Month: March 2010

Not Quite 100%

by digby

I didn’t know quite what to make of David Brooks’ even-more-than-usually noxious column this morning, but luckily I read Pandagon and it all made sense:

I was surprised that his vendetta against famous, successful women became so hysterical this morning that he insinuated that Sandra Bullock should have been at home making a sandwich instead of winning an Oscar, and that would have saved her marriage. Even someone as dedicated to making sure that no woman who works makes more than minimum wage as Brooks usually makes an exception for Hollywood actresses, understanding that it would be disconcerting for modern audiences to adopt the Elizabethean practice of having young boys play female characters in the movies, and it would bring to a crashing halt the practice of having nude sex scenes in films. Unless of course you only made movies for the Catholic priest population, but I just don’t see that bringing in the big bucks that Hollywood has grown accustomed to.

Read on …

Ouch.

My personal experience with the institution of marriage has been terrific, but I would no more make judgments about other peoples’ marriages based upon that than I would judge their taste in desserts. Everybody’s different. But these “values” conservatives never hesitate to inject themselves into the relationships of those to whom they feel superior and oddly enough, they tend to the same conclusion: the woman failed to keep her man happy.

Marcotte, however, answers the main question I had about Brooks when I read this thing this morning:

Why is he in such a crisis of anxious masculinity that the unique, self-contained Hollywood world is bothering him? I’m afraid that we have to assume he’s upset because Nancy Pelosi took his balls. When forced to consider the subject of Nancy Pelosi’s massive success as Speaker of the House—success many people like Brooks would not think a woman capable of—he said this, after Mark Shields suggested Pelosi is the most powerful female political figure in our history:

JIM LEHRER: Do you buy that, David?

DAVID BROOKS: I’m trying to think of alternatives.

Some people say Edith Wilson was very powerful when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke.

Already we’re deep into wanker territory. But it gets worse! Because Brooks simply cannot accept that a woman might acquire power the way a man can, by working hard and winning elections and getting good at her job.

DAVID BROOKS: But, certainly, this is a great accomplishment. And sort of it’s an interesting picture of what it takes to succeed in a job like this.

She is not a great speaker—I mean a spokesperson, a communicator. I personally don’t think she’s great on policy. But she has the skills to know how to control this body, which is a fractious body, even when you have a majority. And, so, those skills are maybe in her blood from her father and her brother, but also skills that she really possesses. And there’s no denying she is a very effective legislator.

Nice of him to admit that she “really possesses” some skills, but it would seem that most of them are passed down from the men in her family, so it’s hard to know if they “count.” But I think that passage illuminates a lot more about Brooks than Pelosi, don’t you?

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Mean Country

by digby

I think there’s a sense among many Americans that all this political sturm and drang that there’s a bit of kabuki involved — that it’s part of the bit Political Show, a reality TV show (which bores most of them to death.)

But there are real life ramifications to the spectacle of average Americans behaving like thugs. I think this may be one of them:

Nine Massachusetts teenagers have been charged with involvement in a months-long campaign of bullying that led to the suicide in January of a 15-year-old girl, a prosecutor said Monday.

Phoebe Prince’s body was found hanging in the stairway leading to her family’s second-floor apartment in South Hadley, Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth D. Scheibel told reporters in the western Massachusetts town of Northampton.

“It appears that Phoebe’s death on January 14 followed a torturous day for her when she was subjected to verbal harassment and physical abuse,” she said.

Earlier in the day, Prince had been harassed as she studied in the library at South Hadley High School, apparently in the presence of a faculty member and several students, none of whom reported it until after the death, Scheibel said.

Prince, who had recently moved to the area with her family from Ireland, was also harassed as she walked through the halls of the school that day and as she walked on the street toward her home, Scheibel said.

The harassment that day, by one male and two females, “appears to have been motivated by the group’s displeasure with Phoebe’s brief dating relationship with a male student that had ended six weeks earlier,” she said.

But that day’s events were not isolated; they “were the culmination of a nearly three-month campaign of verbally abusive, assaultive behavior and threats of physical harm toward Phoebe on school grounds by several South Hadley students,” Scheibel added.

