Trump's Alarming Ignorance About Foreign Aid

With threats to close the U.S./Mexican border - something that will cause possible severe economic damage to the USA and cause severe adverse impacts on U.S. border cities - and his cutting off of all foreign aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Donald Trump has shown his near total ignorance on the issue of foreign aid which more often than not is driven not by U.S. generosity  but instead by the benefits the USA derives. No doubt his ignorance embracing, knuckle dragging base loves that Trump is "punishing" "those people" and is too ignorant to grasp that Trump's actions will only make matters worse and harm U.S. interests.  A piece by former Republican Michael Gerson looks at the stupidity and self-inflicted harm that Trump's petulant ignorance will bring to American interests.  Here are excerpts:

There are times when President Trump manages to be so wrong — so empirically groundless, so logically fallacious, so stridently uninformed — that it seems like a form of parody. But more often than not, this reflects an authentic and alarming ignorance. The mask of a barroom political crank turns out to be the face of the president of the United States.

Such appears to be the case in Trump’s recent threat to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — countries known as the Northern Triangle of Central America — as punishment for their failure to stem migrant flows to the United States.

To make this action a rational one, Trump must imagine that foreign aid is nothing more than cash loaded onto cargo planes and dropped on the presidential compounds of corrupt rulers as reward for subservience to U.S. interests. So he wants to cancel the deliveries until they do what we wish.

The reality of foreign assistance is very different. It is seldom given directly to foreign governments. The work is often contracted to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that work in partnership with locals. And it is generally designed to improve conditions within foreign countries that can give rise to global threats.

This role is obvious, say, in fighting infectious diseases. It is better to deal with an Ebola outbreak as close as possible to the source, rather than waiting for the threat to arrive in Georgia or Kansas. But this is equally true when it comes to a flow of refugees.

Consider an example in Guatemala. More than a decade ago, a remarkable institution called International Justice Mission (IJM) — an NGO dedicated to the fight against modern forms of slavery — began working with local authorities to improve the prosecution of child sexual assault. This partnership improved the capacities of police, prosecutors and courts, while making the whole system less traumatizing for survivors. As a result of the initiative — supported by a grant from the State Department — successful prosecutions in Guatemala have increased by 300 percent, imposing real consequences on predators.

Imagine you had a child and lived in a country where children were raped with impunity. Wouldn’t a dangerous trek north to the United States make more sense? But this program and others like it are threatened by [Trump’s] the president’s aid cutoff. In the real world of U.S. interests, we need more of these efforts to reduce the supply side of illegal migration. And the supply side of sexual trafficking. And of criminal gangs. And of the drug trade. And of illegal arms dealing. And of radicalism and terrorism.

One of the main drivers of illegal migration has been the collapse of criminal-justice systems in Central America. And it reflects a global problem. . . . . Roughly a third of people in the world live in relatively just and stable criminal-justice systems. Another third live under the protection of private security forces — a system that turns security into a luxury good. (In Guatemala, for example, there are seven times more people involved in providing private security than public security.) And a third of people live without the effective protection of the law, experiencing what Haugen calls “everyday violence” from corrupt and exploitative officials.

If U.S. policy does not address the functional collapse of criminal-justice systems in places such as the Northern Triangle, it is not seriously addressing the problem of illegal migration. Yet the IJM program in Guatemala and similar efforts are the kind of spending now being threatened by the president’s announcement. This means that U.S. policy has become self-destructive to U.S. interests.

[T]he lack of justice leading to everyday violence has become a global problem, with consequences that spill up on many shores, including our own. It is a matter deserving policy creativity rather than Trump’s public threats.

It would make far more sense to double assistance for these programs — designed to support local reformers, not to impose American solutions — than to end them. But an absence of vision is one cost of ignorance.

The Internet: Bad for Institutional Religion

Over at Civil Commotion Bob Felton raises an interesting question:

I’ve wondered through the years if the clergy’s hostility to the Internet was really about porn and online-dating and -gaming, or if they sensed the danger to them of easy information sharing — about their own misbehaviors, about life outside the church bubble.

A new study described in MIT Technology Review suggests that thatthe answer is the latter.  The that more information is available through a medium that the"godly folk" cannot censor or restrict, the harder it is to maintain religious based myths and outright untruths.  Here are highlights from the review:

Back in 1990, about 8 percent of the U.S. population had no religious preference. By 2010, this percentage had more than doubled to 18 percent. That’s a difference of about 25 million people, all of whom have somehow lost their religion.

That raises an obvious question: how come? Why are Americans losing their faith?

Today, we get a possible answer thanks to the work of Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail. He says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet. He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation.

Downey’s data comes from the General Social Survey, a widely respected sociological survey carried out by the University of Chicago, that has regularly measure people’s attitudes and demographics since 1972.

He finds that the biggest influence on religious affiliation is religious upbringing—people who are brought up in a religion are more likely to be affiliated to that religion later.

However, the number of people with a religious upbringing has dropped since 1990. It’s easy to imagine how this inevitably leads to a fall in the number who are religious later in life. In fact, Downey’s analysis shows that this is an important factor. However, it cannot account for all of the fall or anywhere near it. In fact, that data indicates that it only explains about 25 percent of the drop.

He goes on to show that college-level education also correlates with the drop. Once it again, it’s easy to imagine how contact with a wider group of people at college might contribute to a loss of religion. . . . . But although the correlation is statistically significant, it can only account for about 5 percent of the drop, so some other factor must also be involved.

That’s where the Internet comes in.  In the 1980s, Internet use was essentially zero, but in 2010, 53 percent of the population spent two hours per week online and 25 percent surfed for more than 7 hours.

This increase closely matches the decrease in religious affiliation. In fact, Downey calculates that it can account for about 25 percent of the drop.

That’s a fascinating result. It implies that since 1990, the increase in Internet use has had as powerful an influence on religious affiliation as the drop in religious upbringing.

“For people living in homogeneous communities, the Internet provides opportunities to find information about people of other religions (and none), and to interact with them personally,” says Downey.

I have long maintained that ignorance and lack of education (and perhaps psychological problems) are prerequisites for adherence to fundamentalist religious belief.   Now, it seems that lack of access to uncensored information provided via the Internet is another prerequisite.  Knowledge and access to information are mutually exclusive with fundamentalist belief.  No wonder the "godly folk" hate the Internet and easy access to the truth.  Interestingly, the decline of religion mirrors what happened in the former Soviet Union: once information and other views became increasingly available, it became harder and harder to maintain the lie that communism was working.  So too with fundamentalist religion.

