Meanwhile, Across the Pond

Britain's answer to the wannabe king in our White House isn't having such an easy time of it:

Boris Johnson’s bid to trigger a general election next month has been blocked by MPs following a string of heavy defeats for the government in both houses of parliament.

The prime minister was thwarted three times in the House of Commons: an attempt by opposition parties and Tory rebels to block a no-deal Brexit easily cleared its second and third readings, and Johnson later failed in his attempt to force a snap general election.

This is one of those times I wish we had a parliamentary government, with the head of state and the head of government being different offices. I could wish that Congress would somehow develop a spine -- which is not likely when #MoscowMitch is running the senate to suit himself and Nancy Pelosi seems intent on not rocking the boat -- but we're hampered by the separation of powers, which normally works fairly well -- until the president turns out to be a sociopath with severe ego deficiency who's in it for the money. Johnson can't even hold his own party in line, while our GOP, which has become a nest of racist grifters, falls right into line with whatever Trump wants.

As for the parallels between Johnson and Trump, this was enlightening:

This is Parliamentary Sketch Writer John Crace's take on Johnson's first Prime Minister's Question Time

Practice makes imperfect. There was an air of expectancy on the Tory benches as Boris Johnson prepared to face his first prime minister’s questions. Surely the previous day’s car crash could only have been an aberration. This time their clown prince would prove to be the headline act they had been promised. Bring them sunshine, make them smile. Give them a reason to feel good about their tawdry, shabby lives. Some hope.

Johnson has breezed through life, flailing effortlessly upwards while happily trashing the lives of all those with whom he comes in contact. For him, being the prime minister is merely a position of entitlement rather than of responsibility. The ideal job for someone predisposed to laziness and arrogance. Someone for whom the idea of preparation is an unthinkable admission of failure.

It goes on, describing the train wreck in detail. One can't help but wonder what would happen if Trump had to address Congress directly on major issues. Something very similar, I expect.

Maybe the Brits can pull themselves back from the brink.

Via Joe.My.God.

No, No, Look Over There!

You've undoubtedly heard about Meryl Streep's speech at the Golden Globes, if you haven't seen it:

Which, of course, got the expected reaction from The Hairpiece (even though his name was not mentioned, and how's that for being self-centered?):

And he's lying about mocking the reporter -- click through for a really disgusting gif.

Booman has an interesting take on this:

I think this is how Trump managed to pull off his miracle election. People can’t focus on the important things. There’s always something new to obsess over instead of staying on message. Do you care more about angry Trump voters who call the National Football League (NFL) the Black Lives Matter Football League (BLMFL), or are you more concerned with the idea of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III running the Department of Justice?

Donald Trump didn’t nominate Meryl Streep as his Director of Central Intelligence or his Secretary of Treasury. He nominated a full-on wingnut and a Goldman Sachs veteran foreclosure specialist for those jobs. So, every second wasted on Meryl Streep is a benefit to Trump and the prospects for his nominees to sail through the confirmation process with little fuss.

Of course Trump wants to talk about the Golden Globes. He wants you to talk about him talking about the Golden Globes.

(Thanks to Mustang Bobby)

Want to guess why he's scheduling his first press conference in six months for the same day as Jeff Sessions' confirmation hearing?

You've Probably Noticed

That I haven't been around lately. Two reasons: recovering from surgery, which has been slow and painful, and the only thing in the news, aside from the occasional hate crime or terrorist attack, is Donald Trump, and to be quite honest with you, he's a crashing bore and certainly doesn't deserve to be slobbered over the way the press is doing.

PS -- forgot to mention it yesterday, but there are more republished reviews at Green Man Review, and a new one, my first in about a year. Go over and visit.

Which Is Worse?

These assholes?

Boston brothers said that they were inspired by Donald Trump to beat and urinate on a homeless Latino man, police revealed on Wednesday.

According to State Police, Scott Leader and Steve Leader encountered the victim on the way home from a Red Sox game near a stop on Boston’s subway system, The Boston Globe reported on Wednesday.

The man said that he awoke to find the brothers urinating on his face and rummaging through his belongings.

“Next thing . . . he was getting hit in the face and head,” a police report explained. “He remembers being punched several times and hit with the metal pole.”

A witness said that the brothers were heard laughing as they walked away.

Or their hero?

Trump called the assault a “shame.”

“I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” he remarked. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

They're not passionate -- they're stupid bullies, just like their leader.

That's really showing our greatness -- beating up on homeless people. If we were really great, we wouldn't have any homeless people.

Blowhard du Jour

I seldom mention Ann Coulter here, mostly because she's not as entertaining as the other gasbags on the right: She's basically the Rush Limbaugh Barbie, going for maximum shock value on the least amount of substance. Today, she's taking on SC Governor Nikki Haley for calling for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house.

She then said that many media outlets, such as MSNBC, got the flag's history in South Carolina wrong, noting that the flag first went up at the capitol in 1962 under a Democratic governor and legislature to mark the 100th anniversary of the Civil War.

Coulter then took a shot at South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), who on Monday called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds.

"I’m appalled by –– though, I really like to like Nikki Haley since she is a Republican. On the other hand, she is an immigrant and does not understand America’s history," Coulter said.

First off, in 1962, the Democratic party was still the home of the Dixiecrats, who, within in the next few years, all bolted the party and proclaimed themselves Republicans because of the Democrats' push for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Second, Nikki Haley was born in South Carolina, the daughter of Indian immigrants. So Coulter's off by a generation.

It's also worth noting that Coulter ignores the fact that Haley was joined at her press conference by SC senator Bob Corker, and that Sen. Lindsey Graham and Jeb Bush have also called for the flag to be removed. Of course, including them would tend to undercut one of Coulter's recurring themes -- immigrants are bad.

