Mr. Deity: Luck

As a political philosophy, this isn't half bad, is it?

We've been here before

Do women walk around naked in women's restrooms? Are there no doors on the stalls? Do you just sit side by side, chatting with your neighbor?

Indecent exposure is still a crime. Nothing about transgender policy would change that. So what's the problem?

Now, in a men's room, there are urinals. But for some reason, we don't hear about the problem of women standing beside a man at one of those. (Admittedly, I probably wouldn't notice, because I don't look at the people peeing beside me, let alone at their genitals!)

As Trevor Noah points out, we've been here before. We've been here when racists were outraged about the idea of sharing a restroom with a black person. We've been here when homophobes were outraged at the idea of sharing a restroom - or a shower - with a gay person. It's the same thing.

Well, not quite, because transgender people are a tiny fraction of the population. If you're not one of them, chances are good that you will never have a problem or even anything that you could imagine as a problem. Indeed, they've always existed, and we've never had a problem before now. Do you routinely inspect the genitals of every person you share a restroom with?

For transgender people, this is a problem. It's a problem they face every day. But for the rest of us, it's not. For the rest of us, it's just bigotry or acceptance.

PS. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend this video. Transgender rights haven't been on the radar for most of us for very long. Ignorance is understandable, but can - and should - be corrected.

John Oliver: abortion laws

John Oliver has been off the air for a couple of months or so. I've missed him. Oh, I've never actually watched his entire show, but I've certainly missed these video clips. He does a great job, doesn't he?

John Oliver makes me miss Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a little less. Well, maybe not much less. But he's definitely their spiritual successor, wouldn't you agree?

(Yes, I know that Stephen Colbert is still on the air, but his new show isn't anywhere near as good as the Colbert Report used to be. Right now, I'd say that John Oliver is the best at this sort of thing, followed by Seth Meyers. I watch Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore, too, and I enjoy both of them, but I've still got to give the nod to Oliver and Meyers.)

John Oliver: sex education

With Jon Stewart gone - and Steven Colbert, at least in his Colbert Report persona - at least we still have John Oliver.

Bristol Palin and the failure of abstinence

Why do I care that Bristol Palin is pregnant again? Normally, I wouldn't care anything about Bristol Palin - or any other 'celebrity.'

But Palin was the highly-paid spokesperson for abstinence-only sex education even when she'd had one unplanned child out of wedlock. She's still unmarried, and this is her second accidental pregnancy. She should be the spokesperson for the complete and utter failure of abstinence-only sex education.

Of course, that wouldn't pay so well, huh? And it wouldn't fit in with right-wing dogma, which is never fazed by reality.

Still, can you imagine if this had been one of President Obama's daughters? Can you imagine the talk on Fox 'News'? Can you imagine how right-wing pundits would be condemning Obama - and 'black culture' in general? Why no obsession about 'white culture' here?

Even in the 2008 election, with Republicans celebrating the Palin family, including this unmarried mother who was supposedly going to marry the baby's father (which never happened), I thought the contrast was incredible. This was a white, right-wing Christian family, so of course it was fine. And, of course, it would never shake their faith in abstinence-only sex education. Reality doesn't matter to these people.

And then Bristol Palin was hired by Candie's Foundation as a highly-paid 'ambassador' for abstinence. (Did I say "highly-paid"? Apparently, she was paid $262,000 in 2009 alone! Not your typical unwed mother, huh?) Somehow, she'd become a celebrity herself. And somehow, she was supposed to be an expert on teen-pregnancy. Somehow, this was supposed to promote abstinence-only sex education.

Well, now she's pregnant again. Again, it was an accident. Of course, she's still unmarried. But she's still white, too, in a right-wing Christian family. Again, can you imagine if this were one of Barack Obama's daughters?

I'm with Cenk here. If Bristol Palin would admit that she'd been wrong to push abstinence, that would be different. If she came out as a strong supporter of comprehensive sex education, a strong advocate of making birth control easily available to all women, condemning abstinence for failing in real-life experiences, that would be different.

But as far as I can tell, she's not. She's still a well-paid celebrity, for some bizarre reason. This won't stop that. If anything, it will just enhance her as a celebrity. She probably won't change her mind about abstinence. Her parents certainly won't. Right-wing Palin fans certainly won't.

This is faith-based thinking. You don't change your dogma just because it's been demonstrated to be wrong - not even when that's demonstrated over and over again.

But can we just recognize how very, very different this would be if she had been one of Barack Obama's daughters, instead of Sarah Palin's?

John Oliver: Bail

Over and over again, John Oliver keeps pointing out big problems which have slipped through the cracks - or, at the very least, problems which I've missed previously, myself.

Bail is entirely outside my life experience. I've never posted bail. I don't think I've ever even known anyone who had to post bail. And I certainly don't watch 'reality TV.' So it's just completely foreign to me.

That's not to say it isn't important, of course. But I had no idea this was going on.

John Oliver isn't just carrying on in the tradition of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. He isn't just a worthy successor. He's bringing up important issues that they didn't (at least, as far as I know). I'm really, really impressed - and grateful that he posts these clips on YouTube.

Happy Mother's Day

Yeah, so I'm a day late. Oh, well, this is still an important video.

Marriage

(xkcd)

No, I'm not going to blog about marriage! :) But I thought this graph was interesting.

I remember reading that, at the time, only 15% of Americans approved of the Supreme Court decision legalizing interracial marriage (and that was in 1967!). Heck, some people still don't approve of it.

But civil rights don't depend on majority support. Well, as a practical matter they do, since as a people, we still have to believe in minority rights. But in modern democracies, "minority rights" is the flip side of "majority rules,"... and arguably even more important.

