Will Red States Residence Bear the Cost of GOP Idiocy?

Alabama governor, Kay Ivey.

The last number I heard was that 12 states still have no "stay at home" or mandatory "social distancing" orders.  All 12 are states with right wing Republican governors who seemingly see Covid-19 as purely a blue state problem.  Florida likely belatedly adopted such a measure but even then exempted church gathers from the social distancing requirements and the ban on large gatherings.  As one friend stated, if these Christofascists would only infect themselves and die, it might be a positive thing socially, but unfortunately, they will infect others and put medical personnel at risk,  Sadly, from 25 years following right wing "Christian" groups, the last thing they think about is others, it's always all about them.  The governor of Alabama - a state where George Wallace would not be able to be elected today because he'd be too liberal - exemplifies the idiocy that courses through GOP controlled governors' mansions.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon and what may come home to roost in this sates.  Here are article excerpts (Hobby Lobby mentioned in the article is privately owned by Christofascists):

Kay Ivey, the Republican governor of Alabama, put down a marker last week in affirming that it was “not the time to order people to shelter in place.”

“Y’all, we are not Louisiana, we are not New York state, we are not California,” she said, suggesting that the fate of hard-hit parts of the country would not be shared by Alabama.

In Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Parson said he was not inclined to “make a blanket policy,” adding, “It’s going to come down to individual responsibilities.”

And in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide stay-at-home order this week under growing pressure as his state’s death toll mounted, a Tampa-area megachurch pastor who was arrested for holding services in violation of a local order announced Thursday he was considering reopening the church in time for Easter and is “praying and seeking the Lord for wisdom.”

[G]overnment and private-sector leaders across a large swath of the country remain defiant that the devastation unfolding in New York and other seemingly faraway cities should not curtail life in their own communities.

In some cases, skeptics have been slow to acknowledge the science behind the spread of the novel coronavirus. In others, such as Florida, politicians took heed of demands from the business community, which lobbied DeSantis as recently as during a Monday webinar to balance medical imperatives with economic needs. Elsewhere, adamance about local autonomy was pronounced. Some, meanwhile, maintained that it was religious authority that mattered.

Experts are now warning that a group of governors in the South and the Great Plains — largely Republican-led states — risk acting too late.

Alabama, for example, has more than 1,100 cases, with just five counties untouched by the virus. New infections have risen as sharply as in California.

In some cases, the resistance has led to rising political tensions, with often Democratic mayors imposing orders of their own that they acknowledge have limited effect when surrounding jurisdictions do not act. “As a city, we need to operate as if we could be anyone else,” said Mayor Randall Woodfin of Birmingham, Ala. “I think we’re in the middle of a storm.”

Lyda Krewson, the mayor of St. Louis, said her city’s stay-at-home order was undermined by the absence of a blanket policy, warning, “We have a fluid society, frankly.”

The pleas have not been from politicians alone. Joining Krew­son and others in appealing to the Missouri governor was the state’s medical association, which sent a letter to Parson saying a statewide order was the “only way to curb the exponential spread of covid-19 in Missouri.” In Texas, the state’s hospital and nurses associations sent a joint letter to the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, telling him, “The time has come for Texas to issue a statewide stay-at-home order.” Abbott announced a new statewide directive Tuesday but refused to call it a stay-at-home order.

“Part of the problem is just reluctance to wrap your head around the fact that the numbers could get that bad that fast,” said W. Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator.

He singled out the South, saying, “It’s almost a different approach, waiting to know it’s bad. I’m afraid that by the time they have reports of cases, it’s already too late.”

Effective planning has been thwarted by the multiple models available to state officials, who choose to rely on certain numbers and not others, the official said, based on a “political decision that is out of the hands of the responders.”

Interviews with mayors, business leaders and health officials in states where stay-at-home orders were recently imposed illustrated how decisive Tuesday’s White House briefing was to their thinking, as Trump struck a newly solemn tone and his advisers unveiled grim projections even with best-case mitigation efforts.

DeSantis acknowledged as much in remarks Wednesday, saying of his statewide order, “I did speak with the president about it.”

The industries exempted from his order, including landscaping and boating in addition to food service and others, resembled the catalogue of essential services requested by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, which sent a letter to DeSantis outlining its view of an appropriate government response on March 22., . . . . “we must be mindful that the policies intended to protect human health and curb the pandemic do not also cause an even worse effect on the economy and jobs.”

After initially barring local jurisdictions from ordering residents to stay at home, Arizona’s governor, Republican Doug Ducey, this week reversed himself and issued a statewide order.

But Will Humble, a former director of the state’s health department, said it was unenforceable. “It says it’s a stay-at-home order, but try to find something that’s not exempted that wasn’t already closed,” he said.

Within states that have issued sweeping directives, there has also been defiance from businesses, as well as religious leaders and vacationers.

The decision by Hobby Lobby to reopen stores in multiple states that had ordered nonessential businesses closed prompted state law enforcement officials to send cease-and-desist letters to the company, which is based in Oklahoma City. . . . . Hobby Lobby’s corporate office did not respond to a request for comment.

Missouri GOP Lawmakers Call On Embattled GOP Governor Amid Sex/Blackmail Scandal

"Family values" GOP Gov. Greitens accused of adultery and revenge porn blackmail

Time and time again over the years this blog has existed, there has been a cavalcade of "family values" Republicans caught in gay sex trysts (or in the case of former Speaker Dennis Hastert, sexual abuse), adultery scandals, and other sexual improprieties.  In the same interval, only a small handful of Democrats, if that number, have been swept up in sex scandals.  Now, the adultery and alleged blackmail scandal swirling around Missouri GOP governor Eric Greitens - he purportedly tied up his mistress naked and photographed her and then told her that he would spread the photos if she ever revealed their affair - is becoming so bad that his fellow Republicans are calling on him to resign from office. At least one episode of physical abuse is alleged to have occurred.  So much for true family values.  Here are highlights from Talking Points Memo:

Four Republican Missouri lawmakers have called for Gov. Eric Greitens (R) to step down over allegations that he attempted to blackmail a woman with whom he carried out a 2015 affair.

