Thousands of women protested when Michigan State Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield) was banned from speaking on the House Floor for a day after she used the word “vagina” during a debate over anti-abortion bill.
But her colleague, State Rep. Wayne Schmidt (R-Traverse City), said Republican leadership’s decision to silence Brown was no different than putting a child in timeout.
“It’s like giving a kid a timeout for a day,” he told Lansing radio host Patrick Shiels. “You know, hey, timeout, you wanna comment too far, you spoke your piece. We’re gonna let these other people have their dissenting comments, and then we’ll get back to business.”
Lisa McIntyre is a 45 year old mother of three, a lawyer and an elected official.
This is another form of gaslighting, which I’m sure most women have experienced at the hands of certain men. Nothing in my professional experience was ever as infuriating as this sort of thing, which I had to learn to suppress in order not to be seen as “difficult” or “hysterical.” But even today, years later, just reading that makes me feel sick inside — and very, very angry.
Treating women like children for speaking their minds is the most widely used tool in the misogynist handbook. Nothing short of physical abuse is more offensive.
I thought I was as cynical as it was possible to be about this sort of thing, but once again I learned that I was a naive old fool:
Advocates of unlimited secret political spending say it leads to a more informed electorate, but according to a new study, in reality it spreads more lies.
An examination of presidential-election advertising spending by the top four secret big-money political groups — all of them right-wing — found that 85 percent of their money over a recent six-month period went to ads that independent fact-checkers determined were in some way deceptive.
That’s spending against each other. Imagine what they have in store for their mortal enemies.
Wow. I don’t know what to say about this. We are about to be overwhelmed with lies on a level we’ve never experienced before. The media is fractured, but when it comes to campaign ads, which in many places is all that people ever hear about politics, it still washes over them in a big wave.
It looks like a whole lot of people are going to be a whole lot stupider before this campaign is over.
Via Andrew Sullivan. We’ve seen this story before, of course. It would be nice if we never had to see it again, don’t you think?
Thank goodness the wealthy job creators don’t have to put up with such indignity:
For anyone who has ever waited days or weeks to see the doctor, concierge medicine sounds appealing: For an additional fee, patients typically enjoy same-day appointments and 24-hour access, more face time with the doctor and extra preventative care. Doctors who offer concierge medicine say the practice frees them from the constraints imposed by insurance providers and allows them time to give patients the individualized attention they need. Skeptics argue that concierge medicine promotes a two-tiered system, improving health care for a few but worsening it for everyone else.
“It’s an attempt to formalize two-class medicine,” says Wharton professor of health care management Mark V. Pauly. “Those who can pay will get better treatment with a smile, and those who can’t will have to wait.”
They’re lives are just worth more, that’s all there is to it.
What the president should have done is follow the advice of the Princeton University economist and former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, namely lay out a specific “three-step rehab program for our nation’s fiscal policy.” Call it the Obama Plan; it should combine a near-term stimulus on job-creating infrastructure, a phase-in, as the economy improves, of “something that resembles the 10-year Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan — which would pay for the stimulus 15-20 times over” and a specific plan to “bend the health care cost-curve downward.” Obama has already offered the first; he still has not risen to the second and the third would be an easy extension of his own health care plan.
Obama needs a second look from independents who could determine this election. To attract that second look will require a credible, detailed recovery plan that gets voters to react in three ways: 1) “Now that sounds like it will address the problem, and both parties are going to feel the pain.” 2) “That plan seems fair: the rich pay more, but everyone pays something.” 3) “Wow, Obama did something hard and risky. He got out ahead of Congress and Romney. That’s leadership. I’m giving him a second look.”
I’d bet anything that if the president staked out such an Obama Plan, Buffett and a lot of other business leaders would endorse it. It would give the G.O.P. a real problem. After all, what would help Obama more right now: Repeating over and over the Buffett Rule gimmick or campaigning from now to Election Day by starting every stump speech saying: “Folks, I have an economic plan for America’s future that Warren Buffett and other serious business leaders endorse — and Mitt Romney doesn’t.”
Has Mr. Friedman actually looked at any polling to see how Americans feel about cuts to Medicare, Social Security and critical discretionary spending during a recession? Has he asked himself why the Simpson-Bowles commission was dead in the water from the moment it was first unveiled, leading some Obama enthusiasts to hypothesize that it was an eleven-dimensional chess move to discredit the idea at arm’s distance from the beginning? Has he considered the actual demographic in America that would support both tax increases on “job creators” and significant cuts to America’s most cherished safety net programs?
Furthermore, has Tom Friedman asked himself just how many voters there are out there who are open to the idea of supporting a Democratic President who endorses tax increases, and also gives a damn what “business leaders” have to say on anything?
