Kneecapping Your Own Quarterback (with update)

(see Update below)
So forty-seven U.S. Senators went and did a thing this weekend, where they sent a rather demeaning and error-filled letter to the Iranian government warning them that any treaty deal over stopping Iran's uranium nuclear-bomb projects will be meaningless:

...What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time...

The Senators are basically telling the Iranians "Screw it.  No matter what deal you make with Obama, we'll just vote it down or ignore it and if we get a Republican in the White House in 2016 you are all bombing targets."

One of the sins that these Senators committed: the whole "advise and consent" element in Article II of the Constitution is that the Senate should be advising OUR PRESIDENT and NOT advising the foreign power.  The Senators are openly influencing - through reckless intimidation - another nation into NOT dealing with our government over a possibly peaceful solution to a serious problem.  This sort of move reeks of war-mongering (the GOP wants a war with Iran, in case you hadn't noticed), this sort of move reeks of treason interfering with our government's ability to work with other nations.

The other sin is that this move reeks of the Senators being total assholes.

The Republicans have taken their 6-years-and-counting obstruction against Barack Obama and turned it into an international scandal.

There are certain things in politics, in the halls of power, you just don't do.  There are written rules of conduct, official checks and balances codified into the Constitution itself.  There are the unwritten rules of decorum and behavior, of ceremony and tradition where certain offices are granted a lot of leeway to get work done.  There's the common sense things where you don't go tugging on Superman's cape or spit into the wind.

It's been an unwritten rule since the days of Washington himself where the President, via his executive offices of the State Department, handles all the heavy lifting and deal-making of treaties with foreign nations.  In this, the Senate only comes in either as individual experts on certain topics or nations to consult with the President directly, and otherwise the Senate waits until a treaty gets signed before it comes to them for 2/3rds vote to ratify.  There was a sense of decorum about it: let the President handle the foreign policies as Head of State.

This letter nukes all of that, metaphorically and literally.  It's an open warning shot across the bow.  It's a blatant show of disrespect towards a President they've accused again and again of being un-American, and it's a disgusting display of obstruction no other President has ever had to cope with in the 220-plus years of our nation's dealings with the world.

I've looked at that Logan Act, the law making it a crime to interfere directly or indirectly with a President's ability to form treaties or deal with foreign powers.

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

I swear, that Senate letter reads to me like it's violating the part of the Act I've marked in bold.  The only thing that's keeping me from screaming about these Senators committing outright treason is that bit about "without authority of the United States."  As Senators, they DO have authority... but my question would be "do they have THIS kind of authority to directly parley or communicate with a foreign nation, in direct interference with the State Department which DOES have the authority? And in direct interference with the President of the United States who DOES have the authority?"

At what point did the Senate cross the line on the Logan Act?  They sure as hell crossed the line for decorum and decency with this bullshit stunt.  This is an open act of sabotage against the President of the United States.  A President in Barack Obama who's won two majority elections to serve as President.  A President who's been attacked again and again for no sane reason other than the Republicans being hateful bastards.

UPDATE: I think I found the answer to the question above ("At what point did the Senate cross the line on the Logan Act?").  There was a court ruling back in 1936 - U.S. vs. Curtiss-Wright Export - where the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the President using his powers to go after arms dealers selling to foreign nations/powers.  Part 9 of the ruling says "In international relations, the President is the sole organ of the Federal Government." To wit:

...In this vast external realm, with its important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems, the President alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation. He makes treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate; but he alone negotiates. Into the field of negotiation the Senate cannot intrude, and Congress itself is powerless to invade it... They think the interference of the Senate in the direction of foreign negotiations calculated to diminish that responsibility, and thereby to impair the best security for the national safety...

I really believe the 47 Senators broke the law: they calculated to diminish President Obama's responsibility to negotiate with the world.  I really believe they should be charged and held accountable.  The Logan Act requires it.  The Supreme Court confirms it.  The only question now should be "who has standing to file the charge?"  If it's Obama, dammit man NOW is the time to fight the fire burning down our political system.  If it's the State Department, your very office DEMANDS you secure your ability to negotiate with foreign powers.  If it can be someone in the Senate, dammit Democrats MAN UP.

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The Republicans Are Working EXACTLY As Advertised: Bad And Worse

What did you expect?

Congress managed at the last minute on Friday night to avert a partial shuttering of the Department of Homeland Security, passing a one-week funding measure for the agency. President Obama signed it shortly before the midnight deadline.

The deal came together after a whirlwind day of negotiations in which the House Republican leadership suffered a humiliating defeat when its 20-day funding bill was rejected. The arrangement is expected to prolong talks about longer-term DHS funding until at least early next week.

All this really did was push the argument down the road for another week.  The same problem is there, and the same roadblocks by the extremists are still up.

What did you expect when you put in power a political party whose ideology is that government is either dysfunctional or deserving of shutdown?

When you hire a plumber who believes the piping in your house is the wrong material, what do you expect when that plumber refuses to fix it and allows the house to collapse when the pipes break? When you call Animal Control about the bear in your kitchen, and the Animal Control guy claims the bear is not real because the last reported bear sighting was 12 years ago and besides we're better off leveling the forest next month to make sure there aren't any bears by then, what did you expect when your house got vandalized by that bear and your property value was decimated when the surrounding neighborhood got napalmed? What did you expect when you vote in a politician who believes government is a problem, and then refuses to do the job just to prove that belief?

I'm reminded of what Andrew Sullivan wrote before the 2010 midterms when the GOP threatened to reclaim the House, where he argued that being in a position of authority would force the increasingly partisan Republican Party to pull back and govern responsibly: "If they win back the House, as it seems inevitable they will, they will have to offer something at last instead of criticizing everything in comically tired tropes..." That never happened: the GOP got worse because their own echo chamber convinced them they won power on merit rather than false advertising.  Even Sullivan realized that the month after those midterms.

The results of 2014 proved the same: they barely governed - fewest bills passed in ages - and consistently behaved incompetent, ignorant, and obstructionist, leading up the Long October of a government shutdown that many Americans blamed them for creating.  Even in the face of all that, the Republicans profited from terrible voter turnout and even more partisan campaigning and won control of both houses of Congress as well as more state offices.

Republicans are not learning any lessons of accountability because they're never held accountable at all.  They were blamed for the Long October shutdown: They won more seats and power that following election.  Negative Reinforcement of the worst kind.  Every electoral win convinces them that their "message" is right and true and accepted by all even when polling shows majorities of Americans disagreeing with Republicans on things like taxing the rich and gay marriage, even when a majority of Americans hate the job they're doing, or back Obama's agenda on immigration.  Because they've rigged elections with gerrymandering and purposeful voter suppression, and pretend otherwise.

The Republicans ideology is that "government is bad", full stop.  This defines their push to cut taxes and cut social welfare programs and cut nearly everything that makes the government function to serve the needs of the people.  This defines their push to deregulate and privatize everything on the assumption that the private sector can self-regulate and provide effective services, even though centuries of public sector work and centuries of private-sector graft and corruption have proven otherwise.

This threat of Homeland Security shutdown is all happening as a backdrop to the CPAC gathering, where Presidential wannabes pander to the wingnut factions to curry early momentum.  None of the potential candidates have called on the failures of the Congressional GOP.  None of them are honestly advocating for good governance.

They are all campaigning on killing schools, killing the social safety nets, killing worker rights, killing foreigners, and killing civil liberties.  The final, purest expression of the social conservatism of the Southern Strategy.  The southern conservatives that drove the horrors of human history of the 19th century and perpetuated that horror in the shadows of the 20th century will achieve their victory in the 21st century: a federal government in ruins, the poor shackled and sick, injustice for many except the elite.

This is what you keep voting for, Americans, especially when you refuse to show up and vote for saner alternatives.  This is what you get when you hire people whose pre-ordained mythology drives them to destroy the very institutions you've allowed them to take control of.

