voters think he is a Muslim, has talked about being a Christian as often as he can.

Still, none of Obama’s references have been in a debate. And there was Obama -- grim faced, nervous, fumbling his words and wearing his American flag pin -- letting Romney, confident and aggressive and in control, roll right over him at every turn.

But the God thing clinched it. If Obama wants to win the next debate, he needs to wear God, as much as it offends him to do so, the same way he captured the flag for this one.

© 2012 The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/romney-captures-the-god-vote-at-first-debate/2012/10/04/e897f44c-0de3-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html [with comments]


--


According to the Washington Post's Sally Quinn, atheists can't claim citizenship

by terrypinder
Fri Oct 05, 2012 at 05:34 AM PDT

I swore I wouldn’t write any more “political” diaries but this, this I could not pass up.

The Washington Post, in its continued slide into utter dreck, publishes a column called On Faith. Sometimes, you get nice offerings from people who are nice. More often than not some asshole is telling me, in a voice they think is loving (and indeed, I think some of them actually orgasm thinking about this), that I’m going to go to an imaginary punishment place. Whatever.

Yesterday’s was more of the same crap [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/romney-captures-the-god-vote-at-first-debate/2012/10/04/e897f44c-0de3-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html (above)]. Sally Quinn writes “This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.” and "Up until now, the idea of being American and believing in God were synonymous."

How nice to learn that I’m not and can’t be a citizen, according to Sally Quinn. Also, she gets it ever so wrong. I really have to wonder what hallucinogens are being put into the D.C. Pundit Cocktail Circuit’s mango appletinis.

[...]

You know what, Sally Quinn? You have the freedom to say whatever nonsense you want, and the Washington Post has the freedom to print your nonsense. I absolutely support that. But I retain the freedom to suggest you stick to getting drunk on the D.C. Pundit Cocktail Circuit and writing about the Real Housewives of DC, or whatever execrable crap you used to write for the Post (which, I’m aware, is a considerable portion of the Post’s On Faith column [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sally-quinn/2011/03/16/AB0r9Rf_page.html ].)

Oh, and yeah, I’m a citizen, because I was born here. I'm a citizen because the constitution (the legal document that is actually in force, and not the Declaration which the evangelicals fetishize) says so. That’s it. That’s the end. That’s all there is to it.

© Kos Media, LLC

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/05/1140476/-According-to-the-Washington-Post-s-Sally-Quinn-atheists-can-t-claim-citizenship [with comments]


--


Sally Quinn Wants Obama to Wear God, Has Gone Mad



By Charles P. Pierce at 12:27PM, October 5, 2012

The continued authorship of something called "On Faith" by Beltway social-climber and Hall of Fame trophy wife Sally Quinn remains the most hilarious thing about The Washington Post, a once-great newspaper now d/b/a an adjunct to the educational testing institute. In her dotage, Sal has become a spiritual explorer, a religious quester, and a thoroughgoing loon. Reading her stuff is like showing up at Lourdes and finding Bernadette Soubirous standing there, dressed in Prada, chilling the champagne and offering the Blessed Mother a couple of seats at the owner's box at the next Redskins game.

Anyway, she seems to have been transported to something resembling ecstasy [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/romney-captures-the-god-vote-at-first-debate/2012/10/04/e897f44c-0de3-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html (at the top)] by the fact that Willard Romney took time out from stomping on the Ninth Commandment the other night long enough to mention a certain Deity, although not by name....

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.. We've got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We've got "In God We Trust" on our coins. We've got "one nation under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

And, in the Beyond, Mr. Madison cracks another bottle of Madeira and drinks it down in two swallows. A belief in God has nothing to do with "claiming your citizenship." And, not for nothing, but Willard Romney's god happens to believe that Jesus came to America to smoke dope with the Iroquois.

Now it's God. The Republicans have claimed God as their own this entire campaign, each candidate trying to out-Christian the other. Even Obama, though 17 percent of registered voters think he is a Muslim, has talked about being a Christian as often as he can. Still, none of Obama's references have been in a debate. And there was Obama — grim faced, nervous, fumbling his words and wearing his American flag pin — letting Romney, confident and aggressive and in control, roll right over him at every turn. But the God thing clinched it. If Obama wants to win the next debate, he needs to wear God, as much as it offends him to do so, the same way he captured the flag for this one.

"He needs to wear God"? Apparently, the president stands no chance unless he becomes the Buffalo Bill [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bill_(character) ] of public Christianism. ("It says the prayers or it gets the hose.") I tried on Quinn's conception of God once, and I found Him a little tight in the crotch.

This is some crazy-ass shit right here.

©2012 Hearst Communications, Inc.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/sally-quinn-obama-romney-god-13403611 [with comments]


--


LBJ's Bunghole Needs Room!

Uploaded by maxpowers518 on Aug 15, 2008

Recording of an actual White House phone call from August 9, 1964; LBJ orders some pants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3GT9UN7nDo


===


President George Bush Snr. on Atheists

Uploaded by Diamonddavej on May 20, 2007

President George Bush Snr., "I don't know that Atheists should be considered as patriots, nor should they be considered as Citizens."

Seneca (4-65 CE), "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."

When George Bush was campaigning for the presidency, as incumbent vice-president, one of his stops was in Chicago, Illinois, on August 27, 1987. At O'Hare Airport he held a formal outdoor news conference. There Robert I. Sherman, a reporter for the American Atheist news journal, fully accredited by the state of Illinois and by invitation a participating member of the press corps covering the national candidates, had the following exchange with then-Vice-President Bush.

Sherman: What will you do to win the votes of the Americans who are atheists?

Bush: I guess I'm pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in God is important to me.

Sherman: Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?

Bush: No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Sherman (somewhat taken aback): Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?

Bush: Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QinS_smfby0 [with comments] [ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush#Attributed : 'attributed'; never contradicted or denied]


===


Jessica Ahlquist, Atheist, Receives Threats Over Prayer Banner Ruling; School Board May Appeal (VIDEO)
01/31/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/jessica-ahlquist-prayer-banner-rhode-island-school_n_1237199.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


--


Jessica Ahlquist, Atheist Student In Prayer Banner Fight, Gets $40,000 Scholarship Fund



02/18/12 03:31 PM ET

CRANSTON, R.I. -- A national association that says there's no proof for the existence of God is managing a scholarship fund set up for a teenage atheist at the center of a dispute over a prayer banner at a Rhode Island school.

The American Humanist Association says 16-year-old Jessica Ahlquist was targeted with online threats after she challenged the constitutionality of the display at Cranston High School West. It says she stood up against her critics "with class and style."

A federal judge last month ordered the banner removed. A school committee on Thursday decided not to appeal.

Blogger Hemant Mehta started a campaign at the Friendly Atheist website to raise money for Ahlquist.

The Friendly Atheist says the fund has brought in more than $40,000. The fundraiser runs through the end of February.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/18/jessica-ahlquist-atheist-_n_1286875.html [with comments]


===


One in five Americans reports no religious affiliation, study says

Politics and religion of voters
How voters affiliated and unaffiliated with traditional religious denominations identify themselves politically, according to a new survey released by the Pew Research Center.

Source: Pew Research Center survey, June 28-July 9, 2012.

By Michelle Boorstein, Published: October 8, 2012

One-fifth of U.S. adults say they are not part of a traditional religious denomination, new data from the Pew Research Center [ http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx ] show, evidence of an unprecedented reshuffling of Americans’ spiritual identities that is shaking up fields from charity to politics.

But despite their nickname, the “nones” are far from godless. Many pray, believe in God and have regular spiritual routines.

Their numbers have increased dramatically over the past two decades, according to the study released Tuesday. About 19.6 percent of Americans say they are “nothing in particular,” agnostic or atheist, up from about 8 percent in 1990. One-third of adults under 30 say the same. Pew offered people a list of more than a dozen possible affiliations, including “Protestant,” “Catholic,” “something else” and “nothing in particular.”

For the first time, Pew also reported that the number of Americans identifying themselves as Protestant dipped below half [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/losing-our-religion-one-in-five-americans-are-now-nones/2012/10/09/60dfc2e4-1218-11e2-9a39-1f5a7f6fe945_story.html ], at 48 percent. But the United States is still very traditional when it comes to religion, with 79 percent of Americans identifying with an established faith group.

Experts have been tracking unaffiliated Americans [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/under-god/post/who-are-the-nones/2012/10/09/e3669952-1238-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_blog.html ] since their numbers began rising, but new studies are adding details to the portrait.

Members can be found in all educational and income groups, but they skew heavily in one direction politically: 68 percent lean toward the Democratic Party. That makes the “nones,” at 24 percent, the largest Democratic faith constituency [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/losing-our-religion-one-in-five-americans-are-now-nones/2012/10/09/60dfc2e4-1218-11e2-9a39-1f5a7f6fe945_story.html ], with black Protestants at 16 percent and white mainline Protestants at 14 percent.

By comparison, white evangelicals make up 34 percent of the Republican base.

The study presents a stark map of how political and religious polarization have merged in recent decades. Congregations used to be a blend of political affiliations, but that’s generally not the case anymore. Sociologists have shown that Americans are more likely to pick their place of worship by their politics, not vice versa.

Some said the study and its data on younger generations forecast more polarization.

“We think it’s mostly a reaction to the religious right,” said Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who has written at length about the decline in religious affiliation [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/10/AR2010121007016.html ]. “The best predictor of which people have moved into this category over the last 20 years is how they feel about religion and politics” aligning, particularly conservative politics and opposition to gay civil rights.

Americans have been fleeing institutions in general, Putnam wrote in his bestselling book “Bowling Alone,” about the decline of such institutions as hobby clubs and alumni associations. The culture is also more secular, with prayer in schools and the closing of businesses on Sundays fading along with traditional religious norms on marriage and sex.

For the presidential campaigns, the data reflect a simple fact on the ground. Three-quarters of unaffiliated voters voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Today, the unaffiliated break like this: 65 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Longtime GOP political strategist and pollster Ed Goeas said the challenge for Republicans in reaching unaffiliated people is, well, that they’re unaffiliated. Unattached to religious institutions, they’re hard to find. “They may be reachable message-wise, but not tactically,” he said.

But what does the political platform of this mammoth group of voters look like?

The nones are strongly liberal on social issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage, but no different from the public overall and the religiously affiliated on their preference for a smaller government providing fewer services.

If they have an issue, it’s that they don’t believe religion and politics should mix. Only a third of them say it matters if the president is a believer. Three-quarters of the affiliated think it matters.

This divide, says religion and politics expert John Green [ http://www.pewforum.org/Pew-Forum/John-C--Green.aspx ], defines our culture.

“I suspect for these reasons that simmering cultural conflict for the last 30 or 40 years is likely to continue,” said Green, who advised Pew on the study.

This chasm isn’t news to religious or political leaders. Some political observers think that one of the reasons Obama and Romney have spoken minimally and in general terms about their faiths is that they haven’t wanted to alienate unaffiliated voters.

And many rising evangelical leaders have pushed hard to uncouple their faith from the GOP, from the Rev. Mark Batterson [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-national-community-church-tries-to-blend-faith-neighborhood-spirit/2012/02/28/gIQAFETiiR_story.html ], who runs an evangelical megachurch on Capitol Hill popular with congressional staffers of both parties, to Focus on the Family’s new president, Jim Daly [ http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/jim_daly/ ], who has said making Christianity less strident is his key mandate.

Lorna Stuart, 74, of Newport News, Va., describes herself as having “no particular religion” and says she votes Democratic because she is strongly in favor of abortion rights. She likes the fact that she doesn’t often hear Democratic candidates talking about religion.

The retired Army analyst grew up in an active mainline Protestant family in Massachusetts. She went to youth groups and Sunday school and sang in the church choir. She raised her children in the Methodist Church but said that at any time during her adult life, she would have told a pollster she didn’t identify with a particular label.

