The Last Word from Newt
13 May 2012 1 Comment
in 2012 Election, Politics Tags: 2012 Election, Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau, Newt Gingrich, Politics
Even though we probably haven’t really heard the last word from Speaker Gingrich, it is nice to think that we have. Here is what may be that last word from Doonesbury today.
Newt started out his quest for the 2012 Republican nomination by telling the truth about the Paul Ryan budget. I think the two things I will remember him most for are the Contract on American and Right Wing Social Engineering. Maybe he can start a new career helping zoos and conservation centers.
Romney’s empathy or the lack thereof
12 May 2012 Leave a Comment
in 2012 Election, Civil Rights, Culture, Gay Rights, Politics Tags: 2012 Election, Bullying, Civil Rights, Don Gorton, Gay Rights, Mitt Romney, President Obama, Seamus
I’ve been following closely the stories on the bullying incident at Cranbrook. I was, like many, horrified at the incident. But I was more horrified by the fact that no one at Cranbrook thought it necessary to discipline the young men involved. And I was most horrified by Mitt Romney’s nervous giggle when asked about the incident. I’ve been groping for an explanation of why he doesn’t remember what happened when the others involved remember it clearly. Then I read this very interesting article in the Boston Globe this morning. The story quoted a gentleman named Don Gorton.
While some observers have expressed doubt that anyone could forget such a dramatic episode, one activist who has studied bullying said he believes Romney may, in fact, have no recollection.
Teenagers who bully others often don’t remember the incidents because they weren’t traumatic for them, said Don Gorton, chairman of the Anti-Violence Project of Massachusetts, a nonprofit group that seeks to reduce violence against gays and lesbians.
“Empathy is the critical variable,’’ Gorton said. “If they don’t feel their victims’ pain, the episode won’t stand out. It wasn’t a big deal for them.’’
Empathy. That is what explains a great deal about Mitt Romney. He lacks empathy. People have been saying that he can’t relate to the common person and he has given many examples. He likes to fire people. A young person who can’t find a job should get his or her parents to give them a loan to start a business. He supports the Ryan budget which raises the defense budget at the expense of the middle class and poor. Plus he certainly was cruel to poor Seamus the dog.
In the Massachusetts Governor’s Office
More from Gorton
Gorton, however, said he was offended that Romney described the episode as typical high school hijinks, even though an 18-year-old Romney was reportedly using scissors to cut Lauber’s hair as Lauber screamed for help.
“I wish he had said nothing,’’ Gorton said. “The fact is, high school pranks are whoopee cushions and wedgies. This was assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.’’
Gorton and other gay-rights activists in Massachusetts said the episode made them recall how Romney disbanded the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth and the Governor’s Task Force on Hate Crimes – two panels that sought to combat bullying and were created under a previous Republican governor.
“It is relevant to judge him for his record in office and he was lackluster, to put it kindly, in his efforts to fight bullying when he was governor,’’ said Gorton, who was cochairman of the Task Force on Hate Crimes when it was disbanded in 2003.
“It is relevant to judge him for his record in office and he was lackluster, to put it kindly, in his efforts to fight bullying when he was governor,’’ said Gorton, who was cochairman of the Task Force on Hate Crimes when it was disbanded in 2003.
Romney has said the groups were disbanded to save money.
I understand that some people are disappointed that President Obama has not brought about miraculous change. But ask yourself this question: Would you rather have a President with the courage to come out in favor of an idea, gay marriage, that, while growing in acceptance, is still viewed in horror by many or a President Romney who lacks any kind of empathy? The answer for me is clear: a President without empathy is a dangerous one.
AIG Backstory: The Gramm Leach Bliley Act
11 May 2012 Leave a Comment
Today (May 11, 2012) JP Morgan Chase appears to have engaged in the same kind of behavior that lead to the 2008 meltdown and people are talking about reviving the Glass-Steagall Act. I thought I should repost this from March 2009.
Yesterday one of my Random Thoughts was to ask if anyone remember when banks were banks and stock brokers were stock brokers.
Another problem with evolution
11 May 2012 Leave a Comment
in Civil Rights, Culture, Gay Marriage, Politics Tags: Dan Wasserman, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, Obama
Dan Wasserman is a genius.
Needs no further comment.