And like suckers buying toxic snake-oil, you're going to keep buying this swill until everyone is poisoned, and everything truly collapses.  And by then it will all be over but the tears.

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Be True - And Fact-Based - To Your School

I mentioned once that I took AP American History back in the day.  It was one of the various classes that helped towards earning college credits - studying for the Advanced Placement exams, where if you scored 3 to 5 on the exam(s) you garnered those credits on that topic - while surviving high school.

It's a big deal for any high schooler aiming to get a college degree.  Get a lot of AP credits through a national program, look good to potential universities while doing it, find yourself earning a way to a major institution - in this case William and Mary WILL do, thank you Steely Dan - that can open doors when you hit the job market.

So what happens when a county school board decides to mess with the Advanced Placement program?  When a school board controlled by a Far Right contingent obsessed with re-writing history - of white-washing it - decides to edit the books and the exam materials to remove any history of civil protest and questioning of authority?

You get Jefferson County (Colorado) School Board, where a thousand students marched in protest - I think this counts as irony, teacher - against the school board trying to remove the very concept of protests from the history books (via Digby):

Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, in a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay...

...Student participants said their demonstration was organized by word of mouth and social media. Many waved American flags and carried signs, including messages that read “There is nothing more patriotic than protest.”

“I don’t think my education should be censored. We should be able to know what happened in our past,” said Tori Leu, a 17-year-old student who protested at Ralston Valley High School in Arvada.

The school board proposal that triggered the walkouts in Jefferson County calls for instructional materials that present positive aspects of the nation and its heritage. It would establish a committee to regularly review texts and course plans, starting with Advanced Placement history, to make sure materials “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law...”

Any honest American might spot the problem right away: the editing of texts to define what citizenship and patriotism are, the editing of texts to "don't encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law."  So who gets to define citizenship?  Who gets to define patriotism?  Who says what encourages or condones civil disorder or disregard of the law?  Hint: the Conservatives (the same Conservatives who'll tell their own gun-toting followers to prepare for secession and Second Amendment remedies) will tell you that only Conservatives should...

The proposal from Julie Williams, part of the board’s conservative majority, has not been voted on and was put on hold last week. She didn’t return a call from The Associated Press seeking comment Tuesday, but previously told Chalkbeat Colorado, a school news website, that she recognizes there are negative events that are part of U.S. history that need to be taught.

“There are things we may not be proud of as Americans,” she said. “But we shouldn’t be encouraging our kids to think that America is a bad place...”

Williams is one of those conservatives who thinks that because Jim Crow is no more that racism is a thing of the past (when it's clearly not), who thinks that we shouldn't consider the darker ramifications of Manifest Destiny, who probably prefers we never even remember things like the Sand Creek Massacre or the Tulsa Riots.

A student demonstrator, Tyrone G. Parks, a senior at Arvada High School, said Tuesday that the nation’s foundation was built on civil protests, “and everything that we’ve done is what allowed us to be at this point today. And if you take that from us, you take away everything that America was built off of...”

It's heartening to see the students rise up: they understand full well that an ideological re-write of their curriculum can well kill off their hopes of getting into good colleges.  It's also good news that the College Board - the organization overseeing the AP exam system - is telling Jefferson's School Board that if they mess with the AP materials by "censor(ing) essential concepts from an Advanced Placement course, that course can no longer bear the 'AP' designation."  Meaning no accredited university will accept it.

With luck, all this uproar will convince the conservative board members to back down (they've already delayed the vote).  But this is not the end of it.

We are under attack in this nation.  There is a movement among the conservatives to demolish the public education system.  Our schools, which have operated like this for decades if not centuries, are facing massive defunding efforts: the slashing of budgets, the wrecking of programs.  Our schools, once places meant to share a means of teaching our kids now getting revamped into privatized profit machines.  Our schools, which try to teach our children how the world is - our science, our math, our language, our literature, our history - are being forced to push political propaganda and religious nuttery.

This is a call to all Americans, all registered voters this midterm cycle: a lot of us are going to have school board elections and county board elections and state legislature elections and gubernatorial elections.  NOW is the time to look, really look, at the candidates for each office that will have a major impact on our communities and our schools.  NOW is the time to vote out every Far Right wingnut who wants to rewrite our history and shred our studies of fact-based sciences.  NOW is the time to clean out the greedheads trying to push vouchers and charter schools down our throats.

NOW is the time to save our schools.  Before the damage gets worse, before we lose our public schools to privatized money-grubbers who'll chew up all our taxpayer dollars while under-educating our kids into idiocy.  Before our kids get taught in biology that Jesus walked with dinosaurs, that the Earth is still flat and the center of the universe, and that it's all just 6,000 years old despite the record of human history going back further.

Time to get politics, greed, and fallacy out of our schools.

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The Only Thing To Say About Dick Cheney

Considering the former Vice President's recent hypocritical and vile comments about Obama's handling of the Iraqi mess Cheney left behind, about the prolonged history of Cheney's lies and distortions, about the thousands of lives broken and killed under his orders, there is only one thing to say:

Arrest the son of a bitch for war crimes and shove his goddamn criminality back into his goddamn face.

That's all that needs to be said now and forever.  No more television interviews.  No more speaking events.  No more book deals.  Send him to jail, put him on trial.  Make him answer for the torture regime, the lies about WMDs, the war-profiteering, the folly of waging two wars with massive debt and without end.

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Florida Gerrymandering Is Real And The Intent Is There

I mentioned before I'm not a huge fan of the gerrymander.

Following up on an earlier story from December 2013, where I noted the state lege and the redistricting committee were facing a court trial over the questionable 2012 mapping, we've got some current testimony to report via Think Progress:

If Florida’s voters evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, the state’s Republicans could still expect to hold 58 percent of the state’s congressional seats. Indeed, according to California Institute of Technology statistics professor Jonathan Katz, a leading expert on redistricting who testified in a trial challenging these maps as an illegal gerrymander, Florida’s maps are the most biased districts he has ever examined...

The thing that gets my attention is how in a state where there's a slim majority of registered Democrats and the percentage of seating should be near 50-50 (kinda more 52-48 percent), the Republicans are able to hold a solid 62 percent (74 seats out of 120) of state representative districts compared to the Democrats' 38 percent.  The Florida Senate is 65 percent GOP (24 seats of 40), the US districts are 16 out of 27 for roughly 60 percent GOP (one seat currently vacant but it's a "safe" Republican seat).  There's no way the remaining other-affiliated or non-affiliated voters all leaned Republican in the 2012 election... and while there are some uncontested GOP districts, there's uncontested Democrat districts roughly balancing that all out.

There's no science to this viewpoint, I know: for all this, another explanation would be that the Republicans had better candidates at the state and congressional level.  Of course, considering how Far Right most of these GOP candidates tend to be (to where I can't conceive that many Moderate and Left-leaning voters would go there), that itself seems unlikely.

So let's get back to the experts, shall we?  That Think Progress article referred to the Orlando Sentinel report:

Katz is part of a group of political scientists considered among the nation's foremost experts on redistricting -- developing a standard for evaluating the partisan bias of maps known as "partisan symmetry" which has been used for years by scientists and the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether states were intentionally tilting electoral playing fields to help political parties or incumbents.

The method involves determining how an increase in voter-share translates into an increase in seats in a legislative body like Congress or a state legislature. With a perfectly neutral map, either Republicans or Democrats would gain the same number of seats on average for a given increase in the share of voters they turned out. Seats drawn with partisan intent would disproportionately boost the number of seats for one party over the other...

...His analysis suggested that the pro-GOP bias using 2010 voter-turnout data was 15.9 percent. Intuitively, that means Republicans could expect to capture 58 percent of the congressional seats to Democrats' 42 percent of the seats, even if voter turnout was perfectly balanced at 50 percent GOP and 50 percent Democrat.

Katz said preliminary analysis of the 2012 election results showed the same bias.

