Monthly Archives: June 2013

Monkey House

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The Republican-dominated House is looking more ridiculous than ever, if that’s even possible. The latest debacle is the defeat of a farm bill that included deep cuts to food stamps. Most House Dems voted against it, and so did 62 House Republicans. The Dems objected because it cut food stamps too much. The Republicans, however, appeared to think it didn’t cut food stamps enough.

Anyhoo, having failed to move its extremist wing to pass something that might actually, you know, become law, the leadership of the House Republicans blamed Democrats.

Greg Sargent:

The leadership of the House GOP — which, last time I checked, controls the Lower Chamber – is blaming Democrats for failing to deliver enough votes to make passage possible. A spokesman for Eric Cantor claimed it shows Dems “are not able to govern.”

Charles Pierce:

The Republicans, and noted soprano-singing House Speaker John Boehner, who last saw his balls in October of 2010, have decided that the blame really lies in a reluctance by Democrats to be properly complicit in making poor children hungry enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps rather than eating them.

Jim Newell:

Then the Republican leadership blames Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for only bringing 24 Democratic “aye” votes to the table. Jesus. We’re not sure that Nancy Pelosi got 24 votes from the Republican Party on all major bills combined in the years 2009 and 2010. Also, there’s a reason that most Democrats didn’t vote for this farm bill, and that’s because they hate it, because it assaults the social safety net. But yeah, anyway, sure, this is Nancy Pelosi’s fault, boo, she’s evil and wears a lot of makeup, boo.

Newell also writes,

Now then, what’s the problem? Oh right, it’s the House of Representatives, which is terrible at everything, and offers no indication of being any other way until at least 2023. Let’s give some credit: They’re adept at passing go-nowhere bills to repeal Obamacare or ban abortion or tattoo the words “Under God” to every baby’s forehead. Great work there from the House Republican Party. On issues that might appeal to an even slightly broader cross-section of the country, though, they’ve got nothing. You know this. You’ve seen the same routine in nearly every important vote since 2009. Remember that time the government considered arbitrarily defaulting on the public debt and destroying the global economy forever? That was a head-scratcher for the House; took some real “working out” before they concluded it would best be averted, for now.

It always works out the same way, at the 11th hour. A Senate-originated compromise, after much pouting, is taken up by the House after several defeats of their own insane legislation. Maybe a tweak or two is offered. The House passes it. Conservatives serve up uncreative epithets for John Boehner for exercising the only decent option available to him. The next big piece of legislation comes up. And, at least as of yesterday’s farm bill flop, they begin this same fatal cycle of time wasting again.

This pretty much means that the only way real legislation can be passed in the House is with a substantial number of Dem votes, because the Clown Caucus won’t pass anything that resembles actual governance.

Charles Pierce explains the implications for an immigration reform bill:

Mind you, Boehner couldn’t whip enough votes out of his caucus to pass this mess, which included enough hometown pork to bring Dan Rostenkowski back from the dead. Keep that in mind when you consider that he is the guy who’s supposed to get a reasonable immigration bill through this monkeyhouse. I keep hearing that they want the “Gang of 8” proposal to get 70 votes in the Senate. This, allegedly, will “put pressure” on the House to pass a decent immigration reform bill. This is completely absurd. Pressure from whom? Boehner? Marco Rubio, who got booed in front of the Capitol yesterday? One half of the national legislature is utterly in the hands of the inmates of Bedlam. What possible reason is there to believe that anything will get done? Hell, Steve King is even nuttier on immigration than he is on poor kids.

Josh Marshall agrees, saying in effect that Boehner’s only real choice is to give the House a relatively “moderate” (by Washington standards) immigration bill that Dems will vote for, and then get out of the way. No bill will be approved by the House extremists that would be acceptable to anyone else.

See also Elise Foley, “Farm Bill Failure Shows John Boehner’s Tight Spot on Immigration.”

Update: Details on what happened — in short, the House Republican Crazies loaded the bill up with amendments to make it toxic to Dems, and then complained the Dems “sandbagged” them by not voting for the bill — see Roll Call and Politico.

The Patriarchy Whines Back

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Yesterday much of the leftie blogosphere came down on James Taranto for dismissing efforts to curb sexual assault in the military as a “war on men” and an “effort to criminalize male sexuality.” I mentioned this at the end of this post. Now Taranto whines that the feminazis are picking on him.

