This Election’s True Faith-Based Candidate

As regular readers know all to well, in general I hold Christianity, especially as practiced by conservative and evangelical Christians, in very low regard.  Indeed, hypocrisy seems to be one of the main traits of the "godly folk" who loudly proclaim their religiosity while condemning and hating others who look, love or believe differently from they themselves. Indeed, as past posts have examined, studies have documented that children raised in conservative Christian households show less empathy toward others than the non-religious and are much more judging of others.  Behavior that is hardly in keeping with Christ's commandment to love one another or to care for the poor, the hungry and/or homeless.  And, if one looks at the political party that so many of the Christofascists support, i.e., the Republican Party, that party's policies are likewise the antithesis of what the Gospel message teaches.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the irony of the fact that Hillary Clinton's religious background and the policies she has supported for decades are more in tune with the Gospel message than the rhetoric of the GOP, the Christofascists themselves, or Donald Trump.  Here are column excerpts:  

This is the inversion election, a contest in which so many of our familiar mental categories have been turned upside down.

This year, it’s the Republican presidential candidate who says the United States isn’t great anymore and the Democrat who insists it is. The Republican says that the former KGB agent presiding over Russia is a better leader than the president of the United States. The Democrat condemns him for it.

But last week reminded us that there is another role reversal in this election. There is one candidate who is authentically religious, who has thought seriously about what the Scriptures teach, and whose own view of the world was changed radically by her engagement with faith. Her name is Hillary Clinton.

Yes, I flinched when I typed that word “authentically.” How can we know whose faith is authentic or truly understand someone else’s relationship to God? It’s hard enough for most of us to come to terms honestly with our own relationship to the Almighty.

Moreover, I acknowledge that I bring a series of predispositions to my case here, beginning with the most basic: my conviction that Clinton is fit to be president and Donald Trump is not. More importantly in this context, her journey in wrestling with the relationship between religious commitment and political action was remarkably similar to my own.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a key influence on both of us. She reexamined many of her assumptions when she heard him speak. I did the same  . . . . I grew up in a conservative family, as Clinton did, and King challenged me — as he did her and millions of other Americans — to embrace a Christian’s obligation to struggle for social and racial justice.

So let me be more specific about my definition of authenticity. It focuses on passages from the letter of James that Clinton cited in her speech last Thursday to the predominantly black National Baptist Convention. James suggests that the best measure of authenticity is whether your faith affects how you think and what you do. Clinton’s religious views, I’d argue, are organically connected to many of the choices she has made in her life.

“The Scripture tells us that faith without works is dead,” she said. “The Epistle of James tells us we cannot just be hearers of the Word, we must be doers.” Clinton explained that she embraced “an activist social justice faith , a roll-up-your-sleeves and get-your-hands-dirty faith.”

What I do doubt is the depth of the conviction of politicians whose religious commitments seem to have little connection to their lives. They paint themselves as religious by either pushing the social conservatives’ hot buttons or, as Trump did Friday at the Values Voter Summit, appealing to their sense of victimhood. He spoke about religious liberty and criticized a media culture that “mocks and demeans people of faith.”

Conservative religious people have every right to test liberal believers by their willingness to defend the role of faith in our public square. But liberal believers have a comparable right to test conservatives by whether what the Gospel teaches about love, justice and our obligation to the poor has any relationship to their public actions and the policies they promote.

Clinton also spoke of “the awesome responsibilities of power and the frailties of human action.” I do prefer politicians who follow Kierkegaard’s lead in approaching the burdens of governing with a certain amount of “fear and trembling.” I see at least some of that spirit in Clinton. I wish I could find it in Trump.

The Christofascists and most of the "professional Christian" set such as Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham,  James Dobson, et al, shout loudly about their supposed faith, yet one sees little or nothing in the personal lives that gives proof to the authenticity of their claimed beliefs.  Some like Graham run on the service charities, yet in the process financially enrich themselves beyond the dreams of most average citizens.   A similar disconnect occurs with the harsh, reverse Robin Hood policies of the GOP which they vociferously support. As for the narcissistic, greed driven Donald Trump, don't even get me started.  Meanwhile, Clinton, for all her faults at least supports programs in keeping with the Gospel social ministry message.  

Jeb Bush the Clueless and Single Mothers

Jeb Bush may be trying hard to distance himself from his idiot brother, but he is quickly reminding us that he is just as out of touch with the reality of the lives of most Americans as was/is the Chimperator.  Moreover, he is out of touch with just how poorly America stacks up compared to other developed countries when it comes to child welfare and well being.  Bush brought all of this into focus while traveling in Europe where he condemned single mothers and said that children needed fathers and mothers to thrive where child welfare exceeds that of the America.  Perhaps Bush was pandering to the Christofascists, but the statement was as obtuse as when Mitt Romney praised Israel's health care system without grasping that it was a nationalized health system - something Romney was campaigning against.   Here are highlights from a New York Times column on the issue:

Last week, Jeb Bush was asked to answer for a passage from his book from two decades ago, “Profiles in Character,” in a chapter titled “The Restoration of Shame,” in which he blamed the “irresponsible conduct” of births to unmarried women on a flagging sense of community ridicule and shaming.

Bush responded, according to MSNBC: “My views have evolved over time, but my views about the importance of dads being involved in the lives of children hasn’t changed at all. In fact, since 1995 … this book was a book about cultural indicators [and] the country has moved in the wrong direction. We have a 40-plus percent out-of-wedlock birth rate.”

He continued: “It’s a huge challenge for single moms to raise children in the world that we’re in today and it hurts the prospects, it limits the possibilities of young people being able to live lives of purpose and meaning.”

