Category Archives: Random Blogging

Not Your Father’s GOP…

Younger Americans don’t understand–probably cannot understand–how far the political pendulum has swung since 1980.

1980 was the year Ronald Reagan ran for President, and I ran for Congress. We were both Republicans, both excoriated as “too conservative.”

Today, Reagan would be too liberal for the “Freedom Caucus” and other far rightwing activists who have taken over the GOP in the intervening years. As for me, I haven’t changed my basic political philosophy at all (although I have changed my position on some issues after learning more, or examining accumulating evidence), and I’m now considered a wild-eyed liberal. At best.

Every once in a while, an old-time Republican decides to violate Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment (Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican), and publicly bemoan what has happened to a once-sane and responsible political party. Most recently, that person was Bob Dole. (I have a soft spot for Dole for a number of reasons, not least because his political action committee financially supported my campaign “back in the day.”)

In a recent interview on MSNBC, Dole bemoaned the current state of the Republican party, which he said had become “an extreme group on the right.” Dole harshly criticized Donald Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, calling Trump “over the top” and saying that he “couldn’t understand” how people supported him.

Dole also opined that Ted Cruz is far too extreme, and not at all a traditional conservative. He criticized Cruz’ so-called Senate “achievements” of shutting down the government twice and calling Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) a liar on the Senate floor.

Dole, like many traditional and Reagan-era Republicans, represent an era that modern conservatives constantly idealize but is seriously disillusioned with the current extremism and ignorance of the Republican Party, which he’s said is “out of ideas.” Dole also said that he doubted Ronald Reagan would win the nomination if he ran in the current extremist climate of the Republican Party.

In the ultimate heresy, Dole also praised President Obama, calling him a “very good man.”

While saying that he probably wouldn’t support Hillary Clinton in a potential general election matchup with Trump or Cruz, Dole suggested that he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to vote for either of those Republican demagogues, saying with a laugh that he “might oversleep” on election day.

A good number of the remaining reasonable, disheartened Republicans are likely to oversleep on election day–or even vote Democratic.

After all, you don’t have to be excited about Hillary Clinton to recognize the gulf between competent and crazy.

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If There is a Hell….

Yesterday, I wondered just how venal and despicable our politicians and plutocrats will be allowed to get  before they trigger an inevitable revolt.

Rick Scott, the obscenely rich and demonstrably corrupt Governor of Florida, is evidently trying to push those limits.

The Miami Herald obtained thousands of pages of health department documents under the state’s public records law, including nearly 800 emails and hundreds of memos and reports that detailed the state’s plan to “restructure” CMS. They show that the elimination of children from CMS was the result of a plan to slash spending on sick kids at a time when Florida had a $635.4 million surplus. For the legislative session that begins next month, Gov. Rick Scott has proposed $1 billion in new tax cuts. The spending plan would eliminate an additional 718 health department positions. […]

The parents of one Palm Beach County infant learned on the eve of a critical craniofacial surgery that their 6-month-old son had been “screened out” of CMS. The little boy is profoundly disabled, records show, having been born deaf, without eyes, and with a disfiguring cleft palate. The child’s mother called CMS in preparation for the surgery, only to be told “the screening is showing ‘NO,’ so they would not do anything.”

A post at DailyKos explained the program and summed up the situation:

This program—for Medicaid-qualified children and for those whose parents make too much for Medicaid coverage but not enough for private insurance—provides more intervention with specialists and care devised for kids with special medical needs. Some of the activities of the CMS, like “providing care coordinators to help parents access therapy and medication, and organizing one-stop clinics for kids with sickle cell disease, HIV or cleft palates,” just doesn’t happen with Medicaid.

But there was too much need in the state for the program. It was getting too many enrollees and it became too expensive to treat these kids, so the state had some options. Not having $1 billion in new tax cuts was not among the options. Dropping 9,000 kids was what they settled on.

Rick Scott’s priorities. Excuse me while I take a long shower….

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Are You a Member of My Tribe?

There’s a lot of research confirming the human tendency to sort other humans into tribes–to distinguish between those who are “us” and those who are “them.” Historically, those categories have primarily–albeit not exclusively–been based on race and religion.

Now, evidently, many of us are basing our tribal identities on partisan affiliation. According to a recent article at Vox,

In 1960, Americans were asked whether they would be pleased, displeased, or unmoved if their son or daughter married a member of the other political party.

Respondents reacted with a shrug. Only 5 percent of Republicans, and only 4 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset by the cross-party union. On the list of things you might care about in child’s partner — are they kind, smart, successful, supportive? — which political party they voted for just didn’t rate.

Fast forward to 2008. The polling firm YouGov asked Democrats and Republicans the same question — and got very different results. This time, 27 percent of Republicans, and 20 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset if their son or daughter married a member of the opposite party. In 2010, YouGov asked the question again; this time, 49 percent of Republicans, and 33 percent of Democrats, professed concern at interparty marriage.