I really think this bit -- "I really like to like Nikki Haley since she is a Republican" -- reveals just how shallow Coulter is.

Oh, by the way -- we're all immigrants here, even the American Indians: there were no people on this continent 40,000 years ago.

Looking Back at 2014

I know, the president says we must look forward, to which I reply, "Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it." Or words to that effect. The Torture Report bears me out. I'm going to cop out, though, and leave the retrospective to Roy Edroso, than whom none can do better. Here are his ten worst moment of conservative excess, with notes on my favorites:

The Year in Bullshit, Part I. Since I adore (ahem) Vladimir Putin, this resonated:

Conservatives fall in love with Vladimir Putin. When Putin muscled Ukraine in March, very few conservatives called for the U.S. to intervene militarily. Nonetheless they blamed the Commander in Chief because, in the words of Rand Paul, he “hasn't projected enough strength and hasn't shown a priority to the national defense” — that is, he hadn’t rattled a saber that no one expected or wanted him to unsheathe.

How odd that the right doesn't want to go to war with someone -- oh, wait: he's not brown. And of course, the "family values" crowd thinks he's the cat's pajamas, because he uses "traditional values" as a mask to hide his consolidation of power. (Of course, I doubt any of them would describe it that way -- too close to home.)

The Year in Bullshit, Part II.

Impeachment for the hell of it. Conservatives have been threatening to impeach Obama since 2009. You’d think the schtick would have gotten tiresome even to them by now, particularly when their favorite impeachable offenses, like #Benghazi, keep going belly-up in their own Congressional committees.

I don't think I need to expand on this, but it seems to be part of the right-wing playbook. If you don't like the president, impeach him. For something. Anything.

The Year in Bullshit, Part III.

Torture as an American value. I’m not sure how old you have to be to remember when torturing prisoners was something the United States simply didn’t do. As a lad I, like many Americans, was shocked to learn about the My Lai massacre; if I had been then told that Lt. William Calley also waterboarded and hung from chains his Vietnamese victims, whether they were Viet Cong or not, I’m sure I would have been even more shocked. Maybe Dirty Harry did that shit, but not John Wayne.

I am old and jaded now, but I must admit, when after the Senate released the torture report in December a number of Americans, including a former Vice-President of the United States, told us that torture was great and it was actually the citizens who balked at it that were anti-American, I was still a little shocked.

I guess I was a little shocked, too. Not at the torture program -- we knew it was going on, we just didn't know how bad it was. But the fact that a majority of Americans were OK with it was more than a bit appalling. (Footnote: atheists and humanists had the lowest percentage of those who approved the program; evangelical Christians had the highest percentage. You do the math.)

The Year in Bullshit, Part IV.

Both items deserve mention:

When CDC declined to seal America’s borders, citing the best science, conservatives declared this was part of Obama’s one-world agenda to unite the globe in disease and misery. (Heather Mac Donald of City Journal actually claimed the “public-health establishment” wouldn’t quarantine other countries because it was “awash in social-justice ideology” and “influenced as much by belief in America’s responsibility for the postcolonial oppression of Africa, and suspicion of American border enforcement, as it is by a commitment to public-health principles of containment and control.”) They ramped up their own custom science: Rand Paul told us you could get Ebola from being in the same room as an Ebola person. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, whose degree is not in medicine, wondered aloud “if this strain of Ebola is easier to catch than we think.”

You know, what with one thing or another, I've spent a lot of time with doctors. They tend to know what they're talking about. Rand Paul, not so much. (Oh, by the way -- my doctors are not self-certified.) My own take is that Benghazi!!1! had gotten stale, and IRS!!1! wasn't gaining the traction they wanted.

And last but certainly not least: Cons, cops, and the end of the “libertarian moment."

There's a lot in this one, but the Cliven Bundy part is good:

This theme reached a sort of climax in April at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, where an old white rancher refused to pay his legally-owed user fees and, surrounded by armed supporters, defied federal authorities’ right to collect his property in restitution. Bundy was celebrated not just by survivalist nuts, but also by elected officials such as Rick Perry and Ted Cruz, and by mainstream pundits such as National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote, in an essay called “The Case for a Little Sedition,” “Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition…” Lest his neckless readers accuse him of siding with a half-naked fakir, Williamson also compared Bundy to the Founding Fathers, not to mention the architects of the previous year’s government shutdown, in which “every one of the veterans and cheesed-off citizens who disregarded President Obama’s political theater and pushed aside his barricades was a law-breaker, too — and bless them for being that.” Moving barricades, pointing rifles at federal agents — same diff!

You know, one thing that struck me pretty much instantly that no one else seems to have mentioned: Cliven Bundy is nothing more than a thief -- not quite at the level of Wall Street, but look at it this way: it's not his land, it's not "government land," it's our land. He agreed to pay rent to use it for feeding his cattle, and now he's reneging. It's pretty simple, really. So simple that even Ted Cruz can't figure it out.

There. That's it. 2014 is officially over.

Idiot du Jour

Bryan Fischer is, among his other accomplishments, an expert epidemiologist, who knows all about transmission vectors and incubation periods.

Of course, in real life Fischer is a raving rabble-rouser who will say anything that will get him some attention, as well as being an everything denialist. (Denial seems to be as much a part of the Christianist toolbox as projection.)

It's people like him that make me sometimes regret that we have free speech in this country -- but then, unlike Fischer and his ilk, I have no intention of setting myself up as the arbiter of who gets to say what.

I wonder if he realizes how ridiculous he is to sane people.

Via Joe.My.God., where you will also find this article on the origins of HIV. Like, real science.

