Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Scarlet Barcode

by digby

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the busybody culture seems to be on the uptick. It’s not just the Schiavo stuff, which is the worst of it in that it featured the president himself flying back to Washington in the dead of night to sign special legislation. It’s more than that and it has to do with the religious right,corporations and government all working together (and sometimes using modern technology) to regulate personal behavior. I no like.

You have moral scolds and personal responsibility hypocrites and authoritarians and rapacious business interests that are determined, for a variety of reasons, to erase the idea of personal privacy on the one hand and the idea of redemption and reinvention on the other. Combined with a breathlessly intrusive tabloid media (dripping with hypocrisy and phony sanctimony) and you have a recipe for some very unpleasant social changes.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

The collateral consequences for people with criminal convictions are already severe. One misdemeanor can significantly diminish or outright ruin your chances for various types of employment, housing, financial aid, higher education, and licensing (not to mention its potential immigration consequences). These collateral effects of criminal convictions — most severe for people being released from prison — disproportionately harm the poor, creating a miserable cycle that makes it even more difficult for people in economically and educationally depressed communities to better their circumstances.

To make matters even worse, the FBI now wants to go beyond tracking “severe and/or significant offenses” (felonies and significant misdemeanors) and include on criminal history reports (accessed by employers and licensing agencies) “non-serious offenses” – from drinking in public to teenage vagrancy, traffic violations to urinating in public, loitering to disorderly conduct. As Michelle Chen observes in the New Standard, this “would foreclose employment opportunities for an untold number of people, disproportionately impact people of color, and invite the abuse of sensitive information.”

The majority of employers will not hire someone with an arrest or “infraction” history, and even the most meaningless of follies will cause heightened scrutiny of the applicant. Any negative information, no matter how minor or long ago, will inevitably be prejudicial towards the applicant. Compound the stigma of even a non-criminal record with the fact that numerous state and federal laws have made it increasingly easy for employers to perform invasive background checks, and soon people’s lives could be negatively impacted by the revelation of even the most minor indiscretions.

Additionally alarming is the fact that these vast criminal records databases are riddled with mistakes or incomplete — half the arrest records do not contain the outcome of the cases (i.e., dismissal, acquittal, the District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute, etc.). Not only does the FBI want to allow even greater invasions of our private lives, but such incursions would sometimes uncover false and misleading information — but damaging nonetheless.

Like the bankruptcy bill or these “shaming sentences” this is part of the zero tolerance culture that we see emerging in the courts and elsewhere, where we have ritual public humiliations designed to “send a message” and where people can never escape the mistakes of their youths. This allows the powerful and the sanctimonious to indulge in the fiction that they are morally superior by forcing others to pay both publicly and forever. A zero tolerance society turns into a paranoid society very quickly.

Here’s the thing. I’m not big on American exceptionalism as a rule. But if there’s anything about American culture that makes it unique it is the idea of second chances. After all, the colony and then the nation was settled by refugees and opportunists, petty criminals, fortune hunters and losers who were looking for a chance to start over again. It’s who we are.

I’ll evoke the usual suspect here, even though it’s an unbearable cliche, because it happens to be true:

“Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.”

There’s a lot about that to quarrel with, but I believe it is intrinsic to our success as a nation, whether its the willingness to take risks and create a dynamic, vibrant economy or our ability to come back after having made mistakes and create art and music and technology — or just a decent life for ourselves and our families. When you strip it down to fundamentals, it’s what makes progress possible.

But this new propensity among our institutions to track your every movement and keep secret lists with your data and share it amongst themselves is likely to stifle all that creativity and energy and turn us into a paranoid, withdrawn, insecure culture where one mistake can mean the end of everything. There can be no vibrant capitalism where you cannot afford to take risks. There can be no growth or knowledge or invention if you must watch your every step and know that no matter how trivial your misstep or whether you pay your debt to society, you will always be subject to social, economic and governmental disapprobation.

Every day I hear conservatives talk about freedom and liberty. And every day I see their institutions conspiring (sometimes with the help of well meaning, but misguided liberals) to erode the foundation upon which liberty is built. Of course people must behave responsibly and lawfully. A civil society depends upon us all agreeing to follow its rules. But humans are only human and they make mistakes. If we begin to use this powerful technology to ensure that there is no statute of limitations on life lessons and errors, everyone who doesn’t have the means to game the system will be wearing a scarlet barcode on their foreheads. Because, (I know you’vve heard this before somewhere) nobody’s perfect.

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Dick or Peter?

by digby

Remember how our president used to say this stuff all the time?

It’s not the kind of war that we’re used to in America. The Greatest Generation was used to storming beachheads. Baby boomers such as myself, were used to getting caught in a quagmire of Vietnam where politics made decisions more than the military sometimes. Generation X was able to watch technology right in front of their TV screens — you know, burrow into concrete bunkers in Iraq and blow them up.

And this:

I learned some good lessons from Vietnam. First, there must be a clear mission. Secondly, the politics ought to stay out of fighting a war. There was too much politics during the Vietnam War. There was too much concern in the White House about political standing. And I’ve got great confidence in General Tommy Franks, and great confidence in how this war is being conducted. And I rely on Tommy, just like the Secretary of Defense relies upon Tommy and his judgment — whether or not we ought to deploy and how we ought to deploy.

What’s he gonna do now?

The Bush administration is split over the idea of a surge in troops to Iraq, with White House officials aggressively promoting the concept over the unanimous disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intense debate.