 

Straight Spouses: The Collateral Damage of the Ex-Gay Myth - Continued

I looked at this subject a little over a week ago and also posted a similar version of the piece on The Bilerico Project.  Some of the comments and messages I received were less than kind and accused me of, among other things, hatred towards Christians.  I also received a great deal of negativity from bisexuals who blamed the Straight Spouse Network ("SSN") for leading to unnecessary divorces of straight/bisexual couples.  Not being bisexual, I cannot fully grasp what equal attraction to both genders is like, but it would in theory certainly make remaining married far more workable than a gay/straight couple situation.  No two marriages are the same and the decision of remaining together ultimately comes down to what the spouses in each marriage are willing to accept.  If the straight spouse demands total denial of the other spouse's sexual orientation, I frankly do not see staying married as a viable option and this type of situation certainly sets the stage for help from SSN for the straight spouse facing divorce. 

That said, in my view it the situation boils down to this: gays and bisexuals continue to marry straights in their quest to conform to societal and religious tradition expectations and they enter into these marriages facing vastly a increased likelihood of failure because of the mismatch of the individuals' sexual orientation.  That's the current reality.  And most of the motivation for marrying straight individuals traces back to prevailing religious beliefs that remain extremely anti-LGBT.  (The same anti-LGBT religious beliefs continue to fuel the discrimination, stigmatization and bigotry LGBT individuals continue to face especially in regressive states like Virginia.)  There simply is no way to give religion and Christians a pass on responsibility for this circumstance.  Take away anti-LGBT religious dogma and bigotry and the number of these "mixed marriages" would plummet.

As for the accusation that I hate and bear animus towards Christians, here's what I posted in a reply on the Bilerico piece I wrote:

I do not bear hatred towards all Chrstians as some would suggest. In fact, I contuinue to consider myself to be a loyal member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which I joined after I left the Roman Catholic Church after coming out 11 years ago. The ECLA has opposed anti-gay marriage initiatives in both Washington State and Minnesota. Sadly, many "good Christians" do nothing and allow the hate merchants like NOM and Family Reseach Council speak for them.

Yes, I DO have a problems with denominations and individuals who knowingly reject legitimate medical and mental health knowledge and cling to ignorance and who continue to demonize LGBT people. Too many lives are being needlessly damaged or destroyed.

Unlike Rio, my divorce was horrific - the divorce court judge who consideres himself an upstanding Christian crucified me for being gay - and my relationship with my former wife remains chilly. Since we have children together that will keep us forever connected, perhaps an uncomfortable truce might be an apt description of our relationship. If my post contained bitterness, its because I have experienced first hand what happens when a doomed gay/straight marriage falls apart. I've also seen first hand what happens to the children of such marriages. And all of this pain and misery derives from religious based bigotry. 

 Yes, some LGBT individuals "are devout Christians and have found embracing, fulfilling spiritual homes" to quote one commenter.  But that doesn't excuse religion and Christianity in particular for the damage still being done to LGBT people every single day.  I would further ask: where are these "embracing spiritual homes" when it comes to standing up to and openly condemning anti-gay denominations that continue to disseminate anti-gay hate and animus?   Most of the time they remain quiet and yield the field to the hate merchants. Oh, they may sign LGBT supportive letters that rarely see the light of day outside the LGBT media and blogosphere.  But we rarely see them on the network news and other outlets that have a massive viewership. 

I applaud the actions of the ELCA bishops in Minnesota and Washington State but the sade truth is that such actions are the exception to the rule.  Most LGBT embracing denominations contine to be afraid to speak out because they fear ruffling the feathers of the sizable minorities within their denominations who are not pleased with the national body's acceptance of LGBT church members and/or clergy.  And the result we see is equivalent to the "good Germans" who remained silent as the Nazis came to power and unleashed hatred on the world.  Silence ultimately renders one complicit in the evil done by others.

Mitt Romney's Real Problem: Today's GOP

The critiques of Mitt Romney continue to analyze why his campaign and the man himself continue to appear so incompetent.  While the far right continue to attack Romney the man, a growing list of pundits are starting to focus on the real problem: the insanity of today's Republican Party which limits what any party nominee is allowed to say.  Anything that might depart from the party base's mantra of no taxes, no rights for gays, no contraception, no rights for racial and ethnic minorities, and the need to destroy government is deemed heresy.  Yet the issues and problems surrounding the nation require serious thought and innovative leadership.  Fareed Zakaria - whom I'm sure the GOP deems some sort of dangerous foreigner - looks at the situation in a Washington Post column.  Here are excepts:

[T]he problem is not Romney but the new Republican Party. Given the direction in which it has moved and the pressures from its most extreme — yet most powerful — elements, any nominee would face the same challenge: Can you be a serious candidate for the general election while not outraging the Republican base? 

Fox News anchor Brit Hume got specific in his critique, saying this month that “Romney’s got the presidential bearing down. . . . What he [hasn’t done is] dwell at length on the economic policies that he would put in place.” Why won’t Romney, an intelligent man, fluent in economics, explain his economic policy? Because any sensible answer would cause a firestorm in his party.

It is obvious that, with a deficit at 8 percent of gross domestic product, any solution to our budgetary problems has to involve both spending cuts and tax increases. Ronald Reagan agreed to tax increases when the deficit hit 4 percent of GDP; George H.W. Bush did so when the deficit was 3 percent of GDP. But today’s Republican Party is organized around the proposition that, no matter the circumstances, there must never be a tax increase of any kind.

So Romney could present a serious economic plan with numbers that make sense — and then face a revolt within his own party. His solution: to be utterly vague about how he would deal with the deficit. 

This is not just a story of the rise of economic conservatives. The same pattern has emerged on immigration.  .  .  .  .  the Republican Party is now so strongly opposed to those proposals — which included a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants — that a co-sponsor of the bill, McCain, has renounced his own handiwork.
Romney has curried favor within the party by opposing the Dream Act, supporting Arizona’s harsh law under which police check people’s immigration status at will and proposing “self-deportation” as a way to get rid of undocumented immigrants.

The Republican Party has imposed a new kind of political correctness on its leaders. They cannot speak certain words (taxes) or speculate about certain ideas (immigration amnesty) because these are forbidden.  .  .   .  .   That’s a straitjacket that even Peggy Noonan’s eloquence cannot get him out of.

Zakaria doesn't even get into other social and societal issues, but the same extremism of the GOP base likewise hobbles Romney from adapting any policy or proposal that might outrageous the Bible beaters and gay haters who now predominate in the party.  American society is changing yet the GOP only wants to move backwards in time.  In my view, only continued electoral defeats can hopefully push the GOP to someday again embrace sanity.

