Month: September 2011

More Republican Morality

by digby

Following on the hopeless morality of the fellow I linked below, witness Presidential candidate Ron Paul on the plight of the uninsured:

At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, Paul took questions from reporters on Snyder, whose story surfaced in the press after Paul said in the last Republican debate that the government should not intervene even to save a comatose 30 year old who did not have insurance. As Gawker noted, Snyder died in June 2008 without health insurance, leaving behind $400,000 in bills. His friends and family set up a fund to raise money to pay off the debt. It’s not clear how much money they were able to raise: a site set up by Ron Paul aide Justine Lam to track the medical fund stopped updating in 2008 with only $34,870 in donations.

“Well first off, people do get care, even under this terrible situation we have in medicine today,” Paul told reporters when asked about his former aide. “Kent, my campaign manager, wasn’t denied any care at all.”

According to Snyder’s friends, he was unable to obtain affordable health insurance — rendering moot Paul’s advice at the debate to find coverage in advance — because of a preexisting condition. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies will no longer be able to reject customers on these grounds starting in 2013. I asked Paul whether Snyder’s inability to secure health insurance, even if he wanted it, put him in an impossible situation without government support. He suggested that states and counties could take action to help the sick, but put the emphasis on charity.

“Why do we suddenly lose confidence, that everyone is going to be thrown out into the street?” he said. “It just doesn’t happen and usually there are people that will help. But this idea you throw away the principles of liberty because you have a case or two where you go ‘Oh, I’m nervous about it’ – it just doesn’t justify doing your own thing.”

Of course. Just because a few people fall through the cracks doesn’t mean that we should just give up our freedom to be denied health insurance.

And why should we have it anyway? According to Paul, we will always be cared for anyway and somebody else will always pick up the tab. That’s called personal responsibility. Or liberty. Or something.

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Blackstone’s dumb ratio

by digby

Blackstone’s ratio:”better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”

If you are looking for an insight into how right wingers justify the death penalty, look no further than this:

In truth, even if an innocent man were executed, it wouldn’t change anything. We already have a system that’s slanted in favor of the defendants in criminal trials and heavily against the death penalty. In fact, if anything, our justice system probably leans too far in favor of the criminal and too heavily against getting justice for the victims. See Casey Anthony and OJ Simpson for evidence of that. Since that’s the case, the only way to make sure an innocent man is NEVER unjustly jailed would be to refuse to put anyone in prison. If you recognize that we do need to punish criminals for their crimes, that the system is already weighted in favor of the criminal, and that it’s impossible to never make a mistake, then you have to accept the idea that despite our best efforts, mistakes are going to happen.

See? They are all guilty and even if a few of them aren’t we’d have to stop putting anyone in prison at all if we didn’t kill a few innocent people along the way. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!

Boy that musty old Blackstone didn’t have a clue, did he?

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Our most vulnerable citizens

by digby

Jon Stewart on the poor millionaires:

Hi, I’m Jon Stewart. Will you be an angel for a helpless mutlimillionaire? Every day, James Merriweather Phillips — “Meester James” to his domestic staff — and thousands more like him live in fear that the top marginal tax rate will be raised from its 35 percent to 39.6 percent. But you can help. For just most of what you earn in a year, you can help James make up that difference. Call now … because he wants the money now.”

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A Moral Nation
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

You can tell a lot about people by the company they keep.

Top death penalty nations, in order of executions carried out in 2010:

1. China
2. Iran
3. North Korea
4. Yemen
5. USA
6. Saudi Arabia
7. Libya
8. Syria
9. Bangladesh
10. Somalia

Countries with the highest income inequality (out of 136 countries listed; lower rank = more unequal):

90. Nicaragua
91. Guyana
92. Nigeria
93. Malaysia
94. Iran
95. Cote d’Ivoire
96. Cameroon
97. United States
98. Jamaica
99. Uganda
100. Philippines

Of course, Americans are deeply religious:

Each of the most religious countries is relatively poor, with a per-capita GDP below $5,000. This reflects the strong relationship between a country’s socioeconomic status and the religiosity of its residents…

The United States is one of the rich countries that bucks the trend. About two-thirds of Americans — 65% — say religion is important in their daily lives. Among high-income countries, only Italians, Greeks, Singaporeans, and residents of the oil-rich Persian Gulf states are more likely to say religion is important.

