Month: July 2014

Isn’t there any religion that objects to Viagra?

by digby

Katha Pollit has written a righteous retort to those who insist that the Hobby Lobby case is just a little inconvenience and that women should pipe down because there’s no way this reasoning could ever extend to really important stuff. Here’s just a little taste:

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues in her stirring dissent, there’s “little doubt that RFRA claims will proliferate, for the Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood—combined with its other errors in construing RFRA—invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith.” The reason it’s unlikely the Supreme Court would uphold a religious exemption for vaccinations or blood transfusions is not something intrinsic to those claims; it’s simply that Alito finds them weird. Birth control is banned by the Bible? Sure. Blood transfusions are banned by the Bible? Don’t be silly. For now. We have no idea, really, how far the Court might be willing to extend RFRA. Could a CEO refuse to pay childbirth costs for unmarried women? Could he pay married men more because that’s what the Lord wants? (Actually, he’s probably already doing that.) But here’s my prediction: the day a religious exemption burdens by so much as a mouse’s whisker the right of men to protect their own bodies from unwanted, well, anything, is the day the Supreme Court Five discover that religion is not so deserving of deference after all.

She’s right. And all you have to do to prove it is look at the vast amount of sexist and misogynist commentary being vomited forth by the right wing in the wake of this decision. Like good old Rush:

“[Some people] treat pregnancy as a great imposition that women need to be protected from.And yet, they wouldn’t have the problem if they didn’t do a certain thing.”

I’m going to guess it wouldn’t be much of a burden on women to refuse to do that “certain thing” with Rush (or any of the “other things” that Rush apparently likes to do.) But I’d think that most men would prefer that their wives and girlfriends want to do that certain thing and don’t really think it’s a good idea to have families consisting of 15 or 16 children.

I just can’t get over the idea that they really seem to think it makes sense to real people in the real world that birth control is some kind of recreational drug for slutty bimbos. Meanwhile, horny guys like Limbaugh are popping Viagra three at a time. And it’s paid for by insurance. Are there no religious objections to that?

Bueller????

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The private sphere is the real battleground


by digby

Joan Walsh has a nice piece up about the rather odd juxtaposition between the rapid (and thrilling) advance of gay rights with the ongoing assault on women’s freedom. She makes a good case that this is because gay rights, particularly marriage equality, are seen as validation of conservative values and institutions while women’s rights still threaten the traditional order in a very fundamental way. She draws together the two big Supreme Court decisions this week to illustrate both the social and economic issues at stake. Well worth reading.

I think this is right and it goes back to Corey Robin’s observations in The Reactionary Mind:

Every great political blast—the storming of the Bastille, the taking of the Winter Palace, the March on Washington—is set off by a very private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power.

That’s what conservatives really care about — maintaining their power in the private sphere. Nothing is more threatening to that power than women having control of reproduction and changing the traditional nature of relationships in family and work. That’s where the fight really is.

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QOTD:The Reverend Welton Gaddy

by digby

“The tenet that religion should never be legitimated as a license to discriminate remains our core belief; that federal money must never be used to fund such discrimination must remain the bedrock of religious freedom in America.”

That’s from Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches who points out in this piece that not all religious organizations are requesting to be exempted from requirements that they not discriminate. Some even think not being a bigot is a religious value. Imagine that.

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The losing fight that cost us big time

by digby

With all the talk this week about the liberals’ favorite Justice, Samuel Alito I thought I’d take a little walk down memory lane in my Salon piece this morning and revisit the Supreme Court hearings wherein liberals tried in vain to filibuster him.

Reading that quote about Alito not imposing “preferences or priorities” from George W. Bush one couldn’t help harkening back to the earlier day when he nominated his associate Harriet Miers and was immediately put in his place by his bosses in the conservative movement. Recall that his close advisor Ann Coulter said at the time:

[S]ome jobs are so dirty, you can only send in someone who has the finely honed hatred of liberals acquired at elite universities to do them … Conservatives from elite schools have already been subjected to liberal blandishments and haven’t blinked. These are right-wingers who have fought off the best and the brightest the blue states have to offer. The New York Times isn’t going to mau-mau them — as it does intellectual lightweights like Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee — by dangling fawning profiles before them. They aren’t waiting for a pat on the head from Nina Totenberg or Linda Greenhouse. To paraphrase Archie Bunker, when you find a conservative from an elite law school, you’ve really got something. However nice, helpful, prompt and tidy she is, Harriet Miers isn’t qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on “The West Wing,” let alone to be a real one.

The qualification, you’ll note, wasn’t the allegedly superior law school degree but rather the “finely honed hatred of liberals.” Bush listened, he learned, and he nominated Alito, a hardcore right-winger best known for his view that strip searching 10-year-old girls without a warrant was perfectly acceptable. Liberals everywhere went ballistic. After all, the justice he was replacing was Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate swing vote, not a rigid ideologue as he clearly was. The court’s tilt to the right would be precipitous.