But look how badly popular approval of interracial marriage lagged - and still lags - its legalization. It's different with same-sex marriage, probably because, as gay people have left the closet, most Americans have come to realize that they have friends, co-workers, and even family members who are gay.

That makes a huge difference. Given our legacy of racism and segregation, most Americans - most white Americans, certainly - don't have friends, co-workers, and family members of another race. Coming out of the closet, as difficult as that was for many homosexuals, was hugely important to the LGBT community.

And to change the topic a bit here, that should provide a lesson for us atheists, too. Note this quote from the latest Pew Research study on How Americans Feel about Religious Groups:

Knowing someone from a religious group is linked with having relatively more positive views of that group. Those who say they know someone who is Jewish, for example, give Jews an average thermometer rating of 69, compared with a rating of 55 among those who say they do not know anyone who is Jewish. Atheists receive a neutral rating of 50, on average, from people who say they personally know an atheist, but they receive a cold rating of 29 from those who do not know an atheist.

I'm not particularly concerned at the low rating of atheists, even from people who know one of us. Partly, that's because we really have nothing in common, except just that we don't believe in any gods. That's really a very minor detail, nothing to hold us together in any positive sense. (Atheists aren't even, necessarily, skeptics.)

But also, atheists are threatening to Christians and other believers in a way that members of other religions will never be. After all, if you're a Christian, you're not going to convert to Judaism or Hinduism or Islam. Yes, converts do happen, but very rarely. The whole idea would be laughable to most people.

No, the risk to believers is that they'll just stop believing the religion they were raised to believe. By and large, they're not at risk of switching to some other superstition, but they do fear losing their faith entirely. There's a reason why they fear atheists, and it has nothing to do with what kind of people we are.

But as with homosexuals, it still matters that they know an atheist. Well, they do know an atheist, almost certainly. But most atheists remain in the closet. You might have a good reason for that. I'm not urging anyone to out themselves if it's going to cause them problems.

But for the rest of us, it's important that we be open about our non-belief. We should learn that from the struggle for gay rights.

OK, I'm getting a bit off the subject here, huh? But you're not actually surprised by that, are you? Heh, heh. It certainly happens often enough!

Sexual/domestic violence and men

In my last post, I quoted Warren Buffett: "Fellow males, get onboard." Well, this guy has the same attitude. I like it.

But don't go to YouTube and read the comments, not unless you want to lose all faith in humanity. Yeah, the 'men's rights activists' are voting this one down. They're angry, very angry, that anyone - especially a man - dares argue against violence directed against women (and against children, and against other men, too).

It's hard to imagine, isn't it? What is there in this video that could bring out such vitriol? But as I said before, these are men unhappy with competition. They either can't compete or they think they can't compete, so they're unhappy with losing the automatic status being a man used to confer.

Now they actually have to amount to something. Scary, isn't it?

Well, they're a minority of men. They're an angry, vocal minority, but they're still a minority. Jackson Katz here is more representative of our future - at least, if we don't let the haters have their way.

Catholic bishops condemn abortion bill

Just think about this:

Ireland’s Roman Catholic bishops say the public should lobby lawmakers to reject a bill that would allow abortions to save the life of the mother.

The bishops in a statement Friday say the bill represents “a dramatic and morally unacceptable change to Irish law.” ...

Ireland has the most severe restrictions on abortion in Europe. Thousands of Irish abortion-seekers travel annually to England, where abortions have been legal since 1967.

An uproar ensued last year when a woman died from blood poisoning after she was refused an abortion.

The Catholic Church has long been a power in Ireland. As the article states, Ireland has the most severe restrictions on abortion in Europe. And the power of the church has also led to other things, like child rape and the enslavement of young Irish women.

Last year, a woman died because she couldn't get an abortion to save her life. (Yes, the fetus died, too - funny how that works, isn't it?)

So now, the iron grip of the Catholic Church in Ireland seems to be slipping a bit - at least, enough for an exception to the ban on abortion when a woman's life is in danger. To Catholic bishops, though - celibate old men who think that they're experts on everything about women's reproduction and health (not to mention morality) - that's "morally unacceptable."

Just think about that. It is morally acceptable, apparently, to let young women die in agony, rather than let them have an operation that will kill a fetus which will likely die anyway. Well, the Catholic Church has never cared for women. No doubt that's their punishment for 'original sin,' huh?

Or do they really think that women want to get abortions? Do they somehow think that an abortion is a pleasant experience? Do they think that women are just naturally slutty, and that their evil nature needs to be controlled (and can be controlled) by denying them birth control and abortions alike - even when their life is in danger? What kind of fantasies do these old men have?

The Catholic Church is a patriarchal institution. Catholic women have no power at all. This would be plenty bad enough if it were women imposing their control on other women, but it's almost laughable (it would be laughable, if not for the tragic results) when it's celibate old men dictating to young women.

Why does anyone still belong to the Catholic Church? Well, I guess a lifetime of conditioning, with a heavy load of guilt (especially for women), is hard to throw off, isn't it?

Medical leave

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What kind of people have we become? Is this really the kind of country we want to be? How did we get to be such miserable, tightfisted, old misers?

Generosity used to be a good thing. Charity used to be a good thing. We used to sympathize with people in trouble, especially after an unexpected tragedy. But now?

What has happened to us? What has happened to America? Iowa deporting comatose accident victims? Las Vegas shipping off the mentally ill with one-way bus tickets?

And it's not because we're poor, but just because we don't want to spend any money. And, especially, that we don't want the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. The Bush tax cuts nearly bankrupted our country, and we still made them permanent for 98% of tax-payers!

Have we simply forgotten what it's like to be a community? Have we forgotten that we're social animals, that we're all in this together? Have we forgotten that we might be one disaster short of needing help, ourselves?