She liked the social structure of the church and the idea of giving her children “something to rebel against,” but she thinks traditional religion is too focused on rules and sin and “things that really don’t apply to God,” she said in an interview Monday.

For the past 13 years, Stuart says, she has been in a weekly meditation and study group made up of people who have “fallen away” from some faiths and others who are still active.

“We are much more than churches give us credit for,” she said of people outside major denominations. “I mean as people. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.”

The beliefs of the unaffiliated aren’t easy to characterize, as the Pew poll shows. The nones are far less likely to attend worship services or to say religion is important in their lives. But 68 percent say they believe in God or a universal spirit, one-fifth say they pray every day and 5 percent report attending weekly services of some kind.

As American religion is in full churn, experts often debate whether the country will go the way of Europe, with a more institutionalized secularism. But many note that religion has been a busy marketplace in the United States and continues to reinvent itself. Even if the structures and institutions and terms we know slip, Putnam said, it’s unlikely that secularism will replace spirituality and faith in this country.

“Religion as a whole in America has been astonishingly resilient. That’s because we have really entrepreneurial leaders,” he said. “I think it would be bad to bet against the creativity of American religion.”

© 2012 The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/one-in-five-americans-reports-no-religious-affiliation-study-says/2012/10/08/a7599664-11c8-11e2-855a-c9ee6c045478_story.html [with comments]


--


Number of Protestant Americans Is in Steep Decline, Study Finds


A cross shaped window inside South Calvary Baptist Church in Indianapolis, Ind.
Chris Bergin for The New York Times

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: October 9, 2012

For the first time since researchers began tracking the religious identity of Americans, fewer than half said they were Protestants, a steep decline from 40 years ago when Protestant churches claimed the loyalty of more than two-thirds of the population.

A new study [ http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx ] released on Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that it was not just liberal mainline Protestants, like Methodists or Episcopalians, who abandoned their faith, but also more conservative evangelical and “born again” Protestants. The losses were among white Protestants, but not among black or minority Protestants, the study found, based on surveys conducted during the summer.

When they leave, instead of switching churches, they join the growing ranks who do not identify with any religion. Nearly one in five Americans say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”

This is a significant jump from only five years ago, when adults who claimed “no religion” made up about 15 percent of the population. It is a seismic shift from 40 years ago, when about 7 percent of American adults said they had no religious affiliation.

Now, more than one-third of those ages 18 to 22 are religiously unaffiliated. These “younger millennials” are replacing older generations who remained far more involved with religion throughout their lives.

“We really haven’t seen anything like this before,” said Gregory A. Smith, a senior researcher with the Pew Forum. “Even when the baby boomers came of age in the early ’70s, they were half as likely to be unaffiliated as compared with young people today.”

The “Nones,” as they are called, now make up the nation’s second-largest religious grouping. The largest single faith group is Catholics, who make up about 22 percent of the population. Their numbers have held steady, mostly because an influx of immigrants has replaced the many Catholics who were raised in the church and left in the last five years, Mr. Smith said.

The rise in people who claim no religion is likely to have political consequences, said Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Southern California.

“The significant majority of the religiously unaffiliated tend to be left-leaning, tend to support the Democratic Party, support gay marriage and environmental causes,” he said.

The Pew report offers several theories to explain the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. One theory is that the young adults grew disillusioned with organized religion when evangelical Protestant and Catholic churches became so active in conservative political causes, like opposition to homosexuality and abortion.

Another theory is that the shift merely reflects a broader trend away from social and community involvement, the phenomenon dubbed “bowling alone” by Robert D. Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard University.

Another explanation is that the United States is simply following the trend toward secularization already seen in many economically developed countries, like Australia and Canada and some in Europe.

The United States has always been the great exception to this secularizing trend, and it is not clear that Americans are necessarily moving toward the European model.

The Pew report found that even among Americans who claimed no religion, few qualified as purely secular. Two-thirds say they still believe in God, and one-fifth say they pray every day. Only 12 percent of the religiously unaffiliated group said they were atheists and 17 percent agnostic.

The Rev. Eileen W. Lindner, who has chronicled religious statistics for years as the editor of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, has observed this complexity.

She said, “There will be lots of people who read this study and go: ‘Oh no, this is terrible! What’s it doing to our culture?’ I would, as a social scientist and a pastor, urge caution.

“A lot of the younger people are very spotty in their attendance at worship, but if we have a mission project, they’re here,” said Ms. Lindner, the pastor of a Presbyterian church in New Jersey. “They run the soup kitchens, they build the houses in Habitat for Humanity.”

They may not come on Sundays, she said, but they have not abandoned their faith.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/us/study-finds-that-the-number-of-protestant-americans-is-declining.html


===


Religious Freedom Being Stifled Around the Globe, Says Study

By Myles Collier, Christian Post Contributor

October 8, 2012|4:28 pm

A new study highlights the growing global trend of religious restrictions, whether by means of government action or social trends- limiting regulations are currently affecting three out of every four individuals.

The study, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, is titled "Rising Tide of Restrictions on Religion [ http://www.pewforum.org/Government/Rising-Tide-of-Restrictions-on-Religion-findings.aspx ]" and showed that the percentage of the world's population that was affected by restrictions on religion increased to 75 percent. That's up from 70 percent the previous year.

What is equally disturbing is the rise of various countries around the globe that have enacted stricter laws governing the observances of practices of faith. The study found that the percentage of countries who adopted such measures increased from 31 percent to 37 percent.

The study lists some government restrictions which include laws against "proselytism" or "blasphemy." It also includes laws limiting some countries citizens' choice of religious materials, such as Uzbekistan, which only recognizes religious materials produced by the state.

Social restrictions, on the other hand are not controlled by the state and can include ostracism, mob action, or other community-based action in response to the exercise of faith. These specific social occurrences are often able to manifest due to the inaction of local authorities.

While the report uses data before the Arab uprisings took hold, it still highlights that region as one of the harshest in terms of limiting religious liberty, while also cautioning that restrictions of religious freedoms and liberty are becoming wider spread.

"The Middle East-North Africa had by far the world's highest levels of social hostilities involving religion as well as government restrictions on religious beliefs and practices," the study stated.

"A rising level of restrictions occurred in each of the five major regions of the world … In three regions – Europe, the Middle East-North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa – the median levels of both government restrictions and social hostilities increased from mid-2009 to mid-2010," the research continued.

The United States, often the beacon of global freedom, was moved from a low category to a moderate category for the first time citing developments at the state and local level.

"In the year ending in mid-2010, there was an increase in the number of incidents in the U.S. at the state and local level in which members of some religious groups faced restrictions on their ability to practice their faith," the study read.

©2012 The Christian Post

http://global.christianpost.com/news/religious-freedom-being-stifled-around-the-globe-says-study-82906/ [with comments]


===


Obama Campaign Building Vandalized With Words 'Muslim Lier' In Iowa
10/05/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/obama-vandalism-muslim-iowa_n_1942505.html [with comments]


===


Russian Christians Demand Apple Change 'Offensive' Logo to Cross


Apple, Inc.

By Stoyan Zaimov, Christian Post Reporter

October 4, 2012|11:35 am

Christians from Russia's Orthodox community are demanding that the country's Apple division remove the famous half-bitten apple logo from its products and replace it with a cross, because they find the apple image offensive to their beliefs.

In popular culture, an apple is often used to represent the fruit that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge when tempted by the devil, as found in Genesis 3 in the Bible – although the exact type of fruit is not mentioned in Scripture.

Still, conservative Christians in Russia have insisted that the logo should be removed and replaced with a cross, Xbitlabs.com [ http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20121004032052_Russian_Orthodox_Christians_Swap_Apple_Logo_with_Crosses.html ] reported from a translated article from Interfax news agency.

The Russian conservatives may get their way and force Apple to change its logo because of new laws being proposed in the country's parliament on blasphemy and insults targeting religious, spiritual, or national values. It is expected that President Vladimir Putin will back the laws, especially since the Russian Orthodox Church heavily supported him during his election campaign in 2012. Besides replacing the logo, conservatives may even stop Apple product sales in Russia if they manage to convict the company of committing anti-religious deeds.

Apple's iconic symbol has been in use in one form or another for over 35 years. The first bitten apple silhouette was introduced in 1976, and has undergone a number of design changes to reach its current glass-themed logo, which was introduced in 2003.

The Russian Orthodox Church has been quick to clamp down on any disrespect or rebellion against its authority. The church was a leading factor in having three members of the punk rock band Pussy Riot jailed for performing a song against President Vladimir Putin inside Moscow's main cathedral. Church officials have called on the all-female group to repent for its blasphemy and hooliganism.

©2012 The Christian Post

http://global.christianpost.com/news/russian-christians-demand-apple-change-offensive-logo-to-cross-82711/ [with comments]


===


Peeling Away the Right-Wing Religious Veneer

by Redneck Aeschylus
Mon Oct 08, 2012 at 07:50 PM PDT

"Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them."
-Leo Strauss

"Faith, hope and love - the greatest of these things is love."
- 1 Corinthians 13:13

Lee Atwater famously said, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can't say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. […] You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.”

Tying Republican fortunes to the white vote made electoral sense in the early 1970s. But since 1980, the white share of the electorate has fallen in every consecutive election. During the 1990s, the Southern Strategy was redirected less on the South itself and more on a general concept that successfully uses wedge issues such as family values, abortion and gun ownership.

We now call it “Dog Whistle” politics when they use the core principles of the Southern Strategy on a national level to help generate support in new regions of the country, mostly rural areas and the Midwest. It works because it allows them to deny racism while at the same time playing on fears of “reverse racism” and economic victimization.

Remember the hatred they expressed for Clinton, whose inclusive politics led the right to call him the “first black president.” And they didn’t mean it as a compliment.

But increasingly they’re fishing in a smaller pond due to demographic changes. Whether or not their candidates are racists (and I don’t believe Romney is), they have come to realize that they have no choice but to use the dog whistle to win. For example, Romney needs 61% of the white vote from a white turnout of 74%. In 2008, John McCain got 55% from the same turnout. The only way out is the double-down on overtly racist rhetoric.

Senator Lindsey Graham admitted, "We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."

It’s all wrapped in a religious veneer, but there’s very little religious conviction behind it – it’s a foil to legitimize their strategy, and it’s put them in a terrible position with the nomination of a Mormon as their standard bearer.

So, where are the right-wing religious fundamentalists and their faux-religious outrage in this election cycle?

They’re nowhere to be seen because the Republicans can’t risk having that conversation – it’s a mess for them. A big huge pile of steaming dog crap that came out of their own collective asshole, and they’re scared to death to step in it.

Romney’s religion is strictly off limits this time and Democrats are more than happy to oblige because it is a part of their core political conviction that religion should remain a strictly private matter.

Let’s connect the dots a bit here.

Four years ago, then-Senator Obama was vilified because of a few statements of Black Liberation Theology made by his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. These were statements he says he never even heard but the right-wing jumped all over him demanding to know, “How could you sit in that church for 20 years?”

On the other hand, the Mormon Church ended its policy barring black men from their priesthood in 1978. Mitt Romney was 31-years-old. Just like Obama, he could have disavowed his religious leaders or gotten up and walked out of that church at any point during those 31 years, but he chose not to. How come he never got asked, “How could you sit in that church for 31 years?”

Why does Romney get a pass when Obama doesn’t? Let me make this really easy for you: Because Obama and his former pastor are black. The Southern Strategy says that, because they’re white, Romney and the Mormon Church are victims and are deserving of cultural self-forgiveness. It gives them the power to degrade other people while maintaining a sense of martyrdom.

Think about it.

What happened to the Saddleback Church Forum, the all-important right-wing litmus test of religious bona fides that look place four years ago (on national television) when both Obama and McCain were required to kiss the ring of pastor Rick Warren at his megachurch in Orange County, California? If it is so important to the right-wingers that we know exactly where a politician stands on matters of faith and morality, why didn’t we have the chance to see Mitt Romney discuss the particulars of his Mormon belief in the plurality of gods and his rejection of the Trinity?