I know that we’re not supposed to like the filibuster. Liberals never used it when it was important, while conservatives were so effective at keeping President Obama’s nominees off the Federal Bench the Democratic Senate finally had to eliminate it altogether for judicial nominees. Unfortunately, their feckless adherence to outdated norms that only exist for the purpose of keeping liberals’ from achieving their ends led to this horrific wrecking ball of a Supreme Court.

Let’s just put it this way — if Anthony Kennedy had retired from the bench instead of Souter or Stevens, do you think conservatives would have allowed President Obama to replace him with a hard core liberal Justice along the lines of William O. Douglas without a fight? Yeah, me neither.

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No, Barry Ritholtz. It’s not an “incompetent Congress.” It’s immoral Republicans.

by David Atkins

Add another steaming pile to the genre of angry rants by impassioned good government types unable or unwilling to put the blame where it actually belongs:

In spite of the celebratory mood, I am troubled by the unrelenting incompetence of the U.S. Congress. Its inability to pass even the most basic legislation is beyond baffling.

Case in point: College students who use new Stafford loans to pay for the 2014-2015 school year will see borrowing costs rise 21 percent. As of July 1, interest on new student loans rises to 4.66 percent from 3.86 percent last year, with future rates potentially increasing even more. This comes as interest rates on mortgages and other consumer credit hovered near record lows. For a comparison, the rate on the 10-year Treasury is 2.6 percent. Congress could have imposed lower limits on student-loan rates, but chose not to.

This is but one example out of thousands of an inability to perform the basic duties, which includes helping to educate the next generation of leaders and productive citizens. It goes far beyond partisanship; it is a matter of lack of will, intelligence and ability.

There are three groups to blame for the gross dereliction of duty we have seen from this do-nothing Congress. The first, paradoxically, is the Federal Reserve. Its monetary policies have allowed some small measure of recovery, giving cover to Congress’s failure to manage our fiscal policies. I will address this in greater detail in the near future.

The second group is the Supreme Court. Its campaign of replacing our Jeffersonian democracy with a corporatocracy — sponsored by and sold to the highest bidder — continues unabated. The entire left-right debate is no longer relevant — it’s over, and has been replaced with a new paradigm: you versus the corporation. It isn’t unthinkable that a century from now, the Roberts court will be vilified like none before it.

But the group most to blame for the sad state of Congress is you, the American voter. Or, more accurately, the American non-voter.

The U.S. has among the lowest voter-turnout rates of any democracy. We are a wealthy nation, fat and happy, and that has led to a decrease in citizen participation. As Fair Vote has observed, “Voter turnout in the United States has never risen to levels of most other well-established democracies.” In the midterm cycle, less than 40 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots. In the primaries, it’s a tiny fraction of that number.

Compare that to countries with compulsory voting. Democracies such as Australia, Belgium and Chile have voter turnout of almost 90 percent. In Sweden and Italy (without compulsory voting) turnout rates are about 80 percent.

Look no further than the recent primaries to see the impact. Extremists from both major parties determine who runs for office. Hence, we end up with a Congress that has the lowest rating in American history returning to office with a 98 percent re-election rate.

“Congress” could have fixed the student loan problem? Not with Republicans in charge. “Congress” could have fixed the corporatocracy? Really? The last major act of Congress saw Democrats singlehandedly create a slightly more humane healthcare system that, for all its marked progressive improvements, was still a corporate giveaway–and get flamed as Communists for their trouble with little media pushback as Republicans told seniors that Democrats were taking away their Social Security to give it to poor people.

Maybe the reason that voter turnout is higher in other countries might have something to do with their parliamentary systems and better protections for workers? Maybe it has to do with not having elections bought and paid for, or a system of government expressly designed to protect the status quo as much as possible?

Maybe the reason the Roberts court is a scorn-worthy joke is because it’s stacked with 4 arch conservatives and one regular conservative against 4 left-of-centers? How is this an institutional failure, instead of an right-wing ideological one?

Both sides aren’t to blame. Just one side is.

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How to insure that Republicans will never win national elections again

by digby

Courtesy Darrell Issa:

House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is calling on President Barack Obama to deport more young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children, known as Dreamers.

Issa and 32 House Republican colleagues sent a letter to the president, dated July 2, urging him to reverse his 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to halt deportation of people who would be eligible for the stalled DREAM Act. They blamed Obama’s “failed policies” for the recent influx of unaccompanied minors into the U.S., mostly from Central America.

“First, we call on you to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program created, without congressional support, by your Administration in June, 2012,” the Republicans wrote. “While the current program only applies to arrivals prior to 2007, the very existence of the program contradicts present law and violates the Constitutional principle of a separation of powers which grants primary law making authority to Congress.

Because deporting the Dreamers is such a smart and necessary thing to do. Not to mention popular.