I think he wants to escalate so badly he can taste it. Fred Barnes says:

It turns out you only have to attend a White House Christmas party to find out where President Bush is headed on Iraq. One guest who shook hands with Bush in the receiving line told him, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Bush, slightly startled but cheerful, replied, “Don’t worry. I’m not.” The guest followed up: “I think we can win in Iraq.” The president’s reply was emphatic: “We’re going to win.” Another guest informed Bush he’d given some advice to the Iraq Study Group, and said its report should be ignored. The president chuckled and said he’d made his position clear when he appeared with British prime minister Tony Blair. The report had never mentioned the possibility of American victory. Bush’s goal in Iraq, he said at the photo-op with Blair, is “victory.”

(Of course, Fred also thinks we were on the verge of a great victory in Vietnam in 1974 until the congressional hippies cut off the funds so I think he may have had a bit too much of the eggnog.)

This should be very, very interesting. Rummy’s gone. What are the Joint Chiefs going to do?

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Brownback Mountain

by digby

You cannot make this stuff up:

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who blocked the confirmation of a woman to the federal bench because she attended a same-sex commitment ceremony for the daughter of her long-time neighbors, says he will now allow a vote on the nomination.

[…]

Mr. Brownback, who has been criticized for blocking the nomination, said he would also no longer press a proposed solution he offered on Dec. 8 that garnered even more criticism: that he would remove his block if Judge Neff agreed to recuse herself from all cases involving same-sex unions.

In an interview last week, Mr. Brownback said that he still believed Judge Neff’s behavior raised serious questions about her impartiality and that he was likely to vote against her. But he said he did not realize his proposal — asking a nominee to agree in advance to remove herself from deciding a whole category of cases — was so unusual as to be possibly unprecedented. Legal scholars said it raised constitutional questions of separation of powers for a senator to demand that a judge commit to behavior on the bench in exchange for a vote.

Mr. Brownback said that he believed Judge Neff’s attendance at the 2002 ceremony merited further investigation, but that he had not meant to set any precedent with his proposal. “It was the last day of the session and I was just trying to provide some accommodation to see if we could make this thing go forward,” he said.

He said that “this is a big hot-button issue” and that Judge Neff had not made it clear that her presence at the ceremony did not mean she could not rule without bias in deciding cases involving same-sex unions. “I’d like to know more factually about what took place,” he said

I’ll bet he would. Was it two women or two men? How were they dressed? Did they kiss a the alter? Tongues?

This, by the way is the same guy who’s involved in one of the freakiest sideshow cults in DC:

Brownback is also reticent about his membership in The Family, a shadowy Christian-right group comprising all-male elites. Some of its most famous members have included Watergate crook Charles Colson, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and the brutal Somalian former dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre. “The goal [of The Family] is an “invisible” world organization led by Christ–that’s what they aspire to,” Jeff Sharlet, a journalist who revealed The Family’s inner workings in Harper’s Magazine, said in an interview with Alternet.

Read all about it.

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As The Kewl Kidz Turn

by digby

I can understand the press being interested in the idea of what Bill Clinton’s role would be in a Hillary Clinton white house. It makes sense. There’s never before been a case where an ex-president might be married to a current one. But someone becoming president eight years after a close family member left the white house isn’t exactly unprecedented now is it, so it’s not so freakish that we can’t imagine it. In fact, one could even say that it was once considered a benefit — all that wise counsel from “grown-ups” and all.

Never the less, I would expect that the political world would be particularly interested in how Bill and Hillary might conduct themselves in this situation because they have always been partners and because Hillary would be the first woman president. One could imagine a line of inquiry that wonders if Bill would really be in charge or if Hillary would be considered more “viable” among men because she has an experienced man backing her up right in the white house.

What one shouldn’t have to imagine is stuff like this:

But there will be questions aplenty. How could there not be? The Clinton marriage fell into political soap opera with the troubles of Bill’s White House years, with nothing but question marks hovering overhead, for a time. Was he contrite? Had she forgiven him? Would she stay? The woman whose earlier assertiveness as first lady rankled some now was tagged with a new set of labels: Hillary the martyr. Hillary the steadfast, for sticking with her man. Hillary as Machiavelli, accepting marital humiliation as the price of power.

The whole article is so sickening I can’t even bear to deconstruct it.

This is not serious political journalism. The only people who really care about this garbage are the superficial morons who inhabit the DC media claque and the gossipy, pitchfork wielding denizens of “the town” who are, apparently, as substantial as cotton candy.

But what is truly insidious about this is something else. This is the press announcing that they have decided what the narrative should be and it is clearly designed to make people shudder with revulsion at the prospect of having to put up with more of this nonsense for another presidency. One of my good friends said to me at dinner last night that she was already exhausted at the prospect of this whole thing — not because she cares about what Bill and Hill do in their personal lives, but because the DC tabloid political media are going to force it on her.

I am not carrying a brief for Hillary and I don’t have an opinion on whether she should run. What I strenuously object to is the idea that the press is going to decide this for us by shoving their sick obsession with the Clinton’s marriage and sex life down our throats whether we care about it or not. The whole damned world seems to be on the verge of exploding — nobody’s interested in explosions in any politician’s pants at the moment.

These gossipy harpies are apparently determined that the nation will not have Hillary Clinton as president. Some of you may be glad about that and are cheering them on. But be advised — they don’t really want ANY Democrat to be president and they will create some demeaning narrative for each of them. They just have a particular score to settle with the Clintons — and the narratives already been written so it’s first out of the box.

Hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’ll fall in love with a Dem this time and treat him with the kid gloves with which they treated Bush in 2000 — he was just a good ole MBA cowpoke from Midland and Kennebunkport who was gonna be decent and honorable and wear a big white hat just like in the movies. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll decide that John Edwards is their guy this time. Or Obama. Or Chris Dodd. And maybe they’ll skew the coverage our way and find some repellant narrative about the Republican that will ensure us a victory. That would be great. We’ll probably win.

But you know, I think it would be a really neat change of pace if the American people got to pick their own president this time. I’m afraid I’m not all that satisfied with who the media and “the townfolk” have chosen for us these last few years. (Their record of Democratic candidate destruction, however, is truly impressive.)

The pundit and kewl kidz primary in which they put us on notice as to which candidates they plan to destroy so we won’t go near them isn’t anticipated in the constitution. If you hate Hillary, that’s your privilege and it’s also your privilege to decide if she should be president. I don’t think it’s good for our politics to let the kewl kidz take that privilege away from us.

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Doomed To Repeat It

by digby

A lot of people are talking about this call by Juan Cole for Bush to fire Elliot Abrams, and for very good reason. It’s a great idea, but since it took six years for him to dump Don Rumsfeld, I’m not holding my breath.

What caught my eye in his post outlining Abrams’ long history of crime and perfidy, though, was this:

In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath. Without the plea deal, he was facing felony charges, since what he did was in fact a felony.

Congress pledged that Abrams would never work at a high level in government again. But by the time the Neoconservative cabal in the Bush administration got Bush to appoint him to the National Security Council, there had been so much turn-over in Congress that, one member told me, “no one remembered who Abrams was.”

Please, someone, tell me this isn’t true. Elliot Abrahams was one of the most evil members of the Reagan administration. He was pardoned by poppy on Christmas eve 1992, just before he left office. He was notorious, infamous.

Unless Democratic staffers and members are all under the age of 40, there is absolutely no reason for them not to have already known who Elliot Abrams was. In any case, their job is to look into the president’s appointees and had anyone done that they would have seen that they were going to be allowing a war criminal back into the government. Then again, he’s just one of many in this administration (that has created a whole new generation of war criminals themselves), so perhaps they just thought that was a prerequisite for the job.

Abrams, unsurprisingly, is back to his old tricks. He’s a very, very bad man and should not ever have been let anywhere near government power again. But he’s one of those awesome Republican “grown-ups” the kewl kids were just thrilled to have back in Washington. I hope they are really enjoying those cocktail weenies.

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S’cuse Us, Yer Highness

by digby

Considering that I’ve been writing about aristocracy a lot these days, this is actually kind of amusing:

To: The Honourable Senator Olympia Snowe (Republican, Maine) The Honourable Senator John D. Rockefeller (Democrat, West Virginia)

Madame, Sir,

Uphold Free Speech About Climate Change Or Resign

The US Constitution guarantees the right of free speech. It is inappropriate for elected Senators such as yourselves to suggest that any person should refrain from exercising that right, as you have done in your letter of October 27 to the CEO of ExxonMobil. That great corporation has exercised its right of free speech — and with good reason — in openly providing support for scientists and groups that dare to question how much the increased concentration of CO2 in the air may warm the world. You must honour the Constitution, withdraw your letter and apologize to ExxonMobil, or resign as Senators.

You defy every tenet of democracy when you invite ExxonMobil to deny itself the right to provide information to “senior elected and appointed government officials” who disagree with your opinion. You are elected officials yourselves. If you do not believe in the right of persons within the United States to exercise their fundamental right under the world’s greatest Constitution to petition their elected representatives for the redress of their grievances, then you have no place on Capitol Hill. You must go.

[…]

You will rightly deduce from Beckett’s sinister remark that after a decade of Socialist government freedom of speech does not figure in our constitution. But let me quote the First Amendment to yours: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the Press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

I call upon the pair of you to live by those great words, or to leave.

Yours truly,

MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY

One does feel the sting of the whip more keenly when it comes from one’s betters, doesn’t one? But this is no joke. It is a letter written by a real Viscount Mockton of Brenchley to two US Senators.

The story is related to my aristocrat series not just because some slice of irrelevant peerage decides to lecture US citizens in the tone of Henry the VIII, but because it is another example of big, big money financing their pet conservative causes by creating bogus think tanks and “institutes.” It’s just a little bit unusual that they have put an actual aristocrat up front. The aristocrat, however, has a long conservative political and journalistic history and currently “acts as trouble-shooter and corporate thinker to leading businesses.” (The first viscount Monckton was Chairman of the Iraq Petroleum Company.)

Lord Monckton is an ardent global warming science foe who recently published an exhaustive 52 page roll of toilet paper on the subject for The Telegraph. (George Monbiot explains the whole thing in this article in the Guardian.)He has no degree in any scientific subject and has never done any work in the field. Lately, he’s best known for his (admittedly impressive)jigsaw puzzle design. But he styles himself an expert, writes nonsensical papers and then demands the resignations of anyone who disagrees with him. I think there was more intellectual rigor involved in Galileo’s trial.

But this is how it works. I find it amusing that Exxon has actually engaged a real blueblood to make its dishonest pitch, but maybe they are getting desperate. They aren’t even trying to hide it.

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Breaking Away

by digby

I think everyone knows I’m a godless hippie and all, but I am fascinated by the subjects of politics and history so naturally I find myself constantly reading about religion. It’s all related.

