That Scary Black Man in the White House

The Right Wing has its panties in a bunch again. According to the usual suspects, President Obama issued a National Defense Resources Preparedness executive order that gives him “unprecedented new powers to appropriate national resources.”

And what does Snopes have to say about this latest evidence of Obama’s usurpation of power and disregard of the law of the land?

The Executive Order itself is nothing more than a restatement of policy that has been in place for decades and grants no authority to the President or the Cabinet that they don’t already have under existing law.

It has become fashionable to attribute the constant hysteria over anything and everything that Obama does to the same hyper-partisanship that prompted “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” And certainly, partisanship bears some blame.

But let’s get real.

I detested George W. Bush. I disagreed with his naive “faith based initiative.” I was appalled when he took the U.S. into the Iraq War. A list of Bush policies that pushed me out of the Republican party would fill pages of text.

But here’s the thing: these were actual policies. When the man was first elected, I found him likable enough–I certainly didn’t detest him before he even took office. And most of the people I knew who came to dislike him intensely (and were probably unfairly critical from time to time) were also reacting to things the man actually did.

Obama hadn’t even taken office when the ugly emails and the out-and-out lies began. The racism that fuels talk radio and “birthers” and insane accusations is too thick and too widespread and too obvious to ignore. The absolute unwillingness of the Republicans in Congress to work with this President–even to implement programs that they originally proposed–has brought this country to a virtual standstill.

One result of this behavior is ironic: those of us who are repelled by what we see as unhinged, vicous and consistently unfair attacks from people who simply cannot come to terms with the fact that we have a black President find ourselves defending Obama even when he is implementing or continuing policies we would otherwise criticize. As I wrote to a good friend,  there’s plenty to legitimately criticize. I’m no fan of the NSA, drone strikes and several other policies this administration has pursued. But calling Obama lawless and a communist, making hysterical accusations about things that previous presidents–including the sainted Reagan– did routinely with absolutely no pushback is so manifestly unjust, people who are fair-minded get protective.

A Facebook post from a (very Republican) friend of mine is a good example of what I’m talking about:

Ok, let me get this straight: Ted Nugent–who during the 2012 campaign declared that if Obama was reelected he (Nugent) would either be dead or in jail within a year (a not-so-veiled threat against the President of the United States)–last month called President Obama a “communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel.” And now, the GOP front runner for the Texas governorship not only welcomes Nugent on his campaign but calls this unhinged racist hater “a fighter for freedom.” What’s wrong with this picture?  The Lone Star GOP needs to find a candidate with the basic decency of Gov. George W. Bush. (I didn’t like him as a president but he was no racist hater. I wonder if the same could be said about Greg Abbott. A man is judged by the company he keeps.)

Allowing buffoons and bigots to become the face of the GOP just pushes moderate folks who might otherwise be inclined to vote Republican into the D column.

Defending racist rants as if they were legitimate criticisms, vowing to block this President at every turn (and damn the common good), repels people of good will who would consider — and perhaps be persuaded by–valid and thoughtful critiques.

There aren’t enough angry old white guys to elect a President. Get over it.
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It Really Sucks to be Poor

It costs a lot to be poor. Just a few examples:

A recent report released by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. Postal Service reports that 68 million Americans — more than a quarter of all U.S. households – have no checking or savings accounts.

How do people get along in a society where payments are made by check, or increasingly, electronic transfer? How do the (growing numbers of) people scraping along paycheck to paycheck access short-term loans when they hit a rough spot?

Evidently, by spending a lot more than the rest of us.

According to the report, these households collectively spent about $89 billion in 2012 on interest and fees for non-bank financial services like payday loans and check cashing. That works out to an average of $2,412 per household. The average underserved household spends an astonishing 10 percent of its annual income on interest and fees — about the same amount they spend on food.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in a column commenting on the report, “The poor pay more, and that’s one of the reasons people get trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder.” Poor people disproportionately rely on the check-cashing stores, pawnshops, payday lenders, and other predatory financial services that took customers for $89 billion in interest and fees in 2012.