Reps. Kathy Conway, Marsha Haefner, Steve Cookson and Nate Walker separately issued statements Tuesday urging Greitens to leave office to avoid dragging his state into a protracted, messy scandal.

Walker’s call for the governor’s resignation is particularly significant since he was one of Greitens’ earliest supporters. . . . Former Missouri GOP chairman Ed Martin also called for Greitens to step down on his talk radio show on AM 1380 Tuesday afternoon, saying “the people deserve better.”

A longtime GOP operative in the state told TPM that, based on his conversations with sources in the State House, he expects the number of Republicans calling for the governor to step down will be “up to 10 trickling in through the day.”

“I think people are believing that there’s more things to come out—that if he did tie her up, the likelihood of another incident or something, in their minds, is higher.”

Greitens is accused of tying the woman to a piece of exercise equipment in the basement of his home and taking a nude photograph of her, then threatening to leak the photo if she went public about the affair.

Greitens acknowledged last week that he engaged in an extramarital affair, but has denied the blackmail and slapping allegations.

“The current scandal is believable given all the other stuff that’s gone on, the way he treats the press, the way he treats other Republican lawmakers,” Dave Robertson, head of the political science department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told TPM.

The Missouri Republican operative told TPM that GOP members of the state’s House of Representatives will meet Tuesday afternoon to discuss next steps, and are leaning towards launching their own investigation into Greitens’ alleged behavior.

City of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner announced last week that she had launched a criminal probe. Al Watkins, an attorney for the woman’s ex-husband, told TPM he’d been contacted by Gardner’s office and the FBI.

Greitens and his wife, Sheena, made a round of calls to GOP lawmakers last week insisting that no further allegations would come out.

Missouri Republican: Homosexuality is Different from Being a Human

Rick Bratinn: self-loath closeted gay or pandering political whore?

One of the tactics used by the Nazi regime to set the stage for the Holocaust was a never ending propaganda campaign to depict Jews as less than human.  Jews were described as a threat to children, disease ridden and many other horrible things.  This Nazi tactic was adopted by fundamentalist and evangelical Christians years ago now and directed at the LGBT community.  Again, the goal has been to dehumanize gays and to in the process make their mistreatment  acceptable to the "godly folk." Indeed, change "Jew" to "gay" and some of the Christofascists propaganda reads nearly verbatim with that of the Nazis.  Typically, Christofacscists stop short of flat out saying gays are subhuman.  Not so with Missouri state representative Rick Brattin - likely a closeted gay himself given the track record of virulently anti-gay Republicans - who flat out said that being homosexual is something different from being a human being.  In a main editorial, the Kansas City Star takes Brattin to task.  Here are excerpts:

Rick Brattin, a Missouri state representative from Harrisonville, seems pretty certain: Homosexuality and humanity are incompatible.

“When you look at the tenets of religion, of the Bible, of the Qur’an, of other religions,” he said Monday, “there is a distinction between homosexuality and just being a human being.”

The statement, made on the Missouri House floor, was deplorable. It betrayed a stunning lack of understanding of theology and self-government: The Constitution protects all Americans from the tyranny of any single faith-based approach to secular law.

We asked Rep. Brattin to explain his statement, but he did not return a phone call to his office.

It isn’t the first time state Brattin has tripped over the Constitution.

He has sought an equal footing for teaching creationism in public schools. He proposed requiring the father’s consent before an abortion except in cases of “legitimate rape.”

It’s a disappointing record. Sadly, some of Brattin’s colleagues appear to sympathize with his views.

Monday, state lawmakers tried to pass an amendment prohibiting discrimination in the state on the basis of sexual orientation or gender status. In Missouri, you can still be fired because the boss thinks you might be gay.

Brattin made his statement during the debate on that amendment. But it quickly became clear that there were not enough votes to pass the plan, leaving gays and lesbians still unprotected by Missouri’s discrimination law.

That sends exactly the wrong message about tolerance in the state.

It gets worse. After all the amendments were dropped, including the protections for gays and lesbians, the House passed Senate Bill 43, a measure that would actually make it more difficult to sue for discrimination.

The bill is another unnecessary blemish on the state. . . . . what business wants to operate in a state that tolerates discrimination? Or a state where a representative thinks gays and lesbians are less than human?

The states that grow in the 21st century will be those that show tolerance, acceptance and intelligence. Missouri’s lawmakers are sending a clear signal this state is not any of those things.  The governor should veto the bill. And Brattin should apologize.

Missouri - A Case Study in Republican Insanity

With gun deaths now exceeding deaths caused by auto accidents, one would think that even those only loosely connected with sanity and objective reality would agree that some sort of focus on increased gun safety is sensible.  Especially among supposedly "pro-life" Republicans.  Sadly, however, such is not the case and the only times Republicans worry about protecting life is before a child is born or when it comes to banning doctor assisted suicide for the terminally ill.  New levels of GOP are now on display in Missouri where the Missouri Republicans have wiped out sane and rational gun safety laws.  Frankly, the GOP has become akin to a pack of rabid dogs, lead by lunatic and scam artist in chief, Donald Trump.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at this latest form of GOP distemper.  Here are highlights:

In an alarming victory for the gun lobby, Missouri’s Republican-controlled Legislature voted Wednesday to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto and enact a wholesale retreat from gun safety in the state.

The law will let citizens carry concealed weapons in public without a state gun permit, criminal background check or firearms training. It strips local law enforcement of its current authority to deny firearms to those guilty of domestic violence and to other high-risk individuals. And it establishes a dangerous “stand your ground” standard that will allow gun owners to shoot and claim self-defense based on their own sense of feeling threatened.