“In this case they did a really good job of following the recipe about how to do a partisan gerrymander," Katz testified in the Leon County court room...

The evidence is right in front of us: the Republicans hold a roughly 60-40 percent advantage over Democrats in a state where the voter registration favors Dems 42-37-20 (when you factor in the NPA and Other voters). Even if you give that 20 percent NPA to the Republicans by a 60-40 split, that's 12 percent to the GOP and 8 percent to the Dems, that's still a 50 percent - 49 percent difference, still close to even. And there's no way the NPA voting would go that further Right without the NPA voters pretty much becoming registered Republicans anyway (the remaining independent parties - the very extreme ones - barely have 300,000 voters combined - and I'm not sure if they're Far Right or Far Left - putting them in the statistical hiccup column).

How the hell are the Republicans dominating the representation UNLESS they're cheating via gerrymandering?

My arguments remain the same: we gotta get rid of gerrymandering.  The simplest solution is to boost the number of districts at least at the Congressional level to where it's that much harder to carve up the densely-populated - and more Democratic - cities spread out to the less-dense - and more Republican - remote counties.  And make the districts compact: none of this "spread out over six counties" crap we get for the minority-majority districts (if we go with the increase in districts, the odds favor the creation of minority-populations centers which tend to center on cities and dense-urban locales anyway).  Anything that doesn't stay within two counties of being formed is doomed (and yeah, I know some of the small Panhandle counties are sparsely populated.  We can still keep 'em blocked together, not stretched thin).

For the state-level districts, where expanding the number isn't likely, we need genuine non-partisan map-making: massive oversight of a public forum committee non-beholden to the state legislature or governor, to where the ONLY data they can work with is the basic census population numbers.

There's an even better solution to gerrymandering as well: getting the damn vote out among the Democrats.  The Republicans may have created a majority of districts favoring them, but to do so they had to stretch themselves out to a lot of +1 to +3 districts compared to the +8 to +12 the Democrat-safe districts are.  A massive turnout by Democrats in a Republican-safe district could still overwhelm a normal turnout by Republican voters...  The only real thing keeping those damn GOP-safe districts safe is Democratic voter (and party) apathy.  GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT, DEMS.

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Rage: The Long-Term Unemployed Are STILL SCREWED

From Five-Thirty-Eight:

Laurusevage, 52, is one of more than a million Americans who lost payments when Congress allowed the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program to expire at the end of last year. The program, which Congress created in 2008, extended jobless benefits beyond the standard 26 weeks provided by most states; at its peak, the federal government provided an unprecedented 6 million workers with up to 73 weeks of benefits. The Senate earlier this year voted to renew the program, but House Speaker John Boehner (personal note: you sonofabitch!) hasn't allowed the measure to come to a vote in the House.

The case against extending unemployment benefits essentially boils down to two arguments. First, the economy has improved, so the unemployed should no longer need extra time to find a new job. Second, extended benefits could lead job seekers either to not search as hard or to become choosier about the kind of job they will accept, ultimately delaying their return to the workforce.

But the evidence doesn't support either of those arguments. The economy has indeed improved, but not for the long-term unemployed, whose odds of finding a job are barely higher today than when the recession ended nearly five years ago. And the end of extended benefits hasn't spurred the unemployed back to work; if anything, it has pushed them out of the labor force altogether.

Of the roughly 1.3 million Americans whose benefits disappeared with the end of the program, only about a quarter had found jobs as of March, about the same success rate as when the program was still in effect; roughly another quarter had given up searching. The rest, like Laurusevage, were still looking...

With chart from the article:

It's that "Stopped Looking" that should break your heart.  It's more than the ones who found a job in time.  It's the number of people dropping out - despairing - and most likely not coming back.  For bad and for worse.

Regarding Laurusevage:

Laurusevage didn't expect it to be this hard. She had been her family’s primary breadwinner, earning roughly $60,000 as a health and safety officer for a Philadelphia-area heating and air conditioning company. Her husband, David, earns less than $35,000 a year selling truck parts. When her position was outsourced in April of last year, she thought that as a college graduate with a three-plus-decade history of steady work, she would find a job relatively quickly. But in many ways, her experience is typical. The long-term unemployed — typically defined as those out of work more than six months — are slightly more educated on average than the broader population of job seekers. And older workers like Laurusevage face a particularly tough time: The typical job seeker in her 50s has been out of work 26 weeks, versus 17 weeks for the typical 20-something.

There has been, continues to be, massive age discrimination against the unemployed.  Part of it involves the practical issues of re-training someone to new work, part of it the refusal of companies to invest in a worker who'll retire in 10-15 years compared to a worker they can control for 20-30, part of it the irrational fear of hiring someone who lost a job, like as though there was something wrong with that person rather than a problem with the down-sizing company who slashed and cut with haphazard panic.

There's also the problem of the education.  Normally having a college or graduate degree gets you hired right quick.  In this recession, it's two strikes against you.  If you seek a job in a profession unrelated to your degree, your would-be employer is afraid you'll bolt for that other profession the moment you get a chance (this really hurts when you're a graduate-level job-seeker looking for part-time work in anything).  Other would-be employers would fear you would be too experienced, someone less malleable in terms of training and inter-office politicking.

And so, into all of this, we still have a sizable population of the United States struggling to stay afloat, struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on their tables.  We have a situation that calls on Congress to provide help as they've provided help before: with emergency aid funding, and laws to fix the discriminatory hiring practices against the long-term unemployed.

And Boehner, that coward that crook that SONOFABITCH, refuses to get the House to act.  Because it's against the Far Right ethos of helping "the lazy".  Because it's too Keynesian for their ideological obsession with austerity and "small government".  Because it's not something that will embarrass or impeach Obama.  Because it's not #Benghazi or tax cuts or repealing Obamacare for the 58th time.

Goddamn them.

WILL YOU PLEASE AMERICA FOR THE LOVE OF GOD VOTE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OUT OF CONGRESS?!  PLEASE?!  GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT.

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This Week... No, This Year... Hold On, This Ongoing Timeline In Racism

It's telling that some of the major news stories of this past week (actually, the past year, no wait the past decade, wait wait let's take this all the way back to 1963, but if we do that might as well drag it out to 1877...) has been about racism in America.

We had a Supreme Court led by a Justice in Roberts - who openly operates on the idea that the way "to end discrimination is to stop discriminating", as though not focusing on the problem will make it go away - issuing a recent ruling in favor of states that vote to end affirmative action policies for colleges.

The big news story of the week started off with a Nevada rancher, who spent years (decades) refusing to pay grazing fees for his cattle on public lands, stirring up an armed showdown against the feds that quickly turned Cliven Bundy into a Far Right, Tea Party, anti-government hero... who just as quickly got caught on tape making disparaging remarks about "the Negro" and claiming Blacks were better off being "happier" as slaves, to where most of the big-name Republicans who were cheering him on found themselves denouncing Bundy as fast as they could (with a few hardliners doing their best to defend the rancher or at least publicly tell him to keep his mouth shut before he digs a deeper hole).

And just this weekend, the sports world is aflame with reports and captured audio of a prominent basketball team owner - Donald Sterling of the Clippers - telling his mistress (oh by the by Sterling's still married, the adulterous lout) to stop bringing Black people to his Clippers' games (the argument apparently started over the girlfriend posting pics of her posing with Magic Johnson).  (P.S.: the mistress is part-Black, which adds a whole different layer of loathing to Sterling's issues)  The shocking element to this story is how Sterling's had the reputation of being a jerkass on racial issues for decades, ranging from unflattering dealings with basketball coaches and players to his mistreatment and disregard for the people who rent from his property holdings.  There'd been talk about doing something to slap some sense into Sterling... going back to 2006.  And only now almost 8 years later there are enough people honestly talking about it.

It just all piled up this one week, didn't it?  I mean, all this ignorance and hate.

Except it's been floating out there (I almost typed "flouted", but in some respects that word fits too) for years now...

