Month: October 2012

An underreported truth behind the great abortion freakout

by David Atkins

I don’t have time today to expand on this with more evidence–I’ll write more on this subject after the election–but it’s important for voters to understand that the great right-wing freakout over abortion and contraception isn’t just about religion and control of women. Like so much else in American politics, it’s also very much about race and the fear of demographic winter.

Consider, for instance, the Freeper reaction to this story about the policy of free birth control and abortions in France. You might expect the reactions to be of a misogynistic and theocratic nature. But they aren’t. It’s almost an entirely race-based:

txrefugee writes:

The Muslims, who will be happy to spawn on the public dole, won’t have to wait so long to take over France.

paddles chimes in:

I suppose it’s never occurred to those arrogant jerks that they’re finally ridding the world of themselves.

Buckeye McFrog:

My Catholic beliefs prevent me from saying anything crass such as “fewer Frenchmen…..so what’s the problem?”

Lucian of Samasota

What a shame that western culture dies through suicide.
I’m sure sharia Europe will be a marvelous place.
At least the US is a few years behind, and I won’t live to see it here.

And mimaw:

I know what you mean, if I weren’t Catholic I’d be cheering them on to abort themselves out of existance.

Topping it off is the Talibangelical impulse to, well, agree with the Taliban. PGR88:

One can at least understand how the simplistic and blinkered Muslims might view all French women as whores.

Make no mistake. As much as the right-wing in this country is deeply misogynistic, it’s no accident that the barnstorm over abortion and Roe v. Wade occurred during and after the Civil Rights Movement. It’s not just a women’s issue parallel to the racial issue. It’s also a racial issue.

There are a whole lot of people terrified that if access to abortion isn’t repealed, the white race will die out. It feeds their animus and ties in with the rest of their political obsessions, which tend to be all about one thing when push comes to shove.

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The stupid is running strong today

by digby

It’s just … oh whatever.

BTW: For the uninitiated, Ben Shapiro was dubbed “The Virgin Ben” many years ago by some blogger wag (I’m thinking Tbogg.) Judging by this morning’s screed, I don’t think his status has changed. And he’s married.  But hey, being a professional virgin is obviously a good career move.

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Shocker: California may become civilized and abolish the death penalty

by digby

There isn’t much about this election that has me inspired. But this will make my decade if it passes:

Voters in California are now effectively split in their views on repealing the state’s death penalty, according to a new poll from USC/LA Times released Friday. Forty-five percent of the 1,440 likely voters polled oppose Proposition 34 (banning the death penalty), while 43 percent support repeal. The numbers are within the 2.58 percent margin of error, making it a statistical dead heat.

The survey represents a big shift from the previous USC/LA Times poll from mid-September, which showed 50 percent opposed to the new ban and only 39 percent in support of outlawing the death penalty. The PollTracker average now shows opposition for the repeal at 46 percent, with support at 43 percent.

Holy, holy, holy shit. I’m not going to get my hopes up, but if it even comes close I will have my faith in my fellow man restored a little bit.

The death penalty is barbaric, randomly applied, often racist form of state violence. Even if you believe in “an eye for an eye”, (which I don’t) you simply cannot believe that a legal system as crudely arbitrary as ours can possibly deliver such a final form of justice with any confidence. A sentence of life without parole will keep society safe while at least leaving open the possibility of rectifying a horrible injustice if the evidence comes to light. And there are plenty of examples of such injustices.

I have zero confidence that it will be banned nationally in my lifetime with the court being what it is and certainly many states (Texas in particular) seem to revel in their kill rates so I wouldn’t expect it to happen there. But California might actually do it. And that’s a start.

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Sununu and the dogwhistle strategy

by digby

It’s hard to know if Romney campaign chair John Sununu is a racist himself or if he’s just been given the racist dogwhistle assignment in the campaign. But either way, he carries the message with gusto, as he did on Piers Morgan’s show last night:

SUNUNU: You have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or that he’s got a slightly different reason for President Obama.

MORGAN: What reason would that be?

SUNUNU: Well, I think that when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being President of the United States — I applaud Colin for standing with him.

Think Progress compiled some of his earlier gems:

– Obama is foreign. Obama doesn’t understand the “American system” because “he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia, and, frankly, when he came to the U.S. he worked as a community organizer, which is a socialized structure.” [Fox News, 7/17/2012]

– Obama doesn’t know how to be an American. During a conference call, Sununu claimed, “The men and women all over America who have worked hard to build these businesses, their businesses, from the ground up is how our economy became the envy of the world. It is the American way. And I wish this president would learn how to be an American.” [Conference call, 7/17/2012]

– Obama is a lazy idiot. Sununu described Obama’s debate performance as “babbling,” “lazy,” and “disengaged,” and dismissed the possibility that he could do better in the future. “When you’re not that bright you can’t get better prepared.” [Fox News, 10/4/2012]

– Obama has no class, just wants to be cool. “That moment of using the B.S. word was kind of a self-defining moment for the president,” he told Sean Hannity. “No class, wants to be cool. Sacrifices the dignity of the presidency for appearing cool to a magazine that works for some of his base.” [Fox News, 10/25/2012]

I believe that this campaign needs to be carefully studied for it’s racist subtext. And what’s interesting about it is that it’s been far more strategic and frankly, obvious, than it was in the last campaign. If I had to guess, it’s because of the two candidates’ different principles on this issue. Say what you will about John McCain, but he resisted the temptation to pull this lever. (After all it had been played against him in 2000 when the Bush people ran a whisper campaign against him in South Carolina about his “black child.”)