The measure has drawn no great national attention, but it certainly provides further evidence that gun safety cannot be left to state lawmakers beholden to the gun lobby. Democrats opposed to the Missouri bill called it a “perfect storm” of lowered standards for the use of deadly force and an invitation for people to be armed without responsible controls. The measure was enacted by the Republicans, despite strong public opposition and warnings about the threat to public safety from the state Police Chiefs Association. Everytown for Gun Safety, one of the groups fighting the gun lobby, noted that stand-your-ground laws result in disproportionate harm to communities of color.

Mr. Nixon, a Democrat, vetoed the measure in June, saying it would allow individuals with a criminal record to legally carry a concealed firearm even though they had been, or would have been, denied a permit under the old law’s background check. Mayors Sly James of Kansas City and Francis Slay of St. Louis warned against restricting the power of the local police to deny guns to those who commit domestic violence. They cited sharp spikes in domestic violence homicides in their cities, and they noted that the police would be left at greater risk by this bill.

Missouri is joining 10 other states that loosened gun laws to allow concealed firearms in public without the need for a permit. Federal gun controls still require background checks on buyers, but only at federally licensed dealers. Unfortunately, there is a separate and busy uncontrolled market where buyers at gun shows and on the internet do not have to undergo background checks.

In the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton has called for extensive gun safety measures, including a ban on the assault weapons favored by mass shooters, closing background-check loopholes, ending the gun industry’s outrageous protection from civil damage suits and denying guns to risky suspects on the government’s no-fly lists.

Yep, America is exceptional alright - exceptional in its stupidity and careless disregard for the lives of law abiding citizens.

 

Missouri Democrats Engage in Inspiring Filibuster of Anti-Gay "Religious Freedom" Law

At times it seems as if self-prostituting Republicans are in a contest across the country to see who can most debase themselves to Christian extremists and undermine non-discrimination protections for LGBT citizens.  Here in Virginia we have seen the Republicans in the House of Delegates introduce a plethora of anti-gay bills, most of which have thankfully been tabled and/or face a veto by Democrat Governor Terry McAuliffe.  In Missouri, similar efforts are embodied by a GOP effort to write discrimination into the state constitution and grant special rights to Christian extremists.  Thankfully,  the Democrat minority in the state Senate have launched a filibuster (it's gone for over 26 hours so far) to block a vote on the foul effort.  The Democrat effort has prompted many Twitter posts that can be viewed here.  Here are highlights from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on other aspects of the filibuster effort:

Missouri is grabbing national headlines as word of Senate Democrats' day-long filibuster spreads.

A proposal by Sen. Bob Onder, R-Lake Saint Louis [Senate Joint Resolution 39], is designed to protect wedding vendors and clergy from legal liability and government penalties if they decline to participate in same-sex marriage ceremonies.

Proponents say churches in other states have had their tax-exempt statuses threatened. They've also used an example from Oregon, where a baker was ordered to pay damages for declining to bake for a same-sex wedding, as a reason for why the amendment is needed.

But Democrats charge that clergy are already protected under the First Amendment, and that the proposal does little more than codify discrimination against gays in the state constitution.

So shortly after 4 p.m. Monday, the Democratic minority launched a filibuster to stall the bill. As of 4 p.m. Tuesday, the bill had yet to come to a vote. Meanwhile, the debate has drawn nationwide attention from news outlets and social media.

Companies and at least one business group have also voiced opposition. Last week, PROMO, an LGBT advocacy group, published a letter with 185 Missouri businesses, churches and other groups voicing opposition.

Dow Chemical and the St. Louis Regional Chamber of Commerce have also recently voiced opposition.

Creve Coeur-based Monsanto also came out against the measure Tuesday.  "Monsanto has a long history of employing a diverse workforce and creating an inclusive environment for our employees," its statement reads, in part. "Monsanto is calling on other businesses and the agricultural community to join the company in speaking out against discrimination here in our home state of Missouri and around the world."

Once again, I ask myself "why would any LBGT individual support GOP candidates?"  

 

Missouri: Fewer Gun Restrictions and More Gun Killings

The NRA and its political whores love to say "guns don't kill, people do," yet a new study that has tracked the decline in gun restrictions in Missouri found that - as any rational person would expect - the easier it is to purchase guns, the more gun killings increase.   With deaths from gun violence now exceeding deaths from auto accidents an a number of states, it is simply ridiculous to pretend that lax gun controls don't increase gun violence and killings involving guns.  Watching the Today Show this morning while preparing for a family get together we were hosting, out of the "top stories from 2015," roughly 3/4th involved gun violence.  True, strict gun control laws might not have stopped all of the tragedies, but many of the perpetrators might very well have not been able to secure the guns that they used to create mayhem and death.  Here are highlights from a New York Times piece that looks at the lesson to be learned from Missouri's short sighted easing of gun restrictions:

In the past decade, Missouri has been a natural experiment in what happens when a state relaxes its gun control laws. For decades, it had one of the nation’s strongest measures to keep guns from dangerous people: a requirement that all handgun buyers get a gun permit by undergoing a background check in person at a sheriff’s office.

But the legislature repealed that in 2007 and approved a flurry of other changes, including, last year, lowering the legal age to carry a concealed gun to 19. What has followed may help answer a central question of the gun control debate: Does allowing people to more easily obtain guns make society safer or more dangerous?

[T]he Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, found that in the first six years after the state repealed the requirement for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, the gun homicide rate was 16 percent higher than it was the six years before. During the same period, the national rate declined by 11 percent. After Professor Webster controlled for poverty and other factors that could influence the homicide rate, and took into account homicide rates in other states, the result was slightly higher, rising by 18 percent in Missouri.