Roberts' and the conservative SCOTUS Justices have just last year struck down the enforcement methods that kept the needed Voting Rights Act of 1965 functioning.  Roberts' reasoning seems to keep going back to his insistence on being literally color-blind - that pro-active efforts to fight discrimination were actually perpetuating that same discrimination - and therefore striking down enforcement provisions wherever possible.

Except that fellow Justice Sotomayor isn't having any of it, and has called Roberts out on his willful blindness:

...Sotomayor is not content to belittle Roberts’ formulation that racism will end when we stop helping minorities. She tells him that the act of ignoring pervasive structural racism is an abdication of judicial responsibility: “As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter...”

...Roberts makes a substantive point in his rebuke of Sotomayor: Racial preferences may lead minority students to suffer shame and self doubt from racial preferences and that it is not “out of touch” to suggest that affirmative action doesn’t remedy race problems. But his deeper, sharper, point is that it is bad for the national dialogue about race for jurists to accuse one another of bad faith and lack of candor. His defensiveness at having someone explaining the limits of his own understanding of racism is palpable. He feels that he has been called out, shamed, and silenced. It is not clear whether or not he understands that his horror at being condescended to, his opinion disregarded, is among the very experiences of racial injustice that Sotomayor is describing...

Justice Antonin Scalia goes even further in his concurrence, describing Sotomayor’s logic in analogizing the Michigan anti-affirmative initiative to Jim Crow as “shameful.” In his view, she has crossed the line of poor taste by suggesting that racism in America today is as pervasive and toxic as it was in the 1950s...

With all due respect to Justices Roberts and Scalia... it IS still as pervasive and toxic as it was in the 1950s. It's as though Roberts and Scalia haven't noticed the high number of black youth getting shot at with Stand Your Ground laws in effect, or the indefensible policy of "Stop and Frisk" that overwhelmingly targeted Blacks and Hispanics over Whites. These Justices seem to think racism ended open discrimination Jim Crow laws were struck down in the Sixties and Seventies... little realizing that while those laws are gone the sentiment behind them is still out there wreaking havoc on our society.

And then you've got Rancher Bundy, Far Right Hero of April 22 2014.  The link here is to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who opens his essay with this point: "I've been laughing my way through the Cliven Bundy fiasco because, as Jamelle Bouie suggests, there may be no better example of racist privilege than the right to flout the government's authority and then back its agents down at gunpoint. Bouie asks, hypothetically, how we'd respond if Bundy were black..."

On the moment when Bundy's video got out to the media, Coates had more to say:

A couple days ago Jonathan Chait asserted that modern conservatism is "doomed" because it is "rooted in white supremacy." The first claim may or may not be true, but there's little doubt about the second. Whether it's the Senate minority leader claiming that America should have remained legally segregated, a beloved cultural figure fondly recalling how happy black people were living under lynch law, a presidential candidate calling Barack Obama a "food-stamp president," or a campaign surrogate calling Barack Obama "a subhuman mongrel," the preponderance of evidence shows that modern conservatism just can't quit white supremacy...

This is unsurprising. White supremacy is one of the most dominant forces in the history of American politics. In a democracy, it would be silly to expect it to go unexpressed. Thus anyone with a sense of American history should be equally unsurprised to discover that rugged individualist Cliven Bundy is the bearer of some very interesting theories...

It wasn't too surprising to others - like New Republic's Beutler - not just that Bundy was saying this stuff but that there's been an environment among conservatives for this ignorance for years:

...And now there's the lawless, mooching Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who takes things further than Robertson and argues that slavery, not segregation, was truly the golden age for "the negroes." Better to be enslaved than subsidized—unless your subsidy comes in the form of the public land upon which your cattle graze for free.

The right's special pleading for Robertson outstripped its special pleading for Bundy. Some conservatives have been willing to admit that Bundy's just an opportunist, not a tribune for individual liberty. But he nevertheless became a folk hero to high-profile conservatives like Sean Hannity and even some national GOP figures.

Today, most of them are either in full retreat from him, or pretending he never existed. Conservative radio host Dana Loesch is one exception. She isn't willing to throw him under the bus just yet, arguing that Bundy's problem may be a lack of polish rather than a rotten core: "I hope no one is surprised that an old man rancher isn’t media trained to express himself perfectly."

Bundy's either a hideous aberration, or another misunderstood soul. But he can't be representative of a subculture, because that would entail acknowledging that safety-net opposition and voting-rights opposition and other conservative policies draw political sustenance from sources other than heady libertarianism....

Same goes for (Duck Dynasty's) Robertson. And the Southern Avenger. And Chris McDaniel's surprisingly robust Senate candidacy in Mississippi. It's all just a weird coincidence...

The Daily Beast's Tomasky is clear on the whole coincidence point as well:

Come on, fellow liberals. Calm down. I guess maybe it’s fair to call Cliven Bundy a racist. That “picking cotton” business put it over the top, and wondering whether they were better off under slavery... 

OK, so Bundy’s a racist. It’s fine to point that out. But point up the fact that he’s a registered Republican? That’s where I draw the line, friends. I mean, come on. That’s just a coincidence. Total cosmic coincidence. Just like it’s a coincidence that that one black comic, a Barack Obama impersonator, was yanked offstage at an official Republican Party meeting in 2011 for telling a series of racially themed jokes. I mean, that could easily have happened at a Democratic—well, maybe not. But still. A coincidence. 

Just like it’s a coincidence that one federal judge who sent an email around to friends saying that Obama’s father was a dog happened to be a Republican. Complete and utter accident of fate, the puny matter of his voter enrollment.

Those rancidly racist T-shirts and posters one sometimes sees at Tea Party rallies? They’re just a coincidence, too. I mean, Tea Party people might not be Republican, strictly speaking, and it’s totally unfair to assume that! OK, Tea Party candidates run in Republican primaries, not Democratic ones, and the Tea Party caucus in the House doesn’t include one Democrat. But still. Guilt by association!

Bundy has a broad libertarian streak, too. But please, let’s not suggest that libertarian-leaning Republicans might be a little racist, too. I mean, again, what’s the evidence for such a statement? What—the fact that Ron Paul’s ghostwriter(s) of his newsletters in the 1990s had very clear Confederate sympathies? If I were you, I would be careful about drawing any inferences from that. It was a long time ago. And a sentence like this one: “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began” ...well, admit it. It’s open to ambiguity. Can be interpreted in any number of ways. What’s that? You counter by telling me that all that was two decades ago? OK. You’re right. And you’re right that it’s also a coincidence that his son Rand’s ghostwriter—that’s Rand Paul, the current Republican front-runner to be the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—on his book also has expressed sympathetic views about the Confederacy? Remember this guy—called himself the Southern Avenger, was photographed wearing a stars and bars superhero kind of mask? It’s just a coincidence that he ended up in Rand Paul’s orbit...

And it's just a coincidence that it's been Republican-nominated Justices like Roberts and Scalia talking about how racism isn't the problem like it used to be in the 1950s...

Topping this all off has been the cherry of a sports owner who's been known for years to be a total dick: not just a racist but also a sexist and a penny-pinching miser of a team owner who kept his Clippers franchise a joke for years just out of sheer spite half the time.

This is a guy in Donald Sterling whose outside means of income of being a team owner is property rentals.  And has a bad history of that to boot: he's been sued multiple times for discriminatory practices, either banning certain ethnic types from renting or using dirty tactics to force those ethnic types out.

With regards to Sterling's behavior towards his rental tenants, that problem has been a major racial issue for decades itself: Coates' biggest discussions lately have revolved around poverty, race, and a policy of neighborhood segregation that kept minorities - Blacks above all - trapped in impoverished conditions regardless of their income.  Sterling's pretty much a poster boy for how those racial policies work in today's America.