What makes this partisan tribalism puzzling is the fact that public opinion on the various issues that confront us are not particularly polarized; opinion surveys show most Americans remaining firmly centrist (depending upon how one defines that term) when asked their positions on  specific issues.  And yet, party affiliation has become a form of personal identity that divides “us” from “them.”

[P]arty affiliation wasn’t simply an expression of our disagreements; it was also becoming the cause of them. If Democrats thought of other Democrats as their tribe and of Republicans as a hostile tribe, and vice versa, then the consequences would stretch far beyond politics — into things like, say, marriage.

And the data was everywhere. Polls looking at the difference between how Republicans viewed Democrats and how Democrats viewed Republicans now showed that partisans were less accepting of each other than white people were of black people or than black people were of white people.

The Vox article describes several experiments that confirmed this partisan bias, some in ways that were deeply troubling. (People awarded jobs or scholarships to less-qualified applicants who shared their partisan affiliation, for example.)

What is driving this phenomenon? Obviously, there is no single cause, but the article does note the role of media:

There are no major cable channels devoted to making people of other races look bad. But there are cable channels that seem devoted to making members of the other party look bad. “The media has become tribal leaders,” he says. “They’re telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along.”

Evidently, most of us have a need to despise some “other,” and if the culture frowns upon using race or religion as the operative distinction, some number of us will substitute party.

Others, of course (Trump, Cruz, Pence, et al) will stick with the old standbys of race, religion and national origin.

Evidently, we humans aren’t hard-wired to see other people simply as individuals.

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The Danger of “Easy Targets”

A couple of days ago, I blogged about the environment created by political rhetoric demonizing people based upon their politics or religious beliefs. (For example, see: Trump, Donald) One consequence of that environment has been an uptick in attacks on Americans who are Muslim.

The AP reports that–in the case of anti-Muslim rhetoric, at least–the demonization is quite deliberate.

Some leading Republican presidential candidates seem to view Muslims as fair game for increasingly harsh words they might use with more caution against any other group for fear of the political cost. So far, that strategy is winning support from conservatives influential in picking the nominee….

Because Muslims are a small voting bloc, the candidates see limited fallout from what they are saying in the campaign.

The notion that Muslims are “fair game” because they are a small minority ignores the likelihood that many non-Muslims will find the tactic repellent. The article quotes Suhail Khan, who worked in George W. Bush’s administration, who said  “There’s no doubt that when specific candidates, in this case Dr. Carson and Mr. Trump, think that they can narrowly attack one specific group, other Americans of various faiths and backgrounds are paying attention.”

The Washington Post recently ran a column by the pollster Stanley Greenberg predicting a tidal wave against the GOP in 2016. Listing the data that led him to his conclusion, Greenberg shared a demographic reality:

Consider that nearly 40 percent of New York City’s residents are foreign-born, with Chinese the second-largest group behind Dominicans. The foreign-born make up nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles’s residents and 58 percent of Miami’s. A majority of U.S. households are headed by unmarried people, and, in cities, 40 percent of households include only a single person. Church attendance is in decline, and non-religious seculars now outnumber mainline Protestants. Three-quarters of working-age women are in the labor force, and two-thirds of women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners of their households. The proportion of racial minorities is approaching 40 percent, but blowing up all projections are the 15 percent of new marriages that are interracial. People are moving from the suburbs to the cities. And in the past five years, two-thirds of millennial college graduates have settled in the 50 largest cities, transforming them.

It’s reasonable to assume that these voters will notice when candidates use bigotry against “easy targets” as a campaign strategy.

Let’s hope that “reasonable assumption”–and Greenberg’s prediction– prove true.

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That Old-Time Islam…

Perfect prank for a Sunday sermon.

Two young Dutch men wrapped a bible in a cover that identified it as the Koran, and proceeded to do “person on the street” interviews with random passers-by. They had the unsuspecting subjects read selected passages, and then asked them for their reactions to what they had read.

The chosen passages were mysogynistic, brutal and judgmental. There were admonitions to women to be submissive, the old standby about homosexuality (“If a man lies with another man” that probably would have given the prank away here in the United States, considering how often homophobic Christians cite it), and a number of passages instructing believers to take punitive actions against nonbelievers or transgressors–cut off their hands, etc.

The reactions to the selected passages were what we might expect. The readings rather obviously confirmed prior impressions of Islam held by the unsuspecting passers-by, who were shocked when the fake cover came off and the “Koran” was revealed to be the bible.

The prank confirmed two suspicions that many of us hold about citizens of Western democratic countries, definitely including our own: that we hold stereotypical and biased attitudes about Muslims and the Koran; and that very few “Christians” have actually read that bible they constantly thump.

You can watch the “man-on-the-street” interviews here.

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