The wonder of lax zoning laws

(Daily Kos)

The fertilizer plant that exploded in West, Texas, probably hasn't received as much attention as it should, given the Boston Marathon bombing, too. It's really been a surfeit of disasters, hasn't it? But I wanted to post this image, which really drives home the problem of lax zoning laws.

From Daily Kos:

It's tragic enough that maybe three dozen were killed because of the gross negligence of the owners of West Fertilizer Co in West, Texas.

But compounding the carnage, it seems as if half the town was leveled including several schools and houses five blocks from the plant. But wait, there were houses five blocks from a fertilizer plant? There were actually houses across the street from this plant, and not just houses, but two of the town's three schools...

Fertilizer is a well-known component of homemade bombs for a reason—it's extremely explosive. The thought that people would build homes around a fertilizer plant boggles the mind, the thought that they would build two schools directly adjacent to it is borderline criminal. What if that explosion had occurred during school hours? ...

The middle school suffered severe fire damage. An apartment building adjacent the plant was completely leveled, killing about 15. See that tan circle off the northwest corner of the plant? That was a playground. A nursing home was within the blast radius and was completely leveled. You can see many more pictures of the damage here.

There is a reason zoning laws exist. But Texas being Texas, apparently the "freedom" to set up shop next to a bomb trumps everything else—including the lives and properties of far too many in West.

Now, I don't know what caused this explosion, but I really suspect that it's too early to be throwing around accusations of "gross negligence." That might be true, but let's wait for the evidence.

However, just look at that image! (Click it to enlarge the picture, if necessary.) That's why reasonable, rational people support zoning laws!

I grew up in a small town in Nebraska, and I can remember my Dad - a right-wing Republican if there ever was one - complaining that they couldn't get zoning laws passed in the town. So it's not just Texas, not at all. (Still, would any place but Texas put schools next to a fertilizer plant?)

No, government is not always the problem. And yes, we need regulations, because we're social animals. We live together in groups, and what you do can affect your neighbor, sometimes disastrously.

Reasonable people can disagree about the extent of zoning laws, and about the exact restrictions written into the law. But look at that image, and the one below, and tell me that we don't need zoning laws at all.

(Reuters)

More photos here. Make sure you've read this post from a volunteer at the retirement home, too.

Thomas Herndon and austerity's spreadsheet error

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I've already blogged about this one, too, on Monday, but I like how Stephen Colbert does it (as I like most of his stuff). Plus, he has an interview with Thomas Herndon, which is kind of fun.

And there are a couple of things about this I didn't know - for one, that the original paper hadn't been peer-reviewed. Peer-review is designed to catch these things before publication. This is a good example of why it's necessary.

Frankly, this is an example of the right-wing jumping all over a paper which was not peer-reviewed, just because it seemed to justify what they wanted to do already. Now, that's human nature, true, but it should be a cautionary tale for us all, not just the right-wing. (And I'll admit right now that I'm doing much the same thing here.)

But the other thing I didn't know is that Reinhart and Rogoff are sticking with their conclusions, despite admitting that the data doesn't back them up (or, at least, admitting to the spreadsheet error - I don't know about the rest of it). Well, they've got a lot riding on this. They've become rather famous in right-wing circles, with everyone citing their paper.

And this is just human nature, too. Social scientists - and physical scientists, as well - are still human beings. But in both cases, the consensus is what matters. No human being likes to be wrong, so we tend to be reluctant to admit being wrong. Luckily, none of us have any qualms about demonstrating that someone else was wrong, and that's what happens in both science and economics.

Herndon has made a name for himself - while still just a graduate student! - by demonstrating that Reinhart and Rogoff were wrong. Assuming he's right, that's really going to give his career a boost. Whether Reinhart and Rogoff change their mind or not isn't important, not really. What's important is the consensus of the experts.

Compare this to religion. Imagine how a priest would fare after demonstrating that the Pope was wrong! Each religion already claims to know the truth (although they can't agree on what that truth is), and heretics aren't ever welcome. In science - and in the social sciences - successful heretics are the heroes of their fields of expertise. In religion, they'd be lucky if they were just excommunicated.

What kind of irresponsible lunatic, indeed?

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It took awhile to get there, but I thought that conclusion was important. Paul Ryan is criticizing what he, himself, helped create. It's always more important to look at what these candidates do than what they say.

And note that most of the rest of that deficit is the direct result of the economic collapse, which happened during the previous administration, the Bush administration, and was also the result of Republican policies which Ryan still supports.

Jon Stewart continued with a very brief clip of John Hodgman (defending "Twilight") here, then got back to Paul Ryan:

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Yes, Paul Ryan, the new Republican idea man! Hmm,... remember Newt Gingrich, their last 'idea man'? Sadly, in both cases, they were all bad ideas.

In fact, they're such bad ideas that the Republicans don't even want to say them out loud.

Jon Stewart: "Basically, what he's saying is, the budget plans from the two of them are very different, but really mostly the same, although... 'we really haven't compared them yet'."

Heh, heh. Yeah, as usual, Mitt Romney doesn't know what he's for, since he's flip-flopped so many times he can't keep track. All he knows is that he's desperate to keep it a secret, whatever it is. (Tax returns, anyone?)

Now, you might argue that unpopular doesn't necessarily mean bad, and that's true. But this is a democracy. We're supposed to be informed voters. It's never smart to buy a pig in a poke.

Besides, we already know much of what Ryan has proposed and Romney endorsed. They want to eliminate Medicare, as we know it. Instead, they plan to give vouchers to seniors and let them try to find a health insurance company willing to insure them.

Yeah, good luck with that! I'm sure that corporations will be beating down the door to ensure my 86-year-old mother, won't they? Especially at the price of those vouchers?