So here we are, in Roberts' color-blind America: where Black kids get frisked for the crime of WWB or worse shot at by gun-toting angry guys; where the voting rights of minorities can get legislated out by the states where Republicans fear they'd lose in fair elections; where college admission guidelines can ignore maintaining any semblance of ethnic diversity without requirement to create alternative means of keeping minority enrollment up; where rental costs and neighborhoods suffer at the whims of landlords who express the worst about the very people trying to live under their roofs; where white guys get all the public support they need to break the law but whenever blacks rise up they get arrested or worse...

I'm with Sotomayor.  Racism isn't going to end by turning a blind eye to it.  Racism ends when you get in its' collective goddamn face and tell it you "dare to care."  You fight racism by calling it when you see it, and pointing out the flaws of logic that fear and hate bring to the issue.  You work to end it, you work to find solutions to the segregation we inflict on our communities, you work to get the kids to break the cycle of fear and keep them engaged with each other as friends, as allies against corruption and hate...

Meanwhile, the clock ticks and with it another day of stupid to defeat... sigh.

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Why The Swift Push For Segregating Teh Gay Marrieds

There's been a sudden flux of Red States - first Kansas, then Arizona, lately a few others - trying to pass legislation under the guise of "religious liberty" that would allow business owners to cite their religious belief should they ever want to refuse service to anyone they believe is gay or "promoting gay marriage" in some form.

They're basically bringing back segregation.  Just not for Blacks, but for Teh Gays.

There's a couple of reasons for that:

1) The simplest, most obvious reason is competition between the various Far Right groups leading each state trying to one-up each other and prove their social conservative bona fides by getting an anti-gay bill passed.  If Far Right Kansas does it, so goes Far Right Arizona, Far Right Mississippi, Far Right Georgia, Far Right Texas, Far Right...

2) The growing realization among the Far Right social conservatives that they're running out of options trying to stop gay marriage from becoming a nationwide reality.

The courts at the federal level are striking down gay marriage bans one state at a time: they just struck down Texas' recently.  The federal ruling against DOMA was a huge blow as well to the Religious Right.  At some point, the economic, legal and social benefits of marriage will not be denied on the basis of race oh wait we solved that with Loving V. Virginia ... marriage will not be denied on the basis of gender preference.

So if the Far Right can't stop gay marriage, they'll go for their next weapon of choice: they'll want to punish people for marrying gay and they'll want to punish people for supporting gay marriage (these laws not only ban those suspected of being gay (or gay-married) but also anyone - family and friends - celebrating it).  And they'll do that by "allowing" businesses to discriminate just by looking at a customer (as though spotting gays and lesbians and those celebrating Teh Gay was that easy.  We do NOT wear pink triangles everywhere we go, haters).

That these Far Right legislators are arcing backwards to a world pre-1965 when businesses were "allowed" to discriminate against Blacks from eating or shopping at their venues - that they are hearkening back to the most odious elements of Jim Crow segregation - doesn't seem to register with them.  Then again, these are the same jokers who never saw a problem with segregation in the first place...

The most horrifying thing about this "religious liberty" excuse is that it's not really about liberty or even expression of faith: it's about using religion as an excuse to be biased, to be hateful towards a small number of fellow humans.  It's using Leviticus as an excuse to punish sexual conduct - specifically, homosexual conduct - all the while ignoring other sins and acts - tattoos, mixing of clothing fibers, working on Sabbath days, adultery - that are more common and yet left uncommented and unpunished.

You don't see anything in these "liberty" laws that allow businesses to discriminate against divorcees or people celebrating their second or third marriages.  That's because they'd be discriminating against, what, half the nation.  It's so much easier and more satisfying to pass moral judgment against the thousands of gays and lesbians instead of risking the wrath of millions of adulterers...

And they wonder why more young people are turning away from Christianity and faith in general in this nation?  It's because they more often than not associate Christianity with the Far Right, with the political ideologues, the hypocrites, the fear-mongers, the haters.  We've had thirty-plus years of the Moral Majority and their political descendants pose as the face of Christianity in this nation: thirty-plus years of evangelical hate-filled moralizers passing judgment on women and children and the poor and gays and everybody else not of their parish.  This is the House they've inherited: Empty not only of our nation's youth but empty of God's love and charity and Grace.  

The good news is that these "religious liberty" bills aren't going very far: the immediate outraged responses to them have made the Far Right haters back down (at least for now, in public).  The bad news?  They're still pursuing these types of laws in other states, and are more likely going to try some other gambit to stop gay marriage from becoming the same as hetero marriage.  This fight is not over, people: we are not wrestling against flesh and blood here but against the haters, the secret powers waging war against our families and friends in the name of their fear...

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Why Stand Your Ground Is a Terrible Law

The weekend news has been how a Jacksonville FL jury held shooter Michael Dunn in the Jordan Davis killing guilty of three counts of attempted murder for firing at the three teen friends with Davis that cold night of November 2012... and how that same jury locked up into a mistrial over Davis' own death.

It defies logic that Dunn will be held accountable for the murder attempts he missed... and yet was pretty much let go over the murder he did succeed in committing. (the state prosecutor's office says it will retry on the murder charge)

But there's a reason logic is getting stomped on here: it's because of a poorly-designed, open-ended, free-for-all free-for-gunowners law called Stand Your Ground (SYG).

The impact this law has had on Florida and other states applying SYG is pretty shocking.  Shooting deaths have gone up in states where the shooters claim self-defense under SYG.  Worse, about a third (34 percent) of the shootings when it's white shooter/black victim are deemed justifiable, while only three percent of black shooter/white victim are deemed justifiable.  That this law exposes the raw nerve of race is hard for me to focus on at the moment, and better explained by better writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates (please follow the link to what he wrote).  I'm better off ranting instead about how stupid and destructive SYG is.

Under the old laws regarding self-defense, it relied a lot on location - your own home or workplace where you have an expectation of self-defense - and it relied on the situation where you or someone else were threatened with bodily harm and there was no other recourse (no escape route or method to contact the proper authorities).  Stand Your Ground now allows someone carrying a firearm (and an anger management problem the size of Mount Doom) to go first for their gun and open fire under a "reasonable" expectation of fearing for their life, even when there are clear alternatives to blasting away in Vigilante Mode.

It's a bad law because it's basically a license for an aggressive, angry gunowner to go after someone and shoot that other person dead.  And then that gunowner can turn around and claim self-defense because he "feared for his own safety."  Regardless of whether or not the victim was genuinely a threat.  And sadly enough, the victim was never that big a threat.

Look at Dunn's testimony.  He's the one with the gun, getting off 10 shots and killing Davis in the process.  Dunn claims he "saw" Davis with a shotgun but the police found no evidence there was any weapon in the car at all.  Yet we're supposed to trust Dunn's testimony because he's the one sitting in the courtroom booth.  Meanwhile, we'll never hear Davis' side of the matter because Davis is dead, much like Trayvon Martin is dead and we'll never really know what happened the night George Zimmerman shot him dead.

Because we can't trust a word of what Dunn or Zimmerman claim, because it's in their own interests to make themselves look the victim.  And because they've got SYG giving them clearance to admit they "feared" for their own safety regardless of the situation.  Especially when - in both Dunn and Zimmerman's cases - the shooters were the ones who escalated in their own anger those situations into shooting deaths.

Are we going to trust the word of the 71-year-old who shot a man texting his babysitter (checking on a child at home) while at the Wesley Chapel movie theater that he was afraid for his life?  Under normal circumstances, the 71-year-old or anyone else upset that a cell phone was in use during the start of the movie would have gone to an usher or theater manager to complain (I did that once.  Guess what?  IT WORKED).  Under SYG, the 71-year-old stood there, let a box of popcorn get thrown in his face, and pull out his concealed gun to shoot dead the person who angered him.

He was threatened with popcorn.  The guy with the gun was threatened with popcorn, and shot the guy who threw it at him.  And now the 71-year-old packing heat gets to go before a jury to explain how he feared for his safety because popcorn was in his face.

