Cato and Conservatives Wrong About Population Trends

Democrats and Population Trends

Let’s set aside the hypocrisy about red states getting a ride off blue states for a moment – maybe they genuinely need that money or red states senators and representatives are better at getting more pork. Just in terms of economic incentives – which is the major slant of the Right – why are so any red state residents reliant on federal dollars if they are an economic conservative/libertarian wunderland. There has been plenty of talk over the last 10 years especially about Democrats and how to frame the debate. That might be a like learning to run in waist deep mud since right-wing voters pay attention to the false and empty slogans of the Right, but very little attention to what they actually do. Republicans are pleased as pigs at the trough at government spending as long as they are the beneficiaries. It has been like this since Nixon in the late 1960s. Some counter-factuals to consider - Behind the Population Shift

The rise of the Sunbelt has two common explanations: one climatic and the other commercial. The climatic, obvious explanation is that it’s the weather, stupid. The commercial explanation, which has a proselytizing undertone, is that places like Texas and Nevada attract companies and people with their lower business taxes and fewer regulations.

The first view emphasizes the outdoors; the second right-to-work laws. If all that we knew was that Sunbelt populations were increasing, it would be impossible to distinguish among these and other theories, but we have evidence on wages, productivity and the price of housing that can help us make sense of the Census.

If economic productivity – created by low regulations or anything else – was causing the growth of Texas and Arizona and Georgia, then these places should have high per capita productivity and wages. Yet per capita state product in Arizona in 2009 was $35,300, 16 percent less than the national average. Per capita state products were $36,700 and $42,500 in Georgia and Texas, respectively.

These figures are far below per capita state products in slow-growing places like Connecticut ($58,500), Massachusetts ($50,600) and New York ($50,200). According to the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey, median family incomes were $56,200, $60,800 and $56,600 in Georgia, Nevada and Texas, but $83,000, $81,000 and $66,900 in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York.

Media Declares GOP Winners in Stimulus Debate

Declaring GOP winner in "stimulus message war," media oblivious to their cohort's role in skewing debate
Many in the media have proclaimed the GOP the winner in the "stimulus message war" over President Obama and congressional Democrats. But they often do so with no self-reflection or acknowledgment of their cohort's role in advancing the Republicans' side of the debate through the credulous repetition of falsehoods and other Republican talking points.

Jeanne Cummings, the Politico's chief lobbying and money correspondent, wrote that Obama is "losing [the] stimulus message war." She is far from alone:

* In a February 4 news analysis in The Los Angeles Times, Peter Wallsten asserted that "[a] surprisingly unified GOP has taken control of the debate" about the stimulus plan.
* The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman and Naftali Bendavid referenced in a February 6 article "Republicans' remarkable success during the past two weeks ... shaping a public image of the bill as pork-laden and ineffective."
* Newsweek senior editor Michael Hirsh wrote in a February 4 piece that Obama "has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending." Hirsh continued: "Team Obama and his party are losing the debate" about the stimulus plan.
* On the February 5 broadcast of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Newsweek senior White House correspondent Richard Wolffe claimed the Democrats' "messaging has not worked." Wolffe also stated of the administration: "What they haven't done is say, hey, it's not just about spending. It's about mitigating, softening the blow of this recession for regular, working Americans. That's the bit they've failed on. They've let it be hijacked by all this extraneous spending programs."
* On the February 5 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, congressional correspondent Jessica Yellin asserted that "official Washington has decided Obama is losing the PR war on the stimulus." She went on to air a clip of Stuart Rothenberg, editor of The Rothenberg Political Report, asserting, "The Republicans have successfully defined the stimulus bill as too much pork."

Yet in declaring the Republicans the victors of the stimulus debate, and in some cases attributing that victory to Republican achievements or Democratic failures, none of the above media figures acknowledged the role their colleagues played in promoting the GOP's often-skewed representations of the bill.

Indeed, Media Matters for America has documented numerous examples of media echoing, repeating, or advancing variations of Republican talking points

Calling Out the Conservative Lies on Stimulus

Calling Out the Conservative Lies on Stimulus
Conservative Lie #1: It's not the economy their protecting. It's the ideology.

Republicans in Congress will claim that they are working to improve the stimulus plan in order to bolster the economy. This claim is false. The truth is that they are grasping at straws in a time when most Americans clearly see the need for government intervention. They know that a successful economic recovery plan that comes from the government will undermine public endorsement of their ideology. They don't want this to happen.

Their tactic is not simply "politics as usual," a code phrase for the meme that government cannot be trusted (conservative ideology again!). It is part of what my former colleague George Lakoff and I call cognitive policy. By cognitive policy we mean strategies for getting high-level ideas-values, frames and principles-to dominate public discourse and shape public understanding so that future material policies will be natural and win public support with ease. Conservatives want Americans to think like they do. And they're willing to let cities drown, as we saw with Katrina, to demonstrate their idea that government doesn't work.