The President and Gay Marriage
10 May 2012 Leave a Comment
in 2012 Election, Civil Rights, Culture, Gay Marriage, Human Rights, Politics Tags: 2012 Election, Andrew Sullivan, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, President Obama, Richard Socarides
The commentators are in full flower. “This is a great move.” “It is risky.” “This could cost him the election.” What does it really mean? We won’t know until the election in November, but we can try to bring some clarity to some of the noise.
Photograph by Pete Souza
We know that many of those who oppose gay marriage for religious or other grounds will never be convinced, but I expect that some will come around to saying something like “I personally don’t support gay marriage, but as a matter of rights, people should be able to choose.” Kind of like what many Democrats have said about abortion. But the majority of the opposition will remain opposed.
Some will say this was a cynical move on the part of the President to solidify his gay and lesbian supporter. I don’t think so. Richard Socarides wrote in the New Yorker
For a long time, Democrats have taken the gay vote for granted. Political consultants tell Democrats that gay and lesbian voters have nowhere else to go, and thus, in effect, can be counted on, so long as politicians pay lip service to the issue. But that is old thinking, out of touch with the new reality of the gay-rights movement. While I know that most gays and lesbians would have supported President Obama, both with their votes and with their financial contributions, no matter what he did on the issue of marriage equality, we were also not going to take “no” for an answer on the most important civil-rights issue of our day. That meant holding the President’s feet to the fire—first on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and then on marriage equality.
What we do know is that this was an act of courage and leadership. President Obama may be part of the tide rising toward marriage equality, but he is part of the leading edge. Andrew Sullivan
I do not know how orchestrated this was; and I do not know how calculated it is. What I know is that, absorbing the news, I was uncharacteristically at a loss for words for a while, didn’t know what to write, and, like many Dish readers, there are tears in my eyes.
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The interview changes no laws; it has no tangible effect. But it reaffirms for me the integrity of this man we are immensely lucky to have in the White House. Obama’s journey on this has been like that of many other Americans, when faced with the actual reality of gay lives and gay relationships. Yes, there was politics in a lot of it. But not all of it. I was in the room long before the 2008 primaries when Obama spoke to the mother of a gay son about marriage equality. He said he was for equality, but not marriage. Five years later, he sees – as we all see – that you cannot have one without the other. But even then, you knew he saw that woman’s son as his equal as a citizen. It was a moment – way off the record at the time – that clinched my support for him.
Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear. He is clearly prepared to let the political chips fall as they may. That’s why we elected him. That’s the change we believed in. The contrast with a candidate who wants to abolish all rights for gay couples by amending the federal constitution, and who has donated to organizations that seek to “cure” gays, who bowed to pressure from bigots who demanded the head of a spokesman on foreign policy solely because he was gay: how much starker can it get?
Both Sullivan and Socarides do believe that in the long run, this will not hurt Obama’s reelection chances. Sullivan first
My view politically is that this will help Obama. He will be looking to the future generations as his opponent panders to the past. The clearer the choice this year the likelier his victory. And after the darkness of last night, this feels like a widening dawn.
Then Socarides
This is not to take anything away from the courage exhibited by President Obama today. His willingness to share with the American people his thinking, indeed, his struggle around this issue will help build a national consensus. Everyone is entitled to a journey on this issue.
I suspect that at the end of this national conversation the result will be a good one, and the process, including Obama’s painstakingly slow evolution, will have been a positive experience for the country. Hopefully, it will lead us in a positive direction—which, after all, is the job of a President.
This is a conversation that is just beginning and we owe the President a conversation that is at once passionate and reasoned. Let me end with this from him
This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president, and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a dad and a husband and, hopefully, the better I’ll be as president.
Elizabeth Warren and the race card
05 May 2012 5 Comments
in 2012 Election, Civil Rights, Culture, Politics Tags: Birthers, Elizabeth Warren, Kevin Noble Maillard, Massachusetts politics, Scott Brown
I’ve been thinking about this since the story broke that Senator Scott Brown and the Boston Herald had uncovered what they thought was Elizabeth Warren’s deception: She had checked off the Native American box when in law school and Harvard Law School had listed her as Native American in some directory a number of years back. First, I don’t think she and her campaign handled it well at first saying she didn’t remember ever telling Harvard about her racial heritage, but saying she did have an ancestor who was Native American. Second, why is Scott Brown doing this?