Most high-income countries are further down the religiosity spectrum. In 10 countries, no more than 34% of residents say religion is an important part of their daily lives. Six of those are developed countries in Europe and Asia with per-capita incomes greater than $25,000.

Moral exceptionalism at its finest. Makes me proud to be an American.

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The Tea Party Alliance

by digby

The House Tea Partiers just helped the Democrats vote down the continuing resolution even though Cantor and the boys got all kinds of hideous cuts in exchange for emergency disaster relief. This isn’t about “the budget” to these guys, they just hate anything that helps people in need for any reason.

Now House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and his leadership team must decide whether to acquiesce to the Democrats, or to cut discretionary spending below the level provided for in this bill. Neither option is good from Boehner’s perspective. Appeasing Democrats will cost him support in his caucus, further weakening his standing in his party. But bowing to his own members by cutting spending even further would violate an agreement he struck with Democrats during the debt limit fight, and poison an already sour relationship between leaders of both parties.

GOP leadership is now debating whether to seek a new, less controversial offset, to scrap the idea of offsetting altogether, or to disentangle the disaster aid from the government funding bill altogether — to essentially admit that yoking the two together in the first place was an error. Democrats say it’s plausible there’s another, hypothetical offset they can live with — the only bright line they’re drawing now is that further cuts to the budget, below the level Republicans agreed to in July, are unacceptable.

I wish I believed that Boehner would choose not to violate the debt limit agreement rather than give in to his loonies, but I don’t think that’s a safe bet. Still, it’s a good day for the American people when once more those loonies wouldn’t take yes for an answer. They are very useful at times.

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Spreading the Free Market Around
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Rick Santorum has a well-known Google problem. Offended by little Rick’s signature homophobia, sex columnist Dan Savage used internet activism to essentially redefine Santorum as, well, a less-than-sanitary potential byproduct of gay sex that now comes up as the top link on when searching for Rick Santorum on Google.

Little Rick contacted Google about fixing the problem, which in itself just made the problem worse through increased press coverage. For its own part, Google has responded:

A Google spokesperson responded to Santorum by advising that users who want “content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly.”

“Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the web. Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly,” the spokesperson said. “Once the webmaster takes the page down from the web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process.”

The spokesperson said that Google does not “remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”

I don’t know what Rick is complaining about. A private individual used individual initiative to redefine a word in the American lexicon. A very successful private company (dare I say “job creator?”) with a very successful search engine formula has reflected that definition in its listings. It would be bad for Google’s business to make an exception for Little Rick. If Mr. Santorum doesn’t like how a private company orders its search listings, perhaps he can pull himself up by his bootstraps and build a web activist army to defeat Dan Savage’s website by generating more links to his own campaign page. It’s the American Way!

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Ritualized Injustice

by digby

I haven’t written about the Troy Davis execution but I’ve been reading about it. And it’s heartbreaking:

Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday for the 1989 killing of a police officer in Savannah, Ga. The Georgia pardon and parole board’s refusal to grant him clemency is appalling in light of developments after his conviction: reports about police misconduct, the recantation of testimony by a string of eyewitnesses and reports from other witnesses that another person had confessed to the crime.

This case has attracted worldwide attention, but it is, in essence, no different from other capital cases. Across the country, the legal process for the death penalty has shown itself to be discriminatory, unjust and incapable of being fixed. Just last week, the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Duane Buck, an African-American, hours before he was to die in Texas because a psychologist testified during his sentencing that Mr. Buck’s race increased the chances of future dangerousness. Case after case adds to the many reasons why the death penalty must be abolished.