You Just Knew This Was Going to Happen

Did you see the story about the two straight guys in New Zealand who got married to win tickets to next year's Rugby World Cup in England?

Two heterosexual New Zealand men who got married to win tickets to the 2015 Rugby World Cup in London have managed to anger both gay rights campaigners and conservative groups.

Travis McIntosh, a 23-year-old engineering student from Otago University, and Matt McCormick, a 24-year-old teacher at Musselburgh School in Dunedin, were married at Eden Park in Auckland on Friday.

Gay rights groups are understandably pissed off at this, which was a stunt by a radio station in New Zealand -- the kind of contest radio stations do all the time. After all, the fight for marriage equality has been pretty serious business world-wide, and this just belittles the whole effort.

Of course, the anti-gays are all over this. Here's Jennifer Roback Morse, via Good.As.You:

Two men can get married for any reason they want. The law does not require them to prove that they are actually “gay,” or that they “love each other,” however those terms might be defined in a legal context. (!)

I hate to say I told you so. But I told you so.

Back in 2010, I created this talk that showed what life under a genderless marriage regime would look like, thirty years on. The story did not contain a single “gay” or “lesbian” person. The story showed that changing the law would induce a whole series of behaviors among people who are not same sex attracted. Two men may want to get married to get off-base housing in the military. Or to get one of them a green card.

Or to win a radio contest.

Gay activists and their wealthy patrons seem surprised that they do not get to control what everyone does and why they do it.

They have not really thought through what redefining marriage will actually mean for the whole of society.

Let's do a little bit of dissection here -- actually, I don't even have to go into much detail: everything she says applies to straight couples as well as same-sex couples. No one asks why you're getting married.

The crack about "Gay activists and their wealthy patrons" is nothing more than pure projection. (And let's guess whose "wealthy patrons" are more than likely a couple of very rich churches who assume that everyone must do as they're told.)

As for the "radio contest" bit -- how many TV shows have there been that can be loosely grouped under the heading "matchmaking for ratings"? -- "The Bachelor," "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?" "The Bachelorette," "The Dating Game" -- and there are more than I can't remember the names of. And as far as taking marriage seriously, check out this from Wikipedia:

Dating game shows are television game shows that incorporate a dating system in the form of a game with clear rules. Human matchmaking is involved only in selecting the game's contestants – usually for amusement value as opposed to any concern for their happiness or compatibility. The audience sees only the game; an important feature of all dating game shows is that the contestants have little or no previous knowledge of each other, and are exposed to each other only through the game, which may include viewing a photograph or at least knowing the basic criteria for participation (typically participants are not already married).

(Emphasis added.)

Eventually, of course, there were gay versions, but late in the game (if you'll pardon the expression). "Boy Meets Boy" ran for sex episodes in 2003 and wasn't particularly straightforward (a lot of the contestants were straight).

Roback Morse's final comment is a moderated form of "The sky is falling!" People very seldom think through the ramifications for society of anything they do. The only people who worry about it are conservatives -- those people who stand in front of the march of history screaming "STOP!" And all they can do is make wild predictions of doom, based on nothing.

Roback Morse and the other outraged conservatives are missing the point, a fact best illustrated by a comment from one of the contestants:

Mr McIntosh told the Otago Daily Times he thought the marriage would last about two years.

Opposition was understandable but the wedding was not mocking the institution of marriage, he said.

“It’s just seeing how far two good mates would go to win a trip to the Rugby World Cup.”

The institution of marriage is in trouble, but not because of gay couples wanting to get married. It's in trouble because of straight people.

Today in "Christian Love": Compare and Contrast

Some "Christian" wingnut named Jack Burkman (a lobbyist, no less), is organizing a boycott of any NFL team that drafts newly out defensive end Michael Sam. From Joe.My.God., quoting the Christian Post:

"We shall exercise our First Amendment rights and shall not stop until the drafting NFL franchise cannot sell a single ticket, jersey or autographed football," said Burkman. "In short, we shall be relentless." Burkman claims in the release that he is currently mobilizing "powerful grassroots organizations in 27 of the 50 states," as well as a "coalition of Evangelical Christian leaders from across the nation to take part in a protest if Sam is drafted. The NFL, like most of the rest of American business, is about to learn that when you trample the Christian community and Christian values there will be a terrible financial price to pay," said Burkman.

Count the buzzwords. My own comment at JMG was "How much clout does anyone thing all these "evangelical leaders" are going to have in Chicago?" Boycott the Bears? Good luck with that. Ask Disney how these boycotts work out. (Burkman is also apparently lobbying in support of a bill in Congress to make it illegal for the NFL to hire a gay player. Seriously.)

In the meantime:

Gay NFL hopeful Michael Sam has signed an endorsement deal, his first, with VISA, ABC News reports:

In his first spot, which is planned to exclusively run on digital platforms, Sam, the SEC Defensive Player of the Year out of Missouri, is shown working out while a voiceover urges the viewer to judge him for his play on the field, not off of it.

"We felt that Michael's story was a perfect fit for our 'everywhere' campaign, which is meant to inspire people to reach their own personal goals and aspirations," Visa's chief marketing officer Kevin Burke told ESPN.com. "We wish Michael the best on and off the field as he embarks on the next chapter of his life."

Here's the ad:

So, Mr. Burkman -- going to boycott Visa for exercising its First Amendment rights?

Duck Dynasty Who?

You might gather from that that I don't watch much TV, and you'd be right. Nor do I pay attention to "reality" shows, which aren't. So I've been enduring the Phil Robertson flap (I had to look up his name) on just about every media outlet you can imagine (and it's taking up way too much space on the blogosphere).