Christian School Fires Teacher For Having A Gay Son

The hate and ignorance that are increasingly the principal hallmarks of conservative versions of Christianity - that's assuming, of course, one can even call such people Christians - took on a new level of nastiness at a "Christian" school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  Teacher Sharon Wright ultimately was fired because of her gay son and her inability to "fix him."  Moreover, the stress and hostility she experienced cause Wright severe emotional harm and depression which ended up necessitating a medical leave - which was likewise used as a justification for her firing.  Wright has now filed a lawsuit against the school and it will be interesting to see where this goes in the courts.  Here are highlights from Think Progress:

The Covenant Christian Academy in Harrisburg, PA believes that “the practice of same-sex relations is a sin and that promotion of such a lifestyle is a sin,” and they’re now using that belief to justify the firing of a teacher.

When Sharon Wright’s son announced on Facebook during his senior year (2009) at the school that he was gay, he was indefinitely suspended and not allowed to return to the school. This created an interesting dilemma for Wright, who was a teacher at the school. She continued to teach there despite her support for her son, but endured comments from school administrators like, “your son is broken, and it’s your job to fix him” and that this was a “battle for his soul.” The ongoing stress of the situation exacerbated her mental health diagnoses of “adjusted disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood” and impaired her “thinking, concentrating, interacting with others, and sleeping.”

Wright was not rehired for a full-time position for the following year. Now, she has filed suit in federal court claiming that she was discriminated against in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

No doubt, the academy’s anti-gay policy and its treatment of Wright’s son are odious. But now it seems the school is using that policy to justify discriminating against one of its teachers. Though the school did not accuse her of violating its tenants in her capacity as a teacher, she endured an environment so hostile that it impacted her mental well-being. Ultimately, the school used that as justification for her termination.

A copy of Wright's lawsuit can be found here.  As author Anne Rice stated sometime ago, please do NOT call me a Christian - I want nothing to do with these horrible people.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on "Republican Islamists"

This blog looked at the batshitery of Missouri Republican Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (pictured at left) yesterday.  For those who missed that post, Akin claims that "legitimate rape" doesn't lead to pregnancies.  It's part of his defense of his position seeking to outlaw abortion in all instances.   Andrew Sullivan calls it like it is:

[W]hat's striking to me is the enduring reality that alleged fiscal conservatives in today's GOP almost uniformly have social views that one normally associates with soft-Islamists. It should be possible to be a total fiscal tightwad and still adopt a live-and-let-live philosophy in government - and yet that is emphatically not the GOP we have today. Akin is a classic Islamist-Republican, seeing women entirely as temptations for men who somehow have responsibility for their fate even when being raped. Women are entirely objects - their lives and crises simply requiring an air-brush to keep the whole neurotic ideology intact.

Andrew goes on to cite other Republican candidates who have held this insane notion.  He finishes by describing this behavior as follows:

That's simply the public tidying up that the fundamentalist psyche constantly requires to keep messy, human reality at bay. It's a function of a backwardness and cultural panic that cannot be entirely disguised by an open and affirming convention stage.

Frankly, I'd be embarrassed to call myself a Republican nowadays.  The party has become something truly ugly.

Mississippi on the Brink of Total Shut Down - But GOP Denies Climate Change

One only need look around at the weather this summer to realize that something is happening: record heat and record drought, rising sea levels and changing weather patterns.  Yet the far right and its political whores in the Republican Party continue to deny that global warming is happening.  Calling such folk as ignorant cretins is perhaps being kind since their denial goes beyond merely being inherently ignorant.  They are choosing ignorance.  Some due to religious based insanity and others - especially in the GOP - due to shameless pandering with no concern for the consequences.  What's happening to the Mississippi River - which is in some places 20 feet below normal - is but another example of objective reality being rejected in favor of ideology and partisanship.  Here are some highlights:

America’s record-breaking drought is drying up the Mississippi River, which is vital for commercial travel. If the country’s largest river system continues to rapidly shrink, all river traffic could get shut down and cost the US $300 million a day.

The Mississippi, which has become thin and narrow, is used for cargo vessels to transport goods. In the US, 60 percent of grain, 22 percent of oil and natural gas and 20 percent of coal travels down the river.  But its reduced size and now-shallow waters are forcing barges to either stop running or reduce the weight of the goods they carry – leading to longer waits for those products in grocery stores. Some areas of the river have dropped 20 feet below normal – and the drop is expected to continue.

“A lot of those barges have had to lighten their loads, and even doing that, they are still running aground. There is a real fear that there could be a possibility of closing the Mississippi River,” said CNN correspondent Martin Savidge. “If that happens, well, all that product that used to be carried cheaply by barge is now going to be carried more expensively by truck or train. And guess who is going to pay for all that.”

If the Mississippi River is closed to all water traffic, goods like grain, oil, natural gas and coal will need to be transported by truck or train – costing the US an additional $300 million a day.

[M]illions of fish are dying as the bottom of the river transforms into an exposed desert. The river flows into lakes and streams across the US, carrying the devastation to all corners of the Midwest. About 40,000 shovelnose sturgeon fish were killed in Iowa in one week as water temperatures reached 97 degrees. In Illinois, fish carcasses clogged an intake screen near a power plant, causing it to shut down one of its generators.

Frankly, I am waiting for Pat Robertson and the other lunatics of the Christofascist crowd to blame all of this on gays and gay marriage - oh, and abortion and a rejection of Jesus, even though they themselves make a mockery of the Gospel message.

The Right's Idiocy of the "You Didn’t Build That" Fight

The Romney campaign and the talking heads on the lunatic right continue to use words taken out of context to try to bloody Barack Obama.  The problem is that to date the individuals chosen to be highlighted in ads attacking Obama time and time gain turn out to have enjoyed government assistance - sometimes lots of it - in building their businesses.   The truth is that many of us receive government assistance be it in the form of tax incentives, grants or even government transportation programs that make one's business more competitive.   There usually is no free lunch.  And that's not to say that successful business owners don't put in a great deal of blood, sweat and tears in creating a successful business.  All I'm saying, is that if one looks, there's also often some government policy in play.  A column in the Washington Post  looks at this reality. Here are some highlights:

My boyhood friend Jack became a doctor — and a conservative. He had gone to public schools, attended college with the help of a government scholarship, went to medical school on the Army’s dime, and learned his specialty in military hospitals. He insisted that the government had done nothing for him. In that way, he is both the soul and the wit of the Republican Party.