So this story by Bruce Wilson at Talk to Action about the Episcopalian break-away over gay rights piques my interest:

Yesterday, seven Virginia Episcopal churches including two of the largest and wealthiest in the American Episcopal Communion voted to break away and, as a New York Times story written prior to the vote put it, “report to the powerful archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality who supports legislation in his country that would make it illegal for gay men and lesbians to form organizations, read gay literature or eat together in a restaurant.” ” Commentor Jim Naughton, who writes the “Daily Episcopalian”, noted “this no longer seems to be a debate about the proper role of gay and lesbians Christians in the Church, but about the moral legitimacy of rolling back human rights for minorities”…

It doesn’t get more political than that. But this highlights something that’s going on in the world of religion that I don’t think most people are aware of: the right is systematically attacking the liberal churches from within.

For instance, it so happens that the ever so mainline Episcopal church has been under assault from big money wingnuts for some time. This article by Max Blumenthal in Salon from 2004 reveals this pet project of rightwing freakshow Howard Ahmanson:

In the summer of 2000, a group of frustrated Episcopalians from the board of the American Anglican Council gathered at a sun-soaked Bahamanian resort to blow off some steam and hatch a plot. They were fed up with the Episcopal Church and what they perceived as a liberal hierarchy that had led it astray from centuries of so-called orthodox Christian teaching. The only option, they believed, was to lead a schism.

But this would take money. After the meeting, Anglican Council vice president Bruce Chapman sent a private memo to the group’s board detailing a plan to involve Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., a Southern California millionaire, and his wife, Roberta Green Ahmanson, in the plan. “Fundraising is a critical topic,” Chapman wrote. “But that topic itself is going to be affected directly by whether we have a clear, compelling forward strategy. I know that the Ahmansons are only going to be available to us if we have such a strategy and I think it would be wise to involve them directly in settling on it as the options clarify.” It was a logical pitch: As a key financier of the Christian right with a penchant for anti-gay campaigns, Ahmanson clearly shared the Anglican Council’s interest in subverting the left-leaning church. Moreover, Ahmanson and his wife were close friends and prayer partners of David Anderson, the Anglican Council’s chief executive, while Chapman and his political team were already enjoying hefty annual grants from Ahmanson to Chapman’s think tank, the Discovery Institute.

Are we getting the picture?

The institute is directed by Diane Knippers, an evangelical Episcopalian and writer who also happens to be a founding member of the Anglican Council and its acting executive director. She is the chief architect of the institute’s Reforming America’s Churches Project, which aims to “restructure the permanent governing structure” of “theologically flawed” mainline churches like the Episcopal Church in order to “discredit and diminish the Religious Left’s influence.” This has translated into a three-pronged assault on mainline Presbyterian, Methodist and Episcopal churches. With a staff of media-savvy research specialists, the institute is able to ply both the religious and mainstream media, exploiting divisive social issues within the churches.

[…]

The campaign against the Episcopal Church climaxed on Aug. 5 last year, just a day before the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson was scheduled to be elected as the church’s first openly gay bishop. In a column titled “The Gay Bishop’s Links,” Weekly Standard editor and Institute board member Fred Barnes alleged that the Web site of a gay youth group Robinson founded contained links to “a pornographic website.” Further, Barnes alleged, Robinson “put his hands on” a Vermont man “inappropriately” during a church meeting “several years ago.” The institute shopped the column to various cable news networks but only Fox News broadcast it. Barnes did not return calls seeking comment.

Though Barnes’ smear was discredited by a panel of bishops investigating the charges, it helped widen the rift within the Episcopal Church and isolate it from its global affiliates. Since Robinson’s Nov. 2 consecration, 13 dioceses affiliated with the Anglican Council have threatened to break with the Episcopal Church and form a renegade network. Though the network has yet to congeal, the momentum for a full-blown split continues to build. And the Nigerian and Southeast Asian churches, which, like the Episcopal Church, belong to the global Anglican Communion, have broken off contact with the Episcopal Church.

Once again you see the nexus between big right wing money, media and power — and not just in government, but all aspects of society. (I will talk about Wal-Mart’s stated desire to export its “culture” another time.) I’m not sure that there is anything the right does that is a true grassroots effort. When you peel away the layers you always find the same people spending a huge amount of money to buy off the leadership and brainwash the folks. Every time. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think a bunch of rich white people were looking to perpetuate an aristocracy.

And in other religious news, here’s a story in the NY Times today that just floored me:

Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.

Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.

“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”

The student, Matthew LaClair, said that he felt uncomfortable with Mr. Paszkiewicz’s statements in the first week, and taped eight classes starting Sept. 13 out of fear that officials would not believe the teacher had made the comments.

[…]

Greice Coelho, who took Mr. Paszkiewicz’s class and is a member of his youth group, said in a letter to The Observer, the local weekly newspaper, that Matthew was “ignoring the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gives every citizen the freedom of religion.” Some anonymous posters on the town’s electronic bulletin board, Kearnyontheweb.com, called for Matthew’s suspension.

On the sidewalks outside the high school, which has 1,750 students, many agreed with 15-year-old Kyle Durkin, who said, “I’m on the teacher’s side all the way.”

While science teachers, particularly in the Bible Belt, have been known to refuse to teach evolution, the controversy here, 10 miles west of Manhattan, hinges on assertions Mr. Paszkiewicz made in class, including how a specific Muslim girl would go to hell.

