No, All Attention Isn’t Good…

There’s an old political saying to the effect that publicity is always good, as long as they spell your name right.

Not so much.

There’s been a lot of attention focused upon Indiana Governor Mike Pence as a result of his RFRA signing and his obvious inability to understand the blowback or handle the subsequent fallout. But aside from generating increasingly serious concern about the damage done to Indiana, the weighing in by pundits and the skewering by late-night talk show hosts, the controversy has also encouraged media exploration of the Governor’s past performance and policy positions–and that exploration has underscored Pence’s deeply-rooted animus to LGBT folks, his contempt for women’s rights, and…how to say this?…his less than adequate analytical skills.

In the wake of the eruption over RFRA, I’ve seen the following:

A 2008 article about Pence’s bizarre 2005 proposal to advance Social Security privatization.  Here’s the first paragraph:

There are very few members of congress with whom I’ve ever had the opportunity to discuss a substantive matter of public policy. But as it happens, one of them — the one with whom I’ve had the second-longest exchange — is Mike Pence (R-IN) who I’ve seen on television today repeatedly discussing the Republican Study Group’s “plan” for the financial crisis. And I can tell you this about Mike Pence: he has no idea what he’s talking about. The man is a fool, who deserves to be laughed at.

The remainder of the article explains how the author came to that conclusion–and explains a lot about the “growth” policies the Governor has been pursuing in Indiana.

Then there was “Smoking Doesn’t Kill and Other Great OpEd’s from Mike Pence, which I originally thought was a joke, but apparently isn’t. It reproduces several op-eds penned by Governor Pence over the years; my favorite was on climate change, where Pence wrote that CO2 from burning fuels can’t cause increased global temperatures because they are a “naturally occurring phenomenon in nature.” (He also mixed up India with Indonesia.)

Perhaps the most telling–given the Governor’s protestations to the effect that he doesn’t believe in discrimination– was this article, detailing his long history of anti-gay bias. From Business Insider, no less. That one begins:

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) apparently previously advocated far more controversial positions on gay rights than his state’s controversial new “religious freedom” law.

One thing about the Internet. Nothing ever disappears. But they did spell his name right.
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Inviting Pollyanna Back

Okay, I know this blog can be a downer.

I think a lot of the “what the hell is going on here” tone of too many of my posts is due to the fact that I’m a perpetually disappointed optimist. Had I approached life with lower expectations, I might have simply shrugged and moved on, but I have always believed that despite ups and downs, the human trajectory is ultimately a progressive one. Over the past several years, most of the available evidence has seemed to rebut that presumption, so you can see where I might get testy.

That said, the current “Pence mess” in Indiana, believe it or not, has made me cautiously optimistic.

Granted, our elected officials–and especially our utterly clueless Governor–have inflicted significant and totally unnecessary damage on my city and state. Granted, too, the fact that we elected these bozos testifies to widespread abandonment of political engagement by most thoughtful Hoosiers.

But the overwhelming anger and pushback over the passage and signing of the “Religious Freedom Act”–from citizens, from CEOs, from Universities, from mayors, from faith communities–is an incredibly positive occurrence.

Leave aside the contending analyses of what Indiana’s RFRA would or would not do. What is beyond dispute is that this measure was instigated by, and intended to placate, right-wing organizations smarting from their loss on the issue of marriage equality. Its anti-gay symbolism was intentional, and a negative response from LGBT folks and their allies should have been anticipated (although it clearly wasn’t).

The depth and breadth of that response, however, wasn’t foreseeable. Three thousand people turned out to a protest organized a mere two or three days before–many of them people I know who have never before participated in a demonstration. The business community, the civic community, religious communities, the media–rose up as one to say “This mean-spiritedness does not represent us. Hoosiers are better than this.” (And by the way, Governor, insisting that you oppose discrimination rings pretty hollow when you also oppose civil rights for LGBT folks.)

The NCAA and even Nascar have piled on.

Dare I let Pollyanna whisper in my ear once more? Might it be that a period of apathy and resignation, a period when nice people just bemoaned bigotry and “talked amongst themselves” on social media and within more inclusive communities, is coming to an end? Might we be seeing the last throes of the Christian Taliban–those who Molly Ivins memorably called “Shiite Baptists”?

Could we be entering into a “Network” age, when people are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore?

I plan to stay tuned…

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Indiana–Where Lawmakers Like to Kick You When You’re Down

Hoosiers can be forgiven for thinking that Governor Pence is conducting a vendetta not just against teachers and gay folks, but working people in general. As if the much-hyped “right to work” law wasn’t enough to depress wages in Indiana, now the administration is promoting a measure to get rid of the common construction wage, and yesterday, while attention was focused on RFRA, the House obediently went along (although 13 Republicans did break ranks to join Democrats who opposed the bill).

The Governor touts Right to Work and elimination of the common wage as economic development tools.  (If I may be forgiven a bit of snark, given the amount of economic damage his “Religious Freedom” bill has inflicted, he shouldn’t be surprised if we take his protestations of concern about the state of our economy with a pillar of salt.)