My take? The guy's an asshole. That's the whole point of his show, as far as I can tell. OK, fine, so he's an asshole who believes in the Bible and thinks that makes him a Christian.

So A&E suspended him. According to the Conservative Bible, a private company can o whatever it wants to employees, including firing them just for the hell of it, or because Obamacare, or whatever. Apparently, that only holds true if said employee is a "liberal" (meaning anyone to the left of Attila the Hun) or offends Sarah Palin, who among her other attributes, may very well be the loudest nonentity of modern times. (Remember Martin Bashir? Did Palin stick up for his right to free expression? Hah!)

Digby has a very good post on this whole thing that lays out very plainly -- plainly enough that even Sarah Palin can understand it -- the noxious combination of ignorance and hypocrisy on the right. I'll give you a hint -- remember the Dixie Chicks?

Read Digby -- it's worth the time.

Idiot du Jour

This is actually from Friday, The Day the Computer Died. (Yes, I'm doing a lot of catching up.) But some things are timeless. Jerome Corsi, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, once again speaking to subjects he obviously knows nothing about, as quoted by Alvin McEwen at Justice For All:

“Our founding fathers knew that if we went this direction, there was no more moral compass and you won’t be able to explain to your children — you’ll have to face the fact that we lost holding the line on one of the most principle issues in the Bible, and that is sex is not about fun,” he remarked. “If you want to have fun, read a book, go to a movie. Sex is about the procreation of children. It’s a sacred responsibility that is meant by God to have men and women commit their lifetime to children.”

(Emphasis added.)

As it turns out, there are lots of reasons that people have sex, but take a look at the top five or ten from these lists (one for women, one for men):

Women:

1. I felt attracted to the person.
2. I wanted to experience the physical pleasure.
3. It feels good.
4. I wanted to show my affection for my partner.
5. I wanted to express my love for my partner.
6. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release.
7. I felt horny.
8. It's fun.
9. I realized I was in love.
10. I was swept up in the heat of the moment.

Men:

1. I was attracted to the person.
2. It feels good.
3. I wanted to experience the physical pleasure.
4. It's fun.
5. I wanted to show my affection for the person.
6. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release.
7. I felt horny.
8. I wanted to express my love for the person.
9. I wanted an orgasm.
10. I wanted to please my partner.

You'll have to search long and hard to find "having children" in these lists.

(OK, granted, this is from Psychology Today, but there is some research behind it, somewhere. Here's the paper the article is based on.)

I realize that reality doesn't carry much weight in Corsi's universe, but for most of us. . . .

Things Rush Limbaugh Doesn't Know

The difference between "affect" and "control":

"See, in my humble opinion, folks, if you believe in God, then intellectually you cannot believe in manmade global warming … You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something that he can’t create."

First off, there's nothing humble about Limbaugh or his opinions, which he may or may not actually hold -- he's one of those "personalities" that will say anything to get attention, especially since his advertisers started bailing. And for Limbaugh to be talking about what's intellectually possible is beyond funny.

Second, no one said that humanity controls the climate.

ThinkProgress notes a whole group of "agnostics and atheists" that recognize humanity's contribution to climate change:

What’s more, scores of religious institutions have responded to our shifting environment in ways that fully acknowledge humanity’s role in creating the crisis. The United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have all issued statements or launched initiatives aimed at acting on global warming, and the United States Council of Catholic Bishops has an entire section of their website dedicated to combating climate change and its disproportionate impact on the world’s poor.

In fact, when Pope Francis officiated his inaugural mass after being elected head of the Catholic church earlier this year, he cited climate change as a core concern for the faithful:

Please, I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in economic, political and social life, and all men and women of good will: let us be ‘protectors’ of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.

Their concern, of course, is based on the idea of humanity as the steward of Creation, which is an interpretation of "dominion" that's been gaining more and more favor in recent years. Limbaugh, of course, like the rest of his money-grubbing cohort, much prefers the idea of "dominion" as meaning "exploit" or "plunder."

And this has been another edition of Liars for Jesus(TM).

A Brand-New Idiot

I don't do Fox (unless I'm stranded in Florida visiting my family, and then I'd rather sit by the pool), so I wasn't aware of John Stossel, who apparently is a Paul Ryan wannabe who creams his pants at the idea of the "undeserving" starving to death. Vis Digby, this choice piece of crap:

Desperate New Jersey drivers wait in long lines to buy gasoline. One line was two miles long[.]

The media blame “a lack of electricity” and report that “Governor Christie has acted to boost supplies of gasoline…by directing Treasury officials to waive licensing requirements that affect merchants’ ability to buy fuel from out-of-state suppliers.”

That would help, but Christie would help more if he could suspend New Jersey’s foolish law forbidding price increases of more than 10% during an “emergency,” and if he’d apologize for bragging that the state will crack down on price “gouging!”

Complaining about greedy profiteers is probably politically smart. But if you're one of the people the law "protects," you won't fare as well.

What politicians call “gouging” is just the free market. When markets are allowed to work their magic, lines disappear. The high price is a big flag planted in the ground that says, “Hey, come over here and make money.”

(Emphasis added.)

Now, I don't know if Stossel is technically sub-normal in IQ -- after all, he's probably making nice money as a commentator for Fox, which can cut both ways -- but his emotional development and socialization are well below par, at least based on these comments.

And actually, when you take a step or two back and actually look at what he's saying, this little screed doesn't show the "free market" in a very flattering light, at least the Randian version, wherein our heroes prove their superiority by screwing everyone else. But even that vision presupposes a market operating under more or less normal conditions. Stossel's version is pure predation.