It appears this little girl was mentally tortured to death.

I’m sure this behavior isn’t unprecedented. Lord of the Flies was an allegory, but it was also a fairly realistic depiction of human behavior. But I can’t help but feel that the violent, apocalyptic rhetoric of the right over the past few years has torn off much of the civilizing bonds we’d built up over the years. Certainly our recent cavalier attitude toward torture (“when they deserve it”) hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Keep in mind that most of the people who are screaming in red faced rage in news stories every day aren’t young people. It’s older people — the faces of authority — who are doing it. These parental (and grandparental) role models acting out of control with anger gives tacit permission to some kids to act like animals too.

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Turning The Tables

by digby

Overture to Catholics:

I have no authority whatsoever to speak for my Church, nor would I presume to do so. But as an Episcopal priest, I call on my ecclesiastical superiors to make a special overture to Roman Catholics who are disgruntled by the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church; scandals that increasingly point to the complicity of the man in charge of the Vatican, Benedict XVI.

My reference here, of course, is to the declaration last fall by the very same Benedict seeking to lure conservative Anglicans and Episcopalians to the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican sensed an opening, especially with those Episcopalians (and former Episcopalians) who were still fuming over the consecration of V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire, the refusal of the Episcopal Church to foreswear same-sex marriages, and the ordination of gays and lesbians and even (still!) the ordination of women.

On October 20, 2009, the Vatican announced a special “Apostolic Constitution” that would welcome these restive Episcopalians and Anglicans into the Catholic Church, allowing them to bring with them some of the glorious liturgies and music of the Anglican tradition.

While I’ve seen no evidence of Anglicans and Episcopalians “swimming the Tiber” en masse (pardon the pun) to Rome, the Vatican’s overture struck me at the time as opportunistic, even cynical. Ignoring decades of ecumenical conversations—not to mention catching the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, off guard—Benedict thought he could harvest disaffected Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church by offering concessions on liturgy and music together with ironclad proscriptions against such “evils” as homosexuality and women priests.

Now, just five months later, the tables have turned. Every new edition of the New York Times, it seems, carries fresh disclosures about priestly pedophilia in Ireland, Germany, and (most appallingly) at a Catholic school for the deaf in Wisconsin. Sadly enough, priestly pedophilia is old news by now. What’s new, in the opening of court documents that the Vatican sought desperately to suppress, is that the Catholic hierarchy stubbornly refused to deal with these cases in a way that would protect children against further abuse by predatory priests. There’s plenty of blame to go around, it seems—mild slaps on the wrist and reassignment to other venues where the abuse continued. But the finger of blame and complicity points unmistakably to Benedict in his pre-papal responsibilities as Joseph Ratzinger while archbishop of Munich and, later, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

So what do we learn from these developments over the past five months? Consider the evidence. I gather that the lesson from the Vatican is that homosexuality, even on the part of those in loving, committed relationships, is sin, must be exposed to the light of day for its shamefulness and must never be countenanced. It’s okay, however, to turn a blind eye to pedophile priests, to reassign them quietly to do harm elsewhere or simply to ignore the problem.

I’ll take my Episcopal Church, warts and all, any day.

Very understandable.

I’m sorry, but the Catholic Church hierarchy deserves this. They have behaved in an appalling manner, both in their arrogant assumption of moral superiority and their indifference for years to the suffering of the children in their priest’s care.

Meanwhile, Wild Bill Donohue loses his marbles for good:

Seldom have I seen such delirium over an innocent man, namely Pope Benedict XVI. Christopher Hitchens, the rabid atheist, wants to know why the European Union is allowing the pope to travel freely. Perhaps he wants the pope handcuffed at the Vatican and brought to the guillotine. Margery Eagan of the Boston Herald, another big fan of the Catholic Church, says, “The Pope should resign.” One looks in vain for a single sentence that implicates his guilt in anything. Then we have the Washington Post indicting priests by painting all of them as child abusers in a cartoon. There are many other examples of this kind of hysteria.