Before the repeal, from 1999 to 2006, Missouri’s gun homicide rate was 13.8 percent higher than the national rate. From 2008 to 2014, it was 47 percent higher. (The new data also showed that the national death rate from guns was equal to that from motor vehicle crashes for the first time since the government began systematically tracking it.)

California, where the San Bernardino gun attacks happened, has some of the strictest laws in the country. But supporters say mass shootings, while attention-grabbing, account for fewer than 2 percent of the more than 30,000 gun deaths in the United States each year. They say tougher gun laws help reduce the slow, steady stream of killings that pile up quietly in communities like this one, often poor, often of color, and cut down on suicides, which make up two-thirds of all gun deaths in the United States.

In 1995 Connecticut enacted a law similar to the one Missouri repealed, and gun homicides declined by 40 percent in the 10 years that followed, he found.

Missouri began changing its gun laws after the Republican Party won control of the State House in 2002 for the first time in years.  . . . .The changes tapped into profound differences between rural and urban Americans about guns. The state legislature is predominantly white, rural and suburban, but the effects of the laws it makes are felt largely in Missouri’s cities, where gun homicides are one of the biggest causes of death for young black men.

“There is this idea that law-abiding citizens’ rights are being secured,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “In fact, it’s the people most inclined to do harm whose privileges are being secured.”

As Rosilyn Temple tells it, guns have become so prevalent in her Kansas City neighborhood that owning one is about as common as owning a cellphone. “You can’t buy liquor, but you can carry a gun,” she said, alluding to the legal age to obtain a concealed carry permit. The legal age to buy alcohol in Missouri is 21.

Of all the gun law changes, the one that most affected homicides was the repeal of the permit law requiring a background check at a sheriff’s office, Professor Webster argued. It had applied to any prospective gun buyer — even someone buying from a private seller.

Now permits are no longer required. Gun buyers must still pass background checks if they buy guns in stores, which send applicants’ personal information to the F.B.I. Gun control proponents say those checks are less rigorous than before, though gun rights supporters insist they are just as thorough. Buying from a private seller requires no check at all.

Guns also confer status. And because the repercussions for carrying them without the proper authorization are so minor, there is little risk in showing them off.  “The big thing used to be having a fancy car and driving it around,” Chief Dotson said. “Now, it’s having a pistol with extended magazine and posting pictures of it on Facebook.”

In this area, my view as that rednecks and poor whites who have to have a jacked up trucks and guns are trying to compensate for their small penis size.  A "bad ass" truck and a trove of guns do not make on a man regardless of what the NRA would have one believe.

Anti-Gay Missouri GOP Representative Caught in Sex Scandal With Barely Legal Intern

As I have noted over and over again, it seems that it is always "family values," anti-gay Republicans (most of whom seem to be fat and singularly unattractive) who are the ones caught in titillating sex scandals.   The latest hypocrite to get caught is Missouri House Speaker John Diehl who has been linked to a college freshman in a Missouri Capitol internship program.  Diehl - who has been married to a woman for 23 years and  has three children - in true "Christian" fashion at first tried to lie about the inappropriate relationship.  In the past, Diehl sponsored a bill to ban gay-straight alliance clubs in public schools. He also filed an anti-gay marriage amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit much to the praise of hate group Family Research Council.   The Kansas City Star has details on Diehl's conduct and the scandal.  Here are highlights: 

Text messages obtained by The Star reveal a sexually charged relationship between House Speaker John Diehl and a college freshman in a Missouri Capitol internship program that shut down abruptly last month.

The conversations unveil a flirty rapport and suggest an intimacy between arguably the state’s most influential lawmaker and a young woman taking some pleasure in a secret association.

Diehl initially declined to comment. But about six hours after the story was posted online Wednesday morning, he issued a statement admitting the relationship.

“I take full responsibility for my actions and am truly sorry to those I let down,” Diehl’s statement said. “I apologize for the poor judgment I displayed that put me and those closest to me in this situation. I also regret that the woman has been dragged into this situation. The buck stops here. I ask for forgiveness. I will begin immediately working to restore the trust of those closest to me, and getting back to the important work that is required in the final days of session.”

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article20822424.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article20822424.html#storylink=cpy

The discovery of the text messages between Diehl and the intern follows a decision by Missouri Southern State University to end its Capitol internship program more than a month prematurely.

Richard Miller, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Missouri Southern, told The Star that the school pulled its four interns out of the state Capitol this spring after an unspecified incident. Yet Miller, citing student privacy laws, declined to be more specific about what led the university to end the internships.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article20822424.html#storylink=cpy

I suspect that Diehl's apology isn't worth a damn.  He obviously cares nothing about "the sanctity of marriage" and is only sorry that he got caught.

 

Anti-Bias Ordinance Repealed in Springfield, Missouri

Wonder how Hitler came to power?  We got a sampling last week when the non-discrimination ordinance passed by the Springfield, Missouri, city council was overturned by a referendum.  Leading the charge for repeal were the Christofascists who continue to demand special rights for themselves and continue to have psychotic need to be able to tell themselves how superior they are to others.  It's the same psychosis Hitler played upon to turn everyday Germans into monsters who closed their eyes to horrors and later claimed ignorance to what many say was only too well known.  It is exactly the type of religious extremist cancer the Founding Fathers did not want infecting America's civil laws.  The New York Times looks at the frightening about turn.  Here are excerpts:

On Tuesday, after a nearly five-month campaign by Christian conservatives, voters in this southwest Missouri city narrowly approved a measure to repeal the [non-discrimination] ordinance.

“We were quite elated to win this,” said Calvin Morrow, the executive director of Christians Uniting for Political Action, a group that led the repeal effort. The push succeeded, 51 percent to 49 percent, in a vote that officials said drew the largest turnout here since 2001.