The response of the Republican party this time around: “Oh, never mind.”

How is it possible that the number of Republicans who think Obama is a Muslim could double since he was elected, and that less than half of all registered voters know what religion he holds (despite the Jeremiah Wright controversy which at the very least clearly showed that he’s a Protestant Christian)?

Perhaps it is because just about every Republican politician has tacitly encouraged or tolerated it. Or perhaps it’s because his religion never really mattered to them to begin with, any more than Romney’s Mormonism matters to them.

“Muslim” is a dog-whistle code-word. Add a little lunatic Birther, Bircher and now Welcher to the brew and you’ve got Romney campaign surrogates like John Sununu dog-whistling that the president “needs to learn what it means to be an American,” is “lazy” and “not that bright”.

What’s it all mean?

Peel back the religious veneer and the blatant racism is laid bare. Because the fact is, it’s not about religion and never has been. It’s about using religion to legitimize racism and xenophobia and homophobia, whip up resentment, hate and division, and ultimately, cynically grab power for the economic elites.

*

A PERSONAL NOTE: I hate this subject. It's the hardest thing to write about, and I know I've done it very little justice, but I'm glad I've tried. It's been a long time in the coming. Like a lot of you, I've often found myself so repulsed by it that I avoid even reading or viewing material that covers the subject. Over the years, I've searched in vain for an explanation that would let me believe that racism and xenophobia and homophobia are really not what motivates the Far Right. I want to believe in the goodness of people, but I've come to the cold hard realization that there's really no other explanation. I'm Catholic and I'm gay - not conflicted (please, no flames), but rather deeply dispirited that the Christian faith has been hijacked by the right-wing to advance their agenda that is anything but "Christian" in my mind. It chases away a lot of my liberal friends who feel rejected, angry and disgusted by the hypocrisy and hate they see on the Right, and I don't blame them for feeling that way. Christ helped the poor, befriended outcasts and "sinners" and healed the sick (for free). All of my heroes have been progressives, and they were also Christians: Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to name a few (not to say there aren't plenty of progressives I admire who were not Christian, because there are lots of them, too). But it's truly painful to see something so admirable be distorted beyond recognition, isn't it?

© Kos Media, LLC

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/08/1141898/-It-s-Not-About-Religion [with comments]


===


Why Would God Give Us Obama or Romney? (Pt. 3 - Final)


By Wallace Henley [ http://global.christianpost.com/author/wallace-henley/ ], Special to CP
October 8, 2012|7:40 am

If Mitt Romney is elected president of the United States, his religion, a serious, cultic distortion of the Bible and history in the eyes of many evangelicals, will have new standing and credibility, and likely experience an acceleration of its already fast expansion.

Under Romney, some policies may languish in the swampy squish of centrism, one that embraces elements of Obamacare. If his leadership in Massachusetts is a sample, Romney may attempt to combine statist, modified Keynesian economics with Reaganesque supply-side policies, a mixture of oil and water. He is untested on national defense and foreign policy.

If President Obama is re-elected he will continue the overturning of a value-system often in direct contradiction with biblically aligned morality and ethics, including expansion of abortion, and official affirmation of same-sex marriage.

As we noted in the previous article in this series [ http://global.christianpost.com/news/7-things-to-expect-in-a-second-obama-administration-pt-2-82501/ (first in the series at http://global.christianpost.com/news/four-advantages-obama-has-in-2012-election-82361/ )], the next Obama administration likely will have secularism as the underlying motif of policy, utilitarianism as the measure of the right to life, equivalency as the standard for universal values, internationalism as the context for foreign policy, statism as the means for the "general welfare," unfettered Keynesianism as the basis for economic policy, and anti-institutionalism as the attitude toward traditional values institutions.

Why would God give us either of these men?

The Bible leaves no doubt that God is in charge of nations as well as individuals. Among those passages is Proverbs 21:1, which says, "The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD, like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes." Daniel 2:21 is just as blunt when it declares, "He changes the times and the seasons; He removes kings and raises up kings…"

So why would God do it? Why would he raise up a president from a belief system that, to some, seems a parody and caricature of the Bible and history, or a president who officially endorses a moral code contradictory to Scripture?

There are a couple of reasons apparent in the Bible, and probably many more in the yet hidden mysteries of God. First, God will raise up national leaders in the best interests of His Kingdom and its advance in the world. Jesus reveals in Matthew 24:14 that the expansion of His Kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17) is the whole point of history. God knows what will make nations fertile for the seeding of His Kingdom, and the kinds of leaders necessary to bring about those conditions.

Second, the accumulation of judgment for the sins of a nation will determine the type of leader God will raise up. There is a point of "fullness" of sins (Genesis 15:16) where the perfect mercy of God must give way to the perfect justice of God. This occurs when a nation rejects God despite His pleadings and prophetic warnings. That judgment may be in the form of a national leader who guides the country into disaster, leading to people waking up and turning back to the Lord and His gracious ways.

In the short term, supporters of the loser will be disappointed and anxious about the immediate future. Obama's extreme partisans fear a nation where freedoms are severely limited, and conservative values imposed on everyone if Romney wins. Romney's most fervent voters fear that if Obama is elected, it is the end of America.

However, everyone must pull way back, and get the largest of perspectives. If God is in charge, and the whole tangled business of elections and governing is leading ultimately to the "blessed hope" (Titus 2:13), then there can be rejoicing even in the midst of what will be defeat for one of those candidates and their voters.

*

READ: IS MITT ROMNEY OR BARACK OBAMA GOING TO SAVE AMERICA?
http://blogs.christianpost.com/smallpreacher-biggod/is-mitt-romney-or-barack-obama-going-to-save-america-11764/

READ: POLITICS AND THE BIBLE - WHO TO VOTE FOR ... PART 1
http://blogs.christianpost.com/christianlife/politics-and-the-biblewho-to-vote-for-part-1-3784/

*

©2012 The Christian Post

http://global.christianpost.com/news/why-would-god-give-us-obama-or-romney-pt-3-final-82503/ [with comments]


===


Now Shut Your Hole & Wallow in Your Delusion-Induced Shame, Christian Right

by The Troubadour
Tue Oct 09, 2012 at 09:33 AM PDT

In the run-up to the 2008 election, Focus On the Family composed a "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America [ http://www.wnd.com/files/Focusletter.pdf ]." The widely-disseminated letter made 34 predictions concerning what America would likely look like after four years under an Obama presidency.

To give you a sense of its tone and direction, here's how the letter began:

October 22, 2012

Dear friends,

I can hardly sing “The Star Spangled Banner” any more. When I hear the words,

O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

I get tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. Now in October of 2012, after seeing what has happened in the last four years, I don’t think I can still answer, “Yes,” to that question. We are not “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Many of our freedoms have been taken away...

We are now in October of 2012, four years after this foul piece of fear-mongering (disguised as Christian wisdom) was penned to scare evangelicals away from voting for Obama.

It should come as no surprise, as Fred Clarke noted recently [ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/10/01/a-documented-case-of-false-prophecy-four-years-later-letter-from-2012-makes-focus-on-the-family-look-ridiculous/ ], that the letter ends up going 0-for-34 in its predictions. But I don't want to focus on its ineptitude.

Instead, I want to expose the depths of the Christian right's crazy (and politically-motivated) delusions that even Clint Eastwood can't touch. I want to stab evangelical soothsaying – a festival that arrives every four years – in its pseudo-prophesying heart.

And all I have to do is present, without comment, a number of the letter's predictions distilled (so you don't have to read the whole, god-awful thing).

It is a festival of hate, xenophobia and utter delusions. Enjoy:

* The Boy Scouts of America will be disbanded rather than be forced to "hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys."

* Pornography is now on television at all hours, making it impossible to prevent children from seeing it.

* First graders will be forced to take "the goodness of homosexuality" classes.

* Home-schooling becomes largely illegal as everyone is forced into using public education standards. Christians flock to Australia and New Zealand! (Seriously.)

* In the military, "homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting in military service" and active duty members or chaplains are expelled if they don't like the new rules.

* Guns are taken from everybody! Only police & active duty military personnel get to keep them.

* Terrorists are blowing up bombs everywhere, and Obama seems impotent to do anything about it. (Osama must still be running things.)

* Russia begins to take over Eastern Europe, invading and taking as satellite states "Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, with no military response from the U.S. or the U.N."

* As the world crumbles, back in America health care becomes socialized, and everyone must wait years before receiving cancer treatment and the elderly don't get to use hospitals anymore.

* Christian doctors will flee their practices across America rather than be forced to artificially inseminate homosexual couples.

* All Christian adoption agencies will be closed rather than be forced to give children to homosexual couples.

* Taxes go through the roof for everyone, particularly the middle class, and nobody can survive any longer.

It's now October 2012, and all I have to say to Focus On the Family and evangelicals who play this apocalyptic game everywhere is the following:

Shut your xenophobic, ignorant pie holes and wallow in your delusion-induced shame.

That is all.

© Kos Media, LLC

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/09/1142075/-NOW-SHUT-YOUR-HOLE-Wallow-in-Your-Delusion-Induced-Shame-Christian-Right [with comments]


===


Is the Republican Party Racist?


The U.S. flag (top), the state flag of South Carolina (middle) and the Confederate flag (bottom) fly atop the capitol building in April 2000 in Columbia, S.C.
Photograph by Erik Perel/Getty Images.

It depends on race-baiting tactics and the votes of former Confederate states.

By Ron Rosenbaum|Posted Monday, Oct. 8, 2012, at 3:50 AM ET

Now that Romney supporters have sought to make race, once again, an issue against Obama with an "explosive" five-year-old video [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/us/politics/07-talk-by-obama-resurfaces-renewing-questions-on-race.html?pagewanted=all ] reminding voters that Obama (yes, it's true!) consorts with black people, perhaps it's time to remind people of the real reason Romney deserves rejection at the polls in November: He is the candidate of the neo-racist Republican Party.

“Neo-racist” seem a little pointed? OK, how about “structurally racist”? I bring up the matter in part because it relates to the discussion lately [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/opinion/sunday/he-said-she-said-and-the-truth.html ] about how journalism must do more than present false equivalency, treating the two sides of any debate as though they are equally valid. Journalism-watchers have been indulging in a fair bit of self-congratulatory rhetoric about how now journalism is all about the TRUTH behind any debate, as if discovering the truth was always something easy to do on deadline, often without sufficient expertise.

Those who dismiss “he said, she said” journalism—the tendency to present both sides of any story without judgment—make the arrogant assumption that they can do better, present the truth, the absolute truth on any given contested issue.

But is this true? Is this always possible?

I present, as a test case, the issue of whether the Republican Party should be identified as a “neo-racist” entity. Could the press present this judgment as a fact? Let’s conduct a kind of thought experiment about how far the press should go in declaring that a matter’s factuality has been decided.

I remember being seated next to Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School, at some dinner and discussing J-school attitudes toward the question of truth. (I’d taught a few writing seminars at Columbia.) And hearing Lemann saying something important that the bold journalism truthers neglect: that the hardest thing to teach J-school students was to “report the debates.”

Report the debates! Not to declare truths as if bearing them down on stone tablets from Sinai, but to clarify and sharpen the questions, investigate the hidden agendas, the underlying theories, the potential consequences of each side of a contested issue. Without necessarily declaring a winner.

And thus the real task, ignored by the anti-“he said/she said” crowd, is to decide which issues are valid debates. Because I agree there are some truths that are beyond debate, though not as many as established and obvious as the anti-“he/said she said”-types seem to think. I think most would agree that the 9/11 “truthers” and the Obama “birthers” do not merit any further debate; the facts are in. We can declare the believers deluded.