The constituency for such a thing is mostly limited to wealthy pundits like Tom Friedman. But he’d be willing to “bet anything” on its success.
I wish, in an alternate universe, someone really were able to take Friedman’s bet and have him risk his entire life’s savings and whatever is left of his credibility on it. Then when he lost, even Tom Friedman would be able to personally feel the pain of the austerity he so devoutly desires.
There is a lot I want to say, but I want to make sure I say that there is a more elemental reason why meritocracy produces a corrupt ruling class and it is this:
Cheaters may almost never win but, given equal opportunity and a large enough competition, the winners are almost always cheaters.
Why?
Well, no one cheats because they think if that even if they get away with it they will be worse off. No, they cheat because if they get away with it they will be better off. Cheaters are taking a gamble.
Even if the system is pretty good and the odds are stacked against the cheaters, if there are enough players then some of the cheaters will get away with it, nonetheless.
When they do they will gain an advantage. Now, imagine that life is a series of such competitions played over and over again. Each time some people will cheat and some will get away with it. Each time some will gain an advantage.
If the competition is immense, say it encompasses a country of 300 Million or a global population of 7 Billion, then by the Law of Large numbers some cheaters will be lucky enough to get away with it every single time. This means every single round they gain an advantage and slip ahead of the pack.
After enough rounds the front of the pack is completely dominated by cheaters.
Sixty-four percent of likely voters surveyed after Obama’s June 15 announcement said they agreed with the policy, while 30 percent said they disagreed. Independents backed the decision by better than a two-to-one margin.
“At first I was really against it, but after sitting down and thinking about it, a lot of kids here are good kids,” Loretta Price, 65, a retiree and undecided independent voter from Ocala, Florida, said in a follow-up interview. “I think it was the right thing to do.”
It’s hard to believe sometimes, but when leaders lead on issues it often forces people to “sit down and think about it”. Certainly not the haters or the hardcore ideological opponents who will never vote for them anyway. But others, the people who aren’t quite sure, often find leadership to be a helpful guide.
It’s a simple formula that goes back a long way. I’m surprised more politicians don’t use it.
This is among the worst taser incidents I’ve ever chronicled:
They keep saying this woman is “mentally disturbed” but she sounds perfectly sane to me, both in the video of the incident and this interview. Obviously, I don’t have a full picture of her mental status, but from what I saw the diagnosis seems to be based upon the idea that she kept replying to the police tasering her and demanding that she “stop”, by screaming “you stop” and then accusing them of meting out punishment and enjoying hurting women. Under the circumstances, that hardly seems delusional.
But then police states often develop this definition of mental illness, don’t they? Anyone who questions the authorities is automatically suspect and must be insane. After all, in America, anyone who doesn’t automatically accede to a policeman’s orders or questions the officer’s right to do anything he chooses immediately subjects themselves to electro shock and possible electrocution. What sane person would assert their rights under those circumstances? Unfortunately many Americans don’t understand this because they’ve been taught all that silly stuff about freedom and the constitution in school.
Unsurprisingly, the officer who held her down by putting his hand over her face as she was on her back hogtied in the back of a squad car while they tasered her turned out to be a violent wife abuser. Two weeks later the police were called to his residence, but they didn’t taser him or even arrest him for some reason. I guess he was polite about it.
The Supreme Court turned down the police officer’s appeal in the 9th circuit decision, which makes me feel a tiny bit more confident that the Court will end up either banning or severely proscribing the use of tasers at some point. It’s hard for me to imagine any American constitutional scholar of any school ruling that it’s ok for police to repeatedly electro-shock people who are in restraints. But I’ve been wrong before.
And that, from the DCCC perspective is supposed to be the best of all possible worlds, a race in which it doesn’t matter who wins and they needn’t spend a penny or offer the least bit of support. Whoever wins will have a D after his name and that’s all that counts. We have been told over and over again that this is their only concern, that they don’t give a damn about ideology, it’s purely a numbers game.
So why in the hell are they endorsing Jared Huffman before it’s known whether or not he’s facing another Democrat? Barring total incompetence as an excuse (which I honestly doubt, they’re watching California like a hawk) the only possible reasons they would do this is because they are putting their thumbs on the scale to try to get Solomon to concede before all the votes have been counted or they are interfering in the vote counting by either talking on back channels or trying to influence Democratic election officials, which is shocking and illegal.
We know that if Solomon wins it will be an uphill battle for him to beat Huffman in the fall. And we also know that the powers that be would much prefer to have Huffman in the congress because they simply don’t believe that the left wing of the Democratic Party should have representation. We make their lives more difficult and embarrass them by complaining when they sell out the interests of working families or otherwise betray the values they purport to hold. They much prefer it if they can triangulate against us as outsiders than have to deal with people who are willing to leverage their power on the inside. I get that. They like Huffman, he’s more their kind of guy, a nice “San Francisco liberal”.