“This is extremely rare for a teacher to get this blatantly evangelical,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit educational association. “He’s really out there proselytizing, trying to convert students to his faith, and I think that that’s more than just saying I have some academic freedom right to talk about the Bible’s view of creation as well as evolution.”

Even some legal organizations that often champion the expression of religious beliefs are hesitant to support Mr. Paszkiewicz.

“It’s proselytizing, and the courts have been pretty clear you can’t do that,” said John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, a group that provides legal services in religious freedom cases. “You can’t step across the line and proselytize, and that’s what he’s done here.”

[…]

…Andrew Lewczuk, a former student of Mr. Paszkiewicz, praised his abilities as a history teacher but said he regretted that he had not protested the religious discussions. “In the end, the manner in which Mr. Paszkiewicz spoke with his students was careless, inconsiderate and inappropriate,” he wrote to The Observer. “It was an abuse of power and influence, and it’s my own fault that I didn’t do anything about this.”

One teacher, who did not give his name, said he thought both Matthew and his teacher had done the right thing. “The student had the right to do what he did,” the man said. As for Mr. Paszkiewicz, “He had the right to say what he said, he was not preaching, and that’s something I’m very much against.”

Where to begin? That last comment alone is stunning coming from a “teacher.” The man is recorded saying in a public school:

“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong. He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell,”

If that’s not preaching, I can’t imagine what goes on in that man’s church. Clearly, this is completely unacceptable; even John Whitehead says so and he’s a raving. religious wingnut.

There are many things about this that are disturbing, of course — the fact that nobody said anything before this kid — the fact that everyone in the community seems to think this is just fine. But I think one of the things that disturbs me the most is that this guy is teaching the class that evolution is not scientific and that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark. Dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s Ark. In a high school history class. And everybody is saying what a good teacher he is.

Am I nuts or have people become so religiously correct that they can’t say that a man who teaches his students that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s Ark cannot, by definition, be a good history teacher?

Still, the kid has a lot of guts and he sounds like he’s tough enough to take all this. That’s not true of a lot of other kids who aren’t as temperamentally defiant and who will sit through that sermon and even participate just to fit in socially or get a good grade even though it goes against their own religious teachings (or their own knowledge that it has no basis in fact.) These kids are trapped in a church that’s being run by the government and that’s unconstitutional.

Still, even though Matthew is a bright kid who will do just fine, you have to feel a little bit sorry for him. High school is a terrible place even for the popular:

Matthew said he missed the friends he had lost over his role in the debate, and said he could “feel the glares” when he walked into school.

Instead of mulling Supreme Court precedents, he said with half a smile, “I should be worrying about who I’m going to take to the prom.”

It will be a girl with exceptionally good judgment and courage who agrees to go with him.

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Raise My Taxes

by poputonian

The latest online from In These Times:

We Are All Waiters Now

By Thomas Geoghegan

Now that the Democrats run Congress, the question becomes, “What should they do?” Yes, raise the minimum wage. And yes, fix the Medicare drug program. But will this bind a new majority to the party? We’re often told, “Democrats have no ideas.” But that’s a silly thing to say. Washington, D.C., is crawling with foundation-types bubbling with new ideas, and if anything, the Democrats are awash with new ideas. Many of these new ideas may make their way into law. And we need not have the cynicism of Mario Cuomo, who once said, “In America, a new idea is a cereal that grows hair.” But what the Democrats don’t have is a serious commitment–the political nerve–to make people happier in the only way they can: by raising people’s taxes. How happy more of us would be if only we could pay higher taxes! More of us at last could joyfully retire. In May 2005, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put out a sort of Michelin Guide to the pensions of the world’s 30 wealthiest nations: the United States, Ireland and their ilk. While the United States is rich, comparatively it’s a beggar at the bottom, with a…

Read the entire article if you want to find happiness.

Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

by digby

Hey folks. I’m hosting Tom Schaller and his new book Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South over at the FDL book salon this afternoon. Come join us for the fireworks.

Cross posted at FDL:

It seems as if I’ve been thinking about southern politics all of my life. The truth is that since the founding, everyone who has ever been involved in American politics has thought about it their whole lives. The struggle over politics and culture and regional pride in the south is America’s story — it is us and we are it, no matter where we live.

The day after the 2004 election we all looked at the electoral map and knew that we were now dealing with a rock solid Republican south. The realignment that had been in the works since the 1960’s was complete. (In fact it was almost exactly the same electoral map of 1860, with the parties reversed.) The south has pretty much voted as a bloc from the very beginning. And it is also a fact that the south is the most conservative region in the country, always has been. (Even FDR had to agree to keep civil rights off the menu — and once the crisis of the depression passed, the Dixiecrats immediately got restless. That coalition forged in the depression was always on a collision course with itself.)

In his book Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South Tom Schaller gathers all the data to prove what those maps imply — the south is conservative in ways that the Democrats cannot crack without offending its other constituents or losing its progressive identity, which is exactly what’s been happening since 1992 when Clinton made a last charge through Dixie and barely managed to get 43% of the national popular vote. In this article by Schaller in The Democratic Strategist, you can see that the statistics tell the story. By all measures of gender,age, religion, family/marital status, occupation and socioeconomic status, the demographics strongly favor conservative Republicanism in the south for the foreseeable future.
And more strikingly, it’s quite clear that as much as attitudes about race are losing their salience in the rest of the country, it remains a strong predictor of voting Republican in the south. From Rick Perlstein’s article called “The unspoken truth about the GOP. Southern Discomfort” in The New Republic:

The very heart of his argument is a taboo notion: that the South votes Republican because the Republicans have perfected their appeal to Southern racism, and that Democrats simply can’t (and shouldn’t) compete.