On the other hand, take drone strikes. I’ve argued here [ http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2010/08/ban_droneporn_war_crimes.html ] that because of the risk they pose to civilians they are, in most cases, by most interpretations of the internationally recognized Laws of Armed Conflict, war crimes. But I can see there are arguments against this, even from liberals, and I don’t think the question is so settled that journalists should be required to identify the president, the secretary of defense and the director of the CIA as war criminals every time they’re mentioned.

I’ve spent some time putting “truth” claims and false equivalencies in perspective because I want to test the theory that there is one truth in political discourse that the media has almost entirely failed to recognize or fears to utter, one at the heart of presidential campaign reporting: The Republican Party is an institutionally, structurally racist entity. It’s the veritable elephant in the room of campaign coverage.

No, I’m not saying all Republicans are racist. I’m saying that as a party, ever since Goldwater and Nixon concocted the benighted, openly racist “Southern Strategy” in the ’60s, the Republican Party has profited from overt and covert racism.

The Southern Strategy was designed to capitalize on Southern white resentment of court-enforced busing to end school desegregation, of the 1964 Civil Rights Act's prohibition of discrimination in interstate commerce, of enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to prevent historically racist Southern counties and states from discriminating against blacks who sought to exercise their right to vote where once they'd been effectively barred. By playing on these issues, Nixon and other Republicans of this era won many traditionally Democratic votes in the South. Later, GOP opposition to affirmative action, race-based hiring "quotas" and all other methods of compensating for the debilitating legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation fed into what was one of the momentous shifts, a total turnaround in just more than a decade (1970 to 1984) from a solidly Democratic South to a solidly Republican one.

A new book about Strom Thurmond [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809094800 ], the openly racist senator from South Carolina (he ran as a "Dixiecrat" against Truman in 1948) details how Thurmond's switch from the Democratic Party to the GOP in 1964 was the harbinger and instigator for that shift to a solidly Republican South. Eventually the party became somewhat less overt in its public statements but not in its appeal at the voting booth.

Which means in practice that the GOP starts out every presidential election with (depending on census changes in electoral vote numbers) some 100 electoral votes, more than a third of the way to the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.

Is it an accident that these 100 votes come from the core states of the Old Confederacy—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina?

Looked at another way, as things stand, there would be no presidential "race" at the moment if it weren't for those ex-confederate states—even if they split their votes. Mitt Romney would have little or no chance of winning and might as well quit the race now. Nor would the GOP have much chance of re-taking the Senate or even winning the House again. They would be dead as a political party if not for the legacy of racism. I think that's a fact. Do you think it's "he said/she said"?

That doesn’t mean that all Southern whites vote GOP only because of race. But when I checked in with the careful historian of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Rick Perlstein, author of books on the Goldwater and Nixon phenomena [ http://www.amazon.com/s/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&field-keywords=Rick%20Perlstein&linkCode=ur2&tag=slatmaga-20&url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks ], he suggested that recent research [ http://books.google.com/books?id=ZGvK7UIJJAEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=whistling+past+dixie&source=bl&ots=TclLsp2Kmo&sig=pnY2roj_d8zqM66g6Vbymt36rvM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hvJYUPPRJYr-9QSKt4DIAw&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=valentino&f=false ] has demonstrated that racial attitudes—as opposed to mere conservatism on other policy issues—determine Republican votes in the South.

He referred me to a book by Thomas Schaller, called Whistling Past Dixie [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/074329016X ], in which Schaller cites sophisticated polling studies of Southern voters. Perlstein has explained his regard for Schaller’s book:

Schaller builds this conclusion on one of the most impressive papers in recent political science, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South," by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears. Running regressions on a massive data set of ideological opinions, Sears and Valentino demonstrate with precision that for example, a white Southern man who calls himself a "conservative," controlling for racial attitudes, is no less likely to chance a vote for a Democratic presidential candidate than a Northerner who calls himself a conservative. Likewise, a pro-life or hawkish Southern white man is no less likely—again controlling for racial attitudes—than a pro-life or hawkish Northerner to vote for the Democrat. But, on the other hand, when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions (such as whether one agrees "If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites," or choosing whether blacks are "lazy" or "hardworking"), an untoward result jumps out: white Southerners are twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Schaller writes: "Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters … the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past."

At the very least these patterns make Southern voters susceptible to what some observers have called "dog whistle" appeals to racism, such as Mitt Romney's false claim in campaign ads that Obama had "gutted" welfare reform work requirements, reminding many of Reagan-era attacks on "welfare queens" in Cadillacs.

Really, just about everybody knows this—that the new solid GOP South is a gift from the legacy of racism—but few say it outright anymore, except a scattering of opinion columnists. It's been "priced in" you might say, taken for granted, or avoided for fear of offense—i.e., telling the truth.

Even The Nation [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/170000/isnt-mitt-romney-member-47-percent ], which recently devoted a cover story to attacking the GOP, focused on the party’s greed (as opposed to the non-greedy groveling to Wall Street by Democrats, of course). The issue did not focus on overt, structural racism as the GOP’s distinguishing—and delegitimizing—sin.

In one of the rare mainstream media recognitions of the issue, which appeared only on an opinion blog, the Times’ Thomas Edsall [ http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/making-the-election-about-race/ ] called out Mitt Romney’s “Southern Strategy”—in particular his dog-whistle “welfare-gutting” ploy:

The Romney campaign is willing to disregard criticism concerning accuracy and veracity [of the welfare slur] in favor of “blowing the dog whistle of racism”—resorting to a campaign appealing to racial symbols, images and issues. ... On television and the Internet ... the Romney campaign is clearly determined ‘to make this about’ race, in the tradition of the notorious 1988 Republican Willie Horton ad, which described the rape of a white woman by a convicted African-American murderer released on furlough from a Massachusetts prison during the gubernatorial administration of Michael Dukakis and Jesse Helms’s equally infamous “White Hands” commercial, which depicted a white job applicant who ‘needed that job’ but was rejected because “they had to give it to a minority.”

Edsall’s honesty is welcome, and would be more welcome (in the new age of no more he said/she said) on the main news pages of the Times, right? Tell it like it is. But even he argues that Romney is using racial tactics as a response to Obama’s poll lead. He does not feel the need to acknowledge that racism has been a built-in structural foundation for Republican Party politics for nearly a half a century.

It’s not that he doesn’t realize this; it’s almost as if he assumes everyone knows it—that it’s, you know, a fact. But if it’s a fact, isn’t it time we attribute this tendency not just to this candidate or that, but to the party itself? In this age of truth in journalism, shouldn’t we make it clear in reporting that this is a neo-racist party that doesn’t deserve false equivalency with the non-racist party? However flawed the Democratic Party was—and is—it’s anti-racist now.

(I'm not calling Romney a racist, I should stipulate, though there's no indication he actively objected to his church's policy of excluding blacks from priesthood until it was ended in 1978.)

And all those poll-analysis geek websites that continuously report vast majorities for the GOP in the South among white voters (far greater than those in the North) somehow can’t see their way to be forthright about why this is.

I’m not saying that the vast majority of Southern whites vote GOP only because of race. But I think Rick Perlstein’s argument, based on careful polling data, suggests that it is a crucial factor that makes an electoral difference.

Let me put it this way. Is it just an accident, a coincidence, that with few exceptions (for sons of the South, Carter and Clinton), in the 10 presidential elections since 1968, the core states of the Confederacy—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina—and their hundred or so electoral votes have been a Republican bulwark?*

Is it any accident that they fly Confederate flags from their statehouse, as in South Carolina, or incorporate Confederate flag symbols into their state flags as in Mississippi and Alabama, or allow them to be flaunted on state-issued license places, even passing laws that declare they must be respected. If you’ve traveled much in the South (as I have), you see them flying too from courthouses, municipal buildings, and other private establishments. If it’s not unconstitutional, it is, frankly, disgusting.

It’s disgusting as well that the Republican Party in the Confederate-flag-flying states recurrently wins elections against opponents who vacillate on the flag issue. Does anyone believe the lie that the display of the slaveholders’ banner is just about “tradition” and “nostalgia”?

Let me make a comparison some might think inflammatory but I believe is entirely justified.

If a conservative government in the German state of Bavaria decided it was going to allow the flying of the SS death’s-head flag, would we find it a touchingly nostalgic tribute to “tradition”? We would not. And yet, as I’ve said before [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_spectator/2012/08/_holocaust_obsessed_it_s_the_new_anti_semitic_slur_.html ], slavery was a slow-motion genocide that murdered, over three centuries, as many or more human beings than Hitler did. And after a brief reconstruction period, people in the slaveholding states continued to murder, rape, and otherwise oppress the freed slaves and their descendants for another hundred years until they were forced by Federal laws and courts against their will to exercise their racism in less obvious ways, voting being just one.

When is the last time a Republican in the South denounced the blatantly racist disgustingly immoral brandishing of the genocidal slaveholders’ flag?

Do you want some numbers? Edsall was good on Romney’s use of dog-whistle code words and phrases like “gutting welfare,” but the best numerical analysis of the state of affairs I found was by Earl Ofari Hutchinson [ http://newamericamedia.org/2012/08/mitt-romneys-southern-strategy-gambit.php ] in an opinion blog.

Speaking of the core old Confederacy he says,

These states hold more than one-third of the electoral votes needed to bag the White House. ... Despite much talk that the white conservative vote has shrunk to the point of being marginalized, it isn’t. Whites make up three quarters of America’s electorate. That’s a drop of slightly more than 10 percent from what they represented in the 1980 presidential election. These numbers belie another stark political reality and that’s that in every election since Nixon’s win in 1968 whites have voted consistently by either sizeable or comfortable margins for GOP presidential candidates. Whites favored Reagan in 1984 by a 64-35 margin. They favored George Bush Sr. in 1988 by a 59-40 margin. ...

The final presidential tally in 2008 gave ample warning of the potency of the GOP’s conservative white constituency. Obama made a major breakthrough by winning a significant percent of votes from white independents and young white voters. Among Southern and Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact. In South Carolina and other Deep South states the vote was even more lopsided among white voters against Obama. The only thing that even made Obama’s showing respectable in those states was the record turnout and percentage of black votes that he got. ...

Romney’s Southern Strategy is anchored in another political reality. He ... crunched the voter numbers and the stats and those numbers have shown that his only path to the White House is getting an overwhelming number of white voters in the South, the Heartland States, and the swing states. Romney’s neo Southern Strategy with Ryan as point man is simply a repeat of what GOP presidential candidates have routinely done for the past five decades.

Let’s face it. If you ask me, there’s no he said/she said here. The Republican Party is only a viable entity because of Southern racism.

I'd say that to call this—or past Southern electoral history—an accident devoid of racism is to be blind to American political history and culture. I don't think you can find a single political scientist who would tell you Mitt Romney's GOP has a path to victory without the old Confederate South's electoral votes. As things stand now, the loss of 100 sure electoral votes would put him hopelessly in a hole.

And yet let’s return to the Bavaria analogy. A party that supported the flying of the SS flag would be called neo-Nazi. I believe Republicans who depend on shameless Confederate flag-flying, white-dominated electorates, nostalgic for their antebellum genocidal “tradition,” should be called neo-racist in the news pages and network broadcasts. I think it’s a fact, not a he said/she said matter. I know, it’s shocking when you think about it, isn’t it? But I believe it’s the truth.

In a way mainstream media outlets who promote a false equivalency between the two parties by failing to note at the very least the neo-racist supporters of the Republican Party are themselves complicit in the charade that the GOP is a morally legitimate entity. Not that racists don’t vote Democratic, and yes I know the GOP was, was, the party of Lincoln, but that was long ago in another country.

I would hope that before the election comes there are at least some discussions in some newsrooms about how to make this clear. How to avoid false equivalency.