It was in rebuttal to the Jacks of this world that Barack Obama earlier this month updated John Donne’s “No man is an island” by knocking the idea that individual success is always the product of individual qualities, such as industriousness: “Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.”

This observation, so obvious you’d think it didn’t have to be stated, was then followed by what became a gotcha sound bite: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

 The entire GOP, including its claque in the press, pounced. You would have thought Obama had just belittled self-discipline and other virtues and quoted from “Das Kapital” or, even worse, a ditty by Pete Seeger. To his critics, Obama’s version of It Takes a Village was further proof of his commie creds, possibly Islamic as well.

 Of course, the president has nothing but truth and history on his side. Every schoolchild in my neck of the woods learned that the Erie Canal, which made New York truly the Empire State, was government-funded — $7 million appropriated at the insistence of Gov. DeWitt Clinton. The railroads did not come from nowhere and neither did the ports or the highway system.

Across the mighty ocean, the Economist magazine has taken note of this debate over the role of government and pronounced it healthy in principle but pathetic in execution. Both the right and the left have trivialized this important issue, but conservatives have gone from simplistic formulas to bravely idiotic ones. “American conservatism has grown so angry that it has become a parody of its former self,” the magazine says. “Tax cuts are always right (even if they inflate the deficit); government activism is always wrong (even if stimulus helped avert a depression). And the right’s hypocrisy when it comes to spending on conservative projects (prisons, the armed forces, subsidies to big business) is breathtaking.

As the Economist notes, this is not a trivial debate. The refusal of the contemporary Republican Party to acknowledge a role for government is linked to an illogical determination never to raise taxes. Obama may be too liberal for some, but the alternative that Romney offers by parroting the conservative GOP line is simply not credible. Prosperity may not always take a village, but it sure doesn’t take the village idiot.

More Anti-Gay Bigotry - and Hypocrisy - in Gloucester County, Virginia

As some readers may recall, last year I wrote about the small, tastefully Gay Pride Month display that was erected in the Gloucester County library only to be hastily taken down after knuckle dragging Gregory Woodard,  member of the Gloucester County Board of Supervisors - who just happened to also be an anti-gay fundamentalist pastor in his day job - complained about the display and said it was "promoting homosexuality."   Here's how one reader who actually saw the display described it:

The only sign on the display read, "June is Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Month" with a graphic of a person in rainbow colors, a copy of the Rainbow flag and a graphic that said "Gay Pride" and "Be Yourself".
*
The materials included in the display included works by Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Rita Mae Brown, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and Alice Walker; music CD's by Sir Elton John, Melissa Etheridge and the Indigo Girls; a movie DVD, "Milk", starring Sean Penn, about Harvey Milk.
*
There were also biographies Andy Warhol, T.E. Lawrence, Alexander the Great, and Michelangelo, together with non-fiction books about LGBT issues and some fiction books for adults and young adults.

Not exactly risque or indecent stuff.  Nonetheless, it was too much for the homophobic Pastor Woodard who would seemingly like to pretend gays do not exist. Thankfully, Woodard decided not to seek re-election.  That being the case, I decided to make an inquiry to Gloucester County as to why there was no Pride Month display this year.  Here's the response I received from Brenda Garton the County Administrator:

Dear Mr. Hamar:

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on Gloucester County’s behalf.  In the area of public library displays, the library director approves displays in the libraries.  Displays change from year to year except for established programs and activities, seasons, holidays and community events.

Respectfully yours,

Brenda Garton

One of my sources in Gloucester County described Ms. Garton's reponse in this way:

What a load of horse shit! Typical Gloucester County...skirt the issue, slough it off, etc.

It seems that in fact many of the library displays never change and are ALWAYS annual events:  there's always a Black History Month display, always something about Christmas, always a military appreciation month display, etc.   And other Gloucester County reader states that the Library is up to it armpits in offering all kinds of "programs" which they describe as "mostly kitschy arts and crafts, and such."  Another, reader said "This library reflects the community's character...tacky and shallow."

All of which brings me to the issue of hypocrisy.  The mere acknowledgment that gays exist and that, yes, some of us have made major contributions to society is just too much for the good residents of Gloucester County.  But guess what book I'm told has a lengthy waiting list with library patrons?   Fifty Shades of Grey - a best seller that has been dubbed "mommy porn" because of the titillating sex (at least titillating if one is a middle aged matron from backwards Gloucester County).  Here's how Wikipedia describes the book:

The plot traces the relationship between recent college graduate Anastasia Steele and manipulative billionaire Christian Grey.  .   .   .  Upon learning that she is a virgin, Grey agrees to have sex with her in order to prepare her for later encounters, fully intending that the contract would be signed. As she gets to know him, she learns that his sexual tastes involve bondage, domination, and sadism, and that childhood abuse left him a deeply damaged individual. In order to be his partner, she agrees to experiment with BDSM, but she struggles to reconcile who she is (a virgin who has never previously had a boyfriend) with whom Christian wants her to be, his submissive and a to-do-with-as-he-pleases partner in his "Red Room of Pain".   .   .   .  The book's erotic nature and perceived demographic of its fanbase as being composed largely of married women over thirty led to the books being dubbed "Mommy Porn" by some news agencies.^[9][10] The book has also been reportedly popular among teenage girls, and college women. 

A review of the book on Amazon.com has this to say in part:

Then come the sex scenes. The first one is tolerable but as she goes on, they become so unbelievable that it becomes more laughable than erotic. She orgasms at the drop of a hat. He says her name and she orgasms. He simply touches her and she orgasms. It seems that she's climaxing on every page.

One has to wonder how a tasteful Gay Pride Month display that was historically accurate and featured noted authors, artists, etc. was too offensive for the sensibilities of Gloucester residents, yet there's a lengthy waiting list for Fifty Shades of Grey made up of women who are apparently just dying to read about "butt clamps" and "vagina balls" and more.  But there may be one explanation - at least for the book's popularity.  If you've seen many of the men from Gloucester County, the female inhabitants have good reason to read fiction to fulfill their sexual fantasies.  The male population for the most part is a veritable nightmare.  They make celibacy look like a really attractive option!