The campaign pitted national gay rights groups against leaders of many of this city’s large churches. Human Rights Campaign, based in Washington, spent more than $27,260 on the “One Springfield” effort against the repeal measure. Its financial support was assisted by a $10,000 check from the Gill Action Fund to finance advertisements and organizational efforts.

But the outside money defending the ordinance motivated local and, to an extent, national efforts to support repeal. More than $37,600 was contributed late in the push by the National Black Robe Regiment, a group that describes itself as a network that helps pastors “to engage in their biblical and historical role to stand boldly for righteousness and transform society through spiritual and cultural engagement.”

Mr. Morrow, who lives in Mansfield, east of here, said that measures intended to protect gays from discrimination create unfair burdens on religious business owners that could lead to costly litigation.

Before Tuesday night, Springfield was one of 15 Missouri cities — including St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia, a college town — that had such ordinances. In December, voters in Fayetteville, Ark., a college town about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Springfield, also overturned a nondiscrimination ordinance, 52 percent to 48 percent.

Mr. Morrow said that Christians thought they “are being targeted and being asked to do some things they would never do.” He said his group would fight any efforts to pass a new nondiscrimination ordinance, saying, “There is no middle ground.”

I suspect Mr. Morrow would have been one of the members of the crowd cheering Hitler and the Nazis as they swept into Austria.  Hate is hate no matter how one tries to dress it up in the cloak of religious belief.  Look at the world today and some of the ongoing wars and atrocities are being driven by the same old curse: religion. 

The GOP Rush to Humiliate the Poor

"Don't feed them and they will just go away . . ."

If there was any doubt that the Republican Party has become the party of the rich and modern day Pharisees, for further proof look no farther than the rush by GOP legislators to trash and humiliate the poor through laws that impose draconian provisions and fan the worse untrue stereotypes of the poor living off the largess of the rest of us.  These ugly laws are claimed to be needed to stop food stamps from being used for everything from aboard cruise ships - a total lie - and to stop the poor from buying "surf and turf" while on SNAP.  Some of the claims would make Ronald Reagan who liked to bash "welfare queens" blush.  And who is cheering all of this on?  "Christian conservatives" of course. A column in the Washington Post looks at the ugliness.  Here are highlights:

Rick Brattin, a young Republican state representative in Missouri, has come up with an innovative new way to humiliate the poor in his state. Call it the surf-and-turf law. 

Brattin has introduced House Bill 813, making it illegal for food-stamp recipients to use their benefits “to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.”

“I have seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs” with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, the legislator explained, according to The Post’s Roberto A. Ferdman. “When I can’t afford it on my pay, I don’t want people on the taxpayer’s dime to afford those kinds of foods either.”

Never mind that few can afford filet mignon on a less-than-$7/day food-stamp allotment; they’re more likely to be buying chuck steak or canned tuna. This is less about public policy than about demeaning public-benefit recipients.

The surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor as the country deals with the high-poverty hangover of the Great Recession.

Last week, the Kansas legislature passed House Bill 2258, punishing the poor by limiting their cash withdrawals of welfare benefits to $25 per day and forbidding them to use their benefits “in any retail liquor store, casino, gaming establishment, jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor, spa, nail salon, lingerie shop, tobacco paraphernalia store, vapor cigarette store, psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade, movie theater, swimming pool, cruise ship, theme park, dog or horse racing facility, pari-mutuel facility, or sexually oriented business . . . or in any business or retail establishment where minors under age 18 are not permitted.” . . .  . it also bans all out-of-state spending of welfare dollars — so the inclusion of a cruise-ship ban is redundant in landlocked Kansas.

A profusion of such laws has bubbled up in states across the country in the last few years, imposing punitive new conditions on the poor. Many of these are from Republican states opposed to big government,  . . . . In their budget plans in Congress, Republicans propose “devolving” food stamps and other programs to state control by awarding block grants with few strings attached. The states, the thinking goes, are closer to the people and have better ideas about how to reduce caseloads. But recent experience suggests that one strategy for reducing caseloads is to harass recipients . .

12 states, most in the South, have passed legislation in the last three years requiring drug testing for public-assistance applicants. Florida’s law, struck down in court, required applicants to pay for the drug test, reimbursing them if they tested negative.

And what if all these new costs for the poor put them out on the street? The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty last year reported a 60 percent increase since 2011 in city-wide bans on public camping and a 43 percent increase in prohibitions on sitting or lying down in public places.

What is also notable about this trend is that while their "conservative" fellow Christians are supporting these attacks on the poor, the "good Christian"  are largely silent and invisible from the fray.  All of which makes me conclude that no deference should be given to religious belief whatsoever.  Both groups of believers are a problem.

GOP Lawmaker: Women Need Man’s Permission for Abortion Absent "Legitimate Rape"

GOP State Representative Rick Brattin

Despite constant Republican Party claims that there is no GOP war on women, actions speak much louder than words and demonstrate that there is indeed a GOP war on women.  How else to explain Missouri Republican Rick Brattin's new bill which states that “[n]o abortion shall be performed or induced unless and until the father of the unborn child provides written, notarized consent to the abortion.” It's legislation right out of the wet dreams of Victoria Cobb and her fellow Christofascists at The Family Foundation (will Del. Bob Marshall introduce a similar bill here in Virginia?).  The GOP has seemly learned nothing from the Todd Akin debacle.  The Raw Story looks at this mindset that views women as chattel property of men.  Here are highlights:

Republican lawmaker in Missouri is introducing a bill that will require women to receive consent from the man who impregnated them before getting an abortion, Mother Jones‘s Molly Redden reports.

State Representative Rick Brattin filed the bill, which states that “[n]o abortion shall be performed or induced unless and until the father of the unborn child provides written, notarized consent to the abortion.”