Conservative Lie #2: Government isn't bad. Conservative government is bad.

They'll claim that "government is the problem" and point to failures that happened on their watch. Of course, this sleight-of-hand maneuver only works if people don't remember our history. The truth is that conservatives intend for government to fail. And they'll do whatever it takes to insure that it does. An example George and I laid out in a past article, Why Voters Aren't Motivated by a Laundry List of Positions on Issues, was the covert policy of undermining public education so that it could be privatized:

For example, take No Child Left Behind. Its stated purpose is to improve public education, but its covert purpose has been to undermine it so that public schools can be replaced by charter schools, private schools, and religious schools. This would increase conservative control over what is taught and further inculcate conservative ideas. It would institute a two-tier educational system to maintain and reproduce the two-tier economic system in the country, so that children of the elite can get an elite education subsidized by the public through vouchers, while children of the uneducated poor remain educated just enough to continue to provide a source of cheap unskilled or low-skilled labor. This agenda is hidden, but it is justified and advanced via cognitive policy.

This is where progressives have our work cut out for us. Not only do we need to promote policies that reflect our values. Unlike conservatives, we have the additional challenge of making sure government programs work! We have to be sure that quality jobs are created that deliver a living wage. We have to provide for the health security of citizens to keep our communities safe from the ravages of disease. We have to nurture the minds of our children to be sure they are prepared for the challenges that lay ahead. And we have to transcend outdated relationships with Old World powers, like those in the Middle East, by generating local, clean energy in our own cities and towns.

Conservative Lie #3: They're not against the stimulus plan. They're against the function of government itself.

The narrow reporting on current Congressional politicking would lead one to believe that conservatives simply want a different bill to be passed. By now it should be clear that this just isn't the case. The truth is that conservatives want to be sure Obama and his progressive colleagues at all levels of government are not able to do their jobs. Imagine what would happen if Obama succeeded at delivering money to state and city officials to build mass transit, generate renewable energy, and provide affordable health care to the populace. This would be the fulfillment of government's moral mission - to protect and empower our citizens.

Conservatives will do everything they can to stand in the way of this progress. They are doing more than obstructing a vital infusion of resources to save our economy. That would be sin enough to drive them from public office if their agenda were widely know. The truth is much more disturbing. They are obstructing the capacity of people to come together and solve our problems through the one mechanism that makes this possible - a functioning government.

Christian Women and Domestic Violence

Christian Women and Domestic Violence
What is a good enough reason for divorce? Well, according to Rick Warren’s Saddleback church, divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery or abandonment -- as these are the only cases permitted in the Bible -- and never for abuse.

As teaching pastor Tom Holladay explains, spousal abuse should be dealt with by temporary separation and church marriage counseling designed to bring about reconciliation between the couple. But to qualify for that separation, your spouse must be in the “habit of beating you regularly,” and not be simply someone who “grabbed you once.”

“How many beatings would have to take place in order to qualify as regularly?” asks Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and advocate, author of the 2007 book Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence, an indictment of church teachings of wifely submission and male headship. As she sees it, by convincing women that leaving their relationships is not an option, these teachings have laid the ground for a domestic violence epidemic within the church.

Andersen writes from personal experience, describing an episode of being held hostage by her husband -- an associate pastor in their Kansas Baptist church -- for close to twenty hours after he’d nearly fractured her skull. Andersen was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention, where she heard an unremitting message of “submission, submission, submission.” She saw this continual focus reflected in her ex-husband’s denunciations, while he detained her, of women who wanted to “rule over men.” Though Andersen was rescued by her church’s pastor, who had his assistant pastor arrested himself, she says other churchwomen aren’t so lucky, particularly when churches tell couples to attend joint marriage counseling under lay ministry leaders with no specific training for abuse survivors, who instead offer an unswerving prescription of submission and headship, often telling women to learn to submit “better.”

Pastor Holladay takes care in the taped sessions to explain that enduring abuse is not a part of a wife’s call to submit to her husband -- a principle that Warren and Saddleback espouse. “There’s nowhere in the Bible that says it’s an attitude of submission to let someone abuse you,” he says in the audio clips. Nonetheless, Andersen finds it telling that the issue of submission always arises in church discussions of domestic violence, “subtly reminding women of their duty to maintain a submissive attitude toward their husbands.”

That this occurs even in Warren’s church, which is derided by more conservative Southern Baptists for its purported cultural liberalism. Andersen sees this as proof of the centrality of male authority throughout mainstream evangelical culture, “which can still be maintained in a controlled separation but is seriously threatened when a woman is given leeway of any kind, for whatever reason, in ceasing to submit to an abusive husband by divorcing him.”