Republican Extremism and the Decline of American Politics

Seemingly across the country the biggest obstacle to addressing the nations problems (and here in Virginia, Virginia's many problems including transportation) is Republican intransigence and an effort to turn the clock back to some mythical 1950's version of America that never existed in fact.   In the GOP's mythical America, white males rule supreme, women, blacks and non-Christians all know their place, and gays are invisible if they know what's good for them.  The irony is that to the extent any form of the "Ozzie and Harriet" middle class world worshiped by the GOP actually existed, much of it stemmed from the financial security that unions had brought to many families - the exact security that the GOP seeks to destroy.  A column in The New Yorker looks at the threat the GOP poses to responsible government.  Here are excerpts:

At least since President Obama’s Inauguration, political observers have been taking note of the Republican Party’s trend toward the right, and away from compromise. “After 2010, it was impossible for a fair-minded person who knew what was going on in Washington and around the country to maintain the fiction that there was an equivalent extremism, and polarization, and ugliness on both sides,” George Packer says in this week’s Political Scene podcast. But there was an impulse among pundits and citizens alike to believe that Democrats, too, bear some of the blame for the country’s polarization, an impulse only now beginning to fade.

Packer traces the polarization back to Newt Gingrich. Starting with his Speakership, Packer says, Republicans have been exhibiting a “willingness—even an eagerness—to use every tactic short of law-breaking to demonize the opponent on the way to winning power.” And that, of course, includes this election.

“With Mitt Romney, there’s the extremism about taxes and about the Catholic Church and its conflict about contraception,” Davidson says. “And then there’s the ugliness as well in things like birtherism and in Mitt Romney’s flirtation with Donald Trump.” 

Packer believes President Obama—who, he notes, “has always been skeptical of hard ideological lines,”—will have trouble in the current landscape. His lack of ideological stance “means that he’s having to start from scratch in assembling a clear argument that opposes the extremism” of the G.O.P.

Beyond this election, even if Romney loses, Packer predicts that Republicans will not relent, but will continue to bog down government and prevent a return to respectable politics. He quotes Barney Frank’s idea for a Democratic Party-wide slogan: “We’re not perfect, but they’re nuts.”

I would add to the analysis of causes for the growing GOP extremism the rise of the Christofascists as the puppet masters of the party.  When those who utterly reject science and who seek to impose a far right Christian theocracy take charge, there is no compromise.   When hate filled people who claim to have God on their side steer the party, extremism is the only result that can be expected.  Unfortunately, the mainstream media remains afraid of exposing the true ugliness of conservative Christianity in this country.  This needs to change NOW.

"Slideshow" Bob Marshall Continues His Anti-Gay Diatribe

There are few individuals outside of the leadership at the FRC hate group affiliate, The Family Foundation, in Virginia who hole more hate and animus towards LGBT individuals that Del. Bob Marshall who has in some ways become the face of the Republican Party of Virginia after co-authoring the foul Marshall Newman Amendment to the Virginia Constitution and leading the charge to "lynch" Tracy Thorne-Brgland in the House of Delegates.  Moreover, by his statements about sexual orientation being a "behavior" he demonstrates his utter ignorance of modern medical and mental health knowledge.  Indeed, to say that Marshall is a bigot and total asshole is being far too kind.  Campaigning for the GOP Senate nomination in Charlottesville this week, Marshall continued to denigrate LGBT Virginians and spout long repudiated faux research as he pandered to members of the Virginia Tea Party.  Marshall gives new meaning to the phrase "ignorant by choice." Here are highlights from the Daily Progress:

A week after making the assertion that “sodomy is not a civil right,” Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Prince William, stood by his remarks during a campaign visit to a Central Virginia tea party meeting.

“If sodomy is a civil right, do we have to protect it? Do we have to fund it? Do we have to teach it? Do we have to encourage it? Do we have to facilitate it?,” Marshall said in an interview Thursday after an appearance at a meeting of the Jefferson Area Tea Party. “… It is not a civil right.”

Marshall touted his efforts to prevent Thorne-Begland from becoming a judge, which he has said were a response to Thorne-Begland’s activism, not his sexual orientation.

“I led the charge. The assembly said no. That’s what I would do in Washington,” Marshall said. “I wouldn’t let a federal judge be an activist there … You saw me. I didn’t let a state judge do it here.”

“It is an insult to suggest that the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are in any way parallel to the efforts to do things that have been criminal for most of this nation’s history.”

Marshall also was asked whether he believes consensual gay sex is protected by the U.S. Constitution.  “The court says it is in certain limited circumstances. But you know what that behavior does? It cuts your life by about 20 years,” Marshall answered. “It causes increased health problems. It doesn’t serve the common good to promote this.”

If we are worried about the common good, then the first thing that needs to be done is to see Marshall removed from office once and for all so he can spend all his time with his nose up the ass of the folks at The Family Foundation and  the asses of the child rapist protecting Catholic bishops.

The Correlation Between Religiosity and Lower Citizen Well-Being

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Time and time again I've looked at the link between the lower economic performance of U.S. states deemed "conservative" and where religion is deemed "important."   The more religious and conservative a state's citizenry, the worse off economically the state is and the less competitive it is in recruiting new and lucrative business.  Now some new analysis shows that this tie between the level of religiosity also correlates to lowers societal well being.  The question is which came first? High levels of religiosity that have caused lower social well being or vice versa.  The authors of the studies put the blame on religion.  Just like some of Richard Florida's analysis that indicates the liberal states are winning out over the conservative sister states for increased business development and improved standards of living.  The map above looks at the levels of religiosity by state.  The map below looks at the so-called "Human Development Index" that considers things such as life expectancy, education, and income corruption, income disparity, child mortality, access to medical care, suicide rates, and so on:

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The South and the Bible Belt over all score the highest and also score the lowest when it comes to life expectancy, access to health care and over 20 other categories.  Texas, Georgis and North Carolina manage to dodge a dead last finish on the Human Development Index most likely because the large cities in those states counteract the abysmal results for the remainder of the state.  Mississippi and Alabama in contrast have no such major progressive cities and not surprisingly they land in the lowest category.

The author of the piece reaches a kinder conclusion toward religion than I do.  I would argue that the author has it backwards and that religiosity leads to low human development and regressive social well being.  Yes, the Christianists talk a good game about helping other and caring for their "neighbor," but in truth they don't follow through.  Meanwhile the best and brightest flee from the area - as is happening in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia - because of the backwardness of their surroundings and the depressed opportunity for advancement.   Here is the author's wrap up:

As you see, we have the same negative relationship between well-being and religiosity that we saw for different countries of the West. The correlation here is r= – 0.66897, and the probability (“p”) that this correlation would arise by chance is p = 0.00000012. (A value of p less than 0.05 is conventionally used to show a significant relationship.) This relationship, then, is not only striking but very highly significant in a statistical sense. Harry put a least-squares regression line through the data; its slope is also highly significant.