The two exceptions to the requirement are “in cases where the woman upon whom the abortion is to be performed or induced was the victim of rape or incest,” or if the woman has “a notarized affidavit attesting to the fact” that the man who impregnated her is deceased.

Brattin told Mother Jones that while the bill allows for an exception in the case of rape, the woman seeking an abortion will have to prove that she has been raped.

“Just like any rape, you have to report it, and you have to prove it,” he said. “So you couldn’t just go and say, ‘Oh yeah, I was raped,’ and get an abortion. It has to be a legitimate rape.”

He insisted that he was using the phrase “legitimate rape” differently from former Missouri representative Todd Akin, who claimed that women cannot become pregnant from a “legitimate rape” because her body will “shut the whole thing down.”

“I’m just saying if there was a legitimate rape, you’re going to make a police report, just as if you were robbed,” he said by way of clarification. “That’s just common sense.”

 Common sense anywhere except in the sane, non-Christofascist world.

Why Michael Brown's Family Never Had a Chance at Seeing an Indictment

I have shared my views before on America's criminal justice system when it comes to the unequal treatment of minorities, especially blacks.  To call the system dysfunctional would be unduly kind.  Rigged, corrupt or biased are terms much more on target.  Howard Fineman has a piece at Huffington Post that evaluates why the Brown family had virtually no chance in seeing their son's killer indicted.  Remember, an indictment is not a conviction.  Rather it is merely a finding that a crime may have occurred and that a full, public trial is warranted to better determine guilt.  Sadly, in Missouri - and other places - even indicting so that a trial can proceed is near impossible given the bias in the system and the unwarranted deference to police.  One has to wonder what the rest of the world (especially countries where non-whites are a majority) must think of "American exceptionalism."  I would guess, not very much if not open disgust.  Here are article highlights:

If you know St. Louis, or Missouri for that matter, you know that the family of Michael Brown had no chance, and that police Officer Darren Wilson would go free.

St. Louis is a lovely place, but legally it can be a toxic police mixture of the Midwestern love of social order and Border State race-based severity.

The city is in some ways on the most tremulous fault line in the history of race in America: The home of W.C. Handy and the blues, of Chuck Berry and rock 'n roll, of the Dred Scott court decision on runaway slaves.

Not surprisingly, the Missouri state legislature has chosen repeatedly to ignore a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1985, which held that a police officer cannot use lethal force against a fleeing suspect unless the officer has reason to believe the suspect is armed and an immediate threat to public order. 

Instead, a police officer in Missouri can shoot a person the officer believes to be a fleeing felon. Period. Not to mention that the officer can shoot one who is moving toward him in a threatening manner.

So the real complaint in Missouri on Monday night should not really be with the county prosecutor, however defensive and cloying he may have been in announcing the grand jury's failure to indict the officer who shot the teenager.

It is with Missouri, and America, for thumbs-on-the-scale state laws that the federal government -- from Abraham Lincoln forward -- has only partly ameliorated. 

St. Louis is emblematic of the glory and the tragedy of the racial history of which this case is only the latest example. The city was a licentious, anything-goes river town in which the slave trade flourished, and was run in later years by German-American burghers and scions of the slave-holding South who wanted to preserve order, and the Old Order.

Some laws are a holdover from those days. They made it easy for the grand jury to return a "no true bill" -- that is, no indictment on any charges -- against Wilson.

[L]et's make no mistake: St. Louis is as American, for better and for worse, as a city can get.

Darren Wilson Walks, No Indictment

I'd be lying if I said I was surprised at the failure of the Ferguson Missouri grand jury to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of unarmed teenager, 18-year-old Michael Brown.  Having dealt with the Norfolk police departments and their internal affairs department (in connection with my own run in with gay bashing cops)and witnessed the disparate treatment of black teens in criminal court, part of me would have been shocked had an indictment been handed down.  I can only imagine the feelings of black parents who must live in dread that their children will be shot down by police officers claiming they "feared for their lives."  In some ways, the Jim Crow days of the South haven't really left us.  Now, instead of lynchings, we have police shootings.  Here are highlights from Salon:

A St. Louis grand jury decided to not indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9, prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced on Monday night. Wilson has reportedly already begun negotiations to resign from the Ferguson Police Department.

Initial reports surrounding the shooting conflict, regarding whether or not Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson were threatening Wilson. Several witnesses reported seeing Wilson pull over the two men on Canfield Drive, at which point he grabbed Brown and started threatening him. Brown and Johnson reportedly ran away, at which point Wilson unholstered his gun and fired at least six shots at Brown, who had his hands up in surrender, killing him. Police officials and one of Wilson’s family friends say that Brown was threatening Wilson, and Wilson shot at Brown in self-defense.

The excessive response from the local police prompted a civil rights probe from the Department of Justice, under the leadership of then Attorney General Eric Holder, for a history of racial bias. Also accused of potential bias was St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch, the man responsible for presenting the case against Wilson. Not only does McCulloch have deep ties to the local police department, he also has a history of siding with law enforcement in similar cases. A petition to appoint a special prosecutor for the case organized by Mo. State Senator Jamilah Nasheed collected over 116,000 signatures.

Authorities have been preparing to crackdown on unrest in the aftermath of the grand jury’s decision: businesses have been boarded up, schools closed and barricades erected. The Federal Bureau of Investigations recently circulated an intelligence bulletin warning that the grand jury’s announcement “will likely” lead to violence from extremist protesters. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon also declared a state of emergency in the St. Louis suburb in preparation for a massive demonstration in response to the jury’s decision.

Michael T. McPhearson, co-chairman of the Don’t Shoot Coalition, outlined goals of his movement: “It must be changing how police and citizens relate to one another. We’re calling for police accountability, police transparency, changing how the police do their work.”

The sad truth is that in many parts of America, if one is not a white conservative Christian, one's life simply doesn't matter - especially to the "godly folk" and their self-proclaimed supporters.   Once again, I find myself ashamed to be an American.