Taranto had expressed approval of a clemency granted to an officer who was convicted of aggravated sexual assault. Today he writes,

Our argument infuriated feminists, yielding hundreds of tweets and perhaps a dozen posts on various leftist websites. Particularly noteworthy was a tweet from @Invisible_War, which promotes a documentary described as “a groundbreaking investigation into the epidemic of rape in the US military.” The tweet read: “Appalling: @WSJ’s @jamestaranto thinks we’re criminalizing male sexuality by prosecuting military rape.”

That is an utter falsehood. Our column discussed sexual assault but made no specific mention of rape, a distinct and more serious offense under military law. Herrera was not accused of rape.

It was aggravated sexual assault, which sounds a whole lot like rape to me. If military law doesn’t consider aggravated sexual assault to be that big a deal, then there’s a problem with military law.

Taranto also complains that some of the comments made about him were “abusive.” Seriously. Saying unkind things about him on the Twitter is “abusive.” But aggravated sexual assault is just boys being boys.

I feel an urge to demonstrate to Taranto what “abusive” means. But he’s not worth the effort, frankly.

Update: It gets worse. See Digby and also Think Progress —

Taranto followed up his op-ed with an appearance on Wall Street Journal’s video channel, where he argued that “female sexual freedom” is responsible for a “war on men,” and that war is embodied in allegations of sexual assault. During that interview, he also said that a woman alleging assault and a man denying it “differed… on whether she consented.” Taranto also cast doubt on the report because someone present “didn’t even hear this going on.”

“What does female sexual freedom mean?” Taranto added, “It means, for this woman, that she had the freedom to get drunk and get in the back seat of a car with this guy.”

I feel like declaring war on James Taranto. This monster needs to be out of a job.

Twilight of the Patriarchy

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It’s behind a subscription firewall, but there’s a lovely essay by Richard Rodriguez in the current issue of Harper’s. He nails down the real connection between heterosexual and homosexual marriage.

Divorce rates in the United States and Europe suggest that women are not happy with the relationships they have with men, and vice versa. And whatever that unhappiness is, I really don’t think gay people are the cause. On the other hand, whatever is wrong with heterosexual marriage does have some implication for homosexuals.

The majority of American women are living without spouses. My optimism regarding that tabulation is that a majority of boys in America will grow up assuming that women are strong. My worry is that as so many men absent themselves from the lives of the children they father, boys and girls will grow up without a sense of the tenderness of men.

The prospect of a generation of American children being raised by women in homes without fathers is challenging for religious institutions whose central conception of deity is father, whose central conception of church is family, whose only conception of family is heterosexual. A woman who can do without a husband can do without any patriarchal authority. The oblique remedy some religious institutions propose for the breakdown of heterosexual relationships is a legal objection to homosexual marriages by defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

IMO it’s all about the patriarchy. It’s why so many (mostly white male) politicians are obsessed with shutting down Planned Parenthood and criminalizing abortion. It’s behind Erick Erickson’s recent rant.

The War on Women Continues

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As near as I can tell from vaguely worded news stories, the bill passed by the House yesterday would ban abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation, or 22 weeks from the last menstrual period. The bill has no chance of being passed in the Senate, and even if it did, the President would veto it. But the bill tells us a lot about Republicans’ inability to respect women.

For example, originally the House Judiciary Committee rejected exemptions for rape and incest. A rape exemption eventually was added, but only if the rape was reported to police within 48 hours after it happened. Otherwise, they say, women will just lie and say they were raped when they weren’t really. Those gestating women can’t be trusted.
Oh, and women hardly ever get pregnant from rape, anyway.

BTW, when the rape exemption was added, one of the bill’s sponsors took his name off the bill. Paul C. Broun (R-Ga.) said he was “extremely disappointed that House Republican leadership chose to include language to subject some unborn children to needless pain and suffering.”

According to one article, minors who are incest victims also are required to have reported the incest before they can get an exemption, which would pretty much mean incest victims can’t get an exemption, even if they’re 12 years old. There is a “life of the mother” exemption, but I don’t know what criteria have to be met for a dying woman to qualify.

I haven’t seen any mention of exemptions for when the fetus is severely malformed and probably won’t live anyway. Some kinds of birth defects usually are only detected around the 20th week of gestation.

(Some background the news stories all leave out: Roe v. Wade guidelines allows states to ban elective abortions after 23 weeks gestation (or 25 weeks from the last menstrual period), because that’s the generally accepted threshold of viability for a human fetus. I understand a handful of babies have been born a little earlier and survived, but medical science has no record of an infant surviving after only 20 weeks of gestation. Also, according to Alan Guttmacher, in the U.S. only 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks gestation. Also, too, in the U.S. nobody is keeping a comprehensive record of why abortions are performed, so there is no way to know how many of that 1.5 percent are rape and incest victims.)