Why the correlation? Again, it could mean—but I am not pushing this interpretation as dogma—that people tend to either become more religious or retain a historical religiosity in areas where they are not very well off. There may also be ethnic differences that contribute to this (the population of blacks in America is concentrated in the south, for instance, and educational attainment is lower in general), but education itself is likely negatively correlated with indices of well being, and poverty is a component of both the HDI and SSS. Although I’m not a Marxist, Marx may have gotten it right when he said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

The problem, in my view is that until regions throw off religiosity, they are NOT attractive to would be businesses and employers  who want to be able to attract the most able and innovative personnel.  That simply will not happen when regions and states are primary known for the knuckle dragging Christian extremist and bigoted social views.  It's a concept that has yet to be grasp by the Republican Party of Virginia and The Family Foundation.

 

Just Say No: No Science, No Sex, No Gay People

The increasing lunacy taking place in Tennessee symbolizes what is happening the the Republican Party across the nation as the open embrace of ignorance and anti-gay bigotry - and I'd add racism - become the pillars of the Party's platform.  Given what seems to be a continued exodus of rational people from the GOP (not that there are that many left to begin with) one has to wonder where it will end.  One also has to wonder what companies and businesses will want to relocate to states that are so increasingly out of the mainstream.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

Wishing doesn’t make it so, but don’t tell that to the Tennessee Legislature. It seems determined to lead the nation in yearning for an era when Genesis was the last word on science, when there were no gay people and nobody engaged in non-marital sex, so there were no teenage pregnancies and no unwanted children.

There was no such time, of course. But that doesn’t seem to deter the Republican majority, which has brought us such modern wonders as a bill to protect teachers who preach the “scientific weaknesses” of “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning,” and a bill that would prohibit elementary and middle school teachers from mentioning the existence of homosexuality.

And now they have sent a bill to Gov. Bill Haslam that would bar sex-ed teachers in public schools from promoting “gateway” sexual activity. . . . This bill is a disaster in the making: It relies on the definition of sexual activity in state law, which includes any contact with even the clothed inner thigh of another person. Critics say it’s so vaguely written that if a teacher doesn’t stop a student from sitting in another person’s lap, he could face punishment.

But don’t get the wrong idea. Tennessee’s Republican legislators know the government can only do so much to enforce morality. Last year, they revised an anti-bullying law so as to exempt anyone who voices a religiously motivated belief.

Sure, said Rep. Jeremy Faison, a few teenagers committed suicide after getting bullied about their sexuality, but “they committed suicide because they were not instilled the proper principles of where their self-esteem came from at home.”  We can’t continue to legislate everything,” he said.

Catholicism's Internal Culture War

As a former Roman Catholic I know the dark side of Catholicism which is predominated by guilt, self-loathing and almost a form of hatred towards women and, of course gays - even though the ranks of the priesthood and Vatican are likely filled with closeted gay men. Looking back more than a decade after leaving the Catholic Church, I feel with the benefit of hindsight that I had recover from almost a form of psychologically abused inflicted on me as a closeted gay teen and then later for many years as a closeted gay man. Fortunately, many within the Catholic laity have come to recognize the severe harm done to many by the intransigent Catholic Church leadership and the huge disconnect between the Christian message of love and compassion and the almost hateful and intolerant rigidity preached by conservatives appointed by the less than saintly John Paul II and the Emperor Palpatine like Benedict XVI. An article in the Washington Post looks at this internal culture war within the Church. A war which hopefully will ultimately won by the laity which increasingly ignores the dictates from Roman and Benedict XVI's henchmen in bishoprics around the world. Here are some highlights:

Barbara Johnson reached out to receive Holy Communion at her mother’s funeral Mass last month at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg. The Rev. Marcel Guarnizo, standing before her, placed his hand over the offering bowl, denying her the sacrament.

Those mere seconds between Johnson, no ordinary Catholic, and Guarnizo, no ordinary priest, have touched off a heated controversy among Catholics across the country — another battle in the seemingly endless cultural wars that have invadednearly every corner of daily life, even funerals.

What’s clear, amid all the dissension, is that distinctly different beliefs about Catholicism turned a random meeting of a grieving woman and priest into a theological collision.

What’s next for Guarnizo is unclear. In his statement, he questioned the Washington archdiocese’s handling of the case and its allegations of his intimidation. Some Catholic commentators noted how unusual it is for a priest to publicly contradict and criticize his superiors. Doctrine dictates that priests are to be submissive to their bishops.

“If I was Cardinal [Donald W.] Wuerl, I’d buy him a one-way ticket to Moscow,” the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Washington Jesuit and former editor of liberal Catholic magazine America, said in reference to the archbishop of Washington. “These days, arch-conservative priests feel much more comfortable attacking their bishops than do liberals because they feel they’ll get support from conservative Catholic blogs and maybe some in the Vatican.”

While the priest has been fiercely attacked by liberal Catholics and non-Catholics, conservative Catholics have rushed to defend Guarnizo‘s decision to deny Johnson Communion. That Johnson ultimately received the sacrament from a lay minister that day hardly seems to matter at this point.

The vitriol the incident has unleashed online has unnerved Johnson and her family.

Personally, I cannot understand how anyone LGBT remains involved in any manner with the Roman Catholic Church. To me, it's like someone who is Jewish joining a Nazi party or someone black belonging to the KKK. With viable alternatives like the Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that offer nearly identical services available to LGBT Catholics, there truly is no reason to remain affiliated with an institution that denigrates one's very existence. Especially when the worldwide sex abuse scandal has clearly revealed the moral bankruptcy of the Church hierarchy. And what I find equally telling is the number of members of the younger generations who have walked away from the Church both because of the sex abuse scandal and the Church's anti-gay jihad. All three of my own children have abandoned the Catholic Church and, to the extent they give any credence to institutional religion, only consider fealty to gay friendly denominations.

These conclusions are not just my own. The Seattle Times has a piece on the disconnect between everyday Catholics and Rick Santorum who markets himself as uber-Catholic and a darling of the Church hierarchy:

Across all states where Republican primary voters were asked their religion in exit polls, Mitt Romney, a Mormon, trounced Santorum among Catholics, with an average margin of victory above 20 percentage points. Even in Southern states, where Romney has struggled, Catholics broke his way.

On Sunday, overwhelmingly Catholic Puerto Rico was holding its primary. Catholics haven't voted as a bloc in decades, leading analysts to declare "the Catholic vote" as such doesn't exist. Still, the results are surprising given that the former Pennsylvania senator puts Catholicism at the center of his public service and personal life.