But never fear. There will always be a few House seats available for unreconstructed bigots. The presidency not so much.

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We are all Quiverfull now


by digby

What??

God, they’re just so damned dumb it’s painful:

A much higher proportion of married than of never-married women use a contraceptive method (77% vs. 42%). This is largely because married women are more likely to be sexually active. But even among those at risk of unintended pregnancy, contraceptive use is higher among currently married women than among never-married women (93% vs. 83%).

Apparently, all these married women are sluts and whores who are supposed to “keep their legs closed” if they don’t want to be pregnant all the time? Is that how it works now?

I guess everybody’s supposed to be Quiverfull now.

It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud

by digby

A national media conference call earlier today:

Austin Barbour, a Cochran campaign adviser, was giving examples of why the campaign felt the charges of double-voting — people who voted in the Democratic primary and then voted for Cochran in the Republican primary runoff — were wrong.

“If they want to file a challenge, we’ve got no problem with that whatsoever,” Barbour said of the McDaniel campaign. But, he went on, “the time has certainly come in our minds for the McDaniel campaign and their allies to either put up or shut up.”

Then someone who was evidently not a reporter interrupted Barbour.

That person repeatedly said that “black people harvested cotton” and accused the Cochran campaign of “harvesting black votes.” Barbour asked him to stop multiple times, saying he would answer questions from anyone at the end of his statement.

The conference call line did not give the Cochran campaign the ability to mute callers’ lines, so there was no way to force the caller to stop speaking.

“I’m happy to address any question, no matter the lunacy of it,” he said.

But the man on the line, who did not identify himself, could not be placated. Finally, Barbour apologized and announced he was ending the call, telling national press that they had the contact information for the campaign if they had any questions.

Yep. That’s going very well.

I’m beginning to wonder if Childers doesn’t have a shot …

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So Jesus joined the NRA

by digby

I’m sure you won’t be surprised:

“We need to go back to the Constitution for not only the First Amendment, but the Second Amendment,” [Georgia Congressman Paul Broun] explained. “Because the First and Second Amendments are the guardians of our liberties.

The Second Amendment is the one that really protects all of our liberties that we are given by our Lord, and our God-given rights, and are protected under the Constitution.”

Let’s be real here folks. The framers made a big boo-boo. The Second Amendment should have been numero uno, amirite? It’s really the only one that matters. After all, the only thing that guarantees your right to say whatever you want or worship whatever you want is the fact that you can blow the fucking heads off of people who disagree with you. Without that, you will never be free my friends, never. Jesus said so right there in the Bible.

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QOTD: Senator Paul

by digby

Waving the bloody shirt for all it’s worth:

“Children are murdered — please show restraint. Cafés and buses are bombed — please show restraint. Towns are victimized by hundreds of rockets — please show restraint while you bury your dead once again. I think it is clear by now: Israel has shown remarkable restraint. It possesses a military with clear superiority over that of its Palestinian neighbors, yet it does not respond to threat after threat, provocation after provocation, with the type of force that would decisively end their conflict.But sometimes restraint can work against you. Sometimes you just have to say, enough is enough.”

This was in response to the administration’s expressed outrage over the killings of the three Israeli teenagers, while calling for a restrained response. (They foolishly thought it wasn’t a good idea to fan the flames by screaming “enough is enough!!!”)

The Politico article linked above declares this to be nothing more than a political ploy to appease the GOP establishment as Paul seeks the presidential nomination. Perhaps it is. But it’s probably a mistake to make such assumptions if the issue being played with is something as vital as middle east foreign policy.

Also too, this:

While talking with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on “Your World with Neil Cavuto” following the prisoner trade of five Guantanamo Bay detainees for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, Senator Paul said, “there would be a drone with their name on it.” 

Senator Paul continued by saying “if people plot to attack our country, they will be dealt with, and they will be dealt harshly.”

And this:

Q. Can you see a time when you would think it was a good idea for air strikes or to send in ground troops?

A. Yeah, I’m mostly talking about ground troops. I think that we have aided the Iraqi government for a long time, I’m not opposed to continuing to help them with arms. I would not rule out air strikes. But I would say, after 10 years, it is appalling that they are stripping their uniforms off and running. And it concerns me that we would have to do their fighting for them because they won’t fight for their own country, their own cities. I am thinking that it is time that they step up.

Very nuanced understanding of the issues there …

These comments have been buried among his contradictions, so it’s hard to know exactly where he stands. But suffice to say that he is a member of the Republican Party and if he cannot stand up to them as a matter of principle in a quixotic presidential run what makes anyone think he will do it in a position of real power?

Oh, and hiding behind the process argument wherein the “real issue” is whether congress signed off is a fool’s game that liberals learned a long time ago.  The congress will very, very, very rarely object to any military action the president wants to undertake — and pretty much never if that president is a Republican. It’s a dodge.

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