But poor people have to contend with more than just predatory lending; they have fewer options across the board.

A few days ago, I wrote about the connection between poverty and marriage; it appears that despite the undeniable correlation between the two, we had the cause and effect backward. Poverty prevents many poor single moms from marrying in the first place. Subsequently, I found research (from professors of psychology and and organizational management) demonstrating that poverty also makes it harder for poor couples who are married to stay that way.

The problem is not that poor people fail to appreciate the importance of marriage, nor is it that poor and wealthy Americans differ in which factors they believe are important in a good marriage. The problem is that the same trends that have exacerbated inequality since 1980 — unemployment, juggling multiple jobs and so on — have also made it increasingly difficult for less wealthy Americans to invest the time and other resources needed to sustain a strong marital bond.

Poor people divorce at a rate that is thirty percent higher than their wealthier peers, with all of the emotional and financial distress that divorce brings in its wake.

Back in 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting Along in America, in which she documented the difficulties faced by low wage workers–  the added costs for shelter (the poor often have to spend much more on “rent by the week” fleabags than they would pay to rent a decent apartment because they can’t afford the security deposit and first-and-last month rent payments) and food (the poor often live in “food deserts” and have to buy food that is both more expensive and less healthy).

Let’s not even get into medical and dental care. That’s a subject for an entirely separate diatribe. (Folks who can’t afford regular, preventive care end up very sick in the ER, costing everyone more money.)

If we really expect poor people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” maybe we should help them afford the bootstraps.

 

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Mike Delph and the Book of Mormon

In the wake of Mike Delph’s bizarre meltdown, and his obvious inability to distinguish between his personal (and idiosyncratic) religious commitments and his civic and constitutional responsibilities, I couldn’t help thinking of The Book of Mormon.

Bear with me here.

For those of you who have yet to see the musical, Book of Mormon is both a delightful comic entertainment and a meditation on the role of religion in human society, for good or ill. While the ostensible subject is Mormonism, the real subject is the uses to which religious commitments are put, and the various harms done by unquestioning adherence to dogma.

When youthful “Elders” from Salt Lake City are sent to Uganda to convert the villagers, they find horrific conditions: widespread AIDS, hunger, poverty and hopelessness. The blond, blue-eyed, privileged Americans are steadfast in their beliefs; they sing of the “spooky Mormon hell dreams” that follow even minor indiscretions, of the “little Mormon trick” of “turning off” and denying unapproved sexual impulses, and–in my favorite, a song called “I Believe”– they affirm all manner of (implausible) doctrinal beliefs, including the belief that “in 1978, God changed his mind about black people.”

Elder Cunningham, one of the missionaries and the play’s comic relief, is a reluctant apostate: when a member of the tribe announces his belief that he can cure his AIDS by raping a baby, the appropriately appalled Cunningham invents a scriptural passage about AIDS that forbids such behavior (and substitutes a frog…you really need to see the show.)

This spontaneous invention–and many others that follow, including a divine prohibition against genital mutilation and commanded reverence for the clitoris–is clearly not consistent with Mormon doctrine. But it’s just as clearly humane and socially useful. And in fact, Cunningham’s version of Mormonism (which owes a considerable debt to Star Wars) is wildly successful with the Ugandans.

This musical morality tale brings us back to what I am going to call the Delph Dilemma.

Every religion has its doctrinal fundamentalists, a minority of believers for whom (their version of) the letter is far more important than the original spirit or purpose of religious law. And that’s fine, so long as we all recognize the wisdom of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, which essentially say “Okay folks, you have a right to believe what you want, and to live in accordance with those beliefs (at least until you start sacrificing small children or violating other basic laws of society). But you don’t get to make the rest of us live by your rules, especially when those rules require marginalizing those who are different.”

People like Mike Delph and Eric Miller and Micah Clark have an absolute right to their belief in a God who doesn’t want gay people to get married. They have an absolute right to throw a hissy fit (on twitter or elsewhere) when they lose a legislative battle. Those of us who see religion as one of many ways humans approach questions of ethics and morality, one of many way we try to understand our obligations to the other humans with whom we share this planet–have a right to think and live differently, and in our system, the government doesn’t get to make anyone’s religious doctrine the law of the land.