But, among scholars, this is hardly news. Schaller builds this conclusion on one of the most impressive papers in recent political science, “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South,” by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears. Running regressions on a massive data set of ideological opinions, Sears and Valentino demonstrate with precision that, for example, a white Southern man who calls himself a “conservative,” controlling for racial attitudes, is no less likely to chance a vote for a Democratic presidential candidate than a Northerner who calls himself a conservative. Likewise, a pro-life or hawkish Southern white man is no less likely–again controlling for racial attitudes–than a pro-life or hawkish Northerner to vote for the Democrat. But, on the other hand, when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions (such as whether one agrees “If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites,” or choosing whether blacks are “lazy” or “hardworking”), an untoward result jumps out: white Southerners are twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Schaller’s writes: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters … the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”

I read the paper Perlstein mentions and this is not a misrepresentation. It shocked the hell out of me.

Now, before everyone gets upset and thinks that we are saying all southerners are racists: the data does not say that. But when it comes to conservative white southerners, I’m sorry to say that the evidence is clear. When all is said and done, the thing that separates them from the rest of the nation is racism. All the racial codes, the slick misdirection, even the appeals to homophobia and religion are in some sense directed at this one simple characteristic. And that characteristic is the thing that trumps all the other concerns about economic justice that Democrats persist in believing they can use to persuade white southern males to vote for them. Democrats simply cannot thread that needle.

Schaller does not “write off the south” as so many assume. Indeed, he explicitly endorses Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy to build for the future and ensure that Democrats are prepared to step in where opportunities present themselves. What he is saying is it is impossible for Democrats to currently win nationally by trying to appeal to the southern conservative majority, which seems to me to be an obvious point. You can’t be all things to all people.

Yet we have seen for decades now a concerted effort to persuade the Dems that they must appeal to NASCAR dads and “the heartland” and “evangelicals” and all the other cultural signifiers that relate closely to the conservative south. But that’s not where the votes for us are and the more we try to get them, the less appealing we are to everyone else. As Schaller persuasively shows, there are plenty of votes to be had among blue collar workers in the upper mid-west and among the less traditionalist and religious types in the west and southwest. These appeals offer the possibility of emphasizing areas on which we agree instead of compromising on fundamental issues on which we never can. Schaller’s “diamond demography” chapter shows exactly where the Dems stand the most to gain.

The fact is that it is the Republicans who have backed themselves into a corner. By allowing their southern wingnuts to dominate they have marginalized themselves and are losing their appeal to the country as a whole.

Here’s Harold Myerson in the Washington Post:

You’ve seen the numbers and understand that America is growing steadily less white. You try to push your party, the Grand Old Party, ahead of this curve by taking a tolerant stance on immigration and making common cause with some black churches. Then you go and blow it all in a desperate attempt to turn out your base by demonizing immigrants and running racist ads against Harold Ford. On Election Day, black support for Democrats remains high; Hispanic support for Democrats surges. So what do you do next?

What else? Elect Trent Lott your deputy leader in the Senate. Sure locks in the support of any stray voters who went for Strom in ’48.

In case you haven’t noticed, a fundamental axiom of modern American politics has been altered in recent weeks. For four decades, it’s been the Democrats who’ve had a Southern problem. Couldn’t get any votes for their presidential candidates there; couldn’t elect any senators, then any House members, then any dogcatchers. They still can’t, but the Southern problem, it turns out, is really the Republicans’. They’ve become too Southern — too suffused with the knee-jerk militaristic, anti-scientific, dogmatically religious, and culturally, sexually and racially phobic attitudes of Dixie — to win friends and influence elections outside the South. Worse yet, they became more Southern still on Election Day last month, when the Democrats decimated the GOP in the North and West. Twenty-seven of the Democrats’ 30 House pickups came outside the South.

The Democrats won control of five state legislatures, all outside the South, and took more than 300 state legislative seats away from Republicans, 93 percent of them outside the South…

The one strategist who fundamentally predicted the new geography of partisan American politics is Tom Schaller, a University of Maryland political scientist whose book “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South” appeared several months before November’s elections. Schaller argued that the Democrats’ growth would occur in the Northeast, the industrial Midwest, the Mountain West and the Southwest — areas where professionals, appalled by Republican Bible Beltery, were trending Democratic and where working-class whites voted their pocketbooks in a way that their Southern counterparts did not. Al Gore carried white voters outside the South, Schaller reminded us; even hapless John Kerry came close.

I would suggest that there are a couple of other reasons why Schaller’s theory is sound, which he doesn’t mention. While the party is listening to the likes of Amy Sullivan about how to compromise on abortion rights so as to appeal to conservative evangelicals, there is a resurgence of ideological progressivism throughout the country and we are not going to sit still for anybody running against us latte swilling liberals anymore. It would behoove the party to factor that into their calculations and see if they can find a way to properly respect their left flank while reaching out to swing voters.

I also suspect that the progressives in the south, with the help of the 50 state strategy, are going to begin to work harder than ever on that stubborn old region from the grassroots — and netroots — up. If they want us, we are here to help our southern brothers and sisters, many of them African American and our most loyal voters, to change that political dynamic once and for all. There’s nothing that says just because the conservatives have ruled pretty much forever that they always will. Where there are candidates who want to run, even if it’s a long shot, we will do what we can to help them just as we did this time — and we’ll be trainspotters for the national party to see where the soft spots are.