I like Digby's summation:

Seriously, this worship of markets is just as faith based as any other religion. And just like all the others it features an invisible Deity directing traffic from somewhere else. I'm not much of a believer in any of them but if I had to choose I'd pick one of the ones that doesn't require the human sacrifices.

I wonder if Stossel is particularly religious. If he is, he's going to have some 'splaining to do when he shuffles off this mortal coil.

Ah, Yes, the Messaging

Paul Ryan (who I begin to suspect has major investments in cat food companies) says this:

But Ryan rejected Kennedy’s assertion and promised to completely undo the law.

“We’re going to repeal the entire law and then we’re going to advance patient-centered reforms that address these kinds of issues,” the Wisconsin Republican said.

.

But then, Mitch McConnell says this:

WALLACE: I just want to ask, what specifically are you going to do to provide universal coverage to the 30 million people who are uninsured?

MCCONNELL: That is not the issue. The question is, how can you go step by step to improve the American health care system. … We’re not going to turn the American health care system into a Western European system.

Do you somehow get the idea the the "replace" part of "repeal and replace" is not going to happen? And how happy to you think the insurance industry is going to be about losing all those customers who have to buy insurance under the ACA? (Which actually makes me wonder if the "repeal" part will happen.)

Catch-Up

I haven't had much to say this week -- it's been abnormal and unsettled. I'm starting to wonder if my life will ever be "normal" again -- or if I just have to find a new normal.

At any rate, this post is as much a link dump as anything else, highlighting some of the more disgusting people in the news.

First off, the Catholic bishops are maintaining their lead easily. Now if you have a relationship with a group that has a relationship with a group that is working for equal rights for GLBTs, you'll lose your funding.

For three years now, Compañeros, a small nonprofit organization in rural southwestern Colorado, has received thousands of dollars from the Roman Catholic Church to help poor Hispanic immigrants with basic needs including access to health care and guidance on local laws.

But in February, the group was informed by a representative from the Diocese of Pueblo that its financing from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an arm of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops devoted to ending poverty, was in danger.

The problem, the diocesan liaison explained, was Compañeros’s membership in an immigrant rights coalition that had joined forces with a statewide gay and lesbian advocacy group, recounted Nicole Mosher, Compañeros’s executive director.

How Christian of them.

And in Seattle, the Church is in the middle of politics:

The two bishops of the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle, in a letter to the faithful, say they will deploy parishes to collect signatures for Referendum 74, a measure for the November ballot designed to roll back same-sex marriage in Washington.

While asking that signatures not be collected on Easter Sunday, the bishops described the issue as “critically important” and said information on the signature drive is being sent to pastors throughout the Western Washington diocese.

I guess even Catholic bishops have some sense of shame, since they don't want to collect signatures to deny civil rights to gays on Easter Sunday. It's unconscionable, though, that they're still trying to tailor civil law to their own primitive "morality". But it gets better:

In their letter, the bishops specifically deny that refusing marriage to same-sex couples equates to discrimination — an argument made by Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Catholic, in arguing for marriage equality.

“Treating different things differently is not unjust discrimination,” the bishops claim. “Marriage can only be between a man and a woman because of its unique ends, purpose and place in society. The word ‘marriage’ isn’t simply a label that can be attached to different types of relationships.

Arrogance and shallowness all wrapped up in one delicious quote. Since when to a couple of (theoretically) celibate men get to decide what marriage is?

I'm not even going to bother quoting Senator Reverend Ruben Diaz -- you already know what he's like.

The Catholic hierarchy seems to be taking most of the honors this week -- sort of odd that Rick Santorum managed to keep his mouth shut. This one is nice, however -- the bigots got some push-back.

A Catholic priest who hosted a mandatory assembly told seniors at Minneapolis’ DeLaSalle high school that single parents and children who are adopted are not normal, preached against same-sex marriage, and a Catholic couple who presented with the priest told the students gay marriage was akin to bestiality, all apparently in an effort to influence the seniors — soon to be of legal voting age — to vote for the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment facing Minnesota, according to a report.

The priest, by the way, did nothing to correct the volunteer couple.

And the pushback? Well, according to the archdiocese, the presentation "upset" some of the students:

Jim Accurso, spokesman for the archdiocese, said most of the presentation went fine. But during a question-and-answer session, a presenter used “an unfortunate example” to answer the question and made students upset.

The students had a different take:

“It was a really awful ending,” said Bliss. “It was anger, anger, anger, and then we were done and they left. This is really a bad idea.”

It's not all Catholics, however. John Derbyshire has finally stepped over the line. I'm not going to try to excerpt this -- Charles Johnson has done a good job of it, if you follow the link. And if you want some evidence that Derbyshire is an unregenerate pig, read David Badash's article.

Scott Walker, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Enterprises, who one hopes will soon the be former governor of Wisconsin, outdid himself this week. From AFL-CIO:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is facing a recall election, quietly repealed a state law making it easier for pay discrimination victims to seek justice. Amanda Terkel reports in The Huffington Post that Walker signed into law a bill passed in party-line votes by Republicans in the state legislature that rolls back the 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act. The act had allowed workers to challenge pay discrimination in state rather than just federal courts.

That's just the latest. Check out this post at C&L to see what else he's been up to.

And finally, our own Supreme Court of the United States.

The US supreme court ruled on Monday that jails do not violate privacy rights by routinely strip-searching everyone, even those arrested on minor traffic offenses.

By a 5-4 vote and splitting along conservative-liberal ideological lines, the high court ruled that privacy rights involving the searches were outweighed by security concerns by jails about a suspect hiding drugs, weapons or other contraband.

Writing the opinion for the court's conservative majority, justice Anthony Kennedy concluded the jail search procedures struck a reasonable balance between inmate privacy and the needs of the institution.