Romney, on the other hand, has not flinched when his staunchest surrogates have been out there pushing these racist themes. It says everything about the man.

Update: McCain is still a complete jerk, however:

“Colin Powell, interestingly enough, said that Obama got us out of Iraq,” McCain told the National Review. “But it was Colin Powell, with his testimony before the U.N. Security Council, that got us into Iraq.”

Well, that was certainly a part of the reason. But I’d have to say that the Maverick made quite a contribution too:

During the run-up to the war, McCain argued vociferously in favor of an invasion, quoting the logic of Vice President Dick Cheney. “As Vice President Cheney has said of those who argue that containment and deterrence are working, the argument comes down to this: Yes, Saddam is as dangerous as we say he is,” McCain said in a saber-rattling speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Feb. 13, 2003. “We just need to let him get stronger before we do anything about it,” he added sarcastically.

In the period leading up to the war, McCain sounded, at times, less like a straight-talking maverick and more like the neoconservative former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. “It’s going to send the message throughout the Middle East that democracy can take hold in the Middle East,” McCain said about the war on Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” on Feb. 21, 2003. He seemed to think Iraq would be a cakewalk, predicting that the war “will be brief.”

He also sounded like Wolfowitz’s boss, Donald Rumsfeld, as far back as late 2002. Despite all his talk now about more troops, as the war drums built toward a crescendo, McCain argued that better technology meant fewer troops were going to be needed in Iraq. “Our technology, particularly air-to-ground technology, is vastly improved,” McCain told CNN’s Larry King on Dec. 9, 2002. “I don’t think you’re going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw, nor the length of the buildup, obviously, that we had back in 1991.” It was pure Rumsfeld.

But even back then, not everyone was so sure that the war would be brief or that Rumsfeld’s smaller force would be sufficient. On Feb. 25, 2003, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki famously warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that “several hundred thousand” soldiers would be needed to take and hold Iraq. Rumsfeld publicly disagreed with Shinseki’s estimate.

If McCain shared Shinseki’s position, he didn’t say so at the time. “I have no qualms about our strategic plans,” he told the Hartford Courant in a March 5 article, just before the invasion. “I thought we were very successful in Afghanistan.”

And while he was quiet about Shinseki, McCain shouted down some naysayers who proved to be much more prescient than he. On the cusp of the invasion, West Virginia Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd took to the Senate floor on March 19, 2003, to denounce the war. It was a speech that predicted the future debacle so accurately that it now seems that the senior senator from West Virginia had a crystal ball in his Senate desk. “We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many,” Byrd warned. “After the war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America’s image around the globe.”

McCain pounced, taking to the Senate floor to predict that “when the people of Iraq are liberated, we will again have written another chapter in the glorious history of the United States of America.”

Like I said, jerk.

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by tristero

Makes sense to me. After all, you can make a lot more money performing ballet than you can pursing an engineering career, so why shouldn’t you pay more for an arts education?

A state task force created by Gov. Rick Scott has released its preliminary recommendations on how to revamp higher education. The proposals end the one-size-fits-all way of funding universities. 

Highly distinguished universities, such as the University of Florida and Florida State University, could charge more than others. Tuition would be lower for students pursuing degrees most needed for Florida’s job market, including ones in science, technology, engineering and math, collectively known as the STEM fields.

The committee is recommending no tuition increases for them in the next three years. 

But to pay for that, students in fields such as psychology, political science, anthropology, and performing arts could pay more because they have fewer job prospects in the state.
“The purpose would not be to exterminate programs or keep students from pursuing them.

There will always be a need for them,” said Dale Brill, who chairs the task force. “But you better really want to do it, because you may have to pay more 

This is the logic of Puritans. It’s all of a piece with the attraction the MSM and many “serious” economists have for austerity programs to the bizarre movement that would force a woman to give birth to her rapist’s child,

It is a worldview that privileges a dreary bleakness over joy.

Women’s sexual empowerment is a terrifying thing for some people

by David Atkins

This cute and harmless short video by Lena Dunham has the conservative establishment in an apoplexy of terror:

For people with a healthy view of sexuality, it’s an interesting and charming metaphor designed to turn out the youth vote. Nothing too remarkable.

But then, wingers aren’t exactly healthy in the sexuality department. Check Erick Erickson’s twitter feed:

What’s worse than the Obama as is that some people really like it. We do live in a fallen, depraved world destined for the fire.

and:

Romans 1 teaches that when God turns a people loose the first sins they embrace are the sexual lusts of the flesh.

Of course, it’s not just conservative men. There’s always Monica Crowley:

1 of the many sick things about this degrading Lena Dunham “lose your virginity to Barack” ad? The Left thinks it’s “empowering” to women.