As indicated in our New York Times op-ed page ad today, the pope is innocent. Indeed, he is being framed. No one has any evidence that he even knew of the case of Father Lawrence Murphy. Indeed, his office didn’t find out until 1996 and then it did the right thing by summoning an investigation (it could have simply dropped an inquiry given that the statute of limitations had run out). No matter, the pope’s harshest critics are blaming him for not defrocking a man whom he may never have heard of, and in any event was entitled to a presumption of innocence. Or was he? There are not just a few who would deny civil liberties protections to priests.

It is a sad day when al-Qaeda suspects are afforded more rights than priests. That this kind of intellectual thuggery should emanate from those who fancy themselves tolerant and fair-minded makes the sham all the more despicable.

Lest you think that Old Bill is just protecting the Pope, get a load of this press release following revelation of the Irish abuse scandal:

Reuters is reporting that “Irish Priests Beat, Raped Children,” yet the report does not justify this wild and irresponsible claim. Four types of abuse are noted: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional. Physical abuse includes “being kicked”; neglect includes “inadequate heating”; and emotional abuse includes “lack of attachment and affection.” Not nice, to be sure, but hardly draconian, especially given the time line: fully 82 percent of the incidents took place before 1970. As the New York Times noted, “many of them [are] now more than 70 years old.” And quite frankly, corporal punishment was not exactly unknown in many homes during these times, and this is doubly true when dealing with miscreants.

Regarding sexual abuse, “kissing,” and “non-contact including voyeurism” (e.g., what it labels as “inappropriate sexual talk”) make the grade as constituting sexual abuse. Moreover, one-third of the cases involved “inappropriate fondling and contact.” None of this is defensible, but none of it qualifies as rape. Rape, on the other hand, constituted 12 percent of the cases. As for the charge that “Irish Priests” were responsible, some of the abuse was carried out by lay persons, much of it was done by Brothers, and about 12 percent of the abusers were priests (most of whom were not rapists).

The Irish report suffers from conflating minor instances of abuse with serious ones, thus demeaning the latter. When most people hear of the term abuse, they do not think about being slapped, being chilly, being ignored or, for that matter, having someone stare at you in the shower. They think about rape.

I guess those priests were just blowing off a little steam. Getting a little “emotional release.”

For a real treat, listen to this interview with Donohue on the subject.

I don’t know what you can say about people like this, but defending violence and sadism does seem to be part of the pattern, doesn’t it?

Here’s Dononue’s ad(pdf) in the NY Times today.

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Where Do They get Their Ideas ?

by digby

“Those crazies in Montana who say “we’re going to kill ATF agents because the UN’s going to take over — well, they’re beginning to have a case.”

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Atlas Cried

by digby

Beck has a new book coming out. A novel. A Big Novel:

An early hint may come in June, when Beck publishes his book The Overton Window, which he described as “a story of America in a time much like today where the people are confused,” with a government in crisis and the rise of a citizens’ group called the Founders Keepers, which “leads to a battle and a civil war, and life is upside-down planetwide.

Dave Weigel comments:

On first blush it sounds like “Atlas Shrugged” with a bit more violence, and with 9-12 Tea Partiers taking the place of underground intellectuals.

Sounds like it. I’d add in a dash of Battlefield Earth and Left Behind as well. Let’s all just pray he didn’t put in any sex scenes.

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Useful Stupak

by digby

That will be the term that’s used instead of “useful idiot” from now on.

Nick Baumann at Mother Jones takes a look at the top lobbyist for the Catholic Bishops (they have lobbyists?) who advised Stupak on his bizarre quest to hold out for the Stupak Amendment over the Nelson Amendment for no apparent reason. It’s a fascinating story.

And now it seems there is serious trouble in paradise:

Perhaps the biggest question hanging over the bishops’ strategy is why they were prepared to see health care reform fail unless the Stupak amendment’s abortion provisions were adopted. After all, there was virtually no difference between the Stupak amendment in the House bill—which Doerflinger insisted was the only acceptable option—and the Nelson language in the Senate bill, which the bishops warned would “require people to pay for other people’s abortions.”