But what I don’t get is why they would care so much about that at this moment when they’ve got plutocrats spending billions on behalf of Republicans all over the country. Isn’t this just a little bit petty and parochial in light of what’s really going on? Why waste the energy?
In a way, it’s clarifying. Up until now they’ve only worked behind the scenes as individuals to ensure that Blue Dogs and New Dems are nominated in primaries. Now we see them interfering in a race in a deep blue district between a standard California liberal and a Progressive Movement leader. No matter what, they would always prefer the most conservative Democratic candidate available. Good to know.
In the wake of my posts about liberalism and human nature, many commentators from Greenwald to Stoller to lesser lights have accused me of being a warmongering imperialist and apologist for America’s wars of choice. But their misguided attacks completely miss the gist of the points I have been trying to make and grossly mischaracterize my views while demonstrating the critics’ own limited imagination of the capacity of human civilization.
I have been trying to explain for some time now that the world needs a new model of human organization if it is to survive. The current one is failing badly.
Consider just one pressing example: climate change. David Roberts at Grist puts it clearly in his TED Talk: if the nations of the world don’t get together to do something about climate change and fast, humanity is screwed.
The notion that an ever-increasing number of nation-states can develop nuclear weapons uninterrupted without engaging in full nuclear war at some point over the next century is similarly delusional. If climate change doesn’t decimate or destroy this species over the next two centuries, nuclear winter almost certainly will. And that’s just assuming the actions of nation-state actors, ignoring the very real possibility of non-state actors taking possession of these weapons.
The notion that the nuclear-armed nation-states of the world will simply adapt to peak oil without resorting to a third world war is improbable at best.
The notion that the world’s governments will somehow adapt with mutually effective treaties and internal domestic laws to deal with the increasing power of multinational corporations is delusional. In a world of global labor arbitrage wherein the top multinational corporations collude to buy off governments, the only competition that occurs is between governments themselves to sell themselves to the Fortune 100 in exchange for “investment.” That is why austerity is so powerful in Europe and the American government is so easily bought. Global corporate power is beyond the power of any individual nation-state to stop, even networked by (toothless) treaties.
I could mention many other examples ranging from environmental challenges to human rights issues. We have, in short, reached a point at which global challenges have breached the limitations of current political structures to control them.
Many on the left would like to pretend that these problems can be resolved through more diplomacy, or that the nation-states themselves can create a patchwork of domestic laws to adequately tackle these problems. They would like to pretend that people are basically good, ignoring millennia of constant warfare and greed throughout global human history amply demonstrating otherwise. They would like to believe that the nation-state is the pinnacle of human political organization, and that if nation-states would simply leave one another alone, setting up trade barriers and reducing military spending, the world would see lasting peace and prosperity. It’s not surprising, but it’s wishful thinking and not helpful in solving the real structural challenges the world faces.
Human history is in many ways the story of the power of civilization and complexification to mitigate the worst tendencies of human nature while expanding universal rights and unlocking the secrets of the universe. Reversals are commonplace, perhaps even cyclical in nature. But the overall trend is clear. Increasingly large and complex societies collaborate to solve increasingly large problems while creating better quality of life and guaranteeing increasing protections for their citizens through the process of government of consensus and consent, enforced by mutually-agreed-upon mechanisms. It’s how tribes grew into villages, how villages grew into city-states, city-states became kingdoms, and kingdoms became empires. It’s how empires fell of their own weight, how dark ages grew into feudalism, feudalism centralized into nation-states, and how nation-states gradually adopted democratic reforms through fits, starts and revolutions.
There is no reason to believe that that process of societal complexification has ended with our current global political structures. In fact, there is every reason to believe that without a metamorphosis of some kind toward greater complexity and universality, humanity itself stands at the precipice of its own destruction.
Within hours of the towers falling, I was on the phone with a friend in Finland who was weeping, “How could this happen?” I replied,”This is all the fault of the Bush administration. They weren’t paying attention.” For years, even confirmed liberals were saying I was hysterical, that no one could have predicted, blah, blah, blah.
Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks.
And thousands of Americans died. Then tens if not hundreds of thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis died from further Bush/Republican incompetence. And anyone who thinks that the fallout from Bush’s 9/11, Afghan, and Iraq fiascos is over has no idea what is going on in the hearts and minds of the relatives of the people Bush – and in their minds, all of America – killed. And because 9/11 is far from over, and because someone halfway competent needs to be in charge, this country cannot afford another modern Republican president. It’s too dangerous.
Romney – who is exactly the same as Bush but without Junior’s rapier wit, work ethic or keen, probing mind- must be defeated.