Warren has made a better answer since her initial reaction, but she would have been a lot better off if she had just said “I’m from Oklahoma and have some Cherokee and Delaware ancestors and I’m proud of it.” But checking that box is always fraught with pitfalls for anyone who is mixed race. This is the Tiger Woods dilemma. What box do you check and how do you decide? Back in 1990 when I was a census worker we were told that a person was whatever they said they were. I have a family story my aunt told me to explain why my hair is naturally curly in humidity even through I am clear Asian. She said that I had a Portuguese ancestor from long ago who had had a liaison with a great, great, etc. grandmother. True? Who knows. But I think it is clear that Warren does have the right to claim Native American heritage.
Steven Senne/Associated Press
And then I read this very thoughtful piece in the New York Times by Kevin Noble Maillard. Titled Elizabeth Warren’s Birther Moment, It begins
If you are 1/32 Cherokee and your grandfather has high cheekbones, does that make you Native American? It depends. Last Friday, Republicans in Massachusetts questioned the racial ancestry of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate. Her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, has accused her of using minority status as an American Indian to advance her career as a law professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. The Brown campaign calls her ties to the Cherokee and Delaware nations a “hypocritical sham.”
In a press conference on Wednesday, Warren defended herself, saying, “Native American has been a part of my story, I guess since the day I was born, I don’t know any other way to describe it.” Despite her personal belief in her origins, her opponents have seized this moment in an unnecessary fire drill that guarantees media attention and forestalls real debate.
This tactic is straight from the Republican cookbook of fake controversy. First, you need a rarefied elected office typically occupied by a certain breed of privileged men. Both the Presidency and the Senate fit this bill. Second, add a bit of interracial intrigue. It could be Kenyan economists eloping with Midwestern anthropologists, or white frontiersmen pairing with indigenous women. Third, throw in some suspicion about their qualifications and ambitions. Last but not least, demand documentation of ancestry and be dissatisfied upon its receipt. Voila! You have a genuine birther movement.
In this case, Brown seems to be claiming that Warren’s success is all because she checked that box. Of course when Warren first came to public notice working for Congress monitoring the financial bailout and making sure consumers weren’t hurt no one questioned her smarts or her ability. Neither did all those Harvard students she has taught over the years. Neither did anyone she worked with when she was doing her famous early study of bankruptcy. The whole idea that she owes her success to her having checked that box is laughable. More from Maillard:
Even within Indian Country, the meaning of race and citizenship is contested. And now the Brown campaign wants to dictate Warren’s own belief in her identity. According to the Brown campaign, Warren could not be Indian because she is blonde, rich and most of all, a Harvard law professor. Her 1/32 Cherokee ancestry, sufficient for tribal citizenship, is not enough for the Republican party. To most people, she appears as white as, well, Betty White, but to the Scott Brown campaign, she is just Dancing With Wolves.
The Brown campaign asserts that Warren knowingly classified herself as Native American in the 1990s when Harvard weathered sharp criticism for its lack of faculty diversity. During this time, they argue, Warren relied upon this classification to enhance her employment opportunities and to improve Harvard’s numbers. Her faculty mentors at Harvard deny this and assert that the law school hired Warren without any knowledge of her ancestry.
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For the Cherokee Nation, Warren is “Indian enough”; she has the same blood quantum as Cherokee Nation Chief Bill John Baker. For non-Natives, this may be surprising. They expect to see “high cheekbones,” as Warren described her grandfather as having, or tan skin. They want to know of pow wows, dusty reservations, sweat lodges, peyote and cheap cigarettes. When outsiders look at these ostensibly white people as members of Native America, they don’t see minorities. As a result, Warren feels she must satisfy these new birthers and justify her existence.
As a law professor and Native American himself, Maillard concludes that Harvard could not have used Warren’s status to promote her since
Looked at from the inside, however, the Warren controversy is all new. When the Brown campaign accused Elizabeth Warren of touting herself as American Indian to advance her career, this was news to Native law professors. We have a good eye for welcoming faculty to the community and identifying promising scholars. We know where people teach, what they have published and we honor them when they die. Harvard Law School named its first Native American tenured professor? Really? In our small indigenous faculty town, we would have heard about it already.
My own conclusion is that Warren checked that box somewhere way back. She has said she was hoping to meet others like her by doing so. She has every right to call herself Native American. Someone at Harvard picked up on the checked box and noted it in the directory, but Harvard never made a big deal about it and they could have. Hey, maybe someone messed up and forgot to announce the appointment of a Native American.
Scott Brown has nothing of substance on which to talk so why not create a birther controversy. He is the one playing the race card. It is tight race and if he can convince a few voters that Elizabeth Warren is untrustworthy and of mixed race ancestry, it might just make a difference.