[…]

In the days since Stupak voted for the bill, relations between his bloc and the bishops have soured. “The church does have some work to do in dealing with frayed nerves and divisions on policy questions,” Doerflinger told Catholic News Service. Last week, Stupak attacked the bishops and other anti-abortion groups for “great hypocrisy” in opposing Obama’s executive order after having supported former President George W. Bush’s executive order banning stem cell research in 2007. He told the Daily Caller he believed the bishops and the groups they were allied with were “just using the life issue to try to bring down health-care reform.” In other words, he suspected he was wrong to trust that his former allies were acting in good faith.

Yah think?

Yes, it was difficult to understand why Catholic bishops who purport to care for the poor would do such a thing. Certainly the non-wingnut laity wondered. In fact, they were aghast. So were the nuns. So were the Catholic hospitals. Stupak and his bloc were apparently just fools.

It was always obvious that these Catholic Bishops were simply trying to tank health care reform for political purposes. They are aligned with the Republican Party. And they have shown that they are, shall we say, somewhat morally indifferent. Powerful leaders who will cover up for pedophiles aren’t likely to give a damn about the plight of the uninsured.

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The Good The Bad And The Ugly

by digby

The Guttmacher institute has done a thorough analysis of the new health care bill’s impact on reproductive rights:

For the nation’s consumers and providers of reproductive health care, and for advocates of reproductive health and rights, the health care reform legislation just enacted is something of a mixed bag. The bill’s onerous abortion restrictions have been rightly denounced by reproductive rights supporters. New funding for evidence-based sex education was regrettably paired with the retention of a failed and discredited abstinence-only program. But, taken together, a number of other provisions in this sweeping measure constitute a clear and significant step forward for the reproductive health of America’s women and men.

Abortion: Insurance Coverage Now an Endangered Species

The bill’s restrictive abortion provision is putatively designed to uphold the status quo on the question of federal funding. Accordingly, federal funds—in this case, subsidy dollars for individuals purchasing insurance plans on the new health care “exchanges” that are slated to become operational in 2014—may not be used to pay for abortion coverage (except in extreme cases), but individuals, at least in theory, may purchase a plan that includes abortion coverage so long as the abortion coverage itself is paid for with their own money. (This mirrors the Hyde Amendment, under which federal Medicaid dollars may not be used to pay for most abortions, but states may cover the procedure for their Medicaid recipients using their own funds.)

In practice, however, the complex, politicized arrangements the legislation necessitates militate heavily against the likelihood that many such plans will be purchased—or even offered. Consumers purchasing exchange plans that include abortion coverage would have to make two separate premium payments—one to cover abortion services and one to cover everything else. Insurance companies would have to jump through numerous, unprecedented hoops to estimate the cost of abortion coverage and ensure that the abortion payments never mix with other funds; they also are likely to face extensive public scrutiny and protest around their action. All told, according to an analysis by George Washington University’s Sara Rosenbaum, “the more logical response” for private insurers marketing plans within the exchanges—and eventually in the broader market as well—“would be not to sell products that cover abortion services.”
Sex Education: One Step Forward, One Step Back

The legislation provides $75 million per year over five years for a new “personal responsibility education program,” most of it in grants to states for programs that educate adolescents about both abstinence and contraception for the prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Similar to the $114.5 million teen pregnancy prevention initiative signed into law by President Obama in December 2009, this new funding stream will focus on programs that are evidence-based, age-appropriate and medically accurate.

At the same time, the recently lapsed Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage education program was resuscitated for five years, making $50 million annually available to the states for programs that have nonmarital abstinence promotion as their “exclusive purpose” and accordingly are prohibited from discussing the benefits of contraception or any safer sex behaviors. Going forward, this means that a total of about $190 million in federal funding will be granted to states and community-based organizations for evidence-based programs, while $50 million will be offered to states for rigid abstinence-only programs (although, notably, roughly half the states have rejected their grant offers in the past).
Medicaid: A Huge Advance for Lower-Income Americans’ Reproductive Health

