Month: April 2012

Ms Overton’s right to choose

by digby

This is an interesting strategy:

As states across the country are passing laws to restrict access to abortion, California lawmakers are considering a significant expansion of who would be able to perform the procedure in the state.

Under a bill that passed its first committee hearing Tuesday, nurse practitioners, nurse midwives and physician assistants would be able to perform what is known as an “aspiration” abortion, which is the most common abortion procedure and takes place in the first trimester of a pregnancy.

The current form of the bill, SB1338 by Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, would allow for only 41 people in the state, in addition to doctors, who have been through a pilot study on the issue to perform aspiration abortions, but backers say they expect that number to be significantly expanded as the proposal moves forward.

Also on Tuesday, an Assembly committee passed a separate bill that would expand access to birth control by allowing registered nurses to dispense the medication.

“These bills are stark contrasts to what is happening nationally and in too many states across the country,” said Kathy Kneer, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, which is backing both measures…

“I’m surprised that supporters of abortion would think this is a good move. They are lessening the medical requirements for someone who can do an abortion,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee. “That does nothing to promote safety or to protect women’s health,”

Tobias said the bill, compared with what other states are doing, shows “California is out of step with the rest of the country.”

The last I heard all this was supposed to be left “up to the states” so I don’t think the zealots are in a position to complain.

And for all its “extremism” it’s really just expanding access to a guaranteed constitutional right. Studies have shown that these medical professionals are perfectly capable of dispensing birth control and performing early abortions. The more people who are qualified and licensed to dispense birth control and perform first trimester abortions, the less likely it is that the forced childbirth zealots are able to reduce their availablility. But that won’t stop thezealots from saying otherwise. After all, these are people who lie about everything in service to their “cause.”

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An epic scam across decades

by digby

Today’s important factoid, from Dean Baker:

In an article on the release of the 2012 Social Security trustees report the Washington Post told readers that:

“Social Security’s bleak outlook is primarily driven by the ever-larger numbers of people in the baby boom generation entering retirement.”

Actually the fact that baby boomers would enter retirement is not news. Back in 1983, the Greenspan Commission knew that the baby boomers would retire, yet they still projected that the program would be able to pay all promised benefits into the 2050s.

The main reason that the program’s finances have deteriorated relative to the projected path is that wage growth has not kept pace with the path projected. This is in part due to the fact that productivity growth slowed in the 80s, before accelerating again in the mid-90s and in part due to the fact that much more wage income now goes to people earning above the taxable cap.

In 1983 only 10 percent of wage income fell above the cap and escaped taxation. Now more than 18 percent of wage income is above the cap.

This demographic “time bomb” the financial industry pushes is industry propaganda. We’ve known about the demographics for decades and prepared for it. The problem is our stagnant economy and a perfidious 1%, not the “math problem” they say it is.

Someone reminded me of this post by Kevin Drum from a couple of years ago that explains the fundamental issue:

In 1983, when we last reformed Social Security, we made an implicit deal between two groups of American taxpayers. Call them Groups A and B. For about 30 years, Group A would pay higher taxes than necessary, thus allowing Group B to reduce their tax rates. Then, for about 30 years after that, Group A would pay lower taxes than necessary and Group B would make up for this with higher tax rates.

This might have been a squirrelly deal to make. But it doesn’t matter. It’s the deal we made. And it’s obviously unfair to change it halfway through.

So who is Group A? It’s people who pay Social Security payroll taxes, which mostly means working and middle class taxpayers. And who is Group B? It’s people who pay federal income taxes, which mostly means the well-off and the rich. For nearly 30 years, Group A has been overpaying payroll taxes, and that’s allowed the government to lower income tax rates. The implicit promise of the 1983 deal is that sometime in the next few years, this is going to flip. Group A will begin underpaying payroll taxes, and the rich, who have reaped the benefits of their overpayment for 30 years, will make good on their half of the deal by paying higher income tax rates to make up the difference.

The physical embodiment of this deal is the Social Security trust fund. Group A overpaid and built up a pile of bonds in the trust fund. Those bonds are a promise by Group B to repay the money. That promise is going to start coming due in a few years, and it’s hardly surprising that Group B isn’t as excited about the deal now as it was in 1983. It’s never as much fun paying off a loan as it is to spend the money in the first place.