Can we take Mitt seriously?
03 May 2012 2 Comments
in 2012 Election, Politics Tags: 2012 Election, Dan Wasserman, Greg Sargent, Mitt Romney, Politics, Republicans
Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is difficult to peg. I’m not sure that he is interested in governing based on his track record here in Massachusetts while Governor. Romney spent large hunks of his time running for President and not showing much interest in the state. He seems to understand capitalism as practiced by companies like Bain Capital, but is really uninterested in what goes on with ordinary middle class and the working poor. He can’t seem to hit the right notes and for the left is all too often the butt of jokes. Here are two.
Dan Wasserman on Mitt and Harvard.
Then there is Calvin Trillin.
The Republican National Committee Selects a Campaign Slogan
Our slogan’s been chosen.
We think it’s a hit.
We’ll shout from the rafters,
“We settle for Mitt!”
There is the dog on the roof, the liking to fire people, etc. etc. etc.
But he is going to be the nominee for the Republicans and we need to find out what we can take seriously. Greg Sargent writing in the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog took at stab at it today.
A few days ago, Mitt Romney chatted with a bunch of firefighters, who told him about their struggles in the Obama economy. As Romney recalled it: “I asked the firefighters I was meeting with, about 15 or them, how many had had to take another job to make ends meet, and almost every one of them had.”
Of course, firefighters are public sector workers. And Romney has said that public sector workers are getting paid too much, not that they’re getting paid too little. As Jonathan Chait puts it:
Romney’s position is that these fine public servants are luxuriating in excessive pay, a fact that, unlike swelling income inequality, constitutes a major source of unfairness in American life. (“We will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve,” he said last week.)
This is actually a policy flashpoint between the two parties. Public employment has cratered in recent years, with public sector jobs continuing to decline even as private sector jobs rebound, exerting a continued drag on the sluggish recovery. Obama’s position is that the federal government ought to provide aid to state governments to rehire some of the laid-off teachers, cops, and firefighters. Republicans oppose this. Romney seems to have forgotten that the firefighters he came face-to-face with are one category of Americans whose economic pain he’s supposed to be in favor of.
Steve Benen takes this further, adding that the episode and the attendant contradiction reveal the failure of Romney’s “transactional politics.” Romney is looking to take things away from public sector workers, students who rely on Pell Grants, those who rely on entitlements and government programs that might be cut, and the like:
His is an agenda of austerity, a sharp reduction in public investments, and hostility towards government activism in general. In a transactional sense, Romney has to hope most voters aren’t looking to make a traditional electoral trade, because he doesn’t intend to give them anything.
What we can take seriously is that Mitt doesn’t care about anyone who isn’t rich. We can take seriously that he and today’s Republican Party want to take women back to the 1950′s and even further. We need to wake up to the fact that today’s Republican Party offers the 99% nothing. We need to take Mitt at his word and vote for him at our peril.
Open Letter to LGBTQ-phobic Pastor Sean Harris
02 May 2012 1 Comment
in Civil Rights, Culture, Human Rights Tags: Civil Rights, Gay Rights
Homophobic North Carolina preacher Sean Norris recently gave a sermon in which he advocated physically assaulting gender variant toddlers. Listen to it here. This letter is my response to him.
Dear Pastor Harris,
Hi. I’m C.J.’s Mom and boy would you hate me! I have a little boy who likes “feminine” things and I’ve allowed him to do so. I’ve even shared it with people on the internet.
Mourning Facts
27 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Culture, Philosophy, Politics Tags: Aristotle, Bacon, fact, Politics, Rex W. Huppke
Did you know that Facts has died? On April 19, the Chicago Tribune published an obituary for Facts brilliantly conceived and written by Rex W. Huppke.
Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012
In memoriam: After years of health problems, Facts has finally died.
Over the centuries, Facts became such a prevalent part of most people’s lives that Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said: “Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.”
To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.
Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.
It’s very depressing,” said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of “A History of the Modern Fact.” “I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts. This means we will never reach consensus about anything. Tax policies, presidential candidates. We’ll never agree on anything.”
Facts was born in ancient Greece, the brainchild of famed philosopher Aristotle. Poovey said that in its youth, Facts was viewed as “universal principles that everybody agrees on” or “shared assumptions.”
But in the late 16th century, English philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon took Facts under his wing and began to develop a new way of thinking.