Santorum underscored his distance from other Catholics by saying recently that he "almost threw up" when he read Kennedy's famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association addressing anti-Catholic bias.

Catholic primary voters were less likely than Protestants to see Santorum as their best ideological match. The polls found that 52 percent of Protestant voters described Santorum's positions as just right, compared with 42 percent of Catholics, while 28 percent of Catholics called Santorum too conservative.

The other thing that is noteworthy is that the current far right form of Catholicism is unable to attract seminarians in America. A New York Times article that looks at the retirement of the Archbishop of Canterbury notes that both the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church the inability to attract seminarians in educated, developed countries is striking compared to what is happening in ignorant, uneducated nations in the third world:

Roman Catholicism’s decline in the West has likewise been accompanied by striking growth in the developing world. (As the number of Catholic seminarians has dropped in the United States and Europe, for instance, it has risen by 86 percent globally since 1978.) In both churches, this geographic and demographic shift is putting a strain on institutional structures that evolved in a more Eurocentric age.

This is probably the last era in which the public face of the world’s major Christian bodies will look the way it did in 1780, or even 1950. The next pope could well be Latin American or African; if not in the next election, then it’s only a matter of time.

A hundred years ago, the idea that one of Western Europe’s most ancient religious offices could be occupied by a black man born in Africa would have seemed like something out of science fiction. By the end of this century, in a globalized Anglicanism and Catholicism alike, it will probably seem like the most normal and necessary thing in the world.

With its refusal to accept modernity and modern medical and mental health knowledge on sexual orientation, the Catholic Church is slowly but steadily condemning itself to a future where it will flourish - at least until education levels increase - only as a third world religion where ignorance and a lack of education predominate. Benedict XVI may want to save Catholicism in the developed world and Europe, but instead his efforts to restore a 13th century mindset in the Church is accelerating the death of Catholicism.

New Poll Proves GOP Base IS Comprised of Neanderthal Knuckle Draggers

PPP Poll of Alabama GOP Voters:

PPP Poll of Mississippi GOP Voters:

This blog looks frequently at the mental - and I would argue moral - death spiral of today's Republican Party. Logic, reason, and just simple common sense intelligence as to things of public record are mutually exclusive when aligned with the base of the Republican Party. And if we needed any proof, a new Public Policy Polling poll of Alabama and Mississippi Republican voters yielded results that Blue Virginia described as "astounding" into "horrifying," "despicable," insanity," "bigotry." Not shown in the charts above are GOP voters' views on interracial marriage: In Alabama, 21% of Republican voters say that interracial marriage should be illegal. In Mississippi, 29% of Republican voters say it should be illegal, while just a bare majority (54%) say it should be legal.

And people wonder why Alabama and Mississippi have difficulty attracting progressive, cutting edge businesses? Who would want to relocated to or open a plant in a state inhabited by morons and/or bigots? Lowell at Blue Virginia summed it up well:

I mean, this goes beyond "differences on the issues" into something else entirely. When people - large pluralities or even majorities of Mississippi and Alabama Republicans, in this case - don't "believe" in evolution (as if scientific/empirical evidence is a matter of "belief" at all), when they don't "believe" a lifelong Christian is really a Christian, when they're bigoted against Muslims, when they're not sure that blacks should be able to marry whites, I'm not sure how you even have a conversation, let alone a constructive, rational, sane one. It's just so depressing that there are significant numbers of people in this country, in the year 2012, who still think like this. And, of course, guess which party they're in? Shocker, huh?

And people ask me why I left the GOP? To have remained, I'd have had to have a lobotomy. Or be driven by overarching greed and a contempt for working people. As for Alabama and Mississippi, this poll shows the type of voter to whom Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are pandering. Frankly, I'd be ashamed to lower myself to such a debased and ignorant level.

Did Colonialism Help Launch the AIDS Epidemic?

Back in October I wrote in a VEER Magazine column about information reported by the New York Times in a book review of “The Origins of AIDS,” published by Cambridge University Press, and written by Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. The piece suggested that there were a number of factors involved - including prostitution and unsanitary medical conditions - in the unlikely spread of a rare virus. The piece also made it clear that Belgian and French colonial policies also played a role as did corrupt and unsanitary procedures in a Hatian plasma center that exported plasma to the USA.. Now, a new article in the Washington Post places even more blame on colonial policies and the population upheavals that colonial trade triggered. Here are some highlights:

We are unlikely to ever know all the details of the birth of the AIDS epidemic. But a series of recent genetic discoveries have shed new light on it, starting with the moment when a connection from chimp to human changed the course of history.

We now know where the epidemic began: a small patch of dense forest in southeastern Cameroon. We know when: within a couple of decades on either side of 1900. We have a good idea of how: A hunter caught an infected chimpanzee for food, allowing the virus to pass from the chimp’s blood into the hunter’s body, probably through a cut during butchering.

For decades nobody knew the reasons behind the birth of the AIDS epidemic. But it is now clear that the epidemic’s birth and crucial early growth happened during Africa’s colonial era, amid massive intrusion of new people and technology into a land where ancient ways still prevailed. European powers engaged in a feverish race for wealth and glory blazed routes up muddy rivers and into dense forests that had been traveled only sporadically by humans before.

The most disruptive of these intruders were thousands of African porters. Forced into service by European colonial powers, they cut paths through the exact area that researchers have now identified as the birthplace of the AIDS epidemic. It was here, in a single moment of transmission from chimp to human, that a strain of virus called HIV-1 group M first appeared.

In the century since, it has been responsible for 99 percent of all of the world’s deaths from AIDS — not just in Africa but in Moscow, Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, New York, Washington.

Once the virus made the jump from chimp to human, a single infected person could have carried HIV down the Sangha, onto the Congo River and into Kinshasa. The Belgians had founded the city in 1881, during what historians call “The Scramble for Africa,” when colonial powers carved up the continent into areas of influence. By the early 20th century Kinshasa, then called Leopoldville, was the biggest city in Central Africa, fueled by the dizzying growth of trade with the outside world.

[A]s scientists plotted out the genetic histories of these varieties and built an extensive family tree for HIV, they all appeared to have spread from a single explosion, a big bang of the AIDS epidemic: Ground Zero was Kinshasa.

The only obstacle to European companies’ reaping huge profits was that collecting ivory and rubber required massive amounts of labor. . . . . The solution to the manpower demands soon became obvious. Colonial powers created what was essentially slavery: cheap muscle at the point of a gun. . . . . That meant African porters had to carry goods and supplies anyplace the steamboats couldn’t reach.