Insurance companies don't want the old and sick. They make money from the young and healthy. And, of course, she'll have a great time searching for health insurance, at her age. Of course, that's not fun at any age.

And don't give me that crap about only destroying Medicare for those younger than 55. This will likely destroy Medicare long before I'm dead, no matter what cutoff age they use. And how about those younger people when they get to be 86? It's going to be just as hard on them.

Of course, these are Republicans. They don't think people care about anyone but themselves. Are they right?

Marriage: a man, a woman, and his prostitute

Apparently, more Nevadans - far more - support prostitution than support gay marriage.

From Indecision Forever:

A recent Public Policy Polling survey found that 66% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats and 58% of Independents agreed that brothels should be legal, as opposed to just 23% of all Nevada voters who believed they should be banned. Even the ideological landscape divide is muted, with 72% of "very liberal" voters supporting brothels compared to 50% of "very conservative voters."

But though there's no prohibition on gay sex in brothels, there is a prohibition on gay and lesbian partners forming state-sanctioned families together. And many brothel-supporting Nevadans would like to keep it that way. According to a recent survey, Nevadans are split on same-sex marriage by a 45-44% margin, with 67% of Democrats supporting equality, compared to just 20% of Republicans.

The results highlight the strength of traditional family values. After all, historically, marriage is an institution involving a man, a woman, and the the women with whom the man is cheating on his wife.

Yeah, we've got to support 'traditional' marriage, huh?

Radical feminist nuns

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I applaud these nuns, but you don't need Jesus in order to care for other people.

And they're voluntarily part of a right-wing patriarchal church. Women have no power in the Catholic Church. They know that. Celibate old men have it all. That's clearly shown in official church positions.

Well, it's a medieval institution which retains a medieval mindset. The Pope is the last vestige of the "divine right of kings" thinking from the Dark Ages, and it's very definitely a patriarchy.

The follow-up to this segment, Colbert's interview of Sister Simone Campbell is here. As I say, I admire what she's trying to do. I don't admire the superstition, though. I certainly don't admire the Catholic Church.

Sure, you can take whatever position you want from the Bible. Whatever your mindset, you can pick and choose the parts you like - and ignore or rationalize away the parts you don't. That's the whole problem with faith.

I'll gladly work with people like this on issues where we agree. But I still think that faith is no way to determine anything. I'd urge them to adopt evidence-based thinking, instead.

Give up the church. It's long past the time it should have withered away.

Jose Hernandez, the astronaut

Heck, these Mexicans are even taking our space jobs,  huh?  :)

This video clip was released by Jose Hernandez, who's running for Congress in California, after Republicans tried to keep him from listing "astronaut" as his profession. Nice response, huh?

From Indecision Forever:

It's pretty much the worst nightmare of every immigration restrictionist. They keep agitating for a higher and higher, double-walled, electrified border fence and here comes a son of migrant farm workers who can fly through space, fuck you very much. In any case, a state judge has ruled that Hernandez meets even the state's stringent guidelines for stating one's vocation on a ballot…

Judge Lloyd Connelly rejected Republican arguments that Hernandez did not work as an astronaut in the year before filing his candidacy and cannot list "astronaut/scientist/engineer" on the ballot as his occupation.

He said Hernandez is an astronaut for "more than the time spent riding a rocket." Hernandez left his job at NASA in January 2011, then worked at a technology company until October.

I, for one, am desperate to know what occupations the Republican presidential candidates will list for themselves on the California ballot, given the requirement to state "one's current profession, vocation, or one held during the previous calendar year." Traveling from state to state while begging for money is a requirement for running an effective campaign, but "professional vagrant" just doesn't have a presidential ring to it.

This shows what's good about America and a bit about what's bad. Hernandez is the son of Mexican immigrants, migrant farm workers, and according to his biography, he was not even fluent in English until age 12.

But he got an education, worked as an engineer and an astronaut, and is now running for Congress. A real success story.

Unfortunately, class mobility isn't as easy as it used to be, especially with college costs going through the roof. Indeed, America isn't even close to leading the world in social mobility these days, and with constant tax cuts, things are getting worse all the time.

You're in good shape if your parents are wealthy. If not, well, I guess you should have thought of that before you picked them, huh?

This picayune kind of maneuver from the Republicans is sadly typical, too. I'd like to claim that only Republicans do this, but all too often, Democrats do it, too - though usually even more ineptly. Well, that's politics, I guess.

The important point to remember is that America still works. Mexican immigrants, like every other immigrant wave in our history, have children who are Americans.

Republicans are actually proposing a permanent underclass for illegal immigrants and their children. No matter what, you can't be one of us. No, even the black president of the United States isn't a "real" American to these people.

I suggest we treat Hispanics just like every other ethnic group which has come here voluntarily - including all of my ancestors. Welcome them, treat them well, educate their children, and we'll end up with Americans just like you and me.

It's worked for America for hundreds of years, and it will still work. Or are we too bigoted, too cowardly, and too cheap to let it?

Six things rich people need to stop saying

Here's an article by David Wong at Cracked.com on the six things rich people need to stop saying. I think it's a great essay, probably because his reaction is so very similar to my own. But I have to wonder why anyone in the middle class would think otherwise.

I recommend that you read it yourself, but here are the six things, paraphrased a bit, with severely edited excerpts and a few brief comments of my own:

#6 - Well, this might sound like a lot, but it's not easy making it on $400,000 a year, or $500,000 a year, or $600,000 a year, or...

Yeah, the more you make, the more you spend. But most Americans are making it on a lot less than you are. Do you understand why it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for the rich? Especially the rich who whine about how hard they have it?