Although none of us has the right to impose our preferred religious doctrines on others, we do each have a right–perhaps even a duty–to assess whether any particular belief system ultimately encourages loving-kindness or abets mean-spiritedness– whether any particular worldview promotes amity or enmity.

We get to decide which is better: the dogma that sacrifices the baby, or the modification that targets the frog.

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But Think About the Children!

There are few things more important to Indiana policymakers and lobbyists than the welfare of our children. Just ask them–or ask Eric Miller, who routinely appears at the legislature to insist that we have to disadvantage gay people “for the children.” Miller has worked diligently to “protect” Hoosier children from the dangers posed by GLBT folks, no matter how fanciful or invented those dangers might be.

For some reason, Miller is far less concerned about the documented, decidedly real-life threat posed by unlicensed church daycare operations. As the Indianapolis Star reported in January

Child advocates have been pushing for decades for tighter scrutiny of unlicensed Indiana day cares but have often watched the legislature take little action, even as the grim tally of child injuries and deaths has grown..An investigation last year by The Indianapolis Star found that at least 22 children have died in Indiana day cares since 2009, with 16 of those deaths in unlicensed day cares.

As the Star noted, bills to tighten licensing requirements have died in prior sessions, killed by objections that the regulations would “infringe on the religious freedom of the churches that run day-care ministries.”

Eric Miller of the conservative advocacy group Advance America has been among the loudest voices of that position.

So let me see if I have this right. Miller says Indiana needs new laws discriminating against gay citizens because children will be traumatized if they have two mommies or see gay neighbors being treated like everyone else. But Indiana absolutely doesn’t need new laws to prevent children from being neglected or abused in unsupervised facilities affiliated with a church. Because making a church follow the same rules that apply to other daycare operators will infringe their religious freedom.

Let’s call that what it is: utter bullshit.

On that logic, church school bus drivers should be exempted from traffic laws. Religious structures shouldn’t have to be built in conformity with building and fire codes.

Eric Miller and his cohorts don’t give a rat’s patootie about the welfare or safety of Hoosier children. They care only about pursuing–and in Miller’s case, profiting from–their Christianist agenda.

The biggest danger to children comes from a legislature cowed by these pious charlatans.

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Back Home in Indiana…

If our legislature paid half as much attention to job creation and economic realities as it does to time zones, same-sex marriage and teaching cursive, Indiana’s economy might actually improve, and state agencies might not have to lie about their performance.

If our lawmakers took an honest look at the results of ideologically-driven measures like tax reductions, constitutionalizing the tax caps and “right to work” legislation–we might  encourage the kinds of economic activity that would work for everyone.

Honest to goodness.

Instead, Indiana continues to underperform on a wide range of measures. In a recent column, Morton Marcus highlighted one of those– a significant increase in the gap between the average weekly earnings of a Hoosier worker and that of the average American worker– and he asked a pertinent (and impertinent) question:

 In Dec.’07 that gap was $20.74; by Dec.’13 the gap between Indiana and the nation grew to $58.99 per week. Is this the economic progress our elected legislative and executive leaders travel the world to advance? Is this consistent with those boastful press releases we read about how well Indiana is doing because of our low business taxes and slack regulation?

Elsewhere in the country, it is dawning on elected officials that it is quality of life, not tax rates, that drives relocation decisions. A state that boasts of its “slack regulation” is advertising its resemblance to West Virginia, where  drinking the water has gotten hazardous.  A state touting its low taxes is communicating where its priorities lie; increasingly, when businesses being courted are told “we have low taxes,” they hear “we have substandard education, poorly-maintained roads and parks, and not enough police officers to protect you.” And they’re right.

Amazing as it may seem, people smart enough to run a successful business are smart enough to know that states, like people,  get what we pay for. And back home in Indiana, we aren’t willing to pay for much of anything.

Honest to goodness, Indiana.
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