But the national party must forge an identity that makes sense, that conveys what we stand for and what our values are. And we cannot do that if we continue to try to split the difference on these culture war issues and tailor our message to some mythical southern white conservative whom we think will vote for us if only we wear the right clothes and carry a shot gun. The data shows that unless we start running “call me, Harold” ads, that isn’t going to work on those guys. (And, btw, the southern conservative women vote pretty much the same way — no gender gap in the south.) Until further notice, they are the southern majority. We’ll do better in places where we can make a case based on economic populism and civil liberties that is untainted by a majority that are still too influenced by racism and fundamentalist religion to even meet us part of the way.

The proof is in the pudding. If Democrats can gain power we can begin to make a real case for progressivism in the south based upon progressive achievement.

(I do disagree with Schaller’s belief that the Democrats could turn South Carolina into the “Taxachusetts” of the south — meaning that we could use it as a symbol of being out of touch with the mainstream. I don’t think it would work. That kind of thing works for the Republicans because they are exploiting an existing grievance among a group of right wingers who are perpetually aggrieved. Those guys have been railing against the yankees since before the country was even a country. It’s peculiar to their own sense of regional pride.)

Now keep in mind that for every assertion I’ve made here, there are a hundred qualifiers and data points that Schaller’s book addresses. He believes that the south will eventually become more progressive from the outside rim inwards, hence the win in Virgina. He sees Florida as a different kind of southern state and subject to a different analysis. There are many other fascinating details that only reading the book will fully satisfy.

I should also take the time to point out that it is an entertaining read for such a dry subject. Schaller spares no important data — it’s a work of scholarship. But it’s written in the lively style that those of us who’ve been reading his posts at Daily Kos, the Gadflyer and TAPPED for the last few years have come to enjoy. It is a very breezy read for a work of social science.

Public Interest Versus Private Greed

by poputonian

A few posts ago, Hullabaloo regular llamajockey and I had a little sidebar about healthcare in Indiana. I was very pleased to hear that Michael Moore’s latest work Sicko will be looking closely at two Indiana corporations: Eli Lilly and Anthem/Wellpoint. With regard to the history of Anthem/Wellpoint, the link below to the Consumers Union details how, in Indiana, two nonprofit corporations from the 1940s became the publicly-traded, for-profit Anthem, Inc., which itself would later become Wellpoint:

Conversion and Preservation of Charitable Assets of Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans: How States Have Protected or Failed to Protect the Public Interest

Indiana Blue Cross and Indiana Blue Shield were created in the 1940s. In 1985, the two plans merged and changed their name to Associated Insurance Companies, Inc. In 1989, Associated created a wholly-owned subsidiary, Accordia, Inc., to handle insurance brokerage, claims administration, underwriting management and employee benefit consulting services. Associated conducted an initial public offering of Accordia stock in 1992 and in 1996, the name was changed to Anthem Insurance Companies. Anthem, a mutual insurance company, has purchased BCBS plans in Colorado, Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire and Ohio.

In February 2001, Anthem announced its intention to convert from a mutual insurance company to a stock corporation (“demutualization”), and filed its demutualization plan with the Indiana Department of Insurance in June 2001. The plan deprived policyholders in Colorado, Maine, Nevada and New Hampshire of any right to receive shares in the new company whereas policyholders in Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio were eligible. Consumer groups in all Anthem states (the eight already owned by Anthem along with soon to be acquired Kansas) concerned about the potential impact of this conversion on health care coverage, encouraged regulators in the Anthem states to review the transaction carefully and to impose conditions that would protect current and future policyholders. Despite this request of the multi-state coalition, only the Indiana Department of Insurance conducted a public hearing – as required by state law. The hearing was held in Indianapolis (Anthem’s home base) in October 2001 and was quickly followed by the approval of the Indiana Insurance Commissioner. Subsequently, Anthem launched its IPO to become a publicly traded for-profit company.

So next came the obligatory attaboy (tongue-in-cheek) for Anthem CEO, Larry Glasscock and his helpers (yes, it really says merit pay):

Anthem Chief To Get Merit Pay Of $42.5 million

The top executive at Anthem Inc. will receive a $42.5 million stock-and-cash award for guiding the company as it became the state’s largest firm and now stands to become the nation’s largest health benefits company.

Larry C. Glasscock will receive the merit-based performance award over the next three years on top of his salary, bonus and other compensation of $3.73 million last year. It’s the most compensation Glasscock has received since he became the company’s chief executive in 1999 and helped convert it to a publicly traded concern in 2001.
…
The large cash-and-stock awards for Anthem executives — based largely on the firm’s profits from 2001 to 2003 — are some of the biggest ever seen in corporate Indiana. The company reported net income of $743 million in 2003, up 41 percent from the previous year.

Award amounts of $16 million each went to Glasscock’s two highest-ranking associates: executive vice presidents David R. Frick, an attorney and former Indianapolis deputy mayor, and Michael L. Smith, a former chief executive of moving company Mayflower Group.

In addition, the president of Anthem Midwest, Keith R. Faller, will get a stock-and-cash award of $11.9 million, while Anthem Southeast President Thomas G. Snead Jr. got $4.36 million.
…
If Anthem acquires WellPoint Health Networks of California this summer, as expected, Anthem will have grown during the past decade from a one-state, nonprofit Blue Cross-Blue Shield licensee to a public company that handles the health benefits of one of every 10 insured Americans.