Hell, you've probably heard it in real life, from a boss or some guy sitting nearby at Starbucks. "I guess I'm considered rich now! Well, if I'm so 'rich,' why am I broke at the end of the month?!?" Uh, I think it's because your mortgage is $3,000 a month, since you live in a fucking palace. And because you took your family on that Disney cruise last summer. And because you pay for your kids' college, so that, unlike us, they won't be crushed under six figures of student loan debt at age 22. And because you eat all the best foods and drink the finest liquids.

Or, as Hamilton Nolan at Gawker put it, "'Sure, it's an objectively large sum of money,' they say. 'But it is far smaller after I spend it.'"

And yes, that's a very good post at Gawker, which also includes this line:

This argument is like a man eating a hearty meal, licking his plate clean, then turning to a starving person and saying, "Look, we're in the same boat. My plate is empty too!"

#5 - Hey, I worked hard to get what I have!

It's insulting for the exact same reason "Hey, I love my country!" is insulting: It implies that the listener doesn't. Otherwise there'd be no reason to say it.

It implies a bizarre alternate reality where society rewards you purely based on how much effort you exert, rather than according to how well your specific talents fit in with the needs of the marketplace in the particular era and part of the world in which you were born. It implies that the great investment banker makes 10 times more than a great nurse only because the banker works 10 times as hard.

I used to work nights, and I'd talk to the cleaning crew when they came in. Most of them had full-time jobs elsewhere, and when they left those, they went directly to that second job, and often to a third job, too, when the buses ran that late. But they were the working poor, nonetheless. With all of their jobs combined, they made less than I did.

You can work hard and still not be rich. In fact, the vast majority of Americans fit into that category. And those who aren't working hard are often just desperately trying to get a job in this terrible economy.

And the really crazy thing about this is that you hear it even from people who were born rich. Yeah, it's great that they're not just sitting on the couch, enjoying their unearned wealth without lifting a finger. But they started with every advantage. (Note that Mitt Romney was born rich, into a politically powerful family, and his kids are starting off with a $100 million trust fund. And yet, he wants to cut his own taxes even further and to eliminate estate taxes, to create even more of a hereditary aristocracy.)

Even if you weren't born rich, chances are that you got a good education, because we were still willing to pay taxes to support public schools back then. Thanks to our tax support, college tuition was still low enough that ordinary people could afford it. (Many kids, like me, could even manage to pay for their own education, simply by working part-time and summers.)

And if you were middle class, your parents probably made enough back then, back when wages and benefits for working families were decent, to help pay for college, if not pay the whole thing.

All we're asking now is for wealthy people to help support the same system that let them succeed.

#4 - To quote Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels: "We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots; we must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves."

How crazy is that? Everyone can't be rich. We could all be middle class, probably. But you can't have everyone on top. That's the whole point of being on top. It's mathematically impossible - not to mention just logically impossible - for everyone to be in the 1%.

So "anyone can get rich" isn't just untrue, it's insultingly untrue. You can't have a society where everyone is an investment banker. And you can't have a society where you pay six figures to every good policeman, nurse, firefighter, schoolteacher, carpenter, electrician and all of the other ten thousand professions that civilization needs to survive (and that rich people need in order to stay rich).

It's like setting a jar of moonshine on the floor of a boxcar full of 10 hobos and saying, "Now fight for it!" Sure, in the bloody aftermath you can say to each of the losers, "Hey, you could have had it if you'd fought harder!" and that's true on an individual level. But not collectively -- you knew goddamned well that nine hobos weren't getting any hooch that night. So why are you acting like it's their fault that only one of them is drunk?

How stupid do Republicans think we are that they'd even say something like that? The haves and soon-to-haves? I'm insulted that they think so little of our intelligence that they'd even try to make an idiotic argument like that! Do they think so little of the American people, that we'd actually be dumb enough to buy that?

#3 - You're just jealous. Or, as Mitt Romney says, "I think it's about envy. I think it's about class warfare."

But I don't hate Warren Buffett. Buffett makes more money in a year than I will in a lifetime, plus he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Am I jealous? Well, I'd certainly like to have Warren Buffett's money, just as I'd like to be able to fly like Superman. (They're both equally likely, I suspect.)

But I admire Warren Buffett. Buffett thinks that it's wrong that he pays a lower tax rate than middle class Americans. Unlike Mitt Romney, he's not trying to cut his own taxes even further. He's trying to make America a better place, even when it would cost him a little extra in taxes.

Hell, every Christmas we celebrate the tale of the wealthy Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. We hate him in the first part of the story, and then we love him by the end. Not because he gave away all of his wealth and became poor (he didn't), but because he stopped acting like a shithead. Do you get the incredibly subtle and nuanced message of that story? ...

And when we hate people, it's always for the same reason: They refuse to acknowledge that their power brings with it any responsibility. It's why we hate bullies and dictators and supervillains. It's why we hate people who benefit hugely from society and then pretend like they're living on an island with a population of only them.

#2 - You're punishing success. ("I never got a job from a poor person.")

There are two parts to this. Indeed, I think Wong should have made this list seven items, rather than six. But let's just dismiss the first part of this as quickly as I can. "Punishing success"? The rich have made out like bandits in recent years, because we've given them more and more tax breaks.

Those tax breaks have given us record-breaking budget deficits. And note that we need tax money. We pay taxes for a reason. Under a progressive tax code, which is what income taxes were always supposed to be, the people who are doing the best should pay more than the people who are doing poorly, partly because those are the people who have the money and partly because they can more easily afford to part with some of it.

And, after all, you became rich in our society, however you did it (even if you just inherited it). So why won't you support the society which made it possible for you to become rich and even just to be rich? And how is paying the same tax rate the wealthy paid in the 1990s, which itself was far less than in previous decades, "punishing" you?

Were we actually "punishing success" in the 1990s, the 1980s, the 1970s, the 1960s, the 1950s,...  You know, we had rich people back then, too. But we also had a flourishing middle class.