The kicker on this one is that in the case presented, the plaintiff had been arrested for a traffic fine that he had paid. Isn't it nice to know you live in a country where any asshole with a badge can make you take your clothes off because he feels like it? If he doesn't decide to shoot you first. (I'm not going to comment on the Trayvon Martin murder, except to say that Zimmerman's "self-defense" defense is so full of holes you could use it to strain pasta.)

I'm going to spend the rest of the day reading comics, I think. They're much less surreal.

Lame

That's this criticism of Rachel Maddow by Adrian Chen, which only demonstrates that 1) Chen doesn't understand humor at all, and 2) he's as prone as anyone to logical fallacies (using the "Pie Spy" satire to tar Maddow, when there's no evidence that Maddow had anything to do with it, except that it's her show). He is right on one score -- the segment's not funny, but it has nothing to do with the reasons he cites, nor, for that matter, anything to do with Maddow.

Sullivan pointed the way to this one, which only figures: he seems to have only a rudimentary sense of humor himself, and certainly isn't one to sit still for someone practicing actual civil discourse in public -- at least, not if it's not on the Village's terms, which is to say, one may only repeat received wisdom, the only variation being in the source.

Sullivan's post is a reader response, and this I found hilarious -- quoting a prior post of Sullivan's:

"Maddow is better [than Olbermann] but oozes toxic levels of smug."

The mind boggles.

"Honor Equals Heterosexual," Revisited

I did a take-down of James Bowman's ludicrous piece The Weekly Standard on "why we should keep DADT" some while ago, but, via Sullivan, here's a point-by-point dismemberment from Nathaniel Frank.

This particular bit caught my attention:

BOWMAN: "The robust heterosexual... knows, or believes, what it seems the homosexual cannot know or believe, or doesn't want to know or believe, namely that the two sorts of love [brotherly and erotic] are different in kind and not just in degree. The resistance from military men to the idea of gays in the military seems to be due to this perception... Eros is so strong that it corrupts and destroys the other kinds of love."

RESPONSE: Putting aside the question of what makes a heterosexual "robust," the idea that all gay people refuse to distinguish between brotherly and erotic love is simply bizarre. More to the point, the idea that open gays must be banned from the military because erotic love destroys military friendships is belied by the millions of healthy bonds in both the U.S. and foreign militaries that have open gays throughout their ranks.

Graham Jackson, a Canadian Jungian psychologist, wrote a very interesting book titled The Secret Lore of Gardening: Patterns of Male Intimacy that deals specifically with this issue. (In fact, a large part of his source material is the work of the WWI British poets and writers, who actually served in the military and whose writings explore the relationships of comrades in arms -- which itself is the term used to describe relationships between peers.) First off, Bowman is mischaracterizing the concept of "eros" as it is used in psychology, particularly the Freudian and Jungian brands. (Somehow, this doesn't surprise me. I don't know whether to ascribe it to ignorance, of which Bowman seems to have an ample supply, or the regulation right-wing hat trick of changing definitions, as in the creationists' use of "theory.") As Jackson describes it, eros is a fundamental drive that, while probably generated by sex (as is most everything, at least almost everything to do with interpersonal relationships, it would seem), has a much wider effect as a means of structuring relationships. What it boils down to is that Bowman is flat wrong -- as Jackson quite effectively demonstrates, the two kinds of love are, indeed, a matter of degree. Going off on my own speculation a bit, I would suggest that, if we accept the idea that human sexual orientation is fluid and does not fit tidily into a "gay/straight" dichotomy (and there is evidence to support that idea), then the relationships between comrades in arms do indeed partake of the erotic in the sense that Bowman uses it.

A personal footnote on this: I've had too many experiences of "straight" guys coming on to me (as in "Dammit, man! Watch those hands!" and no, they weren't all closet cases) to subscribe wholeheartedly to the idea that "friendship" is a different order of creature than "desire," or for that matter people are either "straight" or "gay." The mechanisms and sources of attraction, like so much else in human behavior, are far more complex and variable than we can understand, at least right now, and to try to fit such things into nice tidy boxes speaks to me of nothing so much as an agenda powered by a limited and unrealistic world view.

At any rate, Frank does a thorough job of debunking everything that Bowman wrote, which strikes me as tedious rather than difficult. I admire his patience.

And what is a "robust heterosexual," anyway?

If All Else Fails, Let's Try the "N" Word

I ran across this story in a post by Andrew Sullivan this morning (several posts, actually), but I think Publius has the best insight:

So here's the basic dilemma. On the one hand, there's nothing ambiguous about this. It's straight-up George Wallace-style race-baiting. It's an intentional attempt to stir racial prejudices.

Limbaugh & Friends took a random fight and immediately tried to pin it on Obama (some less directly than others). And after the police quickly backed off claims that it was racially motivated, the corrections either didn't come or were merely one-liner updates inappropriate to the gravity of the previous charges.

But even if it was racially motivated, what on earth does Obama have to do with it? The answer is nothing other race. The only goal here was to stir up racial resentment and then pin it on Obama. I'm sorry, but this is infuriating. We shouldn't be putting up with this in 2009.

And yet, not only are we putting up with it, but a significant proportion of us are eating it up. I'd say Limbaugh and Malkin, et al., should be ashamed of themselves, but if someone has no integrity, no honesty, and no morals, you can hardly expect them to feel shame.

One thing that leapt out at me, that no one else has noted in any post I've seen, is that the police chief also immediately jumped to the conclusion that the beating was racially motivated. That just points up how deepl" y the prejudices that Limbaugh and his ilk appeal to are ingrained in some people. (And frankly, "any" in that case is too many, although to be honest, it seems as though it's impossible to get rid of all racial bias -- the habit of identiying "us" and "them" is probably harfd-wired.) Of course, he's also man enough to retract it and admit his initial statement had no basis -- it was just his assumption.