The Booming White Grievance Industry

In the lead up to the 2014 mid-term elections the GOP base is showing its ugly face in the wake of justifiable unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and the usual suspects are eagerly fanning the flames of white grievance among those who my New Orleans belle grandmother would have derisively labeled as "white trash."  Everyone from Fox News to the KKK and numerous GOP candidates and elected officials are having a near orgasm whipping up the frenzy of hate and resentment.  A piece in Salon looks at the ugly phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Not surprisingly, a thriving franchise of the nation’s booming white grievance industry has opened up in Ferguson, Missouri, over the last week.  It’s worth examining closely. As usual, it consists of two parts lies, one part paranoia, but at its heart it’s a big grift.

The weekend featured multiple protests supporting Darren Wilson, the missing Ferguson police officer who shot an unarmed Mike Brown on Aug. 9. His superiors apparently withheld Wilson’s name long enough for him to delete all social media accounts and skip town, but his supporters are declaring Wilson, not Brown, the victim here. A GoFundMe site raising funds for Wilson’s defense – though he’s not been charged with anything – garnered not only $250,000 in donations, but so many ugly racist rants GoFundMe administrators had to disable comments for the site. (They’ll have no trouble taking a cut of the racists’ money, of course.) Wilson’s supporters say they’ve raised $374,000 online and at local events, “to support his family,” one woman told MSNBC.

Why, besides racism, are Wilson’s supporters so convinced of his innocence? Well, any good grift will involve a hoax or two, to gin up the sense of outrage. First there was “Josie,” a purported friend of Wilson’s who called in to a radio show helmed by gun-loving wingnut Dana Loesch to tell Wilson’s side of the story. “Josie” insisted that Brown attacked Wilson, grabbed his gun, and the terrified cop shot only in self-defense. The problem? The details were almost identical to those shared on a fake Facebook page set up to look like Wilson’s own. But before the tale could be debunked, not only Fox but CNN had reported on “Josie’s” tale with some credulity.

Then we saw right-wing blogger Jim Hoft, named “the dumbest man on the Internet” by Media Matters, peddling a phony X-ray or CT scan purporting to show that Wilson suffered a fractured eye socket scuffling with Brown. Unfortunately, a little sleuthing revealed the image in question came from a facility at the University of Iowa and had nothing to do with the Ferguson case. Oops. Of course Fox ran with the story, but ABC News also reported that Wilson had suffered a “serious facial injury,” claiming its own local source.

Of course Ferguson’s white grievance industry is getting major help from Fox News, the grievance industry’s biggest grifters. . . . .  Fox has peddled every allegation of wrongdoing by Mike Brown from the beginning of the story.

It’s worth noting the way the phony information and paranoia peddled by well-known, oft-discredited right-wing media activists like Hoft and Loesch makes its way into the mainstream media ecosphere, again and again.

All that media support fanned the flames of white paranoia that manifested in the pro-Wilson activities back in Ferguson and St. Louis. You could see the trademark combination of innocence, fear and near-hysteria that powers the white grievance industry.  . . . most Wilson supporters refused to tell journalists their names, claiming they fear retribution at the hands of Brown’s defenders.

That paranoia about retribution is shared by the backers of Wilson’s GoFundMe project. It’s organized by Shield of Hope, a “charitable organization” that lists Ferguson Police Department public relations officer Timothy Zoll and Missouri state Rep. Jeffrey Roorda as directors. Roorda became nationally known for a 2009 bill that tried to keep the name of police officers involved in shootings private, because “releasing a name could put someone in grave jeopardy,” he explained.

The phenomenon - and those who are making money from it - is disgusting.  Although I've seen no corroborating statistics so far, somehow I suspect that many of these aggressive whites count themselves as "godly Christians" and pat themselves on the back each Sunday as the sit in pews in front of pulpits dispensing hate and fear. 

How Many Americans Are Killed by the Police Each Year?

The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and other recent shootings of unarmed individuals by police may have the much needed benefit of forcing a rethinking of the deference too often given to police office.  Yes, there are many good and honest police officers, but from my own experience there are a number of "bad apples" who sadly are protected by police departments rather than expelled.  From my dealings with police internal affairs departments, most are more worried about protecting police officers rather than determining the truth and disciplining police officers who damage the image of the police in general and who too often seem only too ready to trample on the rights of citizens.  A piece in FiveThirtyEight looks at the question of how many Americans are killed by police each year.  What is disturbing is the fact that this question cannot be easily answered.  The impression, however, is the answer is too many.  Here are highlights:

Earlier this month, a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting and the response have reignited concerns about racial profiling, police brutality and police militarization. The incident has also drawn attention to a remarkable lack of knowledge about a seemingly basic fact: how often people are killed by the police.

Some reporting has put forward one of the only figures available: the approximately 400 “justifiable police homicides” each year since 2008, according to the FBI’s annual Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). That data point has appeared with heavy caveats in a string of media reports, including in USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Washington Post.

But these estimates can be wrong. Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, which compiles the SHR, relies on voluntary involvement of state and local police agencies — a fact that may raise some questions about the integrity of the data.

But the bigger issue is that the basic UCR reports don’t include any information on victims or offenders. That data is provided to the FBI via a separate form, also called the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). The circumstances of each death are supposed to be recorded here, with classifications like “gangland killings” (code 46), “lovers triangles” (code 40), and “felon killed by police” (code 81).