“There was a shift of the word ‘fact’ to refer to empirical observations,” Poovey said.
Facts became concrete observations based on evidence. It was growing up.
Through the 19th and 20th centuries, Facts reached adulthood as the world underwent a shift toward proving things true through the principles of physics and mathematical modeling. There was respect for scientists as arbiters of the truth, and Facts itself reached the peak of its power.
But those halcyon days would not last.
Yes, anything can be stated and if done so with enough authority it is believed to be factual. There is, in my opinion, a failure to distinguish between fact and opinion. It is a fact that I am sitting at my computer on Aril 27 at 6:11 am typing these words. It is my opinion that the budget plan proposed by Paul Ryan is bad for the economy.
Facts was wounded repeatedly throughout the recent GOP primary campaign, near fatally when Michele Bachmann claimed a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease causes mental retardation. In December, Facts was briefly hospitalized after MSNBC’s erroneous report that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign was using an expression once used by the Ku Klux Klan.
But friends and relatives of Facts said Rep. West’s claim that dozens of Democratic politicians are communists was simply too much for the aging concept to overcome.
As the world mourned Wednesday, some were unwilling to believe Facts was actually gone.
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Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.
Services are alleged to be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that mourners make a donation to their favorite super PAC.
Representative West can be proud: He is responsible for finally killing Facts. But we all helped.
Fear of polls
22 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in 2012 Election, Politics Tags: 2012 Election, Democrats, Mitt Romney, Nate Silver, President Obama, Republicans
It doesn’t matter whether you support Romney or Obama. When a new poll is released you start to parse it. Who did the poll? Are they a Democratic or Republican leaning pollster? How is it different from the last poll you saw? What do the pundits say? Does the result make me happy or anxious?
This morning RealClear Politics had these numbers:
Average: Obama +3.2
Electoral College: Obama 227 Romney 170 (270 needed to win)
Intrade: Obama 60.4 Romeny 38.2
Nate Silver, my poll guru, had some advice the other day. If you are a political junkie, read the whole article, but here are some of the highlights for me.
1. Be patient. Many of the poll-watching habits you learned for the primaries you will need to unlearn for the general election.
In the primaries, it is often worth paying a tremendous amount of attention to how recently a poll was conducted. Because voter opinion shifts rapidly in primaries, a poll that is even two or three days old might have substantially less information value than one that was released today.
That just isn’t true in the general election, when there are fewer swing voters, the candidates are better known, and voter preferences are more rigid. Instead, polls have a much stronger tendency to revert to the mean, and what is perceived to be “momentum” is often just statistical noise. In October, it might be worth sweating just a little bit if there seems to be a two- or three-percentage point shift against your preferred candidate. Right now, it probably isn’t; a poll released on April 20 isn’t going to be much better in the long-run than one released on April 10.
2. Take the poll average. This ought to be obvious, but you should generally be looking for a trend to show up in several different polls from several different polling firms before you start to view it as newsworthy.
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5. Pay attention to likely voters versus registered voters. It is worth looking at whether the poll is conducted among registered voters, likely voters or all adults.
In the past eight presidential election cycles or so, the Republican candidate has done a net of about two percentage points better on average in likely voter polls than in registered voter polls.
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6. Keep paying attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings. In the early stages of general election campaigns, a president’s approval ratings have often been at least as accurate a guide to his eventual performance as the head-to-head numbers. Thus, for at least the next couple of months, I would pay as much attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings as his head-to-head polls against Mr. Romney.
It is probably slightly better to look at Mr. Obama’s net approval rating — his approval less his disapproval — than the approval rating alone.
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11. Read the polls in the context of the news. Polls don’t just shift on their own; they change because people are reacting to changes in their circumstances and to different news events.
Political reporters have beats and deadlines and need to turn stories around every day. But most of the day-to-day squabbles that the campaigns have don’t matter to most voters. If there is a shift in the polls, it is much more likely to be real rather than illusory if it follows something like an Israeli air strike on Iran or a stock market crash than something like this or this.
The other caution is that even when major news events do shift the polls, they sometimes have a half-life with the effects fading over time. These events may produce long-term and permanent effects on how voters see the candidates, but they often overshoot the mark in the close term. Recent examples include the uptrend in Mr. Obama’s approval ratings after the death of Osama bin Laden or the downtrend following the debt ceiling negotiations, both of which persisted for some weeks but then faded.
My conclusion: This is going to be close election. Closer than in my opinion it should be.