So–what are the actual facts that the Senate should consider as this latest assault on middle-class Hoosiers comes up for a vote in that chamber?

The Institute for Working Families (disclosure: I serve on the organization’s advisory board) issues a biennial Status of Working Families Report; it  examines data on poverty, the labor market, wages and taxes.

“From the time the recession started, the rate of poverty, child poverty, and the share of low-income Hoosiers have all increased at rates greater than all neighbor states and the U.S. Moreover, while in all states around us, poverty is declining, it’s still rising in Indiana, as is the share of low-income Hoosiers. Inevitably, this means that Indiana’s middle-class is shrinking.”

 Additional research findings included:

  • Median household income has been on the decline since the beginning of the century – down by nearly $8,000 since 2000, and still declining as of last count. Again, while all neighbor states’ median household incomes are growing, ours is still declining.
  • Median hourly wages and 20th percentile wages – which are still declining – are down by about $0.80 each since 2007.
  • Of the half-million jobs in the top three industries, 74% pay below $13.00 per hour
  • During the growth period from 2001 – 2007, Indiana netted only around 18,000 jobs, while the population grew by hundreds of thousands. Only the low-wage category experienced a net gain (97% of which pay less than $13.00 per hour).
  • Or, since the recession started, only the low-wage category experienced a net gain. Of the jobs lost in mid-wage industries during the recession (2007 – 2010), 43% were manufacturing jobs and 38% were construction and contracting jobs. Despite a strong comeback in manufacturing, both of these middle-class jobs are still well below pre-recession levels.

Only two other states saw larger increases in income inequality than Indiana last year. That gap makes it virtually impossible to grow our middle class and/or create a sustainable economy.

So where does the common wage factor in? As Derek Thomas, Senior Policy researcher at the Institute explains,

By maintaining the common wage – especially at a time when middle-to high-skill jobs are in demand – local governments can enhance the welfare of Hoosier families and communities who desperately need quality, middle-class jobs that pay well enough to meet their most basic needs.

Just once, could Indiana’s Governor and lawmakers stop pandering to their political godfathers/donors, and resist measures to keep us at the level of a third-world nation?

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Cakes, Pork Chops and SB 101

Okay, this is sufficiently annoying that it justifies an “extra” post.

Defenders of SB 101 keep talking about the baker’s right to refuse to bake a cake with a swastika or the Muslim or Kosher butcher who the law “protects” from having to handle pork.

Excuse my french, but this is bull****.

If I go into a menswear shop and ask for a dress, am I being discriminated against when I’m informed the store doesn’t sell women’s clothes? Of course not.

Civil rights protections don’t require the baker who doesn’t bake swastika cakes, or the butcher who never sells pork to do so. Civil rights laws do keep the baker from refusing to sell the cakes he does make to “certain people” (And yes, that means that he has to sell the cakes he does make to the skinhead who comes into his shop, provided the skinhead is behaving himself and has money with which to make the purchase.)

The kosher butcher doesn’t have to carry pork, but he does have to sell his kosher chickens and beef to Muslim or Christian or even anti-Semitic customers, again, so long as those customers can pay and are abiding by the generally applicable rules of the shop.

Clear?

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Who Thought Letting Him on TV Was a Good Idea?

Dear lord, where were his handlers?

In the firestorm that has erupted over SB 101, and in a ham-handed effort to ameliorate the immense economic damage he and his party have inflicted on the state, Governor Mike Pence took to a Sunday talk show, with disastrous results.

According to Daily Kos (and multiple members of my family who watched):

In the annals of damage control that did more harm than good, Indiana’s Gov. Mike Pence has truly set the new standard. Appearing on today’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” to defend and “clarify” Indiana’s new right to discriminate law that he eagerly signed last week, Pence—and this is putting it kindly—crashed and burned.
Six times Stephanopoulos asked if, under the law, it would be legal to refuse service to gay customers and six times Pence refused to answer. And when asked outright if “you [Pence] think it should be legal in the state of Indiana to discriminate against gays or lesbians … it’s a yes or no question,” Pence’s astonishing (and eye roll-inducing) answer was, “Hoosiers don’t believe in discrimination.” So there you go.

And while Pence continued to peddle the notion that he’d support efforts by the Indiana legislature to “clarify” their new license to discriminate, when asked if making the LGBT community a protected class would be considered, Pence said no, that he wouldn’t push for that, that it’s not on his agenda and that it’s “not an objective of the people of the state of Indiana,” and then flat-out said, “We’re not going to change the law” and that “I stand by this law.”

I was actually looking forward to a Pence bid for higher office, stocking up on popcorn in anticipation of watching our “Not ready for prime time” Governor embarrass himself on the “circuit.” But in this context, his persistent cluelessness is doing incredible economic damage to my city and state.

This, children, is what happens when grownups don’t participate in the political process.

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