The second part of this,... well, I'll let Wong tell it:

... it's the concept of "You have your job because of a rich person."

This is true, I suppose, if that rich person inherited their money and you are personally working for them as a gardener. But if you are working at a Toyota factory, your paycheck doesn't come from under the mattress of the owner of the company. That money came from lots and lots of regular Joes who bought Toyota cars. The guys in suits are just middlemen between the supply and the demand.

So as for the popular talk radio joke, "I've never gotten a job from a poor person"? Well, Sean [Hannity], a lot of your listeners are poor, and your advertisers are paying you with money they made by selling goods to those poor people. So, yeah, the cash you make does in fact bear the smelly fingerprints of the lower classes. It's the same for somebody working at Walmart, or a grocery store, or a liquor store. You didn't get your job from a poor person, but collectively their money made it happen. Which is just a long way to say the obvious: That rich people don't make the world go around. It takes everybody.

#1 - Stop asking for handouts! I never got money from anybody!

Yeah, right. Sure you didn't.

I think your parents poured untold resources into your hungry mouth. I think you had a roof over your head that was paid for by other people, I think you went to schools that were built and staffed and paid for by other people, I think you felt safe because the streets were patrolled by other people, I think you drove to your three jobs on roads paved by other people, in a car built by other people and burning oil that was drilled by other people in a nation whose borders were defended by other people. ...

Kids, if you're reading this, and you fucking shouldn't be, but if you are, let me tell you now:

The world doesn't give a shit about you, and you'll have to wrestle it for every good thing you get. Hell, I've written an entire article about how grown-ups don't tell us how freaking hard everything is, and how the shock of unexpected effort trips us up.

But, for the rich, this somehow gets extended to the absolutely delusional idea that they exist on a purely self-sufficient island, in an ocean full of shiftless layabouts always asking to borrow their stuff.

No man is an island. No woman, either (but women tend to be smart enough to understand that). We are social animals. We've always been social animals. We live together in societies. We live or die, we survive, we prosper in societies. It's always been that way, since our species first evolved.

That's why I think that libertarians are batshit crazy. Individualism? Fine, but only to a point. Yes, you succeed on your own merits, on your own efforts, but only to a point. Only to a very, very limited point. We are all part of our societies. And those societies were built, and are maintained, by other people. We would have nothing without that.

If you live in my part of the country, you'll hear hard-working, rural farmer types say, "I got my own piece of land, I grow my own food, all I want is to be left alone." All right, well tell me this, cowboy:

Let's say some mean, even richer guy, like a wealthy gangsta rapper, hired a bunch of armed thugs to come take your farm. What would you do? Your shotgun won't fend them off -- they have a hundred bigger shotguns. What will you do, call the cops? That is, other people, who will risk their lives while being paid with still other people's tax money, who will try these bad guys in a court funded by yet other people's tax money, under laws passed by legislators paid with other people's tax money? Whoa, slow down there, welfare queen!

But if none of that stuff existed, there would be nothing stopping Jay-Z from taking your farm. In other words, you don't "own" shit. The entire concept of owning anything, be it a hunk of land or a house or a fucking sandwich, exists purely because other people pay other armed men to protect it. Without society, all of your brave, individual talents and efforts won't buy you a bucket of farts.

So when I say "We're all in this together," I'm not stating a philosophy. I'm stating a fact about the way human life works. No, you never asked for anything to be handed to you. You didn't have to, because billions of humans who lived and died before you had already created a lavish support system where the streets are all but paved with gold. Everyone reading this -- all of us living in a society advanced enough to have Internet access -- was born one inch away from the finish line, plopped here at birth, by other people.

Hey, I agree with every bit of this. And it's hard for me to see how anyone wouldn't. But some people, clearly, end up buying what rich Republicans are saying. Why? How can they possibly do that?

Is it just because there's a black man in the White House? Is it still so easy to think the worst of other people that Fox News can convince you that Democrats are taking your hard-earned money and giving it to lazy, shiftless black people? Are you actually gullible enough to believe that rich white men have your best interests at heart when they demand a lower tax rate for themselves?

Republicans have made a very successful political career out of their "Southern strategy." But for chrissake, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was nearly 50 years ago! We're in the 21st Century now! We have a world-wide global economy! We understand that people are people, whatever the color of their skin.

But in Mississippi, even today, barely more than half of Republicans think that interracial marriage should be legal. Legal, not just whether they think it's right. 29% think that interracial marriage should definitely be banned, and 21% in Alabama. Only 12-14% think that Barack Obama is a Christian. Would anyone question that if he were white?

And yeah, Republicans in other parts of the country might not be quite that crazy, but they're still eager to see him as a "socialist." Well, he's black. And they're not. And it's been my experience that white conservatives tend to see economics in social (i.e. racial) terms.

Scratch a Republican, even when talking about purely economic matters, and race isn't usually far beneath the surface. I'm sure there are exceptions, but my experience is more that they'll indignantly deny being racist, and then express some incredibly racist views.

I suspect that's how the Republican Party gets middle- and low-income Americans to support tax cuts for the rich. They package it up in cultural terms and use blacks and Hispanics as boogeymen. And since it's always easy to think the worst of other people, especially when you have little personal contact with them, it works.

The punanny state

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Is this really the kind of nation we want? Or would you rather keep the government out of your most personal, private matters?

Oddly enough, the self-described "small government" people want the government to be your gynecologist - with everyone else looking over his shoulder. Well, women can't be trusted to manage their own bodies, can they?

And, of course, they want the government to decide who you can and can't marry. Why? Well, because they think that sex is icky, and that gay sex is especially icky - so icky that they obsess about it every waking minute. Odd that, huh?