These are some very sick people, and they cannot be allowed to run this country.

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Your moment of zen

by digby

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War without end, Amen?

by digby

This is a great piece by Walter Shapiro on the drone war — and the absence of any debate in either political party.

I urge you to rad the whole thing, I’ll pick it up after he discusses Robert Gibbs’ nauseating comments in the spin room the other night:

Drone strikes are not, as Gibbs clearly understood, a major voting issue in this campaign. And for that sliver of the electorate concerned about this airborne assassination program, November 6 offers scant choice, unless you want to cast a minor-party protest vote. Mitt Romney — whose overall tone in this campaign has been more hawkish than Obama’s — unhesitatingly embraced the president’s drone policy during Monday night’s final debate.

The Washington Post reported this week that the Obama administration is developing a “disposition matrix” for its next-generation terrorist assassination program. (The adjective Orwellian is over-used, but it is undeniably apt for a kill list being euphemistically reworked as a “disposition matrix”).

During the Vietnam War, George Aiken, a Republican senator from Vermont, suggested that America should declare victory and come home. Eleven years after the Sept. 11 attacks and 18 months after the death of Osama bin Laden, it is time to debate how long America is justified in using drone attacks against the remnants of al-Qaida and other groups of loosely affiliated terrorists.

Is this war without end, amen? Does the bureaucratic momentum of the drone program mean that it will continue for decades? Is there another kind of disposition matrix that will tell us when the costs of the drone program (from terrorist recruiting to collateral damage) outweigh its benefits?

Obviously, America should not relax its vigilance against terrorist threats. (Of course, heavy-handed airport security is another story). But drone strikes are a form of military convenience – no boots on the ground and no American casualties (aside from the stray teenager in Yemen). And at a certain point, it becomes difficult to justify both practically and morally such extraordinary measures based on a horrible morning in 2001.

Indeed it is. And if more respected journalists like Shapiro would write with such clarity on this issue we might even have a real discussion.

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The consequences for Mourdock start coming

by David Atkins

The DSCC is out with a new ad:

But that’s OK. Most of the GOP has already forgiven him and still supports him. And why shouldn’t they? As Markos points at Daily Kos, it’s what they believe:

Not an original idea—but there’s a reason people like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock are saying the things they are saying. It’s because they believe them. It’s as if you said, “I love my mother,” and the whole country exploded in outrage. You’d be rightfully puzzled. You’d think, “why, obviously I love my mother, why the freakout?” at the same time people were demanding that you apologize. Why would you apologize for loving your mother?

And that’s where the modern GOP finds itself—completely out of the American mainstream on issue after issue. Yet they live in their safe little bubbles with Fox News and wingnut radio and internet telling them the things they want to hear without the messiness of reality getting in the way.

So then they say crazy things about rape, or claim that President Barack Obama never called the Benghazi attacks an act of terror, or that it’s the Democrats who are trying to suppress the vote, or that only sluts want birth control, they are genuinely shocked when reality smacks them hard upside the head.

This is the same crowd that spent the entire primary season arguing that Republicans needed to move right in order to defeat Obama, forcing Mitt Romney into his “severe conservative” caricature. Yet in the general, it wasn’t until Romney moved far to his left that he regained some modicum of competitiveness. The “severe conservative” version of Romney was going nowhere fast. Some conservative country, huh?

Of course it isn’t. But as long as the Romneys of the world can get by with the support of Talibangelicals while pretending to be moderates, why should they change their tune?

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Did you know that Elizabeth Warren is a hermit who lives in her mother’s basement?

by digby

Alex Pareene quotes some very important Politico writer I’ve never heard of doing some very important news analysis on CBS. I’m guessing she’s rushing Village U’s Alpha Sigma Sigma Sorority:

As the use of Twitter has exploded in the 2012 campaign, coupled with more expansive use of Facebook and other social networks, the rumble of extreme partisans propagating strange conspiracy theories is getting louder.

Generally, it’s not the campaigns or their surrogates pushing the most drastic of apocalyptic scenarios. And often one doesn’t have to venture into the bowels of the Internet to find such predictions on low-traffic blogs being run by hermits still living in their mother’s basement.

That hilarity never gets old does it?

Were you wondering what the “conspiracy theories” we hermits still living in our mothers basement are cranking out? Pareene writes:

The conservative “conspiracy theories” are: 1) That (black) Obama supporters will riot nationwide if he loses and that Obama will then declare martial law and refuse to leave office. 2) That Obama is secretly planning to seize all American guns. 3) That Obama will “hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N.”

The liberal “conspiracy theories” are: 1) That the Republican are attempting voter suppression of black citizens on a massive scale. 2) That if Republicans win they will … weaken reproductive rights for women.

I’m sure you will agree that those things are equivalently batshit crazy.

She name checks all the looney tunes bloggers living in their mommy’s basement.

On the right we have: Conservative Daily, and the obscure Western Journalism center along with Drudge. Plus some unknown judge from Lubbock Texas and Wayne LaPierre.

The liberal cheeto-eating basement dwellers? Elizabeth Warren, Eric Holder, Debbie Wasserman Shultz and a Daily Kos diarist.

Village journalism at its finest.

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