All these roles were filled by Africans, many imported from villages hundreds or even thousands of miles away. African life here was beyond cheap. It was disposable. Contemporary accounts by journalists and missionaries tell of colonial officials across the Congo Basin ordering mass slaughters and the torching of restive villages while creating forced settlements that resembled nothing so much as concentration camps.

Ominously, something else followed the rubber trade through Cameroon: disease. Sleeping sickness, smallpox and skin infections were the most obvious. . . . . Colonial authorities attempted mass inoculation campaigns for smallpox and set up quarantine zones that restricted where the porters were allowed to travel. But even so, the diseases spread.

[I]t’s clear that colonial commerce created massive new networks of sexual interactions — and massive new transmissions of infections. (In later decades, transmission through the reuse of hypodermic needles in medical care probably had some role in HIV’s spread as well.)

To fulfill its grim destiny, HIV needed a kind of place never before seen in Central Africa but one that now was rising in the heart of the region: a big, thriving, hectic place jammed with people and energy, where old rules were cast aside amid the tumult of new commerce. It needed Kinshasa. It was here, hundreds of miles downriver from Cameroon, that HIV began to grow beyond a mere outbreak. It was here that AIDS grew into an epidemic.

So the improbable journey of the killer strain of HIV was feasible for only a few hectic decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s. Without “The Scramble for Africa,” it’s hard to see how HIV could have made it out of southeastern Cameroon to eventually kill tens of millions of people. Even a delay might have caused the killer strain of HIV to die a lonely death deep in the forest.

Regardless of the cause identified with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it goes without saying that HIV/AIDS has been a tragedy for humanity.

Quote of the Day - Bob Felton on Santorum's Ignorance of History and the Truth

I posted yesterday about the lunacy that Rick Santorum spouted at Ave Maria University - an ultra far right Catholic institution - and his claims the Satan is undermining America. Among the bathshitery stated by Santorum was the claim that the concept of equality comes from the Judea-Christian heritage of the United States. The hubris and untruth of the statement was too much for my blogger friend Bob Felton who had this analysis:

“Where,” Rick Santorum rhetorically asks, “do you think this concept of equality comes from? It doesn’t come from Islam. It doesn’t come from the East and Eastern religions. It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

That smug ‘question’ is the exemplar for what is so irritating about Santorum; it betrays ignorance of his religion’s teachings, ignorance of his religion’s history, that he is a man who repeats whatever self-aggrandizing nonsense he is told by the Holy Men without any interruption for mental processing.

According to the Inerrant Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a sociopath who favors genocide (Numbers), child sacrifice (Judges), summary execution of homosexuals (Leviticus), summary execution of adulterers (Leviticus), slavery (Genesis to Revelation), and theft and other dishonesties against those who aren’t your co-religionists (Genesis).

The concept of equality did not come from the Bible. Christian piety ruled the West for more than 1000-years and nobody ever heard a word about equality — except for clergy, I mean, who were more equal than everybody else.

Equality, as we use the word nowadays, is descended from the Enlightenment idea of natural rights, and that was a reaction against the miseries inflicted by Christian governance.

Make no mistake. Santorum is dangerous and is George W. Bush multiplied ten fold.

The GOP/Christianist View of the World

As a history major and one who not only loves geography but who has been lucky enough to do significant traveling overseas I am constantly dismayed by the idiocy and lack of knowledge of both geography and the rest of the world that plagues so many Americans. The phenomenon seems to be the worse amongst Christianists and their fellow Neanderthals in the GOP base. The map above, while in some ways a spoof, sadly probably only too accurate when it comes to this demographic of the U. S. population. A piece in Foreign Policy looks at the ignorance of Americans when it comes to geography - a 2006 survey revealed that only 40% of 18 to 24 year olds could locate Iraq and only 10% could locate Afghanistan. How can one cast an informed vote when you don't even know where countries the USA has invaded are located?

Today's GOP: Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

The hate and extremism fest known as CPAC has continued to provide great sound bites to use against individual GOP candidates and the Party in general. Interestingly, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked the crowd of loons to take a good look in the mirror. It's doubtful that the advice will be heeded, but long term I suspect that the only way to save the GOP is to allow it to largely self-destruct as it remains a puppet of an aging and soon to be extinct segment of the population. Given that the GOP has become a de facto religious party, the Party like the Christianists who control it is known more and more by what its against and who it hates. In both cases, the only ones not hated or opposed are those in the shrinking tent. A column in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon. Here are highlights (Dana Milbank coined the nattering nabobs of negativism phrase):

“How many of you,” Scott Rasmussen asked the crowd at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, “have ever mocked or made fun of the president’s call for hope and change? Raise your hands.” Most people in the Marriott Wardman Park hotel ballroom raised their hands. There were cheers and whoops. “With all due respect,” the conservative pollster and commentator told them, “I’d like to say that’s really stupid.”

This time, there was uncomfortable laughter. “Voters are looking for hope and change as much today as they were in 2008,” Rasmussen explained, and “you ought to be encouraging Republican candidates, people you support, to offer that positive step forward.”

Rasmussen had put his finger on a major problem for Republicans in 2012, and conservatives in particular: At a time when the national mood has begun to improve, they remain nattering nabobs of negativism. At CPAC, any hint of a “positive step” was buried in vitriol.

[W]ith optimism and confidence finally on the rise, Republicans are left with an anger management problem. They risk leaving the impression that they are rooting against an economic recovery. Take, for example, the speech to CPAC by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. . . . . “The president seems to have forgotten . . . that he was elected to be president of the United States, not the Occupy Wall Street fan club,” McConnell lectured, spitting out the words.

The unrelenting anger in the ballroom was an extension of what’s been happening on the campaign trail. In the week preceding the Florida Republican primary, 92 percent of the political ads were negative, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group. There was only one positive ad for Mitt Romney — and it was in Spanish.

The dour message has contributed to low voter turnout and an enthusiasm gap among GOP voters — a worrisome development that the Washington Times’ Ralph Hallow tried to warn the CPAC participants about. “None of these things I see are particularly good,” he said during one of the conference panels. “Intensity and enthusiasm about voting is now with the Democrats.”
. . . . . But at the moment, the message remains backward-looking and negative.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) even dismissed the significance of the death of Osama bin Laden, the fall of Moammar Gaddafi and the birth of the Arab Spring. They are “tactical successes” that pale against the “mess that Barack Obama has created,” she said.

Such nattering is exactly what Obama needs.