The Republican war on contraception

(The Maddow Blog)

First, we saw the Republican war on science. Then, the Republican war on voting. Now, it's the Republican war on contraception. What's next? How crazy can they get?

From Steve Benen:

As far as the White House is concerned, Friday's compromise on contraception coverage effectively ends the matter. Religiously affiliated institutions won't be required to pay for birth control, but women who work for these employers will still have access to the same preventive care as everyone else. As Tricia noted earlier, the West Wing doesn't see anything else to talk about.

Congressional Republicans strongly disagree. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) raised quite a few eyebrows yesterday when he endorsed a controversial proposal to allow all American employers to deny women contraception coverage altogether. [my emphasis]

"You know if we end up having to try to overcome the President's opposition by legislation, of course, I'd be happy to support it and intend to support it. It would be difficult as long as the President is rigid in his view that he gets to decide what somebody else's religion is. I assume he would veto it. But yeah, we will be voting on that in the Senate. And you can anticipate that that would happen as soon as possible."

Even McConnell couldn't believe the president wants to "decide what somebody else's religion is." It's such a strikingly dumb comment, chances are, the senator just got carried away in the moment.

But the larger concern has nothing to do with rhetoric, and everything to do with the GOP's increasingly-aggressive war on contraception. McConnell told CBS's Bob Schieffer, "The fact that the White House thinks this is about contraception is the whole problem. This is about freedom of religion."

At this point in the debate, that's just absurd.

Absurd, indeed.

First of all, there was nothing at all wrong with the original policy. From Religion Dispatches magazine:

Obama wasn’t being hostile or insensitive to religion. The rule as the Obama administration announced it on January 20 was constitutionally sound. Not only was it legally supportable, it was politically supported by a majority of Americans. Nonetheless, the objectors to the contraception coverage requirement claimed that even though it exempted houses of worship [my emphasis], the regulation should also exempt religious institutions whose hierarchies believe contraception is a sin. ...

Religious institutions already comply with very similar laws to the announced January 20 rule in 28 states. Catholic Charities challenged substantially similar laws to the new federal regulation in two states, California and New York, and the highest courts in both states held that there was no violation of the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. That’s because the law doesn’t “substantially burden” anyone’s religious practice and is one of general applicability that was not targeted at infringing a particular religious practice.

To permit religious beliefs to “excuse compliance with otherwise valid laws regulating matters the state is free to regulate,” would, the California Supreme Court wrote in its 2004 decision, quoting from a U.S. Supreme Court case, “‘make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.’”

Unfortunately, the Obama administration did not defend this perfectly normal, perfectly mainstream, perfectly constitutional decision. Yeah, that's become a real pattern for Democrats, hasn't it? It's really frustrating when they won't even defend winning positions. I've begun to cringe whenever I hear the word "compromise."

But - my second point - they did announce a compromise, and - I was pleasantly surprised - this one didn't just give away the store. In fact, it was quite workable, mostly since insurance companies wanted to offer contraception coverage for free, since it actually saves them money. Contraception, after all, costs them little compared to abortions and very little compared to pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care.

The Catholic Health Association quickly jumped on board, too. It looked like a win/win. Even though the original policy was perfectly fine as it was, this was a simple change to make everyone happy...

...Except, of course, for the President's right-wing political opponents, who happen to include Catholic bishops - celibate old men who think that they're experts in all matters concerning sex and family planning.

And there's a third reason why this is absurd. As Jesse Singal notes:

Earlier I said I was curious to hear more about Rick Santorum’s clearly impassioned stance on voting rights after he accused Mitt Romney of abusing the CPAC straw-poll process. Now I’m equally curious to get McConnell’s thoughts on the observant Muslim taxi drivers who refused to transport customers carrying alcohol back in 2007. How could he not support them? He is very concerned about freedom of religion.

The point is that you can't just give special benefits to your own religion. So what are these Republicans actually proposing? As it turns out, it's even crazier than I expected.

Back to Steve Benen:

As of Friday, Sens. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) were pushing measures to allow all private-sector employers, including those completely unaffiliated with any religious institution, to start denying health services that businesses might find morally objectionable. [my emphasis]

The proposals are aimed at blocking access to contraception, but as Igor Volsky noted, they're so expansive, "an insurer or an employer would be able to claim a moral or religious objection to covering HIV/AIDS screenings, Type 2 Diabetes treatments, cancer tests or anything else they deem inappropriate or the result of an 'unhealthy' or 'immoral' lifestyle. Similarly, a health plan could refuse to cover mental health care on the grounds that the plan believes that psychiatric problems should be treated with prayer."

The Obama administration's underlying goal is entirely straightforward: the law already makes preventive care free for all Americans, and officials believe access to contraception must be included as part of this coverage. If faith-based employers don't want to pay for this directly, the White House has already changed the policy to ensure they won't have to. [again, my emphasis]

The Republicans' underlying goal, at least of yesterday, is equally clear: no American employer should have to cover contraception, ever.

As Jonathan Cohn explained, this is simply untenable.

The Bishops' position, which the Republicans have now adopted as their own, is that religious leaders have the right to override that decision, even though it will affect employees who have no moral or religious qualms about birth control. Writing in Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan captured the Bishops' thinking perfectly: "Catholic doctrine should, according to the bishops' spokesman, also apply to non-Catholics." [...]

[T]he principle seems pretty clear to me. The Bishops want a veto over public policy. And the Republicans want to give it to them.

The "it's about religious liberty" talking point effectively died on Friday. The longer the GOP keeps up this fight, the more obvious the party's war on contraception will be. Given the support contraception access enjoys with the American mainstream, it's a fight Republicans are very likely to lose.