Why is it that we have to be reminded that the Civil War was not a war of moral equivalence? Just blue and grey, both sides brave and good. Sorry, no way. The issue is likely going to come up again later this year if, as is expected, the Supreme Court reviews the Voting Rights Act, one of the greatest pieces of legislation ever passed by Congress, because it put the spotlight on the rancid racist history of Southern states that sought to continue the shameful legacy of the Confederacy through a history of racist voter denial. Is this a matter of moral equivalence too? In other words, should historically racist states be treated as equal to states that did not legally institute racism by the courts when it comes to voter discrimination? I don’t think so.

It’s not just an intellectual exercise deciding whether Southern racism is still a factor. The current Supreme Court could rule the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional this term, on the grounds that all states are morally equivalent and history should play no role in assessing their behavior. They would be wrong to do so. That’s a fact.

Speaking of reminders of why we need to end the false equivalency. Consider this one, a thrilling comment from someone who was once at the forefront but who hasn’t spoken out on the subject for some time. Obviously he felt it was something people needed to think about anew.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan said:

This country is just too fucked up about color. ... People at each other’s throats because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back—or any neighborhood back. ... It’s a country founded on the backs of slaves. ... If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today.

Yes: “A country founded on the backs of slaves.” And a party cravenly unashamed to base its existence on the backs of slaveholder states. Journalists, start telling the truth about the GOP.

© 2012 The Slate Group, LLC (emphasis in original)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_spectator/2012/10/is_the_republican_party_racist_how_the_racial_attitudes_of_southern_voters_bolster_its_chances_.html [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_spectator/2012/10/is_the_republican_party_racist_how_the_racial_attitudes_of_southern_voters_bolster_its_chances_.single.html ] [with comments]


===


Loy Mauch, Arkansas Lawmaker, Defended Slavery In Letters To The Editor


Arkansas state Rep. Loy Mauch (R-Bismarck) penned a series of letters to the editor in which he compared Abraham Lincoln to Karl Marx, among other controversial statements.

By John Celock
Posted: 10/08/2012 3:18 pm EDT Updated: 10/08/2012 3:39 pm EDT

A Republican member of the Arkansas House of Representatives has a history of writing in support of slavery and the Confederacy, along with comparing Abraham Lincoln to Karl Marx.

State Rep. Loy Mauch (R-Bismarck) wrote a series of letters to the editor [ http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2012/10/06/loy-mauch-update-the-republican-rep-is-on-record-on-slavery-too ] of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, defending slavery and attacking Lincoln, the Arkansas Times reports.

The revelations about Mauch's letters come days after it was reported that state Rep. Jon Hubbard (R-Jonesboro) wrote that slavery "may have been a blessing [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/jon-hubbard-arkansas-slavery-book_n_1943661.html ]" in a 2010 book.

The Arkansas Republican Party has condemned [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/07/jon-hubbard-slavery_n_1946890.html ] Hubbard's comments, along with comments by Republican legislative candidate Charlie Fuqua, who advocated expelling Muslims from the United States [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/07/jon-hubbard-slavery_n_1946890.html ].

Mauch, a first term legislator, wrote the letters [ http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2012/10/06/loy-mauch-update-the-republican-rep-is-on-record-on-slavery-too ] starting in 2000. He has called Lincoln a "fake neurotic Northern war criminal" and said the 16th president committed "premeditated murder" on the Constitution. He called Lincoln and Civil War generals "Wehrmacht leaders" -- the name for the armed forces in Nazi Germany. He also praised his ancestors for standing up to "Northern aggression" and said the Confederate flag is "a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order."

In two letters, Mauch wrote about the Bible and slavery. The Arkansas Times quotes from a letter Mauch wrote in 2009 [id.]:

If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?

In 2010, it was reported that Mauch [ http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/the-south-shall-rise-again/Content?oid=1380685 ] was a member of the Sons of Confederates Veterans and the League of the South, which has been described [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/league-of-the-south ] as a "neo-Confederacy" group advocating for second southern secession. Mauch was also reported to have chaired the western Arkansas chapter of the League of the South, which he downplayed as an honorary title. He also helped organize a 2004 conference [ http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2011/12/08/thursday-night-line ] calling for the removal of an Abraham Lincoln statue in Hot Springs, which included a keynote speech entitled "Homage to John Wilkes Booth."

The Huffington Post reached out to Mauch via telephone and email seeking comment but did not receive a response.

Mauch is retired from AT&T and lists on his state website [ http://www.arkansashouse.org/member/279/loy-mauch ] that his hobbies include hunting, fishing, reading history and writing. He is currently vice chairman of the Children and Youth Subcommittee. On his campaign website [ http://www.loymauch.com/ ] he cites bills he's written on sewer, water and education issues.

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

[with comments]


===


Tim Garvey, Kansas State Candidate, Explains Anti-Obama Facebook Rant


The Kansas State Capitol in Topeka.

By John Celock
Posted: 10/05/2012 3:31 pm EDT Updated: 10/05/2012 3:59 pm EDT

Tim Garvey, a Republican candidate for the Kansas House of Representatives, is saying that a bizarre Facebook post he wrote several weeks ago about race, President Barack Obama and the late conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart was his attempt to help end racism.

Garvey, a 25-year-old property owner/manager, told The Huffington Post that he wrote the rambling message on his personal Facebook account "when I was really mad." He said that he wants people to look beyond race and that he believes Obama is trying to force a racial divide on the country. In the post, he accused "Mr. Obama" of wanting to "f*** us over" and wrote that "there is no black or white ... we all bleed red."

This is a screenshot of Garvey's post, obtained by HuffPost.



Garvey, who is supported by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) [ http://timgarvey4ks.com/endorsements-3/ ], said looking back on the post that he should have written it differently, but he stands behind the message.

"It would have been better if I had left out the f-word," he said. "There should not be race. I have talked to people in the past who said that they voted for Barack Obama to show they're not racist."

At the time of his post, Garvey said, he was upset about Obamacare. "I was really fed up with people smearing the Constitution and spitting on the Founding Fathers' idea of how the country was founded," he said.

Garvey, who noted that he has black friends, said he does not see people through a racial lens and wants others to look beyond race. He said that one of his campaign volunteers is both a longtime friend and a black Democrat and that he does not play that up while campaigning.

He argued that some Americans are trying to ignite racial tensions for political purposes. He said "people get killed every day" and questioned the media's attention to Trayvon Martin's death in Florida. He linked the focus on Martin to Florida's status as a swing state in the presidential election.

"It is not the rest of the country's business," Garvey said of Martin's death. "Florida is a big state to get in a presidential year. Whatever happens is to distract us from the big picture."

Kansas Democratic Party spokesman Dakota Loomis took issue with Garvey's Facebook post, noting his use of "f***" and his "disrespect" in calling the president "Mr. Obama."

"It was immature and disrespectful and displays his inability to be a leader for Kansas," Loomis said.

Garvey is running against Democratic educator Carolyn Bridges [ http://blogs.kansas.com/gov/2012/06/06/former-school-principal-carolyn-bridges-joins-race-to-replace-rep-pottorff/ ] for a Wichita-area House seat. On his website [ http://timgarvey4ks.com/ ], he has posted a quote from game show host Chuck Woolery railing against "career politicians." Woolery has become an outspoken conservative activist [ http://www.mediaite.com/online/cpac-2012-no-love-connection-for-chuck-woolery-and-president-obama/ ] in recent years.

Answering questions from the Kansas chapter of the Koch brothers' group Americans for Prosperity, Garvey said that he wants to limit the number of bills legislators can introduce, set page limits for bills, reduce taxes, abolish pensions for state legislators and switch to an elected state Supreme Court. He told HuffPost he believes that legislators should be limited to introducing seven bills each a year and that the Legislature should focus its time on reviewing established programs and previously passed laws every two years to see if they are still needed.

On his campaign Facebook page [ https://www.facebook.com/TimGarveyFor83rdHouseDistrictOfKansas ], Garvey highlights his signing of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge and his support for the Tea Party. He posted a link to a story [ http://www.abc4.com/content/about_4/bios/story/conceal-and-carry-stabbing-salt-lake-city-smiths/NDNrL1gxeE2rsRhrWCM9dQ.cspx ] about a man toting a gun who stopped a knife-wielding man in a Utah supermarket. On his website, he lists among his hobbies [ http://timgarvey4ks.com/meet-tim-garvey/ ] shooting, reading and going to church.

Garvey is one of a growing number of 20-something Republican candidates in Kansas, including state Sen. Garrett Love [ http://kslegislature.org/li/b2011_12/members/sen_love_garrett_1/ ] of Montezuma, state Rep. Brett Hildabrand [ http://www.kslegislature.org/li/b2011_12/members/rep_hildabrand_brett_1/ ] of Merriam, and Wichita Councilman Michael O'Donnell [ http://www.michaelforkansas.com/ ], who is seeking a state Senate seat. Garvey has been endorsed by the Kansas Federation of Teenage Republicans [ http://timgarvey4ks.com/endorsements-3/ ].

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/tim-garvey-kansas-facebook_n_1943040.html [with comments]


===


Gay Boy Scout, Bullied by Troop, Denied Eagle Rank

Video [embedded]

Ryan Andresen, a 17-year-old from California, said he will be ineligible to earn the Boy Scout Eagle Award because his is gay.
(Courtesy Karen Andresen)

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES
Oct. 5, 2012

Ryan Andresen has spent a decade completing the requirements for the coveted Eagle Scout award, and now that he is just about to turn 18 -- the cut-off date for attaining the highest honor -- his Boy Scout troop won't approve it because he is gay.

His project, a "tolerance wall," was inspired by the years of hazing he endured in middle school in Moraga, Calif., and later at Boy Scout summer camp, where his nicknames were "Tinkerbell" and "faggot."

"I had I had no idea what gay was at that point," said Andresen, who described hazing that included, among other rituals, having the word "fag" written in charcoal across his chest.

"It was really embarrassing and humiliating," he said. "And I was terrified."

His mom, Karen Andresen, was so upset by the troops' decision that she posted a petition on Change.org [ http://www.change.org/petitions/boy-scouts-don-t-let-your-anti-gay-policy-deny-my-son-his-eagle-award ] that has topped more than 22,000 signatures.

"It was not his idea, it was mine," she said.

In the petition, Andresen cited the merit badge -- "Citizenship in the Community."

"[It] means standing up for what is right, and I am proud of Ryan for doing just that," she wrote. "Will you stand with him, too?"

His father, Eric Andresen, who had joined the troop as the chief administrator to help his son with the bullying, was confronted by the scoutmaster and told that because Ryan was gay, he could not sign off on the project. His father resigned "on the spot."

"He wants nothing to do with the troop," said his wife.

Deron Smith, spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America, told ABCNews.com in a statement:

"This scout proactively notified his unit leadership and Eagle Scout counselor that he does not agree to scouting's principle of 'Duty to God' and does not meet scouting's membership standard on sexual orientation. Agreeing to do one's 'Duty to God' is a part of the scout Oath and Law and a requirement of achieving the Eagle Scout rank."

Smith also said that even though the Boy Scouts does not actively ask the sexual orientation of boys, discussions with the Andresens have made Ryan "no longer eligible for membership in scouting."

He said the "ideals and principles" in the Scout Oath and Law are "central to the mission of teaching young people to make better choices over their lifetimes."

A senior and honors student who hopes to go the University of San Francisco, Ryan joined the Boy Scouts at age 6. "He just liked the outdoors and hiking," said Karen Andresen, 49.

Ryan came out to his parents when he was "around 16," said his mother. In July, he wrote a letter to the troop in response to a bullying incident and "thought he could help," disclosing he was gay.

But just this week the scoutmaster of Troop 212 [ http://www.bsa-troop212.org/overview.php ], Rainer Del Valle, refused to give the final signature on Ryan's project, one that he had initially approved, according to the Andresens.

Del Valle did not immediately respond to an email and a telephone call from ABCNews.com.