According to the Congressional Budget Office, a provision expanding eligibility to all Americans with a family income below 133% of the federal poverty level will allow 16 million more Americans to join Medicaid by 2019 than would otherwise be the case. All Medicaid recipients receive the program’s guarantee of family planning services without cost sharing, along with coverage for its comprehensive package of reproductive health services beyond family planning. (The major exception, of course, is abortion; however, this provision effectively would expand abortion coverage in the 17 states that fund abortions for their Medicaid recipients with state dollars.) The legislation, moreover, goes one step further: It allows states to expand Medicaid coverage solely for family planning services to the same income eligibility levels they use for pregnancy-related care, typically around 200% of poverty.
Private Insurance: Real Improvements on the Horizon

Under the legislation, currently uninsured individuals with incomes above 133% of poverty will be able to purchase private insurance coverage through the new health care exchanges, almost all of them with the help of a federal subsidy. Most of the plans offered on the exchanges will be required to offer a similar package of core services. The deliberately sketchy package described in the legislation specifies maternity care, closing a major coverage gap in the individual and small group market, but the final package is expected to also include coverage of a broad package of reproductive health services, including contraceptive services and supplies, as is typically the case in private-sector plans today. Insurance plans participating in the exchanges also will be required to contract with essential community providers, defined to include family planning centers, community health centers, public hospitals and HIV/AIDS clinics.

Meanwhile, all private insurance plans, both inside and outside the exchanges, will be required to cover, without cost sharing, a package of preventive and screening services for women. The exact package will be defined by the federal government, following a study to be conducted by the Health Resources and Services Administration. Similarly, all private plans that provide dependent coverage will be required to make it available for unmarried adult children younger than age 26. This provision, which goes into effect later this year, represents another important avenue for young adults to receive reproductive health care coverage.
Public Health: New Money for Struggling Safety-Net Providers

Finally, although strengthening the health care provider network was rarely mentioned as a core goal of the health care reform legislation, the law includes a vast array of new grants and programs to that end. It includes $1.5 billion over five years to support maternal, infant and early childhood home visiting programs, with a focus on high-risk families. It provides a significant increase in the rebates pharmaceutical manufacturers must offer to state Medicaid programs for both brand-name and generic drugs and in the discounts offered to safety-net providers, including Title X–supported family planning centers, under the 340B Drug Discount Program. It includes many billions of dollars in new funding for community health centers, which provide family planning services and other basic reproductive health care to their clients, and establishes a dedicated $50 million yearly funding stream for school-based health centers, many of which provide contraceptive care to students in need. The legislation also includes several dozen programs designed to bolster the health care workforce through loan forgiveness and provider training programs, some of which are relevant for family planning providers.

Women’s rights aren’t a zero sum game and giving up insurance coverage for abortion shouldn’t have to be the price for passing these other vitally important programs.

The pro-choice movement needs to study the methods of the NRA. They never let their advocates use them as a bargaining chip for anything. And anyway, at this point, the pro-choice advocates have very little left to bargain with.

These other advances are great news and explain why the pro-choice liberals were caught between a rock and a hard place and ultimately voted as they did. But they should never allow themselves to be blackmailed like that again. If they do, it’s all over.

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The Real Frat Boys Of Orange County

by digby

An Orange County Republican blog reports that the RNC booze and bondage party at Voyeurs was actually a big event to lure youthful donors:

The O.C. connection? As the Daily Caller story in that second link shows, DMI President and Gen Next member, Erik Brown, was who picked up that tab and ended up expensing it to the RNC. According to sources who were in attendance that night, the “official” part of the evening started with 50+ person dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel, then carried on throughout the evening, eventually ending up at Voyeur. While RNC employees, who were in town to recruit members to its “RNC Young Eagles” program, did participate throughout the entire evening and did find their way to the bondage-themed club, Michael Steele himself was “not in attendance” for any portion of the evening. Brown, by the way, is reportedly a “Young Eagle” himself, a fundraising sub-group of the RNC which targets larger donors based on age group. Presumably, the Daily Caller (which broke this whole story on its website earlier today) is continuing to pour through RNC disclosure documents. If so, it will likely find significant sums spent by the RNC on services rendered by DMI; not only do local politicos report that Brown liked to brag about his ties to this and other state-wide and national organizations and campaigns, but it would seem consistent with someone who would think he could get away with running through such a large expense.