Elsewhere — Get this —

The Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto dismissed the epidemic of sexual assault in the military, claiming that efforts to address the growing problem contributed to a “war on men” and an “effort to criminalize male sexuality.”

That’s right, folks. Assaulting women is just standard male sexuality. See also “Five Easy Steps for Becoming a Rape Apologist.”

Republicans apparently think that abortions restrictions will help them in the 2016 2014 midterms. I don’t see how. See also “GOP has learned absolutely nothing from 2012.”

Righties Are Stupid

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James O’Keefe has a new video out purporting to show that Welfare Recipients of Color are selling their “Obamaphones” to buy drugs. And the usual gullible twits who believe everything they see on Drudge are breathlessly passing this along. The Dumbest Man on the Internet thinks they are buying Louis Vuittons also.

It seems O’Keefe’s video doesn’t actually show anyone selling his phone to buy drugs, just some actor-recipients saying that’s what they’ll do, and a sales clerk saying, in effect, he doesn’t give a bleep what they do with the phones. Obviously the sales clerk is taking direction directly from the Oval Office. (/sarcasm)

But we’re not talking iPhones or Androids here. These appear to be bare-bones cell phones that just make phone calls and which come with less than $10 a month in calling time. No doubt they are locked to particular phone providers and accounts, so someone not registered to the account probably couldn’t use them without unlocking them. And the buyer would have to know how to do that, because the service providers aren’t doing it any more, I don’t think.

So the phones are hardly worth the price of a Louis Vuitton. They may not be worth the price of a luggage tag.

And the free cell phone program began during the Bush Administration, so logically they ought to be called “Dubya phones.” But neither Dubya nor the current POTUS was actually involved with setting up the program, which is not subsidized with tax dollars but by phone companies, which are also making money from this somehow. The video explains:

[Apologies; video has disappeared.]

See also Annenberg Fact Check and Gawker. People are paying a surcharge on their phone bills to help pay for the program, but the same surcharge also helps to subsidize phone service in rural areas. So some of the yahoos who might be complaining about the surcharge also are benefiting from it.

The bigger wonder, though, is how so many on the Right are so completely void of critical thinking skills that they don’t question how a cheapie phone would be worth enough money to buy drugs. They quote a clerk on the video saying to take the phone to a pawn shop to see what they are worth, but you don’t see O’Keefe actually doing that. My bet is that pawnbrokers won’t take them.

Why Texans Are Sheep

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Texas governor Rick Perry is to the welfare of Texas citizens what a black hole is to matter. Yesterday I linked to an article that explained how Perry, and conservatives in the Texas legislature, are allowing construction companies to get around existing law so that workers have no insurance, no workman’s comp, no safety net whatsoever.

Not only do these workers lack health insurance – in Texas, workers’ comp is optional – they’re also not paid by the hour, don’t receive overtime pay, lack safety training and, of course, get no retirement plan. If you venture out to one of the many subdivisions being built just about anywhere in Texas, you’ll see row upon row of houses under construction. The workers, mainly Latinos, are one serious injury away from needing the volunteers of the Living Hope Wheelchair Association or other faith-based groups. They’re toiling in the hot Texas sun with no safety net. If they’re hurt, they’ll be patched up at the emergency room. Their employer will not get a bill. You and I will pick up the tab through our property taxes. Socialized medicine at its best, I suppose.

Perry also just vetoed a bill that would have prevented wage discrimination against women. And last week the “Merry Christmas” bill was signed into law.

The measure allows schools to display religious symbols such as nativity scenes and Christmas trees so long as at least one other religious image or secular icon is also included. …

…“It’s a shame that a bill like this one I’m signing today is even required, but I’m proud that we’re standing up for religious freedom in this state,” Perry said at a “Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion.” …

… At the Thursday signing ceremony for the new law, cheerleaders from Kountze High School wore t-shirts that read “I cheer for Christ.”

In May, a Texas judge ruled that the cheerleaders could continue to display signs at football games emblazoned with Bible verses.

Since this is Texas, in effect this means the public school system will revert to being a recruiting arm for evangelical Christianity. Let’s see what happens when a kid shows up at school with a yab-yum T-shirt. Freedom from religion will start to make sense to them then, I suspect.

Texans vote for these clowns. Texans are sheep.

More Health Care Follies

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Republicans are banking on the failure of the evil Obamacare to restore their political fortunes in 2014 and 2016. But Ramesh Ponnuru warns them they must not be complacent. Oh, it’s going to be a disaster, he says, but perhaps not disastrous enough.