Meanwhile the ones with actual bullets in them - Martin, Davis, a 43-year-old man with a fatherless child waiting at home - lie there dead, and what law speaks for them when Stand Your Ground trumps logic?  When it trumps common sense?

The law needs to go.  The courts need to rule it unconstitutional because it violates the victims' - usually unarmed - rights to due process (a presumption of innocence).  They need to overturn SYG because it's become a form of legalized lynching where angry white guys are shooting blacks over questionable slights (Trayvon Martin had every right to walk through his father's own neighborhood, for God's sake).  The legislatures need to stop passing these laws that violate public safety at the expense of a gun lobby that wants to conceal-carry wherever they want and pretty much shoot anybody they (don't) like.

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Dear Unemployed: Time To Get Your RAGE On

This continues to piss me off, even though - THANK GOD - I am now employed.

...Republican senators on Thursday blocked a three-month revival of long-term unemployment compensation for 1.7 million Americans out of work.

Democrats fell just one vote short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster. Four Republicans voted with Democrats -- Sen. Dean Heller (NV), Kelly Ayotte (NH), Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Susan Collins (ME). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) changed his vote at the last minute to preserve the option of bringing up the bill in the future. The final vote was 58-40...

...The reality is a large number of Republicans want the program to end but don't want to say so because it's popular. First enacted in 2008, amid economic free-fall, it provides insurance to Americans who are looking for work for up to 99 weeks. It expired on Dec. 28.

A follow-up vote Thursday to extend the unemployment benefits for three months, without a pay-for, also failed 55-43...

I guarantee this continues to piss off millions of long-term unemployed Americans who've been stuck like I had been for years: unable to convince HR departments to hire us, unable to find money to start our own businesses, unable to get into a job market that's biased against anyone with a high-level college degree or is over the age of 40...

In a just world, every damn Senator who just voted to block this emergency extension should stand in the unemployment lines for six straight months and see how THEY like it.  No, better, make it six straight YEARS...

The g-ddamn filibuster needs to go for ALL non-appointee bills coming to the floor.  THIS OBSTRUCTION IS KILLING OUR ECONOMY AND OUR NATION.  I know Dems fear the possibility that they'll find themselves in a minority in the Senate, but DAMMIT we shouldn't have our government stuck on STALL all the time!

Every unemployed person needs to find the nearest Republican Senator's office and start a sit-in protest.  DAMN THESE SENATORS.  They gonna arrest you?  So?  No jury in the nation - unless it's a jury made up of hedge fund managers - will convict you.

RAGE.

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Division

What does it tell you when the opposition party plans not one but THREE separate presentations against the President's annual State of the Union (AKA the one where no President is crazy enough to tell the truth and always says, ALWAYS SAYS, "The state of the Union is STRONG" like the White House doesn't have access to a freaking THESAURUS, I mean damn use a new word people!)?

What does it say that the modern GOP is so divided between the establishment wing, the Tea Party wing, and the ego-minded "lemme get my name out there for 2016" wing that they're going to give three boring reprisal spiels to follow up Obama's boring checklist for 2014?

From Salon.com:

...That’s right: It’s almost time for the annual State of the Union address and its rapidly multiplying responses...following the president’s address, Americans will also (if they choose to) hear from three separate elected Republicans. Because if there’s anything Americans love more than lengthy speeches from politicians, it’s three successive lengthy speeches from politicians...

There's the response from the establishment wing by Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rogers (highest ranking female Republican in the House), then the response from the Tea Party faction by Senator Mike Lee, and also a response via personal YouTube channel by Senator (and 2016 campaigner) Rand Paul.

...When Michele Bachmann delivered her “Tea Party” response to the State of the Union in 2011, it seemed unlikely to become a tradition. But the next year, presidential candidate and pizza magnate Herman Cain delivered his own Tea Party response. Then came Paul, who apparently enjoyed it so much that he decided to deliver his own totally unaffiliated response speech Tuesday, to be posted on YouTube and sent out directly to his followers and fans via his email list...

...Rand Paul’s response won’t be on the networks, because Rand Paul’s audience isn’t everyone, and his intention isn’t necessarily to persuade the median voter. He will sit for cable news interviews after the speech, and hit up the Sunday show circuit a few days later, because he’s still campaigning for 2016 and needs as much free media as possible, but a YouTube response sent directly to people who already support Paul is mainly about energizing and expanding his list.

And that’s sort of the problem the Republican Party faces right now: For Paul, there’s not really any reason not to distract from the “official” party response with a nakedly self-serving bit of early campaigning. There’s nothing stopping whomever wants to declare themselves “the Tea Party” from delivering a response too, because part of identifying with the Tea Party is rejecting the “Washington” leadership of the GOP... but the responses are multiplying for the same reason phony talking filibusters suddenly caught on among Senate Republicans last year: because the GOP is effectively leaderless and acting like a rebel insurgent is the only way to win over grass-roots conservative voters...

The leaderless issue stems from how Speaker Boehner - technically the highest ranking Republican in government - seems unable to control the various conservative factions within his own party, something previous Speakers were supposed to do with a level of finesse and back-room bullying.  (Part of this "lawlessness" within the House has been the blocking of pork-barrel spending and committee patronage: Speakers no longer have a carrot to help keep party factions in line)  But there are other reasons why the GOP is leaderless: The most obvious is that there are too many splits within the furthest wing of the political spectrum: there's too many Far Right groups struggling for control without any moderate faction to balance them (or force them to unite against intra-party rivals).

The current schisms seem to be between the ones most wanting to prove themselves the heirs to Reagan (the Establishment), the ones most wanting to prove themselves the heirs to Reagan and Ayn Rand (the Libertarian), and the ones most wanting to prove themselves the heirs to Reagan no wait Richard Nixon well not really oh hey yeah Strom Thurmond and Jerry Falwell (the Tea Party).  The ones most wanting to prove themselves the heirs to Teddy Roosevelt and Ike have pretty much been forced to sit in the hall outside the principal's office (RINOs).

Despite the similarities these factions share with each other - a hatred of hippie libruls and hating on Obama for simply existing - they're all jockeying for dominance within the GOP itself because there are still slight differences.  The Establishment types are for basic deregs and no tax hikes, talking the game but amenable (without admitting to it) to making deals on issues like immigration.  The Libertarians are fully small government (total deregulation) to the point of hating government, but not too keen on social issues like the drug war or abortion.  The Tea Partiers say they're all for fighting taxes, but they've really organized over social (anti-immigration, anti-Obamacare) and religious (abortion) issues and protecting their own interests (Medicare and Social Security, but only for themselves).

Adding to the craziness is the need to grandstand - much like Paul doing his own counter-speech to the counter-speeches already lined up - in order for each official to claim the banner of "flag-carrier" for whichever movement they seek to front.  It's a kind of Catch-22: the Republicans appear leaderless, so individual Republicans present themselves as the leader except for the fact there's 10 to 50 other Republicans doing the same thing, forcing them to fight each other and perpetuating the view that the Republicans are leaderless...

So you've got them - the individual grandstanders, the three major wingnut factions - pulling the party apart. Primarily because the other option - forming their own political party - is too much work and not guaranteed to succeed.  Our electoral system is geared to two parties: third parties do not last long, as history bore out.  Owning the Republican Party outright is the smart move.  And the ones who do own the Republican Party - the deep pocket uber-billionaires like the Koch Brothers - honestly don't care which faction is at the controls as long as their pet projects - tax cuts and deregulation - stay safe.