Then, in 2003, Anthem indeed swallowed Wellpoint. Oligopoly Watch reported on those details:

Big Healthcare Merger

Indiana-based Anthem, one of the largest managed care companies in the US announced it will acquire California-based WellPoint Health Networks for about $16.4 billion (a cash and stock deal). The new company will operate under the WellPoint name but will have its headquarters in Indianapolis. In fact, Anthem is the smaller company. Anthem has a market capitalization of around $11 billion, while WellPoints’s is around $12 billion.

According to the Wall Street Journal (“Anthem to Acquire WellPoint Health”, 10/27/2003).

The transaction brings together two of the nation’s largest providers of Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, with about 26 million members. More importantly, it will transform the Blue Cross and Blue Shield name into a truly national brand for the first time. The Blue plans currently operate under license from a nonprofit association but are owned by different companies.
…
Both WellPoint and Anthem have a long history of acquisitions as they have grown from single-state Blue Cross/Blue Shield providers to major national managed care chains. While Blue Cross was once existed only as independent state programs, in recent years, there has been a frenzy of acquisitions as one after another has been snapped up by the larger managed care oligopolies.

WellPoint started in 1942 as the managed care of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of California.

*In 1996, WellPoint acquired the health insurance division of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company.
*In 1997, that was followed by the group health division of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance.
*In 2000, it bought up PrecisionRx, a mail-order pharmacy, along with Rush Prudential Health Plans of Illinois
*In 2001, Cerulean Companies, Inc.-parent company of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia.
*In 2002, WellPoint acquired RightChoice, the parent company of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Missouri and of the Healthlink network. The company also acquired the MethodistCare HMO in Texas.
*WellPoint in August 2002 just completed acquiring Cobalt Corp. Cobalt was founded by the merger of Blue Cross & Blue Shield United of Wisconsin and United Wisconsin Services, Inc
…
The Anthem name was invented in 1997. In 2002, Anthem acquired Trigon Healthcare of Virginia for $4 billion. On the other hand, this August, it got a rebuff when its attempt to acquire Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Kansas was ejected by the Kansas Supreme Court, citing competition reasons.

According to the WSJ, “The deal will be one of the year’s largest mergers, and is likely to trigger other unions among providers of managed care.
…
Most analysts expect that things will not be so great for “members” or medical providers like doctors and hspitals. Anthem in particular has had a growing number of complaints about its prompt payment for treatments. As an oligonomy, these new healthcare giants can squeeze on both sides to make money, and they tend to squeeze hard. With headquarters remote from the people they serve and less competition all the time, the incentive for good service is slackening.

So how have the Anthem/Wellpoint executives fared post-merger?

Health Insurance CEOs Feast On Exec Pay

Executives at WellPoint have enjoyed a cornucopia of compensation in recent years.

The wealth came as the new WellPoint, headquartered on Monument Circle, was created from the $20.8 billion merger of Anthem of Indiana and WellPoint Health Networks of California.

Since then, 31 current and former WellPoint insiders have sold more than $500 million worth of company stock, according to insider trading data tracked by Thomson Financial. Those sales, along with exercising stock options, have given those insiders gains well in excess of $150 million.
…
WellPoint, which provides health insurance to more than 34 million people nationwide, says its executive compensation policies are designed to recruit and retain top talent in a competitive marketplace.Company spokesman Jim Kappel said those executives help WellPoint in “delivering more benefit to its members than ever before while helping to hold down the rising costs of health care.”

Delivering more benefits and holding down costs? For the residents of Indiana? Since the original BCBS public-interest, nonprofit charters were converted for private gain by self-interested sharks? Yes, says the Anthem-Wellpoint web-site (see the “About Us” tab):

Our mission is to improve the health of the people we serve. At Anthem, we believe the best health care coverage can actually help people stay healthy. That’s why we go beyond simply providing health care coverage. We help encourage members’ wellness by:

-Offering large networks of some of the region’s best physicians, specialists and hospitals.
-Reminding members to have important preventive screenings.
-Providing programs and information to help manage chronic health conditions.
-Offering related services including dental coverage, life insurance and pharmacy benefits management.

We work with physicians, hospitals and other providers to help ensure that care is accessible, coordinated, timely and provided in a manner and setting that promotes positive patient-provider relationships.

But no, says today’s Indianapolis Star:

More than a half-million Hoosiers have no health insurance, an uninsured rate among the highest in the nation. To make matters worse, compared with other states, we’re not very healthy. Too many of us smoke, are overweight and lack childhood immunizations, with rates far above the national average. These lead to higher medical bills, for which you, the taxpayer, help pay.
…
Indiana’s alarming health statistics
• 561,000: Hoosiers without health insurance on any given day.

• $953: additional amount each family with health insurance paid in premiums in 2005 to cover the uninsured.

• 10,200: children under 18 who start smoking each year.

• 160,000: children now under 18 who will die prematurely from smoking.

• Second: number of adult smokers compared with other states.

• 10th: percentage of adults who are overweight/obese.

• 22%: children do not receive requisite immunizations by their second birthday and lack immunization against preventable diseases.

You gotta love that invisible hand, working in mysterious ways to create private wealth out of the public good. And who sits on the Wellpoint Board and has apparently enjoyed seven-figure gains from some of these private transactions? Susan Bayh, wife of Indiana Senator and former presidential hopeful, Evan Bayh.Sicko indeed.UPDATE: Commenter tofubo notes the President’s uncle Bucky Bush is also on the Wellpoint Board.