But pay it off they must. The rich have been getting a loan from the middle class for decades, and the loan papers are the Social Security trust fund bonds that George W. Bush is admiring in the photograph above. Anybody who claims the trust fund is a myth is basically saying it’s OK for the rich to renege on that loan.

But surely no one would ever say such a thing. Right?

As Gaius Publius from Americablog (with whom I had the pleasure of spending time with this past week-end) told me: “they just don’t want to pay the money back.”

It’s not much more complicated than that. Between an unwillingness to properly raise the cap to keep up with the change in wage distribution and wealthy bondholders telling the rest of us “thanks very much for the nice loan but they won’t be paying it back,” we have a projected social security shortfall in a couple of decades right in elder years of the baby boom — which is allowing these greedheads to argue for reducing the program even more. Sa-weeet.

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A Nation in Chaos

by digby

Not that this could in any way possibly be relevant to the issue, but still, it’s interesting:

“There has been a decrease in apprehensions at the border, which points to the fact that fewer people are crossing the border,” says Pew’s Ms. Cohn.

In 2005, more than 1 million Mexicans were taken into custody trying to cross the US border. By 2011, that number decreased by more than 70 percent.

Meanwhile, deportations of illegal Mexican immigrants have jumped sharply. In 2010, nearly 400,000 unauthorized immigrants were deported – 73 percent of them Mexicans.

In fact, this hasn’t been a real problem for quite some time:

One million Mexicans said they returned from the US between 2005 and 2010, according to a new dem-ographic study of Mexican census data. That’s three times the number who said they’d returned in the previous five-year period.

And they aren’t just home for a visit: One prominent sociologist in the US has counted “net zero” migration for the first time since the 1960s.

One might ask why so many of these states have suddenly decided to enact these new draconian laws since the 2010 takeover by the Tea Partiers, but that would be very rude. So, I’ll just re-read this instead.

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Randian Catholicism

by digby

Via Think Progress

VOTER: Do you think that health care is a right or a privilege?

KELLY: My belief system is this. The health care for anybody but especially for our nation. The highest quality and lowest cost can only be delivered without the government. What I believe is that all things we drive, we do, health care, anything, is a privilege to some extent. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, those are inalienable rights endowed by your creator. If you’re claiming a right, if you’re going to say anything’s a right, if you’re going to say you have a right to a cell phone, then who has the responsibility to pay for it? That’s what I believe.

VOTER: So you’d put health care as a privilege then?

KELLY: Absolutely, absolutely. I believe that all things we have are. But they’re privileges you earn.

Jefferson was only talking about fetuses, you see. Our Creator endows us with an inalienable right to life but once born we must earn the privilege of keeping it.

That’s Paul Ryan’s Randian Catholicism in a nutshell.

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Family values

by David Atkins

Yesterday I wrote about the centrality of patriarchy disguised as “family values” to the conservative project of maintaining private power, be it in Rick Santorum’s America or in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia. I argued that in a bizarre but very real sense, keeping women oppressed was seen as central to the maintenance of conservative political and economic power. Case in point: the disturbingly American psychotic sexual politics of Iran under the Ayatollahs:

Khamenei contends that the health of the family unit is integral to the Islamic Republic’s well-being and is undermined by female beauty. Although to some this worldview is fundamentally misogynistic, Khamenei sees men, not women, as untrustworthy and incapable of resisting temptation:

In Islam, women have been prohibited from showing off their beauty in order to attract men or cause fitna [upheaval or sedition]. Showing off one’s physical attraction to men is a kind of fitna … [for] if this love for beauty and members of the opposite sex is found somewhere other than the framework of the family, the stability of the family will be undermined.

Interestingly, the word Khamenei employs against the potential unveiling of women — fitna — is the same word used to describe the opposition Green Movement that took to the streets in the summer of 2009 to protest President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s contested reelection. In other words, women’s hair is itself seen as seditious and counterrevolutionary. Even so-called liberal politicians in the Islamic Republic have long fixated on this issue. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran’s first post-revolutionary president, who has spent the past three decades exiled in France, reportedly once asserted that women’s hair has been scientifically proven to emit sexually enticing rays.