The “400 justifiable police killings” figure comes from these SHR forms. This is a problem, for four main reasons:

1. Fewer local police agencies report SHR data than report standard UCR data.
2. “Felon killed by police” refers narrowly to justifiable police homicides, and “unjustifiable homicide by police” is not a classification. This means it’s difficult to combine unjustifiable police homicides — which could be listed as crimes elsewhere in the database — with “justifiable” police homicides.
3. If the legality of a police homicide is in question, it may not be reported to the FBI SHR until the investigation is resolved. If the investigation concludes in a new reporting year, the old SHR data may not be updated, regardless of whether the killing was found to be justifiable or not. Criminology professor Geoff Alpert of the University of South Carolina, an expert on police violence, said he has “never seen a department go back and audit their numbers and fix them.”
4. Killings in federal jurisdictions, such as federal prisons or military bases, are not included in the database.

Account for all that, and you would have the true number of police homicides each year.   It’s more than 400.

Obviously, with the militarization of police forces, the chances that more Americans will be unjustifiably killed by police officers increases significantly. 

Defending White Privilege: An Insidious Virus

If one looks at the Tea Party, the majority of falsely named "Christian" family values organizations, and many main stream Republican elected officials the core of the agenda is to protect white privilege which these people believe to be under attack by those they deem "other" and who in their eyes are not "real Americans."   Those falling into the category of "other" range from blacks, Hispanics, gays, non-Christians, etc.  Basically, anyone who isn't a white conservative Christian.  The Family Foundation ("TFF") here in Virginia is a perfect example of the phenomenon: a lily white organization with a leadership descended from 20th century segregationists.  The only time TFF cares about minorities is when it is trying to dupe black pastors into acting as its water carriers like trained circus dogs attacking gays and other groups TFF despises (which is almost everyone).  A piece in Salon looks at this insidious virus afflicting American society.  Here are excerpts:

Painful recent events on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri — and the strongly divided national response to those events — offer us a chance to become aware of the ways we see race in America “through a glass, darkly,” and perhaps also the beginnings of a chance to see each other face to face, to know as we are known. Let me be clear that when I say “we” I am primarily addressing America’s white majority, to which I belong. We are the ones whose vision is occluded by the darkened glass of white privilege, and it’s up to us to do something about it. Black people can see white privilege pretty clearly, but from a different perspective, and it’s beyond their power to change it.

White privilege is a term that sometimes gets thrown around too cavalierly, especially when people are having a fight on the Internet and want to shut each other up. . . . . Recognizing white privilege does not mean that white people don’t get to express our views on controversial racial topics, or that we have to defer to whatever a person of color may say. It does mean, however, that we have a responsibility to be alert to advantages we may possess, whether as ordinary citizens on the street, economic agents or wielders of rhetoric that appears neutral rather than “racial.” By definition, it means that some of those advantages are things we don’t notice, or take entirely for granted.

But the most insidious power of white privilege, the albatross effect that makes it so oppressive to white people themselves, is the way it renders itself invisible and clouds the collective mind. It’s like a virus that adapts in order to ensure its own survival and perpetuation, in this case by convincing its host it isn’t there. So we see polls suggesting that large percentages of white Americans believe that racism is not a significant factor in Ferguson or law enforcement in general, that cops are just doing their jobs, and that whatever bad things may have happened once upon a time in our beloved country, they’ve been locked away in the dusty cabinet of history and don’t matter anymore. We passed the Voting Rights Act and exiled the Ku Klux Klan to the margins of society (or at least to websites with really bad graphics). Ergo, white privilege obviously doesn’t exist anymore.

Among the “childish things” we need to put aside, white people, is the idea that America’s tormented racial legacy belongs to the past. . . . . In the more paranoid formulation prevalent in the Fox News demographic (but not limited to it), this becomes the idea that the federal government has spent the last 50 years giving away money, housing, education and other “free stuff” to black people who don’t work or pay taxes, while vigorously grinding down the white man.

This kind of white privilege is a willful blindness, along with a passionate embrace of exactly the kind of aggrievement and victimhood that white people often claim to resent in others. It’s found in Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity, of course, but also among people like hipster über-troll Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice, who wrote a piece not long ago explaining that racism, sexism and homophobia do not actually exist.

There is a much larger population of white Americans, I believe, who feel troubled by what they saw in Ferguson but are unable or unwilling to face the fact that it reflects a recurring historical pattern that has obviously not been exorcised, a pattern of power, privilege and domination in which they are complicit.Any white person who is being honest can understand this reluctance, and probably any other kind of person too. It’s a lot more comfortable to believe that equal opportunity has been pretty much afforded to all, allowing for some bumps in the road – or to believe that you yourself belong to the unfairly downtrodden and stigmatized group – than to consider the alternatives.

William Faulkner’s famous remark that the past is not dead, and isn’t even past, could not be more vividly illustrated than by the images from Ferguson: A black man shot dead in the street; angry African-American protesters facing impassive and heavily armed white police officers; tear gas, broken glass and the National Guard. But how to deal with these events that seem like nightmarish echoes of too many previous events? One way, the path of survival pursued by the virus of white privilege, is to detach each of these cases from history. Each of these inexplicably dead black men becomes an isolated phenomenon, with no reference to any discernible pattern.

That pathway remains highly seductive for white America, because it avoids any notion of collective or social responsibility and accesses the Calvinist myth of individualism that lies at the core of white American identity. A man makes his own fate or is elected by Providence – it comes to the same thing in the end – and if those young men and a distressing number of others met death in the street under unsettling circumstances, that can only have been their just deserts. Considering the possibility that they died because of a system of justice and law enforcement that skews heavily toward arresting, imprisoning and otherwise suppressing black and brown people, and that that system is itself embedded within much larger cultural and historical patterns, raises a lot of painful questions. 

An entire right-wing ideological empire remains devoted to convincing white people that benefit-sucking African-Americans and job-stealing Latino immigrants are somehow to blame for their downward trajectory. White privilege is the solvent used, throughout American history, to dissolve multiracial coalitions of working people, and the drug used to brainwash whites into making common cause with the class of CEOs, financiers and landlords. Kicking that drug habit is the only way white America can ever set itself free from the past.