This is not something you're going to see from Limbaugh, Malkin, or any of that brood. In fact, Sullivan quotes Malkin's response:

She refuses to remove or correct the post that says baldly that the attack was racial and her correction amounts to:

The police are backing off the racial motive claims. Given the explosive consequences of candor about such matters, this is not surprising.

No: one police chief said he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. But Malkin insists that the real reason was racial and the the chief is bowing to political correctness.

The problem with the right in this country (and, to be "fair and balanced" about it, it does crop up on the left as well, but seems not to be as prevalent) is that they "know" certain things, and mere facts are not going to affect their reactions at all. This is not necessarily an ideological thing, but a human personality thing. It just seems that that type of personality tends to gravitate toward a world view that relies on received wisdom -- "wisdom" in this case being the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin.

And tell me -- should we take either of those worthies as an example of white superiority?

Whatever Happened to David Gergen?

Not much, apparently -- he still gets on talk shows sounding like he actually knows what's going on. Here he is on Anderson Cooper's 360, telling it like it is (in some weird alternate reality):

I think one of the other aspects of this is very fundamental to who we are as a people. There are a lot of sociologists and historians will tell you we as American people are just different. We're an outliers measured in many ways. Our value system is different. We don't think like Canadians. We don't accept government the way it is. We're not deferential to authority the way Canadians are or in Western Europe.

And so, I think the Clintons misread that some, and I think President Obama has misread that some. When you come and try to sell something big, big government to the American people, they tend to be very, very weary of it. It's been true throughout our history. . . .

I think there's no way that the American people will ever accept single-payer system, a government-run health care system for all. I just don't -- you know, I don't think we're like the British or the Canadians in that sense.

That does not mean you can't have universal coverage. It does mean you can have a very robust system in which poor people have a chance for protection and will have a chance for decent life. It does mean that -- in the American system, we tend to do that more through the private sector than through the public -- than through the public sector.

It's an amazing tour-de-force on Gergen's part -- every scare argument, every disproved exaggeration, rendered in very temperate language as though he actually knows what he's talking about. (Something that I don't ever recall him being guilty of in the past.)

On at least one point there he's demonstrably wrong: Americans are much more deferential to authority than either Canadians or Europeans. I remember a story the novelist Jerzy Kozinski told, of trying to get on a plane in Italy. He donned a suit that looked like a uniform, although it bore no insignia, and went to the airport and very matter-of-factly butted in at the head of the ticket line. The ones who didn't object were the Americans. As I recall -- this was in a TV interview with, I believe, Dick Cavett -- he was amazed and tried the same trick several other times, with the same result.

The American people will accept anything, if you give them some real information and some time to think about it. Look at gay marriage -- not even a concept twenty years ago.

The whole program looks to have been pretty depressing, from an information standpoint.

Read Digby's priceless commentary on this. It's totally High Snark.

About That Socialist Healthcare Proposal. . . .

I've been meaning to get back to Megan McArdle and her anti-health care screeds for a few days now. Sadly, No! has reminded me about it. For the sake of some sort of coherence when looking at a phenomenon that is essentially incoherent, here is McArdle’s first attempt to “clarify” (and I use the quotes advisedly) her original post. Sorry, but on second reading, the first post is still largely junk, full of unsupportable assertions and faulty logic, not to mention the almost palpable sneer with which she invests the term “social justice.”

From the follow-up, here is the key blunder, stated clearly:

But wholesale transfers to large classes, from large classes, are not good moral philosophy unless those classes are very well specified to the moral effect you are trying to achieve.

And here it is restated later on, with the “morality” clause elaborated:

A gigantic single-payer system is a pretty blunt instrument; it transfers money from one group, the young and healthy, to another group, the old and sick. It does not distinguish much more finely than that between the deserving and undeserving within that class.A gigantic single-payer system is a pretty blunt instrument; it transfers money from one group, the young and healthy, to another group, the old and sick. It does not distinguish much more finely than that between the deserving and undeserving within that class.

No. It doesn't. We’re not talking about a wholesale transfer from one large class to another. That is simply a bald assertion with no foundation. This is so obvious that I can’t help but think it’s deliberate. (Nor can I believe I'm the only one to spot it -- someone must have commented on it and I've just missed it somehow. Please, tell me that's so -- my faith in the blogsphere's at stake here.) That, actually, is somewhat the system we have now with Medicare and Social Security (largely due to the fecklessness of the government in various incarnations), which, one hopes, a single-payer health care system would in some measure alleviate. This is also the basis of McArdle’s major straw man, that a single-payer system is designed to force the “young and healthy” to pay for health care for the “old and sick.” These are statements without intelligence or honesty. A single-payer system means that everyone pays in and everyone is entitled to benefits. Let me repeat that: everyone pays in, everyone gets benefits. What is so hard to understand about that?

I really don’t see where questions of morality come into it at all, except for McArdle's apparent need to determine who is "deserving" and who "undeserving." Like I'm going to take her word for it.

Looking at McArdle's follow-up to her original post, the reality gaps are pretty obvious.

1) Single payer transfers money from anyone who is young and healthy to anyone who is old and sick, regardless of their need for the money.

Sadly, No. (Sorry -- couldn't resist.) As does private insurance, which McArdle seems to desperately want to hold onto by whatever means necessary, a single-payer system means that every member of the insured group pays in (taxes, in that case) and every member is entitled to benefits. That's the way insurance of any kind works. Duh.

2) For this to be moral, the entire enormous class of people who are old and sick must have some justified claim on the money of the young and healthy.