Ryan said it was, in fact, Del Valle, who encouraged him to pursue the Eagle project, after dropping out of scouts for months because of the bullying.

"He was in love with my project," said Ryan, even after he had told the troop about his sexual orientation.

"He was he was leading me on the whole time," said Ryan, who said he thought his scoutmaster had succumbed to pressure from older leaders in the troop.

"He still hasn't had the courage to tell me himself. I am sad and confused over the whole thing," he said. "He told my Dad to tell me. I haven't heard from him since."

The Boy Scouts of America [ http://www.scouting.org/ ] has openly banned gay leaders and scouts, a policy that was challenged in 2000. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Boy Scouts [ http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/29/us/supreme-court-new-jersey-case-supreme-court-backs-boy-scouts-ban-gays-membership.html ], ruling 5-4 that it was exempt from state laws that bar anti-gay discrimination because it is a private organization.

Just this year, the Boy Scouts reaffirmed its longtime stance [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/boy-scouts-reaffirm-ban-gays/story?id=16795868 ], disappointing gay advocacy groups.

At the time, national spokesman Smith said that the policy was the "absolute best" for the 112-year-old organization. He said it represented "a diversity of perspectives and opinions."

The Boy Scouts is one of the largest youth organizations in the country with 2.7 million members and more than 1 million adult volunteers.

Many voices, including individual within the organization, have opposed the Boy Scouts policy.

AT &T CEO Randall Stephenson, an executive board member of the Boy Scouts of America, has said he was committed to ending the ban. He takes over as president in 2014.

Andresen said that many troops in San Francisco's Bay Area, where the family lives, "don't care" about the national policy.

"They even sent letters that they can't abide the ban to the national council," Andresen said.

After years of bullying, Ryan struggled with cutting and an eating disorder, according to his mother.

"Everything was going against him and I needed to be his advocate," she said. "It's not his fault he was born gay. It's all so unfair and I wanted to help."

The response to her online plea to end the ban on gay scouts has been "overwhelming," said Andresen. One young man who signed the online petition even offered to renounce his own Eagle Award and send it to Ryan.

"That is huge," she said. "He said that Ryan had helped him come out of the closet."

Gay Scout Completed Eagle Requirements

To reach the rigorous level of Eagle, scouts must attain five ranks, earn 21 merit badges, serve six months in a leadership position and complete a community service project.

Ryan worked at the local middle school to organize an art project for Respect All Differences Day, which has an anti-bullying theme. Students created 288 tiles expressing "kindnesses," which he used to create a mural that was mounted on a wall by the school library.

But with the deadline of Ryan's 18th birthday looming, Andresen said she doesn't know if there is enough time to get his Eagle Award approved. Her husband has appealed to the local scouting board and the family is hoping for the best.

"I am really not doing this for my Eagle award," said Ryan. "I don't want anyone else prevented from getting theirs."

But his mother said Ryan had been "pretty depressed" over the incident.

"It's just one more blow to him. I am so shocked. His scoutmaster knew of Ryan's self-harm and this could have brought him off the deep end. ... He has no compassion."

"It's so upsetting as a mother," she said. "The military has changed, the Girl Scouts, the 4-H," said Andresen. "Why not the Boy Scouts?"

Copyright © 2012 ABC News Internet Ventures. Yahoo! - ABC News Network

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/boy-scout-bullied-denied-eagle-rank-gay/story?id=17401340 [with additional embedded video reports, and comments]


===


GOP: Gays Out of the Party

Republicans coddle their anti-gay base -- and make the choice for gay voters clearer than ever before
Oct 9, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/09/gop_gays_out_of_the_party/ [with comments]


===


Nate Phelps, Son Of Westboro Baptist Church Leader, Speaks Out On HuffPost Live (WATCH)

Posted: 10/05/2012 8:29 am EDT Updated: 10/05/2012 12:15 pm EDT

Nate Phelps is the son of Pastor Fred Phelps -- the founder of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church. Known for picketing military funerals and spewing hate against gays and other religious groups, the church has been widely criticized as a hate group.

By age 16, Nate found himself at odds with his father's views and tired of the extreme physical punishment he endured. On his 18th birthday, he escaped his family, driving off in a used Rambler Classic in the middle of the night. He slept in a gas station bathroom for three straight nights, filled with a mixture of fear and hope.

Nate eventually began a new life, moving first to California and then to Canada. Today, he joined HuffPost Live from Calgary, Alberta, to share his amazing life story.

Also joining the conversation were James Schwartz, who grew up gay and Amish in Michigan, leaving his community so he could live openly. We also heard from Libby Anne, a woman raised within the Christian ministry Vision Forum -- which advocates Quiverfull's patriarchal principles. As a college student, she too, left her religion behind.

The Executive Director of MeadowHaven, a long term treatment facility for escapees of high-control organizations, also lent his perspective to the conversation, explaining his approach to healing.

Watch the full conversation below.

[video embedded]

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/westboro-baptist-church_n_1941509.html [with comments]


===


Antonin Scalia: Death Penalty, Abortion, 'Homosexual Sodomy' Are Easy Cases

By MARK SHERMAN 10/05/12 03:34 AM ET EDT

WASHINGTON -- Justice Antonin Scalia says his method of interpreting the Constitution makes some of the most hotly disputed issues that come before the Supreme Court among the easiest to resolve.

Scalia calls himself a "textualist" and, as he related to a few hundred people who came to buy his new book and hear him speak in Washington the other day, that means he applies the words in the Constitution as they were understood by the people who wrote and adopted them.

So Scalia parts company with former colleagues who have come to believe capital punishment is unconstitutional. The framers of the Constitution didn't think so and neither does he.

"The death penalty? Give me a break. It's easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state," Scalia said at the American Enterprise Institute.

He contrasted his style of interpretation with that of a colleague who tries to be true to the values of the Constitution as he applies them to a changing world. This imaginary justice goes home for dinner and tells his wife what a wonderful day he had, Scalia said.

This imaginary justice, Scalia continued, announces that it turns out "`the Constitution means exactly what I think it ought to mean.' No kidding."

As he has said many times before, the justice said the people should turn to their elected lawmakers, not judges, to advocate for abortion rights or an end to the death penalty. Or they should try to change the Constitution, although Scalia said the Constitution makes changing it too hard by requiring 38 states to ratify an amendment for it to take effect.

"It is very difficult to adopt a constitutional amendment," Scalia said. He once calculated that less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, residing in the 13 least populous states, could stop an amendment, he said.

In a lengthy question-and-answer session, Scalia once again emphatically denied there's a rift among the court's conservative justices following Chief Justice John Roberts' vote to uphold President Barack Obama's health care law. Scalia dissented from Roberts' opinion.

"Look it, do not believe anything you read about the internal workings of the Supreme Court," he said. "It is either a lie because the press knows we won't respond – they can say whatever they like and we won't respond – or else it's based on information from someone who has violated his oath of confidentiality, that is to say, a non-reliable source. So one way or another it is not worthy of belief."

"We can disagree with one another on the law without taking it personally," he said.

*

The issue of gay rights, or more specifically same-sex marriage, is expected to be a big one in the term that began this week. While the justices initially were scheduled to discuss the topic at their private conference in late September, it now appears likely that they will not make a decision about whether to take up a gay marriage case until after the presidential election, which would mean arguments would not take place until the spring.

The justices have a variety of pending appeals they could choose to hear that deal in one way or another with gay marriage.

One set of cases looks at whether same-sex couples who are legally married can be deprived of a range of federal benefits that are available to heterosexual couples. Another case deals with California's constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and federal court rulings striking down the amendment. An Arizona case deals with a state law that revoked domestic partner benefits, making them available only to married couples. Arizona's constitution bans gay marriage.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/antonin-scalia-abortion-gay-rights_n_1942068.html [with comments]


===


Access To Free Birth Control Causes Abortion Rate To Drop Dramatically: Study



Posted: 10/05/2012 11:44 am EDT Updated: 10/05/2012 12:07 pm EDT

When women are given access to birth control at no cost, the rate of unintended pregnancies and abortions among them drops dramatically, according to a new study [ http://esciencenews.com/articles/2012/10/04/abortion.rates.plummet.with.free.birth.control ] published [ http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Abstract/publishahead/Preventing_Unintended_Pregnancies_by_Providing.99945.aspx ] on Thursday in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The Contraceptive Choice Project, conducted by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo., enrolled 9,256 women and teens from 14 to 45 years of age in the St. Louis area between 2007 and 2011. The participants were all uninsured, low-income, or otherwise determined to be at risk for unintended pregnancy.

Each woman was given a choice of birth control methods, ranging from long-term and more expensive contraceptive devices, such as the intrauterine device (IUD) or an implant, to more common methods, including birth control pills, the ring and the patch. Since price wasn't an issue, about 75 percent of participants chose the implanted methods, which are more effective than short-term methods.

The results were significant: The annual birth rate among teenage girls in the study from 2008 to 2010 was only 6.3 per 1,000, compared to the much higher U.S. rate of 34.3 per 1,000 for girls the same age. And the abortion rates among among all participants ranged from 4.4 to 7.5 per 1,000 women over the two-year period, substantially lower than the national rate of 19.6 abortions per 1,000 women in 2008.

The rate of abortions in the study was even dramatically lower than the rates in the St. Louis area, which range from 13.4 to 17 per 1,000 women.

"The impact of providing no-cost birth control was far greater than we expected in terms of unintended pregnancies," said Jeff Peipert, MD, PhD, the Robert J. Terry Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and lead author of the study. "We think improving access to birth control, particularly IUDs and implants, coupled with education on the most effective methods has the potential to significantly decrease the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions in this country."

The findings of the study are significant at a time when a number of conservatives in politics and public policy are pushing back against the Obama administration's contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act, which requires most employers and insurers to cover birth control at no cost to women. Moreover, a number of states have voted to defund Planned Parenthood [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/03/north-carolina-planned-parenthood_n_1646466.html ] -- one of the nation's leading providers of contraception to low-income and uninsured women -- because some of the organization's clinics also offer abortions.

"I would think if you were against abortions, you would be 100 percent for contraception access," Dr. James T. Breeden, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said of the results.

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/study-free-birth-control-abortion-rate_n_1942621.html [with comments]


===


Republicans out Democrat in 'World of Warcraft' witch hunt

Colleen Lachowicz is a Democratic candidate running for State Senate in Main. She's also a level 85 Orc in the massively popular online game "World of Warcraft."

Colleen Lachowicz
Oct 4, 2012
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/ingame/republicans-out-democrat-world-warcraft-witch-hunt-6283586


===


(linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=3967329 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=36884252 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=36944958 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=73717545 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74145637 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74957568 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74984338 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75523844 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75764465 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75967358 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76078802 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76270058 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76455764 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77045108 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77237197 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77283705 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77970515 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78439680 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78673492 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78671795 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78789956 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78837108 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77837984 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78744850 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54833454 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78915505 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79123429 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79356259 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79468765 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79976234 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80008846 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80051332 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80070274 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80268818 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80273078 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80286479 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80289530 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80297712 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80366863 (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80366982 and preceding and following

[StephanieVanbryce]

The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent


Gianni Dagli Orti/Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
A painting of 17th-century Venice, with a view of the banks of the Grand Canal and the Doge’s Palace, by Leandro Bassano.

By CHRYSTIA FREELAND
Published: October 13, 2012

IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.

Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.

The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis [ http://whynationsfail.com/ ] that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

You can see America’s creeping Serrata in the growing social and, especially, educational chasm between those at the top and everyone else. At the bottom and in the middle, American society is fraying, and the children of these struggling families are lagging the rest of the world at school.

Economists point out that the woes of the middle class are in large part a consequence of globalization and technological change. Culture may also play a role. In his recent book on the white working class, the libertarian writer Charles Murray blames the hollowed-out middle for straying from the traditional family values and old-fashioned work ethic that he says prevail among the rich (whom he castigates, but only for allowing cultural relativism to prevail).