There are more blatant examples of excusing abusive male authority among stricter proponents of complementarianism and submission theology. In June 2007, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Bruce Ware told a Texas church that women often bring abuse on themselves by refusing to submit. And Debi Pearl, half of a husband-and-wife fundamentalist child-training ministry as well as author of the bestselling submission manual, Created to Be His Help Meet, writes that submission is so essential to God’s plan that it must be followed even to the point of allowing abuse. “When God puts you in subjection to a man whom he knows is going to cause you to suffer,” she writes, “it is with the understanding that you are obeying God by enduring the wrongful suffering.”

Final Piece in Our Economic Collapse

Final Piece in Our Economic Collapse
Having campaigned on a broadly sketched platform of hope for those on the fringes of economic and physical viability, President Obama is watching the ticker line expand to the point where half of the U.S. population considers itself either underemployed or underserved.

An expanding percentage of this group -- 43.6 million by the Centers for Disease Control's 2006 pre-recession count -- are without health care.

This number has certainly burgeoned well beyond the 50 million mark given the fresh round of layoffs, financial failures and re-budgeting by the recently unemployed.

My concern, and the concern of many, surrounds the disappearance of Obama's commitment to health care provision for the uninsured and underserved members of our population.

We are about to ignore our single functional economic engine -- that of the health care sector -- by prioritizing long-dead sectors of finance and auto manufacturing.

FACING A FISCAL TROUGH

If we fail to rescue health care and public health itself as we move forward, we will be entering a fiscal trough that may take decades to rebuild.

Now would be the perfect time to pick the sector with most viability to fuel our recovery. Later will be far too late.

As we pour countless, and lightly accounted for, billions into bailouts and tax cuts for those having sufficient income to avail themselves of such stimulus measures, we are leaving an ever larger proportion of our country behind, and in the most dire state of need.

Health has been largely commoditized and subjected to profit-focused market efficiencies for the past quarter century, leaving more and more Americans behind in the eternal rush to the margin.

As this process unfolded, and despite the loss of millions on the health care coverage rolls, there were ample dollars to ensure the profitability of health as a commodity.

This will not be the case moving into the near and distant future. Health care is, like so much else, heading into its own meltdown, and it will make the financial collapse of 2008 look like a mere blip on the Bloomberg screen.

With the U.S. economy claiming more and more members of the middle class for transition toward the poverty line, we are about to enter a period in our history defined by a statistical majority in the U.S. population having little or no access to health care - at a time when health care is acting as one of the few profit-making sectors in our economy.

With a spiking unemployment rate in the health care sector and a dilapidated pharmaceutical industry that continues its merger mentality to control costs no longer borne by a viable financial sector, we are heading into an uncharted abyss of social disaster.

TURN THE TIDE AROUND

The only way to stem the tide on this decline -- and its accompanying fiscal and public health consequences -- is to fund health care as the fiscal engine it has recently become amidst the financial sector collapse.

Had the health care sector been given half of the recent financial and auto manufacturing bailout funding, we would have been able to expand and extend health care coverage.

We would thereby be capturing the remaining stability of this sector as an engine of economic and public health recovery.

It surprises me that the economists and health care consultants working in the Obama administration have not taken this opportunity to the bank.

They could have made a difference by diverting meaningless cash dumps from non-functional industries into the single most viable and necessary industry in the country.

I am sad to say that the crash of the health care economy will be heard in a very different way than the crashes that recently preceded it.

It will take our final breath economically, and literally with the disappearance of greatly diminished health care services to all economic classes in the United States.

John Rockefeller of Camden is CEO of a management consulting firm, Zero Consult Ltd., based in Boston

One Justice For Average Americans Another for the Elite

The Definition of A "Two-Tiered Justice System" by Glenn Greenwald
Aside from the intrinsic dangers and injustices of arguing for immunity for high-level government officials who commit felonies (such as illegal eavesdropping, obstruction of justice, torture and other war crimes), it's the total selectivity of the rationale underlying that case which makes it so corrupt. Defenders of Bush officials sing in unison: We shouldn't get caught up in the past. We shouldn't be driven by vengeance and retribution. We shouldn't punish people whose motives in committing crimes weren't really that bad.

There are countries in the world which actually embrace those premises for all of their citizens, and whose justice system consequently reflects a lenient approach to crime and punishment. The United States is not one of those countries. In fact, for ordinary citizens (the ones invisible and irrelevant to Ruth Marcus, Stuart Taylor, Jon Barry and David Broder), the exact opposite is true:

Homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100

A homeless man robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill. After feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police the next day. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Roy Brown, 54, robbed the Capital One bank in Shreveport, Louisiana in December 2007. He approached the teller with one of his hands under his jacket and told her that it was a robbery.