3) The large class of old and sick people do not need the money; as a group, they are wealthier than the young, healthy people from whom we are transferring the money.

Given that McArdle has completely misrepresented the system to begin with, this is so much garbage. Nevertheless: It doesn't operate in terms of groups, at least not in terms of actual payouts. Insurance premiums are figured on statistical probabilities; one assumes a tax to support a single-payer system would be based on something similar (one does hope that, truly). Now, talking about the "entire enormous class" of old/sick people is more than a little disingenuous. It's not as though the government is going to be giving flat grants to old sick people as a class, so you really can't legitimately cast the question in those terms. Perhaps, as a group, the old sick people don't need the money, but 1) I'd like to see some breakdowns on the number of elderly who are at or below the poverty line, and 2) remember, when it comes time to pay for the care, we're not talking about groups, we're talking about individuals.

4) Therefore, we must look for another legitimate claim on society's resources.

5) Another such claim might be a fairness claim: the old and sick have been terribly unlucky, so we should pay for their health care even though they don't need the money.

6) This is not a good argument. Most of the old and sick are sick because they are old. Getting old may suck, but it is not unfair; it is inevitable. All of us will become old and sick, unless something even worse happens to us to make us dead. Some of the old and sick are just sick, and have never been healthy. But to calculate the relative deservingness of the whole group, we have to weigh the bad luck of those people against the bad luck of the currently young and healthy people who will, in the future, die young. As a group, there's no reason to think that the (currently) old and sick have had worse luck than the (currently) young and healthy, although obviously some members of each group are unluckier than others.

7) A third argument we might make is that the young and healthy should pay for the care of the old and sick because they have more responsibility for the problems than do the old and sick people themselves. This is self-evidently stupid. If even 100 people who are currently old and sick smoked and dranked themselves into early debility, while all the other old and sick people in America had absolutely no causal role in their own illness, this tiny aggregate responsibility for a few cases of lung cancer and cirrhosis would, to a near certainty, be larger than the responsibility the young and healthy bear for other peoples' ill health1.

8) Thefore, as a group, the old and sick have no moral claim to massive transfer payments from the young and healthy. This tells us nothing about any moral claims individual members may have. For example, veterans could be entitled to care, regardless of need, because they incurred some part of their current illness on behalf on the nation.

9) Arguments that we shouldn't let the worst off members of society die are not valid moral arguments for single payer. They are arguments in favor of giving health care to those who cannot afford it, a much more limited project.

More garbage. I seriously question the idea of casting this whole discussion in terms of "morality." It's the sort of thing only a libertarian could come up with, particularly if she's trying to stay in the good graces of the rabid right. This whole section is nothing but straw men, smelling of many day dead red herrings. In fact, the more I look at McArdle's "arguments," the less impressed I am -- it's just one big straw man, a single-payer program sewn from whole cloth to fit no particular reality, just McArdle's philosophy. I'm afraid I have to give more credit to BradRocket's "me, me, me" comment than I had at first figured. There certainly does seem to be a large measure of self-centered special pleading going on here.

There is another argument -- not on McArdle's side of the fence, however:

Let's try one simple example: you feel obligated to take care of your elderly parents, because it's traditional, they're your parents, and you love them and want to be sure they're OK. They also took care of you when you were tiny and helpless, so turn-about only seems reasonable. It's the basis of the traditional family, after all. I mean the real traditional family.

However, sometimes medical care can be very expensive, and you're afraid you won't be able to afford it if something serious happens. You don't want to jeopardize your children's future to take care of your parents -- not to mention your own life if you should need major medical care. If you go, who's going to take care of the elderly parents and the helpless children? That's a real quandary. So the government provides a program into which you pay premiums in the form of taxes, and everyone has the assurance of the care they need. It's called "spreading the risk," which is, after all, what insurance does, save that in the case of the government-run program, you have a much better chance of claims being honored, private insurance companies having become notoriously arbitrary in that regard.* You pay your share, everyone else pays their share, your parents are taken care of, anyone who needs medical care gets it (including you and your children) and you can (hopefully) afford to send your kids to decent schools. And they will, in their turn, be able to be sure you're being taken care of when you're old and sick.

What's so hard about that?

I have a distinct sense of McArdle feeling that, as a good libertarian, she needs to be against government-provided health care because she needs to be against government-provided anything, but she can't quite come up with a solid reason against it. So we have an argument on the basis of “morality” (which itself is a travesty -- what McArdle recognizes as morality is quite bizarre) which simply can’t be made to make sense, particularly since it relies on a fantasy version of universal health coverage.

And she can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t get it. Maybe they just aren’t as clever as she is. Or maybe they're cleverer than she thought.

Sorry, but even though McArdle takes a poke at those who objected to her first two posts on the subject, the more I read through these things, the more convinced I am that, if McArdle is a true example of libertarian thought, then it really is a morally bankrupt philosophy.

By the way, BradRocket does his own, quite effective take-down. Read it. And just to refresh your memory, I had some comments on McArdle’s first post on Asymmetrical Information here. (You can ignore the part about Philip Atkinson, although I still think they make good bedfellows.)


* There is also evidence, in the form of the S-CHIPS program and some parts of Medicare and Medicaid, that the government can run an efficient and effective program. Yes, even our government.

Update:

Someone did spot the holes -- the commenters at McArdle's blog. And quite thoroughly took her to task for it, on the same basis I outlined -- straw men, red herrings and all. Strangely enough, those who rose to her defense seemed mostly to rely on arguments centering on "knee-jerk liberal do-gooderism" and not much in the way of substance. And what, pray tell, is wrong with wanting to do good?

I feel much better now.