Category Archives: Random Blogging

What Planet Did You Say This Is?

During a televised interview, Missouri Representative Todd Akin, who is running for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Claire McCaskill, was asked about his position on abortion. Rep. Akin favors a complete ban, with no exception for rape or incest. He explained that an exception for rape was unnecessary, since victims of legitimate rape don’t get pregnant. The woman’s body “has a way to deal with that.”

Leaving aside the question of what constitutes “legitimate” rape, the more important questions are how this moron has managed to get elected, and how he won a statewide Republican primary. (He evidently serves on the House Subcommittee on Science, no less–a terrifying prospect.)

According to various reports, Akin sponsored legislation that would redefine rape in federal law to limit funding for abortion providers, and has a long track record of uninformed and extreme views about women’s health. He has a consistently radical  voting record on women’s issues, wants to ban the morning-after pill, and–my personal favorite– has expressed concern that criminalizing marital rape gives women “a legal weapon to beat up on the husband” during a divorce.

This guy is a real piece of work.

But before we laugh too hard at the people who actually voted to place this man in a position of authority, perhaps we should look at one of the men we have sent to Congress. Not only sent to Congress, but are likely to elevate to the top position in the state.

Google–as I did–Pence and Akin. You’ll find that they have co-sponsored several measures–one that would have distinguished between “forcible” and “other” rapes, one to de-fund Planned Parenthood, one to get rid of the Department of Energy, another to make English America’s “official” language….In fact, when I searched for “Pence Akin co-sponsor,” I got 1,730,000 hits. Obviously, hundreds if not thousands were duplicates, and thousands of others were perfectly innocuous… still, it became clear scrolling through them that Akin and Pence are cut from the same (poorly woven) cloth.

The only difference is that Mike Pence understands–as Akin clearly does not–that he needs to reinvent himself as someone who actually cares about Indiana’s economy and job creation, rather than the social issues which have been his major focus as a congressperson.

Unlike Akin, he realizes he needs to soft-pedal the crazy.

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Are We There Yet?

Two and a half more months of content-free campaign ads for state and local offices.

Two and a half more months of spin, hyperbole and outright falsehoods from national campaigns and the Super Pacs that support them.

Two and a half more months of voters being addressed as if we are idiots–and two and a half more months during which large numbers of voters behave as if they are–filling the comments sections of blogs with invective, treating complicated issues as if they are simple and obvious, and displaying racism, homophobia and anti-immigrant bigotries.

Elections, as political philosophers remind us, are a sign of human progress, a civilized substitute for warfare and other uses of force to settle our differences. Looked at in that light, perhaps the “dirty tricks,” the inane debates, the “win at all costs” behaviors are understandable, if unattractive.

Maybe we should just learn to live with the reality that elections aren’t really about ideas and competing policies, but more like sporting events where crowds root for those they’ve identified as their “team,” irrespective of the merits and sportsmanship of that team’s players. Maybe we should learn to accept that civilization is just a veneer, that reasoned argumentation based upon evidence and verification is still beyond us.

Maybe we should just accept that we’re not there yet.

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The Drug Culture

Since Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel, there has been a renewed focus by the chattering classes on the role of “culture” in creating social norms. (Romney attributed the fact that Israel’s economy is more robust than that of the Palestinians to a superior “culture.” It caused quite a stir.)

Culture certainly plays a significant role in all societies, albeit not in the linear and highly simplified fashion Romney implied.  Often, being immersed in the culture as we are, we miss the connections.

I thought about the unappreciated ways in which we reinforce cultural cues yesterday morning, while I was dutifully doing my time on the treadmill. The television was in real-time (no TIVO at the gym!) and one commercial after another implored me to talk to my doctor about [insert name of drug here]. The purple pill, the pill for COPD and the cure for a raft of other initials and acronyms for ailments I don’t have.

There are a lot of appropriate reactions to the onslaught of medical ads with which we are all inundated daily. One of my pet peeves is the amount of money being spent by pharmaceutical companies at the same time they defend charging big bucks for medicines by citing research and development costs. The last numbers I saw suggested that the 5+ billion dollars annually being spent on advertising to consumers actually exceeds those R and D outlays.

But yesterday, it suddenly hit me that the message being conveyed–intentionally or not–isn’t the relatively innocuous (if expensive) “buy my aspirin” but “have a problem? Take a pill.” Thinning hair, low “T”, anxiety, trouble sleeping, gas….you name it, there’s a pill for it. An easy fix for whatever ails you.

These messages overwhelm the other ads, the ones imploring parents to talk to their children about the evils of drugs. How believable are those solemn discussions, when teenagers see their parents and grandparents being medicated and over-medicated? How are they supposed to respect the (highly artificial) line between the “good” pills (legal) and the “bad” drugs (illegal). I did a fair amount of research on drug policy a few years ago, and was astonished to discover that nowhere in the convoluted labyrinth that is drug prohibition is there a definition of what constitutes “abuse,” or an objective distinction between use and abuse, or a bright line between narcotics that are illegal and those that are routinely prescribed.