There is some truth in both arguments. But the 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation’s economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.

Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, I interviewed Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown. She was the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university and has served on the board of Goldman Sachs. Dr. Simmons, a Harvard-trained literature scholar, worked hard to make Brown more accessible to poor students, but when I asked whether it was time to abolish legacy admissions, the Ivy League’s own Book of Gold, she shrugged me off with a laugh: “No, I have a granddaughter. It’s not time yet.”

America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today’s oligarchs is far subtler than Venice’s. It works in two main ways.

The first is to channel the state’s scarce resources in their own direction. This is the absurdity of Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent” who are “dependent upon government.” The reality is that it is those at the top, particularly the tippy-top, of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support — and at getting others to pay for it.

Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.

The second manifestation of crony capitalism is more direct: the tax perks, trade protections and government subsidies that companies and sectors secure for themselves. Corporate pork is a truly bipartisan dish: green energy companies and the health insurers have been winners in this administration, as oil and steel companies were under George W. Bush’s.

The impulse of the powerful to make themselves even more so should come as no surprise. Competition and a level playing field are good for us collectively, but they are a hardship for individual businesses. Warren E. Buffett knows this. “A truly great business must have an enduring ‘moat’ that protects excellent returns on invested capital,” he explained in his 2007 annual letter to investors. “Though capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’ is highly beneficial for society, it precludes investment certainty.” Microsoft attempted to dig its own moat by simply shutting out its competitors, until it was stopped by the courts. Even Apple, a huge beneficiary of the open-platform economy, couldn’t resist trying to impose its own inferior map app on buyers of the iPhone 5.

Businessmen like to style themselves as the defenders of the free market economy, but as Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argued, “Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.”

IN the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. “We have no paupers,” Thomas Jefferson boasted in an 1814 letter. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”

For Jefferson, this equality was at the heart of American exceptionalism: “Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?”

That all changed with industrialization. As Franklin D. Roosevelt argued in a 1932 address to the Commonwealth Club, the industrial revolution was accomplished thanks to “a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used. ” America may have needed its robber barons; Roosevelt said the United States was right to accept “the bitter with the sweet.”

But as these titans amassed wealth and power, and as America ran out of free land on its frontier, the country faced the threat of a Serrata. As Roosevelt put it, “equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.” Instead, “we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.”

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good. The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

The editor of Thomson Reuters Digital and the author of “Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else,” from which this essay is adapted.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/opinion/sunday/the-self-destruction-of-the-1-percent.html?pagewanted=all

[F6]

Mitt Romney Small Business Town Hall with NFIB - June 6, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucuMHuVlIW0

---

(linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80641449 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77113935 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75561491 (and preceding and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=73902104 and preceding (and any future following)

[fuagf]

The man without a soul

Wednesday, Oct 24, 2012 06:00 AM +1100

In the final debate, Romney disavows almost everything he's
ever said on foreign policy while the media just shrugs

By Joan Walsh



(Credit: Reuters) [.. my emphasis ..]

Mitt Romney should be doing a walk of shame today, after reversing most of his
irresponsible, hawkish foreign policy statements from the last year just to have a hot
night with undecided female voters in the final debate. How does he live with himself?

But I’m having a hard time watching television coverage of Romney’s debate performance the morning after. The conventional wisdom seems to be that while President Obama won the debate, Romney’s “prevent defense” at least kept him in the race – and it was the politically wise course. Of course, Obama’s “prevent defense” two weeks ago in Denver was a debacle that changed everything. I’m not sure why Romney’s turn at it is supposed to be smarter politics.

Beyond scoring the debate on style points, though, why aren’t more people horrified by Romney’s capacity to disavow virtually everything he’s said on foreign policy and cuddle up with Obama, in order to seem less frightening to voters? On Afghanistan, on Iran, on abandoning Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, on killing Osama bin Laden, on Syria, on drones, Romney mostly said “me too” to Obama’s policies. And it’s not as though the debate merely gave Romney the space to explain foreign policy positions that may have been misinterpreted. After a year spent attacking Obama’s “weakness” globally and promising to be hawkish, he was, at times, the dove, insisting more than once “We can’t kill our way out of this.” And when he wasn’t echoing Obama, he sounded like a schoolboy reciting what he just learned in world geography class.

I found it chilling. Once again I thought to myself: Who is this guy who’s trying to imitate a cautious, sober global statesman (albeit one who sweats a lot)? I just watched Doris Kearns Goodwin on “Morning Joe” say Romney did the right thing because his goal was not to scare anybody and lose the momentum he gained from Debate 1, and everyone seemed to agree. But in what new realm of cynicism is it the right thing to hide your real policies in order to become president?

I suppose the media folks who are reassured by Romney’s mild debate performance think that’s the real Romney – he’s not the hawk who’d let crazy John Bolton, a key adviser, run his foreign policy. This is the same approach a lot of people take to Romney’s extremism on women’s issues – oh, c’mon, ladies, he’s really a Massachusetts moderate who doesn’t mean any of what he says about overturning Roe v. Wade or defunding Planned Parenthood. That’s ridiculous. The fact is, we don’t know which Mitt Romney would take the oath of office, and that alone should consign him to an ugly defeat in two weeks.

The only thing the post-debate punditry really cares about is whether Obama’s modest (by their standards) debate win can make a difference, and again the conventional wisdom is it won’t, because foreign policy debates never do. First of all, I’m not so sure about that. I’d like to see some polls before I weigh in. But most important, insisting that the debate won’t move the electoral needle almost instructs voters not to take it seriously, and downplays the extent to which Romney’s reinvention is played as big news.

I go back to Kevin Drum’s idea of the “hack gap” between the left and right .. http://www.salon.com/2012/10/09/do_democrats_have_a_hack_gap/ , in which righty hacks are supposedly so much more numerous and robotic in their support of their candidates that they move public opinion (and spineless mainstream media folks) with the sheer force of their lies, and the left can’t match them either in numbers or mendacity. I still don’t think that’s the way it works. The fact that MSNBC pundits were thrilled with Obama’s last two performances certainly didn’t change the media narrative that these debates don’t really matter much. Far more influential, to me, is most of the media’s inability to either see, or tell the truth about, how far to the right the Republican Party has shifted in the last 20 years.

Obama’s best line came when he told Romney, “You seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.” That wasn’t just a good zinger, it’s a great summary of what’s at stake in this election. I hope voters ignore the supposedly savvy horse race coverage of this crucial debate, and pay attention to Romney’s lack of core convictions on foreign policy or anything else.

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter with White People: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was." More Joan Walsh.

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/23/the_man_without_a_soul/

.. hope the L2 storm hitting the Bahamas now doesn't hit the USA badly ..

[fuagf]

Robert Bork? John Bolton?? 9 Advisers Who Have Romney's Ear

Want to know what a Romney presidency would look like? Check out these guys' records.

—By Dana Liebelson and Adam Serwer - Wed Oct. 24, 2012 3:03 AM PDT .. 130 ..

One way to understand what a presidential candidate might do if elected is to look at his advisers. Here are nine advisers who are shaping Mitt Romney's views—and could end up shaping his presidency. You may not have heard of them, but you should know about them.

Cofer "head on dry ice" Black



Position: Foreign Policy Adviser

His Qualifications: Black was head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center when Al Qaeda brought down the towers and is a former executive for the "private security" company Blackwater .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110202165_pf.html .

What You Need to Know: Black has long been associated with the Bush administration’s "dark side," including torture and extraordinary rendition. He's also a fan of colorful speech, having said that he wanted to .. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4511943.stm .. "Capture Bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box on dry ice." That didn't happen, but a 2005 CIA inspector general's report .. https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/Executive%20Summary_OIG%20Report.pdf .. did chastise the CTC for not sharing information with other agencies that could have led to the discovery of the 9/11 plot before it occurred.

Walid "LEbanese warlord advisEr" Phares



Position: Foreign Policy Adviser

His Qualifications: Phares has worked as a professor, counterterrorism adviser, author, and pundit for Fox News.

What You Need to Know: As Mother Jones first reported last year .. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/walid-phares-mitt-romney-lebanese-forces , Phares "was a high ranking political official in a sectarian religious militia responsible for massacres during Lebanon's brutal, 15-year civil war." Phares has tried to downplay his involvement .. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/walid-phares-mitt-romney-lebanese-forces .. in this messy war (which resulted in more than 100,000 fatalities .. Position: Foreign Policy Adviser ) but according to Régina Sneifer, who served in the Lebenese Forces' Fifth Bureau, "Mr. Phares was aware of the crimes of Samir Geagea [a ruthless militia leader] and he was still close to him."

Robert "saturday night massacre" Bork



Position: Judicial Adviser

His Qualifications: Bork was a failed Supreme Court nominee .. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/24/politics/24REAG.html?pagewanted=all .. under President Ronald Reagan and played a controversial role .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/watergate/robert.html .. in the Watergate scandal.

What You Need to Know: Bork, then solicitor general, agreed to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was close to cracking open Watergate. (Bork's colleagues, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, had refused to fire Cox and resigned on principle.) Ted Kennedy .. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/weekend-opinionator-kennedy-bork-and-the-politics-of-judicial-destruction/ .. later said that "Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids [and] schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution." Bork has also proposed .. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/15/opinion/why-judge-bork-is-unacceptable.html .. reducing the scope of the 14th Amendment, and says it's "silly" to .. http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/10/robert_bork_has_good_news_for.html .. think: "Gee, [women are] discriminated against and we need to do something about it."


Kris "birther flirter" Kobach



Position: Immigration Adviser

His Qualifications: Kobach is the secretary of state for Kansas.

What You Need to Know: Kobach is the intellectual architect behind harsh Arizona-style immigration laws .. http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/kobach-arizona-immigration-law .. all over the country. Kobach has flirted with birtherism .. http://cjonline.com/news/2012-09-13/kansas-panel-delays-ballot-decision-obama .. and even sought to abolish .. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/kris-kobach-birthright-citzenship-cpac .. birthright citizenship. But illegal immigration isn't Kobach's only hobby horse: At the GOP convention, he dipped his toe into Shariah panic by urging the adoption of an anti-Shariah plank to the GOP platform .. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/08/gop-platform-5-weirdest-items .

Paul "you're a taker" Ryan



Position: Domestic Policy Adviser/Vice Presidential Candidate

His Qualifications: Ryan is a Republican congressman from Wisconsin and the chairman of the House Budget Committee.

What You Need to Know: Technically he's the veep pick, but in choosing Ryan, Romney tied himself to Ryan's policy agenda. In the past, that agenda has included turning Medicare into a voucher system .. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/whats-in-the-ryan-plan/ .. so that seniors have to pay more for their health care, slashing Medicaid .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/29/everything-you-know-about-paul-ryans-budget-is-probably-wrong/ .. so that states have less money to cover medical services for the poor, old, and disabled, and all while cutting taxes on the wealthy .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/11/ryan-wants-to-give-the-wealthy-even-bigger-tax-cuts-than-romney-does/ . Where does Ryan's plan make up that extra revenue? In part by raising taxes on the poor .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/12/what-paul-ryans-budget-actually-cuts-and-by-how-much/ . There's no one on Romney's team who embodies the "half the country are moochers" mindset expressed by Romney on that 47 percent video .. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/watch-full-secret-video-private-romney-fundraiser .. more than Ryan does.

John "it's never a bad day to bomb iran" Bolton



Position: Foreign Policy Adviser

His Qualifications: Bolton is a lawyer and diplomat who served under George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush.