The other problem with the GOP being leaderless is that the real leaders - the aforementioned deep pocket billionaires, the media elite types like Rush Limbaugh and Fox Not-News manager Roger Ailes - are not in positions of accountability within the party itself.  None of them hold offices either within the party nor elected positions in a federal or state government.  They are talking heads standing on the sidelines, caustic critics throwing bombs at foe and friend alike, refusing to answer to anyone and forcing the actual elected officials to kow-tow to them.  It'd be up to them other normal circumstances to broker deals in the back rooms to get one faction favored over another... but favoring one to the exclusion of the others is bound to piss those factions off to commit acts of sabotage (say, refusing any deals to resolve a government shutdown).  And the factions are relatively weak because none of them - Libertarian, Tea Partier, even the Establishment faction - appeal outside of their Far Right base.  None of them have members that appeal to the populism of a Reagan or even Bush the Lesser (none of the potential leaders are Passive-Positive personalities).

As long as there's been opposition replies to a State of the Union (since 1966), there's never been a divided series of replies like this.  Letting the Tea Party faction in 2011 do their own didn't help the Republicans, and now they're up to three separate replies with no guarantee any of them will stay "on message" to help with the 2014 mid-terms.  Who's to say by 2016 the Republicans are going to have twenty, most of them by desperate primary-running Presidential candidates, half of them spewing craziness that wins over primary voters but scares off the moderate, mainstream voters that are needed to win general elections?

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The Long October: They Haven't Learned

One big sign that the Far Right Republicans in Congress are willing to put the country through the nightmare they pulled at the beginning of this month?

The Senate Republicans just pulled a symbolic vote that "repudiated" the actual vote they made a few weeks ago to end the Shutdown and avoid a default.

This particular vote went nowhere.  It was an open attempt by the Senate Republicans to position themselves for any primary challenges they'll face next year and/or 2016.  They want to be able to say with a straight face in a slew of ads starting right about now that "oh, we were always against a functioning federal government, we just don't want you noticing the vote we passed before this one to keep government functioning!"

Insert headdesking here.

The thing is, the deal that got passed to end the Shutdown was just another temporary reprieve.  The agreement will only last until February, perhaps March of 2014.  Which is right about the time a good number of primaries for the Congressional midterms can happen.  At least a sizable number of challenger campaigns will be in full gear by that point.  Meaning there will be even greater incentive for the sitting incumbents to suck up even more to the extremist base voters that are key to every primary.

And the best - the ONLY - way to show off their Far Right credentials is to pull another Shutdown and threaten the government with default.  Again.

But there's a problem.  While the base voters are key to the primary stage of an election, the moderate and independent voters are key to the general election, the election that really matters.  And if the Republicans have either A) voted in a challenger whose credentials are further to the Right than ever before or B) voted for an incumbent who won by swinging further to the Right than ever before, they're suddenly stuck with  candidates and platforms that will not appeal to moderate and independents, who will go stampeding off to the other choice (the Democrats in those races).

What's happening in Virginia right now is a decent example.  The Democratic candidate McAullife is beating the Republican candidate Cuccinelli by an almost double-digit percentage lead (caveat: polls are not always accurate.  But when a slew of them show similar numbered results, there's a trend worth noting).  Granted, the numbers are pretty skewed compared of the regular 52-48 close-call race, but the shocking thing are the unfavorable numbers against Republicans:

Among minorities, it's a given the unfavorable numbers are that high: the shocking number are among independents, who are now firmly opposed to the Republican ideology (you used to see the numbers more even, with independents giving either party a meh approval).  I've rarely seen independent voters be anywhere close to 60 percent unfavorable against one party.

And try to remember that McAullife, who is more businessman than politician, isn't someone the majority of his own party actually likes: at the start of all this the general response among Virginia Democrats was "Oh God was THIS the best we could do?"  And this is a guy whose questionable business practices echo the same miscues as his primary backer Bill Clinton, which is saying something.  And STILL McAullife is about to win the governorship by a double-digit percentage lead, mostly because a majority of voters aren't voting for him they are voting against Cuccinelli and the GOP (the down-ticket candidates in Virginia are suffering too).

We'd still need to see the final results for the Virginia election next week, and we'd still have to recognize that Virginia is NOT a common bell-weather indicator for 2014 midterms (mostly because Virginia - a major employment zone for the feds - was hard hit by the GOP-led Shutdown this month, which pissed off Virginia voters to no end).  But it's still important to note: Virginia's population is large enough and diverse enough to provide comparisons to other bell-weather states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado, maybe even states like Texas where the dissatisfaction among women voters are likely going to make things look very bad for the Republican label.  The results are going to matter because there are a lot of other states that can reflect the same response against the Republicans.

Hell, this is a key element in the New York City Mayoral race where a liberal Democrat (De Blasio) is running about a 40-point advantage over a Republican challenger (Lhota) where De Blasio's accusations that Lhota is a Tea Partier is working to full effect... even though Lhota as a New Englander Republican is actually pretty moderate.  The polling has 4 out of 10 New York Republicans opposed to the Republican Party.  That level of abandonment against their own party is unheard of in today's GOP: This is how toxic the Republicans are right now to themselves.  Just how toxic do you think they'll be to the independent voters?

And they don't care about that.  The Far Right GOP are going to keep doing this until they gain control of the federal government AND until they wreck it, break it down to a small enough size to drown in Grover Norquist's bathtub.

This Long October won't end until November 2014, when I hope to God enough people vote the Republicans out of power for good.  Until then... keep working.  Get the vote out.

God Help Us.  And stop voting for Republicans.

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The Long October: How It Came To This, a Followup Post

Following on a previous thought about how we as a nation got to this shutdown debacle, and how this all echoes back to the obstruction / nullification follies of the 1860 Southern Democrats as well as the shifting of conservative ideology whole-heartedly into the modern Republicans due to the Southern Strategy, I'd want to add a few more thoughts on this, and at best from another person who's been thinking about the same problems and doing a better job of discussing it.

Zack Beauchamp over on ThinkProgress had a great article today on the whole thing: How Racism Caused The Shutdown...

...A lot of people think the only way that racism “causes” anything is when one person intentionally discriminates against another because of their color of their skin. But that’s wrong. And understanding the history of the forces that produced the current crisis will lay plain the more subtle, but fundamental, ways in which race and racism formed the scaffolding that structures American politics — even as explicit battles over race receded from our daily politics.

The roots of the current crisis began with the New Deal — but not in the way you might think. They grew gradually, with two big bursts in the 1960s and the 1980s reflecting decades of more graduated change. And the tree that grew out of them, the Tea Party and a radically polarized Republican Party, bore the shutdown as its fruits...

But the Depression-caused backlash against Republican incumbents that swept New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt into the White House and a vast Democratic majority into Congress also made Southerners a minority in the party for the first time in its history... Yet, Reed notes, the New Deal not only benefited blacks, but brought them to a position of power in the Democratic Party. “The Social Security exclusions were overturned, and black people did participate in the WPA, Federal Writers’ Project, CCC and other classic New Deal initiatives, as well as federal income relief,” he reminds us. “Black Americans’ emergence as a significant constituency in the Democratic electoral coalition helped to alter the party’s center of gravity and was one of the factors–as was black presence in the union movement–contributing to the success of the postwar civil rights insurgency.”

...UC-Berkeley’s Eric Schickler and coauthor Brian Feinstein built a database of state party platforms from 1920-1968 and examined their positions on African-American rights. They found that “the vast majority of nonsouthern state Democratic parties were clearly to the left of their GOP counterparts on civil rights policy by the mid-1940s to early 1950s.” African-Americans and other sympathetic New Deal Coalition constituencies, like Jews and union leaders, deserve the bulk of the credit — these new Northern Democrats made supporting civil rights a litmus test for elected Democratic officials. That explains why, from the Early New Deal forward, congressional Northern Democrats voted more like Northern Republicans than their Southern brethren on civil rights...

That last bit kinda helps explain the hostility Southern states still have (the "Right to Work" laws that are nothing but) towards unions... but I digress.  Continuing on:

...Hence the famous Dixiecrat revolt of 1948, when Strom Thurmond and like-minded Southerners temporarily seceded from the Democratic Party over Harry Truman and the Democratic platform’s support for civil rights. The tacit bargain that Katznelson documents during the Roosevelt Administration, in which the Northern Democrats would get their New Deal if the Southern Democrats got their white supremacy, became untenable.