The grievous errors in the Davis case were numerous, and many arose out of eyewitness identification. The Savannah police contaminated the memories of four witnesses by re-enacting the crime with them present so that their individual perceptions were turned into a group one. The police showed some of the witnesses Mr. Davis’s photograph even before the lineup. His lineup picture was set apart by a different background. The lineup was also administered by a police officer involved in the investigation, increasing the potential for influencing the witnesses. … Studies of the hundreds of felony cases overturned because of DNA evidence have found that misidentifications accounted for between 75 percent and 85 percent of the wrongful convictions. The Davis case offers egregious examples of this kind of error.

Anyone who had read this blog for any length of time knows that I have an aversion to the death penalty across the board. It’s cold blooded, premeditated, ritualized killing that does nothing but offer a faux catharsis and illusion of safety and justice. But nothing is more horrifying to me than the state executing an innocent man.

This is not the first time that the US is executing an innocent man, although to hear conservatives tell it, this is the one the thing the government does absolutely perfectly. (I’ve also heard people say it doesn’t matter if we execute some innocent people — price of freedom and all that. Those people suffer from a lack of empathy so strong that it borders on sociopathy. And there are a lot of them.)Our multi-tiered, crude system of law, the endemic racism, the imperfection of human beings and America’s death culture guarantee that this ultimate state power is dispensed unjustly. Today, it looks like we are going to watch it happen before our eyes.

According to Greg Mitchell, we’re also going to see the white supremacist who dragged James Byrd to his death in Texas in 1998 executed today. I think I’m supposed to be conflicted here and see this as some kind of moral dilemma, but I don’t. This fellow has admitted to his crime and he’s a putrid piece of human garbage. But killing him isn’t justice either. It’s just revenge and revenge just perpetuates more violence. Obviously, he’s a dangerous killer and should be kept away from other humans for the rest of his life. But kill him? It only validates a system that’s unjustifiable.

For a very slight bit of hope in the Davis case, read this at emptywheel, via Gaius Publius. It seems that even the most conservative “originalists” are having some second thoughts about killing innocent people.

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Chart ‘O the Day

by digby

From Think Progress:

They can steal a lot of elections with that money.

If you’re curious about why their wealth has grown so much so fast, it’s apparently because of speculation on the energy markets. Lot’s and lots of job creation right there.

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Bozos, Bangles and Beads

by digby

I’ve got some American exceptionalism for you right here:

A Pennsylvania school district has decided not to stage a Tony Award-winning musical about a Muslim street poet after community members complained about the timing so soon after the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Richland School District in Johnstown had planned to stage “Kismet” in February, but Superintendent Thomas Fleming said Tuesday that it was scrapped to avoid controversy.

“We’re not saying there’s anything bad about the musical. We may potentially produce it in the future,” Fleming told The Associated Press. The Tribune-Democrat of Johnstown first reported on the district’s decision.

Music director Scott Miller said the district, not far from where hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, last performed “Kismet” in 1983 — to sold-out audiences.

The play has no inappropriate content, Miller said, but he and other members of the performing arts committee decided to switch to “Oklahoma!” after hearing complaints.

“Kismet” is an Aladdin-style love story set in Baghdad more than 1,000 years ago. It won the Tony for best musical in 1954, and a Hollywood movie was made the next year.

We are exceptionally stupid and we’re getting stupider every day. This is a school, after all.

What I want to know is why we haven’t banned “I Dream of Jeanie”? It’s not just disrespectful to the victims of 9/11, it’s disrespectful to our military as well.

And pita bread also, too.

h/t to bb

Colbert, Rocket Scientist

by digby

Stephen explains why we can’t tax the job creators:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

If I thought that conservatives were capable of understanding satire, I’d recommend this for them. But I’m quite sure they’d take it seriously.

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