What You Need to Know: It's never a bad day to bomb Iran .. http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/02/29/john-boltons-default-setting-when-in-doubt-bomb/186567 .. if you're John Bolton, the walrus-mustachioed Bush-era ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton has been pushing for an Iran strike for years, he recently said he thought the Israelis should have bombed Iran .. http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/05/16/john-bolton-on-iran-i-thought-the-israelis-shou/184883 .. "three and a half years ago." A favorite of anti-Muslim activists like Pamela Geller .. http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/08/02/284150/john-bolton-geller-spencer/ , Bolton likes a good conspiracy theory himself, recently warning that a UN small arms treaty could take Americans' guns away .. http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/07/12/foxs-bolton-adopts-right-wing-medias-fearmonger/187106 .

general tommy "where's bin laden?" franks



Position: Military Adviser

His Qualifications: Franks, a retired commander of the US Central Command, led the 2003 invasion of Iraq…and came in at No. 4 on Foreign Policy .. http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/06/02/the_worst_general_in_american_history 's "worst general in American history" list.

What You Need to Know: It's hard to know where to start .. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/10/romney-military-adviser-tommy-franks-iraq .. with Franks: He didn't tell the American public .. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline .. he was planning on invading Iraq and then he helped spread the big fat lie .. http://2010.newsweek.com/top-10/worst-predictions/tommy-franks.html .. that there were actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Once the war was over, he had no plan to deal with the aftermat .. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/washington/15military.html h. [ that could have been on purpose ] Oh, and he lost Osama bin Laden .. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E7DE1730F93AA15752C1A96F9C8B63&ref=tommyrfranks .


harold "drill baby drill" hamm



Position: Energy Adviser

His Qualifications: He's a self-made American oilman worth $9.7 billion .. http://www.forbes.com/profile/harold-hamm/ , as of September 2012.

What You Need to Know: Hamm would end federal control of drilling on government land .. http://stateimpact.npr.org/oklahoma/2012/08/24/romneys-energy-policy-written-by-oklahoma-for-energy-states-like-oklahoma/ , a policy Theodore Roosevelt ushered in to help protect wildlife and America's most beautiful places. Instead, states would have the authority to frack and mine government lands. The New York Times .. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/us/romney-would-give-reins-to-states-on-drilling-on-federal-lands.html?pagewanted=all .. calls this "a radical shift from decades of policies under both Democrat and Republican presidents." According to Rolling Stone, Hamm has also given nearly $1 million .. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/mitt-romneys-dirty-dozen-20121022 .. to Romney's super-PAC.


kevin "dow 36,000" hassett



His Position: Economic Adviser

His Qualifications: Hassett was a senior economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

What You Need To Know: Hassett is your typical right-wing economist: He favors stimulus when Republican presidents are in office .. http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/91384/when-conservatives-loved-keynes .. and austerity when Democrats are in office .. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-23/bury-keynesian-voodoo-before-it-can-bury-us-all-kevin-hassett.html , and in that sense he's kind of a perfect adviser for Mitt Romney, who is known for changing his mind on big issues when it's convenient. Hassett is most infamous, though, for writing (with James K. Glassman) the 1999 book Dow 36,000, in which he predicted an ever-rising stock market .. http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/09/dow-36000-2/ . "Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground," Hassett and Glassman wrote, which is true if you ignore subsequent downturns including the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. With a track record like that, how can Hassett's assertion that Romney's jobs plan .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/mitt-romney-jobs_n_1733359.html .. will create "millions of jobs" possibly be wrong?

Photo Credits: Cofer Black: State Department. Walid Phares: An-Nahar. Robert Bork: Wikimedia Commons. Kris Kobach: Wikimedia Commons. Paul Ryan: Flickr, Starley Shelton. John Bolton: Flickr, Gage Skidmore.Tommy Franks: Wikimedia Commons. Harold Hamm: Wikimedia Commons. Kevin Hassett: Wikimedia Commons.

Dana Liebelson - Writing Fellow



Dana Liebelson is a writing fellow in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. Her work has also appeared in The Week, TIME's Battleland, Truthout, OtherWords and Yahoo! News. RSS | Twitter

Adam Serwer - Reporter



Adam Serwer is a reporter at the Washington, DC, bureau of Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. You can also follow him on Twitter. Email tips and insights to aserwer [at] motherjones [dot] com. RSS | Twitter

If You Liked This, You Might Also Like...

* Romney Enlists General Behind Iraq Debacle as Key Military Adviser
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/10/romney-military-adviser-tommy-franks-iraq
The same guy who bungled Iraq planning and was in charge when bin Laden escaped is now advising the GOP candidate.

* Romney Military Adviser Wanted Separate Housing for Gay Troops
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/10/top-romney-military-adviser-wanted-separate-housing-gay-troops
The campaign's Military Council of Advisors features top general who was a major opponent of DADT repeal.

* Meet Romney's—and Obama's—Climate Change Adviser
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/mitt-romney-gina-mccarthy-climate-change
Gina McCarthy runs Obama's air policy. But before that, she ran Romney's.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/mitt-romney-administration-top-advisers

.. damn! .. thank you Dana Liebelson and Adam Serwer .. Mother Jones is tops .. with Putin putting women band
members in jail for criticizing the regime all the world needs is another fascist regime in the USA .. seriously,
thank Sod the American people are evermore seeing through the Romney facade .. for sure Romney's effort has
to be one of the phoniest and most cynical presidential campaigns ever .. i don't know .. just seems it must be so ..

[StephanieVanbryce]

JPMorgan Chase Faces Full-Court Press of Federal Investigations

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG and BEN PROTESS
March 26, 2013, 10:00 pm


Jamie Dimon is chief of JPMorgan Chase.
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

As the nation’s strongest bank, JPMorgan Chase used to be known for carrying special sway with regulators. Now it increasingly finds itself in the cross hairs of federal authorities.

At least two board members are worried about the mounting problems, and some top executives fear that the bank’s relationships in Washington have frayed as JPMorgan becomes a focus of federal investigations.

In a previously undisclosed case, prosecutors are examining whether JPMorgan failed to fully alert authorities to suspicions about Bernard L. Madoff, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. And nearly a year after reporting a multibillion-dollar trading loss, JPMorgan is facing a criminal inquiry over whether it lied to investors and regulators about the risky wagers, a case that could accelerate when the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other authorities interview top JPMorgan executives in coming weeks.

All told, at least eight federal agencies are investigating the bank, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. in New York are also examining potential wrongdoing at JPMorgan.

A recent misstep points to the growing friction between JPMorgan and regulators as well as to the concerns within the bank. JPMorgan misstated how the bank may have harmed more than 5,000 homeowners in foreclosure, according to several people briefed on the matter. The bank’s primary regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is expected to collect a cash payment from the bank to remedy the flawed review of loans, these people say.

The bank acknowledges its broad regulatory challenges. “We get it, and we are dealing aggressively with these issues,” said Joe Evangelisti, a JPMorgan spokesman.

The mortgage errors, while by themselves relatively minor, have heightened concerns within JPMorgan because they come on top of the other investigations. The increased scrutiny presents a challenge for the bank and its influential chief executive, Jamie Dimon, who was widely praised for steering JPMorgan through the 2008 financial crisis, leaving it in far better shape than its rivals. Among some executives at the bank, the worry is that the unwanted attention will undercut Mr. Dimon’s authority in Washington.

“Jamie and other executives feel terrible that the bank’s self-inflicted mistakes have put regulators in an awkward position,” Mr. Evangelisti said. He added, “We are wholly to blame for our errors and are fully cooperating with all authorities to make things right.”

Mr. Dimon has already testified before Congress and apologized for the trading losses. In response to last year’s trading blowup, the bank has also worked to root out the problems, shuffled its top executives, bolstered its risk controls and brought in a new head of compliance.

The bank’s board, which halved Mr. Dimon’s compensation in January, recently reiterated its support for him as both chairman and chief executive. JPMorgan, whose shares have soared in recent months, has recorded record profits for the last three years.

But as JPMorgan seeks to address its legal woes and restore its credibility in Washington, the bungled review of troubled mortgages could present a setback for the bank. The problems stem from January, when JPMorgan and other big banks agreed to a multibillion-dollar settlement over foreclosure abuses. As part of the pact, the bank agreed to comb through each loan file to spot potential errors, a process that the regulators will use to help determine the size of the payouts to homeowners.

While assessing 880,000 mortgages, JPMorgan overstated the potential harm for more than 5,000 loans, the people familiar with the matter said. The mistakes were not deliberate, according to a person with direct knowledge of the review, who also noted that the extent of the problem was small and that other banks were encountering their own issues with the review.

To ensure those errors didn’t cheat homeowners out of relief, JPMorgan offered additional compensation for borrowers, according to one person familiar with the matter. Still, the comptroller, which is growing impatient with JPMorgan’s mistakes, could also fine the bank, another person said.

Tensions between JPMorgan and its primary regulator were highlighted in a recent Senate report that examined the $6.2 billion trading loss. The report, by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, portrayed a somewhat defiant stance by Mr. Dimon, showing how during a brief period in August 2011 the chief executive stopped providing regulators with profit-and-loss reports about the investment bank.


Jamie Dimon, left, at headquarters. His occasional defiance of regulators may have emboldened his employees to do likewise.

Although the bank says Mr. Dimon was merely concerned about a security breach, the report says he took an adversarial tone with regulators, pushing them to explain why they needed that level of information. Mr. Dimon’s approach seemed to influence other executives, including one employee who once screamed at examiners and called them “stupid.”

Those episodes, combined with the current investigations, are costing the bank some of its influence in Washington, according to government officials who would speak only anonymously. The legal problems also pose a test for Stephen M. Cutler, the bank’s general counsel, who is advocating for the bank to take a respectful approach with regulators.

In April, according to people briefed on the matter, senior executives are expected to meet with investigators who are examining the trading loss. A handful of executives have already met with authorities, but the second round will include Mr. Dimon. While he is not suspected of any wrongdoing, the officials hope Mr. Dimon will help build a case against traders in London suspected of lowballing their losses.

The investigators will also seek information about whether some top bank executives misled investors and regulators about the severity of the losses. Even as losses mounted last year, the bank did not publicly disclose the problem for months. The bank has said that “senior management acted in good faith and never had any intent to mislead anyone.”

But the S.E.C. is also examining such disclosures. And under the Dodd-Frank regulatory law, the F.D.I.C. is investigating the trading loss, according to people briefed on the matter.

The S.E.C., F.D.I.C., Comptroller’s office and F.B.I. all declined to comment.

JPMorgan has separately come under fire for lax controls against money-laundering. In January, the comptroller hit JPMorgan with a cease-and-desist order for failures that threatened to allow tainted money to move through the bank’s vast network.

Mr. Evangelisti, JPMorgan’s spokesman, has said the bank has “been working hard to fully remediate the issues identified.”

Still, federal prosecutors in Manhattan are examining JPMorgan’s actions in the Madoff case, suspecting the bank may have violated a federal law that requires banks to alert authorities to suspicious transactions. The comptroller’s office is investigating similar issues.

“We believe that the personnel who dealt with the Madoff issue acted in good faith in seeking to comply with all anti-money-laundering and regulatory obligations,” Mr. Evangelisti said.

The federal investigation echoes claims in a 2010 lawsuit against the bank brought by Irving H. Picard, the bankruptcy trustee gathering assets for Mr. Madoff’s victims.

The suit cited internal JPMorgan e-mails sent 18 months before Mr. Madoff’s arrest, in which one employee acknowledged that a bank executive “just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme.”

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/jpmorgan-chase-faces-full-court-press-of-federal-investigations/

[StephanieVanbryce]

it's just too bad that mitt didn't have a sizable amount in Cyprus.

............. I would have loved to have seen that. mainly due to the fact that I read he said, just the other day, that 'He was enjoying getting back to normal' and living his life as a 'normal guy' ... something like that (not a quote' just a memory of what he said) ... anyway, If they really only left him 37. percent something of his money and took the rest ... well.........sheesh, even then he wouldn't get to know what it's like to be a 'normal' guy ...........lol .. ;)