But the Dixiecrats weren’t ready to migrate en masse to Party of Lincoln just yet. Something needed to happen to make the Republican Party shed its commitment to leading on civil rights wholesale. That “something” was the rise of the modern conservative movement...

...By the Johnson-Goldwater election, it had become clear that overt racism and segregationism was politically doomed. Brown v. Board of Education and LBJ’s support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act saw to that. As this scary recognition dawned on Southern whites, they began searching for a new vehicle through which to shield themselves and their communities from the consequences of integration. The young conservative movement’s ringing endorsement of a minimalist federal government did the trick — it provided an on-face racially neutral language by which Southerners could argue against federal action aimed at integrating lily-white schools and neighborhoods...

...The Reagan realignment of the 1980s dramatically expanded the number of Republicans and conservative independents in the region’s electorate.” The Blacks attribute this to a combination of Reagan’s winning political personality and (more persuasively) the relative prosperity of the 1980s. Not only were white conservatives ideologically inclined to support Reagan’s Republican Party, but they became wealthier on his watch...

...The South’s conversion to movement conservatism led to local and Congressional Republican victories throughout Dixie. These culminated in the Gingrich Revolution in 1994, when hard-line Southern conservatives took charge of the Republican Congressional delegation, seemingly for good...

We all know what happens next. The Southern conservative takeover of the Republican Party pushes out moderates, cementing the party’s conservative spiral. This trend produces the Tea Party, whose leading contemporary avatar — Ted Cruz — engineers the 2013 shutdown and risk of catastrophic default...

It's all there. The obsession with Southern politicians to dismantle everything New Deal, which was the breaking point of the Jim Crow era. The merging of conservative ideologies that were previously unwedded - race, economics, religion - into a broad movement.

From this point, Beauchamp draws his conclusions:

...First, that the shutdown crisis isn’t the product of passing Republican insanity or, as President Obama put it, a “fever” that needs to be broken. Rather, the sharp conservative turn of the Republican Party is the product of deep, long-running structural forces in American history. The Republican Party is the way that it is because of the base that it has evolved, and it would take a tectonic political shift — on the level of the Democrats becoming the party of civil rights — to change the party’s internal coalition. Radicalized conservatism will outlive the shutdown/debt ceiling fight.

Second, and more importantly, the battle over civil rights produced a rigidly homogeneous and disproportionately Southern Republican party, fertile grounds for the sort of purity contest you see consuming the South today. There’s no zealot like a new convert, the saying goes, and the South’s new faith in across-the-board conservatism — kicked off by the alignment of economic libertarianism with segregationism — is one of the most significant causes of the ideological inflexibility that’s caused the shutdown. That’s not to dismiss the continued relevance of race in the Southern psyche. There’s no chance that, when 52 percent of voting Americans are over 45, the country has just gotten over its deep racial hang-ups. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ masterful “Fear of a Black President” if you don’t believe me...

As the Southern faction became the face of the GOP in the mid-90s, the GOP’s electorate became a lot more conservative nationally. Panel data reviewed by Alan Abramowitz and Kyle Saunders found that, from 1992-1996, ideological conservatives joined the Republican Party in droves. That’s because Southern elites played a key “signalling” role; their prominent national conservatism signaled to conservatives around the country that the Republican Party was theirs.
Penn’s Matthew Levendusky, who literally wrote the book on conservatives “sorting” themselves into the Republican Party, says that “even when the data are consistent with a nationalization hypothesis, the South still played a crucial role in the sorting process because of the key role of Southern elites.” As conservative Southern elites took over the Republican Party, hyper-conservative Americans followed, becoming the GOP primary voters we know and love today...

Given the evidence that Beauchamp puts together, he paints a situation where a very lopsided Far Right national political party - the modern GOP - has set itself up with an ideology driven by Southern factional needs.  While it's not as overtly racist as it once was, the attitude is still there: the hatred of any kind of social service that could benefit minorities even though whites benefit as well; open contempt for voting rights by way of pursuing voter purges that disproportionately affect minorities; the desire to shut down a federal system that upholds such things as due process and citizenship rights.

The biggest reason this Long October is going to be long: The modern Republican Party is still fighting the Civil War... and the Reconstruction... and the New Deal... and the 1960s... as well as Obamacare and Obama himself.  It's been a long war already, and it's not over yet...

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The Long October: Pretty Good Idea About WHY the Far Right Is Pushing For Default

Well, other than the fact that the Far Right in the House GOP are convinced that Obama is to blame for everything and must be defeated at all hazards, there's this little tidbit - "Crisis? What Crisis?" - coming out of the Capitol Building (via David Weigel over at Slate):

That’s how plenty of House Republicans, who remain the prime movers in the shutdown crisis, are looking at the terrain. They were told for years that a shutdown would be a disaster for the economy and their party. They were told the same thing about sequestration. Neither crisis has really lived up to the end-of-times hype, especially not in their districts. The worst effects, the ones constituents ask about, appear to them to be engineered by a vindictive Obama administration. And they expect the same if they fail to raise the debt limit—a crisis manufactured by Obama, not by them.

To be fair, the wingnuts have a valid point: nobody is really certain what will happen if the debt ceiling gets capped and the nation defaults.

This is despite the fact that there's a lot of financial experts - bank CEOs, Wall Street institutions, foreign investors - are freaking out that if the United States defaults due to the debt ceiling, the global reactions would be on the scale of the 2007-08 banking collapse.

To the Far Right Congresscritters driving this crisis, it's STILL all a bluff on Obama's part.

This is due to the fact that the Far Right are neither true conservatives - who by nature would be cautious and alert to potential hazards - nor real thinkers - they cannot perceive the potential of future effects, they can't ask the "what ifs".  To these people, the only thing that matters is the immediate recognizable past and the immediate NOW, things that can be perceived and understood.  And for what they know, the last time this was a crisis - in 2011 - the worst thing that happened was a slip in the Credit Rating from AAA to AA.  The nation and the planet kept chugging along.  And before that, the major disaster was the banks failing in 2007, which the Far Right still believes was a problem with housing markets and a corrupt Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac system (which is wrong in different ways).

The Far Right can only experience and understand the NOW, what happens in the moment and no further.  And to them, there's really no sign that a default or refusal on the debt ceiling would really cause any serious, long-term, or even permanent harm.

This is akin to a car driver speeding along a narrow cliff-side highway overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  They've been told in driver's ed class of the danger going off the road, and they've had gravity explained to them in physics and astronomy, but that driver really doesn't know what it's like to drive that car off that cliff.  And it's not even a suicidal impulse on the part of the driver: he just honestly doesn't know what will happen once the tires leave the road and the car goes spinning off into the blue.

For all the Far Right driver knows, the car won't even get dinged up all that bad, that the impact into the water won't be that harsh, that there aren't rocks hiding in those waves, and that after all the car is designed to survive impacts or at least protect the passengers from serious injury.  The Far Right driver can expect a thrilling rush, the taste of danger, and then let the airbags deploy and the driver can swim away and let the insurance company buy a replacement car.

And if that all doesn't work out, that Far Right driver can always ALWAYS fall back on the excuse that the car going over the cliff was Obama's fault.  Even though Obama was in the back seat the whole time since the Constitution doesn't allow him to set the budget, uh drive the car, and Obama was the one screaming the whole time at the driver to fucking stop before that car went over the cliff.  "Gee, if Obama didn't make all that screechy noise when the car punched over the guard rail..."

THIS now makes a whole lot more sense.  The Far Right have no qualms about driving the entire government AND the entire financial sector over that cliff... simply because they really don't know, and they really don't CARE to know, what might actually happen if they do.  The wingnuts seem to genuinely think the whole thing's a bluff to make them "surrender" to Obama.

Despite the fact that gravity is real.  Despite the fact that defaults are real.

Welcome to The Long October.

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