We can only hope Republicans lose on this, and lose big. Even Catholics, by a two to one margin, support the president on this. They want contraception covered in their insurance policies, because they disagree with their church on this (but have no control, themselves, over church matters, since the Catholic Church isn't a democracy).

The Catholic Health Association supports this, too, but despite representing more than 600 hospitals and 1,400 other health care facilities in the United States, Sister Carol Keehan and the other nuns have no authority in the church. They're just women, you see.

And the really, really crazy thing about this is that Republicans want to let employers stop providing health care, not just for contraception, but for anything they want. This should be a slam-dunk for President Obama. Unfortunately, the Republicans have Fox "News" and the increasingly right-wing Catholic hierarchy pushing lies for them. So, who knows?

***
Earlier today, I noted how liberal Christians want to take back their religion from the right-wing. (I say "take back," even though I doubt they ever had it in the first place.) As I said, that's all well and good, but I'd much prefer turning to evidence-based thinking, instead.

After all, if you believe by faith, how can you criticize someone else when his faith tells him to kill abortion doctors or fly passenger planes into buildings? After all, he's believing for the exact same reason you are, because he has faith.

Well, that Religion Dispatches column points out that liberal believers actually enabled the Catholic Bishops in this controversy:

President Barack Obama’s accommodation on the birth control coverage requirement was not legally or politically required. But by reacting to Democratic pundits’ amplification of the complaints of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other conservative Catholics, Obama’s actions may have the effect of strengthening the hand of Democrats who insist that the party needs to be more religious.  ...

Neither Obama nor his surrogates ever publicly defended his administration’s rule on these grounds [the grounds I mentioned above]. And because the ensuing media firestorm over the rule was not just driven by the usual conservative suspects, but by a handful of Democratic and liberal pundits, it took on a different hue. What made it a man-bites-dog story, and subject to the more scintillating horserace coverage the media adores, was that “even progressive Catholics” like E.J. Dionne and Michael Sean Winters were up in arms about it.

As I noted, this wasn't about freedom of religion. It was entirely a political attack from Barack Obama's political enemies. But all too many liberal believers were willing to go along with it. This is the problem when you've got your faith you're trying to defend, even when it conflicts with reason, evidence, and common sense.

When it comes down to a conflict, which do you choose to support - rational, evidence-based thinking or your faith? Do you stand for the separation of church and state when it really counts, or not? Oh, you'll always have a good excuse, no doubt, but it's easy to believe what you want to believe, isn't it? Especially if you're faith-based to begin with.

Burns Strider, the political strategist who, as an aide to Nancy Pelosi, launched the House Faith Working Group and later advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, complained to Politico, “There could have been a more inclusive conversation that included more members of the faith community” over the contraception coverage. He warned, “Electorally speaking, you can’t deny that we’re a nation of faith. In the public sphere, you ignore that at your own peril.” Another, anonymous strategist said, “They [the White House] don’t seem to have their finger on the pulse of the modern religious, Democratic-leaning voters, which is problematic.”

I would love to see the polling data which shows “modern religious Democratic-leaning voters” who planned to abandon Obama over this, like Winters pledged he would, or even opposed to the Obama policy. Where’s the evidence? It may be that Strider and his allies are grasping at straws; after all, two years ago they were miffed that the party didn’t contract with them to advise on congressional races. Later, Strider’s business partner, Eric Sapp, baselessly argued that it was the lack of religious outreach that caused the party’s losses in the 2010 midterms.

Nonetheless, the Young Democrats of America are relying on Sapp and Strider, along with the anti-choice, anti-gay marriage DNC faith outreach director the Rev. Derrick Harkins, to serve as “leading experts in Democratic religious outreach” for its 2012 Leadership Summit in March. [my emphasis, but for chrissake, isn't one faith-based political party enough?]

Time contributing editor Amy Sullivan has been critical of Obama for being “tone deaf” on the contraception issue and castigated liberals for their lack of “gratitude” for the Catholic Health Association’s role in passing health care reform. The CHA’s supposed heroism in the legislative battle would not have been necessary, however, had Democrats like Bart Stupak not insisted on holding up the legislation at the behest of the Bishops in the first place, based on false claims that it required taxpayer funding of abortion coverage. ...

After Obama announced the accommodation Friday, Sullivan tweeted that her book, The Party Faithful, would be helpful for “political institutions in recent firestorms.” In her book, Sullivan argued that Democrats needed to pay more attention to religious and anti-choice voters to win elections, charging that Democratic elites ignored this advice at their peril. One supposedly cautionary tale she related was how damaging it was that then-Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe didn’t recognize megachurch pastor Rick Warren when introduced to him at a social gathering.

After Obama won the election, though, he asked Warren to deliver the invocation at his inaugural, a gesture that somehow has eluded his critics who claim he is waging a “war on religion.” This week, at the height of the frenzy over the contraception rule, Warren demonstrated his “gratitude” to Obama when he tweeted, “I’d go to jail rather than cave in to a govement [sic] mandate that violates what God commands us to do.”

Sorry about the wall of text, but I couldn't cut it down any more. (I suppose you're used to that here, anyway, aren't you?)

But just think about that. Some believers aren't happy with just one explicitly Christian political party in America. They want two.

I'm not saying that Democrats need to be anti-religious, of course not. I'm saying that we need one political party which will stand up firmly for the separation of church and state. Appeasing believers isn't going to do any good if they're too dumb to understand how the separation of church and state benefits them, too!

Well, this just confirms my longstanding point that we need to encourage reason and evidence-based thinking. Your religion is your own business, and I don't have to agree with you about that in order to work with you where we do agree.

But on the other hand, I'm not going to support pandering to believers, either, even if they are liberal believers. I'm trying to work for a good world for all of us. If that's not enough for you, that's just too bad. Maybe you belong with the right-wing after all.