He did get away with it. The party paid the expense, after all. It was only the press looking into it that exposed it.

It’s fairly crude for the party of family values to do this at any time, but it’s particularly distasteful spend this kind of money on strippers when the state of California is suffering from 12 and half percent unemployment and the whole state infrastructure is coming down around our ears. Not that they care, of course. But they usually pretend.

I suppose they can always say they were “stimulating the economy” — but “trickle down” doesn’t look so good in this particular context.

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Village Blowback

by digby

The Michigan Militia may be throwing the Christian Soldiers under the bus, but the mainstream conservatives are defending them. That’s interesting. More interesting is the fact that the spokesman for the Michigan Militia, appearing on Dylan Ratigan, says the Hutaree Militia members are more of an armed religious cult, which in his view is unconstitutional because the constitution requires no religious test. Ok. But that certainly has never been a key point to the Patriot Movement before. Indeed, they turned the Waco seige into a constitutional martyrdom operation and “honor” the Waco dead every April 19th (culminating in the Oklahoma City bombing on the same day.) If Koresh and the gang weren’t an “armed cult” I don’t know what is.

What’s fascinates me most about the resurgent rightwing fringe is the fact that it’s so confused. And I think that actually works for it. Their only true organizing rationale is a common sense of outrage that anyone would think their philosophy/ideology is not a majority position. And when you think about it, that’s not entirely irrational.

After all, this doesn’t just come from the FOX ghetto — the mainstream media have also been saying for years that this is a conservative country and that these salt-o-the-earth Red State Republicans are the Real Americans etc. If that’s what you’ve been told all your life, the idea that a liberal (ish) black president and a party of women and non-whites could legitimately win an election wouldn’t seem possible.

Blame the fatuous gasbags. They’re the ones who have sold these people that bill of goods all these years. They believe that their cramped, conservative intolerance was shared by the majority because that’s what the villagers believed — and told them so for the past several decades.

Update: Amanda makes a good point that relates to the above I think:

Any fool could see from the outset that the teabaggers are a bunch of Fox News-addled right wing nuts that are sore losers whose anger is exacerbated by racist resentments. But the mainstream media insists on covering it like it’s an exciting, fresh shift in the political landscape. I don’t think they’re carrying Republican water on this issue, though. I think the eagerness to run with this “teabaggers are fed-up independents” narrative is stoked by a desire for novelty above all other things. But it defies common sense. You can look with your own eyes and see that the teabaggers aren’t really a collection of spring chickens.

But according to the mainstream narrative it’s these elder chickens who are the heart and soul of the Real America, you see. So when they speak, they speak for The People and are therefore extremely newsworthy.

These folks, not so much:

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Fighting Words

by digby

As regards the fellow who threatened Eric Cantor, according to TPM he has a problem with lots of people:

According to the federal complaint against him, Norman Leboon of Philadelphia has admitted making some 2,000 videos that contained threats. A sampling of his “work” reveals rambling incoherent videos that mix pseudo-religious incantations with random warnings and threats. In one video he addresses President Obama, Vice President Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid by name and says, “Your punishment is coming, the swine, it will be severe, and you will beg for mercy to your god, it will be severe, you will know god’s swine, god has warned you.” (Some conservatives are already chortling over the fact that Leboon contributed to Obama’s 2008 campaign, though it’s not clear what that’s supposed to signify.)

It wouldn’t make any difference if he had given money to Sarah Palin. The right wingers were able to sell the idea that the Islamic fanatics who shoot women like dogs, hang gay people and want to take the world back to the 11th century are big allies of the feminazi, gay marrying liberals. This does not require any intellectual coherence. All they need to know is that this particular nutcase threatened a Republican lawmaker to prove that it’s the liberals who are threatening violence and the conservatives who are the victims. And this naturally leads to the conclusion that the conservatives must “fight fire with fire,” arm up and defend themselves.

It’s not an original rationale, god knows. It’s been used to justify wars since time began — even as recently as 2003. But considering that Newt Gingrich is going around saying that Obama is “the greatest threat to the American way of life since the 1850s,” it’s something worth thinking about.

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