Opponents of Obamacare should plan instead for the likelihood that in its first years of full operation the law will fail in undramatic and unspectacular ways. Premium increases, cost overruns, and the like may keep the law from becoming popular, but they will not prompt the third of the public that supports it to switch sides, or even get its many soft opponents fired up about it. Meanwhile, the administration will spend millions of taxpayer dollars to advertise the law’s benefits. The law’s dogged defenders will explain away all the disappointing developments, and the polls, as the result of continuing opposition in red states. A few conservative lawmakers have speculated that the law will crash so badly that the Democrats will themselves demand repeal in the next couple of years. That is not the way to bet.

Republicans’ confidence that Obamacare will collapse has contributed to their lassitude in coming up with an alternative. It is a perverse complacency. If the program were going to collapse in the next three years, it would be all the more important for Republicans to build the case for a replacement for it. We can be sure that the Left would respond to any such collapse by making the case for a “single payer” program in which the federal government directly provides everyone insurance.

Ponnuru thinks a third of the country supports the health care reform law. A CNN/ORC Poll (they poll orcs?) taken May 17-18, 2013, found that 43 percent of Americans favor the law and 51 percent oppose it. However, only 35 percent oppose it because it is “too liberal.” The remainder of the opponents don’t think it is liberal enough. So it’s really just over a third who see it the way Ponnuru does. But let’s continue.

Jonathan Chait thinks that it’s politically smarter for the Republicans to not put forward an alternative plan, because that would expose what nitwits they are. Well, that’s not how Chait puts it, but that’s basically what he’s saying.

Republicans have wisely decided to attack Obamacare without committing themselves to an alternative because the alternative would be easy to attack. Ponnuru, for instance, suggests changing the tax code and stripping regulations to create “a market in which almost everyone would be able to purchase relatively cheap, renewable insurance policies that protected them from the risk of catastrophic health expenses.” Telling tens of millions of Americans they’ll lose their insurance that covers basic medical expenses and get bare-bones policies with thousands of dollars in deductibles is not a winning play.

Republicans are doing a good job scaring people with highly misleading claims about “rate shock.”

But the vast majority of the public is not going to see any changes under the new law. Even if the Obamacare exchanges collapse, they only bring in people who don’t have Medicare or employer coverage anyway and are already suffering through a dysfunctional individual insurance market. The “shock” is going to be felt by conservatives who are expecting their Randian fantasies of socialist dystopia to come true.

Timothy Egan writes,

The early indications are that most Americans will be pleasantly surprised. Millions of people, shopping and comparing prices on the exchanges set up by the states, are likely to get far better coverage for the same — or less — money than they pay now. The law, as honest conservatives predicted, before they orphaned their own idea, is injecting competition into a market dominated by a few big names. …

…“The surprise is that, for many in the individual market, the premiums will be lower and the benefits so much richer,” said Mike Kreidler, the state insurance commissioner in Washington. “Eventually, I can see the Affordable Care Act being embraced like Medicare, because once people get used to this kind of coverage, it’s going to be a pretty abhorrent thing to try and take it away.”

Egan compares today’s “ossified right” to conservatives who predicted dire things about Social Security and Medicare — before they went into effect. The question is, how long will the Right be able to keep the fear-mongering going once the law goes fully into effect? I expect that next spring we’ll be inundated with all kinds of stories hyping every little glitch. But if the sky does not fall, will the fear-mongering have an impact on the mid-terms in November? We’ll see.

Sorta kinda related — “How Do They Sleep at Night?“

The NSA Story: Less Than It Seems?

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I’m just throwing this out for comment.

Kevin Drum:

“Direct access” implies that NSA can just root around in Google’s servers whenever they want. That’s big news. Conversely, a story about how companies transfer information to NSA after they get a court order is a complete nothing. Who cares what technical means are used to transfer data to NSA? What we care about is what kind of information NSA is getting, and nothing in the PRISM story has given us any insight into that.

If Snowden really has the technical chops he claims to have, he should have cleared this up. But Greenwald and Gellman apparently didn’t ask about it, and Snowden apparently didn’t volunteer anything. (I say “apparently” because I don’t know for sure who said what to whom.) This suggests either that Snowden didn’t know what this phrase meant or else chose not to explain it properly. Either one raises some red flags.

Do read Drum’s entire post.

Update: Rick Perlstein corroborates that “direct access” probably doesn’t mean what some people assumed it meant.