This sort of sexual “family values” politics designed to quash female empowerment leads not surprisingly to rampant, culture-wide hypocrisy:

Google Trends, which monitors searches from around the world, shows that of the seven countries that most frequently search the word “sex” on Google, five are Muslim and one (India) has a large Muslim minority. (The word “sexy” is even more popular among Arabs.) Google Insights, another trend spotter, shows that the most rapidly rising search term for Iranians so far in 2012 has been “Golshifteh Farahani,” a popular exiled actress who in January posed topless for the French magazine Madame Figaro.

That’s reminiscent of the fact that the leading porn consumers in the United States, per capita, are red states with hyper-religious Utah and hyper-conservative Alaska leading the pack.

I’ll close with Ayatollah Khamenei:

More than Iran’s enemies need artillery, guns, and so forth, they need to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption.… I recently read in the news that a senior official in an important American political center said: “Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts.” He is right. If they arouse sexual desires in any given country, if they spread unrestrained mixing of men and women, and if they lead youth to behavior to which they are naturally inclined by instincts, there will no longer be any need for artillery and guns against that nation.

Substitute “America” for “Iran” and “Satan” for “America,” and it sounds like something Rick Santorum might have said. Misogyny is central to the conservative social order. Take it away, and conservatism itself crumbles underfoot. The Ayatollahs know it. The Taliban know it. Rick Santorum knows it. Rush Limbaugh knows it.

And that’s why, no matter how counterproductive it is for Republicans, they can’t resist waging the war on women. It’s of existential importance to them.

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Pierce vs Douthat

by digby

Yet another in the very long list of things I didn’t know: Charlie Pierce is a Christian scholar. And, as might be expected, he takes Ross Douthat’s new book downtown. Hard:

[N]owhere does Douthat so clearly punch above his weight class as when he decides to correct the damage he sees as having been done by the historical Jesus movement, the work of Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman and, ultimately, Dan Brown’s novels. Even speaking through Mark Lilla, it takes no little chutzpah for a New York Times op-ed golden child to imply that someone of Pagels’s obvious accomplishments is a “half-educated evangelical guru.” Simply put, Elaine Pagels has forgotten more about the events surrounding the founding of Christianity, including the spectacular multiplicity of sects that exploded in the deserts of the Middle East at the same time, than Ross Douthat will ever know, and to lump her work in with the popular fiction of The Da Vinci Code is to attempt to blame Galileo for Lost in Space. First, he offers a threadbare explanation for why Pagels is wrong in her assessment of the early Gnostic texts. (His argument: St. Paul says they’re wrong.) He describes the eventual calcification of the sprawling Jesus movement into the Nicene Creed as “an intellectual effort that spanned generations” without even taking into account the political and imperial imperatives that drove the process of defining Christian doctrine in such a way as to not disturb the shaky remnants of the Roman empire. The First Council of Nicaea, after all, was called by the Emperor Constantine, not by the bishops of the Church. Constantine — whose adoption of the Christianity that Douthat so celebrates would later be condemned by James Madison as the worst thing that ever happened to both religion and government — demanded religious peace. The council did its damndest to give it to him. The Holy Spirit works in mysterious ways, but Constantine was a doozy. Douthat is perfectly willing to agree that early Christianity was a series of boisterous theological arguments as long as you’re willing to believe that he and St. Paul won them all.

This is about a subject about which I know almost nothing. But when Charlie Pierce writes about it, I want to know more. It’s a wonderful piece for all sorts of reasons and you should read the whole thing.

As I said, this is not my field, but I do know this: anyone who thinks that Catholics had it better in the past in America are drinking communion wine spiked with acid. I just ain’t so.

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Jesuit snap

by digby

Georgetown calls out the Great Randian Hope:

Dear Rep. Paul Ryan,

Welcome to Georgetown University. We appreciate your willingness to talk about how Catholic social teaching can help inform effective policy in dealing with the urgent challenges facing our country. As members of an academic community at a Catholic university, we see your visit on April 26 for the Whittington Lecture as an opportunity to discuss Catholic social teaching and its role in public policy.