The teller handed Brown three stacks of bill but he only took a single $100 bill and returned the remaining money back to her. He said that he was homeless and hungry and left the bank.

The next day he surrendered to the police voluntarily and told them that his mother didn't raise him that way.

Brown told the police he needed the money to stay at the detox center and had no other place to stay and was hungry.

In Caddo District Court, he pleaded guilty. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison for first degree robbery.

Under federal law, "the simple possession of just 5 grams of crack cocaine, the weight of about two sugar packets, subjects a defendant to a mandatory five-year prison term." In Alabama, the average sentence for marijuana possession -- an offense for which most Western countries almost never imprison their citizens -- is 8.4 years. Until recently, the state of Florida "impose[d] mandatory-minimum sentences of 25 years for illegally carrying a pillbox-worth of drugs such as Oxycontin" and still imposes shockingly Draconian mandatory sentences even for marijuana offenses.

Our political class has embraced mandatory minimum sentencing schemes as a way to eliminate mercy and sentencing flexibility for ordinary people who break the law (as opposed to Bush officials who do). The advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums details just some of the grotesque injustices here, including decades of imprisonment for petty drug dealing which even many judges who are forced to impose the sentences find disgraceful. Currently in the U.S., close to 7,000 people are serving sentences of 25 years to life under our merciless "three-strikes-and-out" laws -- which the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional in a 5-4 ruling -- including half for nonviolent offenses and many for petty theft.

As I've noted many times before, the United States imprisons more of its population than any other country on the planet, and most astoundingly, we account for less than 5% of the world's population yet close to 25% of the world's prisoners are located in American prisons. As The New York Times' Adam Liptak put it in an excellent and thorough April, 2008 article, revealing how self-absorbed and hypocritical are the cries for mercy, understanding and "moving on" being made by media stars and political elites on behalf of lawbreaking Bush officials:

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes - from writing bad checks to using drugs - that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. . . .

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

"In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in "Democracy in America."

No more.

"Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons."

Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The Handbook of Crime and Punishment."

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach" . . . .

The American character - self-reliant, independent, judgmental - also plays a role.

"America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility," Whitman of Yale wrote. "That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years."

And that's to say nothing of the brutal and excessive tactics used by our increasingly militarized police state (Digby's writing on the use of tasers is indispensable) and the inhumane conditions that characterize our highly profitable prison state.

Under all circumstances, arguing that high political officials should be immunized from prosecution when they commit felonies such as illegal eavesdropping and torture would be both destructive and wrong [not to mention, in the case of the latter crimes, a clear violation of a treaty which the U.S. (under Ronald Reagan) signed and thereafter ratified]. But what makes it so much worse, so much more corrupted, is the fact that this "ignore-the-past-and-forget-retribution" rationale is invoked by our media elites only for a tiny, special class of people -- our political leaders -- while the exact opposite rationale ("ignore their lame excuses, lock them up and throw away the key") is applied to everyone else. That, by definition, is what a "two-tiered system of justice" means and that, more than anything else, is what characterizes (and sustains) deeply corrupt political systems. That's the two-tiered system which, for obvious reasons, our political and media elites are now vehemently arguing must be preserved.

‘Would You Want A Guy Like This Living In Your Backyard?

‘Would You Want A Guy Like This Living In Your Backyard?
Since President Obama’s announcement last week that he would shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center within on year, Fox News has done its best to frighten its viewers about the rule:

SEAN HANNITY: That’s somewhat frightening, you’re going to close Guantanamo Bay, you don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know where you’re going to put these people. [1/23/09]

GLENN BECK: Somebody told me that if this goes through and we put 200 people into this system, that it will shut down our justice system. Our justice system just won’t be able to do it.[1/20/09]

BRIAN KILMEADE: You’re talking about the worst of the Taliban, the worst of al Qaeda, and we have to let them go, give them trials? Why do we need to do this and compromise the CIA and our intelligence bureau — a lot of the intelligence was built on these guys, was done using our clandestine operations. So we have to expose that for these trials? [1/22/09]

Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) said last week that the U.S. could hold the detainees in federal prisons, just like we hold thousands of other dangerous inmates. This morning, Fox and Friends responded by sending a reporter to Murtha’s district to flash photos of suspected terrorists — their only identification being Muslim headgear — and ask residents, “Would you want a guy like this living in your backyard?” Watch it:

Despite Fox’s suggestion that detainees could be pitching a tent in your backyard, Guantanamo detainees transferred to the U.S. for trials would be housed in federal prisons — where dozens of dangerous terrorists are already held. In fact, the United States has already successfully prosecuted 145 terrorism cases in federal court, a sharp contrast to the series of debacles in Guantanamo prosecutions.