Here is an experiment anyone can do: turn on your television for an hour, and count the number of commercials for drugs. Watch how those ads portray people before and after they take the product being peddled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, people were constantly being urged to stop worrying and take a drug called soma. ““You do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma.” Soma was described as having “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” 

Sounds eerily familiar…..

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A Choice, Not an Echo….or the Base that Roared

Bowing to the demands of the purist GOP base, Mitt Romney has chosen his running mate. Paul Ryan is the final signal of his capitulation to the True Believers.

I think it was during the Goldwater campaign that Phyllis Schlafly wrote a book titled “A Choice, Not an Echo.” The idea was that the two parties have too much in common, collaborate too frequently (shades of Richard Mourdock!), and that what Americans really want is a for-real choice between starkly different platforms and philosophies.

Well, the choice of Paul Ryan means we’ll have that choice this November!

Ryan is mostly known for his budget and tax plan–a plan Roll Call says would slash Mitt Romney’s effective tax rate from 13% to 1%. (And we thought “Romney Hood” was bad…)

The New Republic describes the effects of Ryan’s budget–millions of Americans losing health insurance (Ryan’s budget would end Medicare), senior citizens falling back into pre-social security poverty, a Government “so starved for resources that, by 2050, it wouldn’t have enough money for core functions like food inspections and highway maintenance.” The richest Americans would get a huge tax cut.

The Catholic Bishops and nuns haven’t been agreeing on very much lately, but they agree that the Ryan budget is “immoral and unChristian.”

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 1.4 million jobs would be lost if Ryan’s budget were passed. The budget proposes to eliminate Pell Grants for over a million college students; it would continue subsidies for Big Oil, but cut funding for alternative and clean energy development. (In 2011, The Daily Beast reported that Ryan’s family leases land to oil companies, and benefits from those subsidies–I’m sure that’s just a coincidence…)

Paul Ryan has called Social Security a “Ponzi Scheme,” and supported privatizing it, but he would actually increase the already-bloated Defense budget. (When several Generals testified that the reductions in Obama’s Defense Budget would not jeopardize national defense, he called them liars. He later apologized.)

If you are thinking–okay, the guy is just one of those deficit hawks, well, you don’t know the whole Paul Ryan. He may reject his Catholic faith’s teachings on social justice, but he enthusiastically embraces its anti-choice positions.

Ryan sponsored a “Fetal Personhood” bill. That bill gave fetuses full personhood rights from conception and would not only outlaw all abortion, but most popular forms of birth control. He voted to defund Planned Parenthood, and supported  a bill which would have allowed hospitals to refuse to provide a woman with an emergency abortion even if it was necessary to save her life.

Ryan has pooh-poohed the science of climate change. He voted against the Lily Ledbetter Act to ensure equal pay for women.

There’s more, but this should give any voter a pretty good idea of the agenda we are being asked to endorse.

Paul Ryan is the Koch brothers’ wet dream. In a sane world, someone this radical would be unelectable.

Pray for sanity.

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Return of the Welfare Queen

The Romney campaign has “gone there.”

A recent ad accuses the Obama Administration of “gutting the work requirement” that was part of welfare reform. The charge isn’t even remotely true–Politifact gave it a “Pants on Fire” rating, and reporters have noted the chutzpah of criticizing Obama for granting a request by Republican governors for more flexibility to try innovative job placement programs. Charles Blow of the New York Times noted that in 2005, Romney himself, and 8 other Republican governors, had signed a letter requesting even more flexibility than the administration has now granted.

So the ad is an outright lie, but that isn’t the point. The point is to play on white working-class resentment of the lazy, unproductive (black) moochers  who are living high at the expense of hardworking Americans. Those resentments, racial and economic, are closer to the surface in bad economic times, and let’s face it–the people who harbor them are much more likely to believe the charge that a black President  is enabling “those people.”

Resentments don’t respect facts, unfortunately. Most welfare recipients are white, and a majority are children. Another large subset are disabled. Of recipients who are working age, most work–and most of those work 40 hours a week. They simply work at jobs that don’t pay a living wage.

My biggest gripe with the folks who get bent out of shape about welfare, though, is different. It’s their definition and lack of consistency.

By far the largest recipients of welfare are corporations–the special interests whose lobbyists have successfully argued for favorable tax breaks and lucrative subsidies. Huge and highly profitable corporations like GE pay virtually no taxes. Obscenely profitable oil companies like Exxon continue to receive immense subsidies. (As E.J. Dionne wryly noted a few months back, evidently giving money to the rich gives them an incentive to produce, but giving money to the poor makes them dependent.)

We’ve only seen one year of tax returns from Mitt Romney, but in that one year, he took advantage of tax preferences–aka corporate welfare–that reduced his effective rate to 13%.

We have heard very little from Mitt Romney about his policy proposals. We are told we have no business seeing his tax returns. All we know is that he wants to be President so badly that he is willing to say or do anything–including flat-out lying and appeals to social and racial resentments.

References to Welfare Queens worked for Ronald Reagan, but Reagan had other things going for him. I do not think they will work for Mitt Romney.

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