However, we would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few. As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has wisely noted in several letters to Congress – “a just framework for future budgets cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons.” Catholic bishops recently wrote that “the House-passed budget resolution fails to meet these moral criteria.”

In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.

Cuts to anti-hunger programs have devastating consequences. Last year, one in six Americans lived below the official poverty level and over 46 million Americans – almost half of them children – used food stamps for basic nutrition. We also know how cuts in Pell Grants will make it difficult for low-income students to pursue their educations at colleges across the nation, including Georgetown. At a time when charities are strained to the breaking point and local governments have a hard time paying for essential services, the federal government must not walk away from the most vulnerable.

While you often appeal to Catholic teaching on “subsidiarity” as a rationale for gutting government programs, you are profoundly misreading Church teaching. Subsidiarity is not a free pass to dismantle government programs and abandon the poor to their own devices. This often misused Catholic principle cuts both ways. It calls for solutions to be enacted as close to the level of local communities as possible. But it also demands that higher levels of government provide help — “subsidium”– when communities and local governments face problems beyond their means to address such as economic crises, high unemployment, endemic poverty and hunger. According to Pope Benedict XVI: “Subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa.”

Along with this letter, we have included a copy of the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, commissioned by John Paul II, to help deepen your understanding of Catholic social teaching.

Paul Ryan responded by saying this:

“Chairman Ryan remains grateful for Georgetown’s invitation to advance a thoughtful dialogue this week on his efforts to avert a looming debt crisis that would hurt the poor the first and the worst. Ryan looks forward to affirming our shared commitment to a preferential option for the poor, which of course does not mean a preferential option for bigger government.”

No word on what to do with the poor (also known as moochers, looters and parasites) but I’m sure he has some ideas.

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The greatest revolution

by David Atkins

Mona Eltahawy’s heartrending piece in Foreign Policy on misogyny in the Middle East is just another reminder of something that has become increasingly obvious: while racial and religious tyranny are standard practice in conservative societies, the deepest core of the conservative impulse lies in misogyny.

As Corey Robin often points out, conservatism is at its core about the maintenance of private power. Government is hated by conservatives when it interferes with the free exercise of private power even at the expense of others; it is beloved by conservatives when it helps private power extend its control and influence.

There is nothing more central to the conservative concept of private power than the traditional family. In the West, “traditional” family has been redefined to “nuclear family,” but make no mistake: “traditional” family in the true sense of the word means the most patriarchal form possible, including polygyny and child marriage. That’s why the most conservative fundamentalist movements, wherever they may be found, always revert back to this form. When conservatives talk in such glowing terms about “traditional family,” they do so because the family unit constitutes the most basic private unit. And they know exactly who, in their mind, belongs in charge of that unit: men.

Women’s rights constitutes an assault on their control not only of women’s bodies, but of the most basic unit of private power. To assault that is in a very real sense to assault the entire conservative enterprise. If the Enlightenment and state interference to protect women’s rights can intervene in even this most sacred of units, then no piece of private power infrastructure is safe. If the man can be torn down as king of his castle–a private power arrangement that has been in place for millennia–how much less safe are investment bankers at the top of their own very recent artificial dungheap?

The right to misogyny, then, must be defended at all costs: the more conservative the society, the stronger the misogyny. And the stronger the conservative impulse, the violently will the misogynistic impulse be defended.

Whether in Santorum’s America or Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, this impulse is the same. It’s the last, greatest stand of conservative power. And it’s here that the greatest revolution against conservatism must be undertaken. It’s not an overstatement to suggest that the powerful psychological elements of conservatism will have been broken when the undertrodden and underrepresented 50% of the population finally achieves equal rights and standing throughout the world.

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Where’s my conscience exception?

by digby

I guess that’s just fine. But asking religiously affiliated employers to offer contraception coverage is a violation of the 1st Amendment. Interesting how that works.

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Fair’n Balanced

by digby

Colbert explains Fox News subtext:

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

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