But, as a 2014 Pew Research Center report points out:

“It’s important to keep in mind that just because a woman has a nonmarital birth, that does not necessarily mean that the mother is ‘going it alone.’ For instance, in the U.S., more than half of births that occur outside of marriage are to women who are cohabiting.”

That same Pew report reported that 17 European countries (Iceland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, France, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Latvia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, Finland and yes, Estonia) have higher birthrates to unmarried women than does the United States.

And according to a 2013 Unicef report, “Child Well-Being in Rich Countries,” all those countries except Latvia (Bulgaria was not included) had higher ratings of overall children’s material well-being (a measure of things like child poverty rates; child deprivation of things like three meals, including some with protein and fresh fruit and vegetables; books; regular leisure activities; some new clothes and properly fitting shoes; and whether the family owned an automobile, traveled for vacations, had a computer and had a separate bedroom for the child).

In addition to material well-being, almost all of them outranked the United States in children’s health and safety, education, behaviors and risks, and housing and environment.

We spend quite a bit of energy blaming births to unmarried women for our woes, but that is only part of the picture. The other part is the way we as a society treat those women and the fathers of their children. Instead of endless efforts to sanctify marriage, the emphasis should be on finding ways to support children and encourage more parental engagement from both parents, regardless of marital status. This includes removing all barriers and penalties for people, especially the poor, to cohabitate.

First, we should seek to reduce the level of unintended pregnancies in this country. As the Guttmacher Institute pointed out in February, about half of pregnancies here are unintended, and “unintended pregnancy rates are highest among poor and low-income women, women aged 18–24, cohabiting women and minority women.”

Second, we have to examine how we have used the law as an instrument to push unwed fathers out of homes, particularly poor ones, rather than encourage them to stay.

Maybe a deficit of shame is not our problem, but rather a deficit of common sense in advancing policy and promoting co-parenting.

Sadly, once a child is born and is no longer a fetus, the concern of the Christofascists and the Republican Party disappears and programs that would aid child well being are slashed, insurance programs cut, and children, especially those of the poor are treated as disposable garbage.  The callousness and hypocrisy is truly breath  taking.  Jeb Bush is another clueless, out of touch plutocrat.  We do not need him holding any public office.

Conservatives' Seriously Bad Ideas

Like the SBC, today's Republican Party and its conservative allies overseas cling to an outdated - indeed, fairy tale - vision of objective reality and continues to push policies that have been proven to be failures by facts and reality.  Dogma trumps facts and actual experience.  And no admission can ever be made that the policies and those who trumpet them were wrong - terribly wrong.  The result?  Here at home in America we see the GOP still pushing economic and social policies that have the opposite effect of the claimed objectives and which continue to make matters only worse for all except the most wealthy.  The same is happening in Britain where the same Kool-Aid is being consumed.  A column in the New York Times looks at this continued embrace of truly bad ideas.  Here are excerpts:

One thing we’ve learned in the years since the financial crisis is that seriously bad ideas — by which I mean bad ideas that appeal to the prejudices of Very Serious People — have remarkable staying power. No matter how much contrary evidence comes in, no matter how often and how badly predictions based on those ideas are proved wrong, the bad ideas just keep coming back. And they retain the power to warp policy.

So the true story of economic disaster, which is that it was caused by an inadequately regulated financial industry run wild and perpetuated by wrongheaded austerity policies, won’t do. Instead, the story must involve things like a skills gap — it’s not lack of jobs; we have the wrong workers for this high-technology globalized era, etc., etc. — even if there’s no evidence at all that such a gap is impeding recovery.

And the ultimate example of a seriously bad idea is the determination, in the teeth of all the evidence, to declare government spending that helps the less fortunate a crucial cause of our economic problems.

[A]ll these claims of irresponsibility involve rewriting history, because on the eve of crisis nobody thought Britain was being profligate: debt was low by historical standards and the deficit fairly small. Finally, Britain’s supposedly disastrous fiscal position has never worried the markets, which have remained happy to buy British bonds despite historically low yields.Nonetheless, that’s the story, generally reported not as opinion but as fact. And the really bad news is that Britain’s leaders seem to believe their own propaganda.

Nobody fully understands either why this slump has happened or how to reverse it, but surely the combination of a still-weak economy, terrible productivity performance and negative borrowing costs says that this is a time to increase investment in things like infrastructure. (Passenger trains here make rail service in the United States look good, and traffic congestion is getting ever worse.) Yet the Osborne proposal would kill any such initiative.

Now, some readers are probably thinking that I’m giving the likes of Mr. Osborne too much credit for sincerity. Isn’t all this deficit obsession just an excuse to slash social programs? And I’m sure that’s part of it. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. Seriously bad ideas, I’d argue, have a life of their own. And they rule our world.

A Republican Ruse to Make Tax Cuts Look Good

As the Republican Party prepares to take control of Congress - hopefully, for only a two year period - efforts are afoot to craft a propaganda package that will dupe party supporters into supporting programs against their own financial interests.  Among the agenda to be pushed are more tax cuts that benefit the rich, under fund infrastructure and social safety net programs, and continue the GOP push for a new Gilded Age.  A column in the New York Times looks at how tax cuts will be represented as something good when in fact, they likely will harm many outside the 1%.  Here are column highlights:

AS Republicans take control of Congress this month, at the top of their to-do list is changing how the government measures the impact of tax cuts on federal revenue: namely, to switch from so-called static scoring to “dynamic” scoring. While seemingly arcane, the change could have significant, negative consequences for enacting sustainable, long-term fiscal policies.

Whenever new tax legislation is proposed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office “scores” it, to estimate whether the bill would raise more or less revenue than existing law would.

In preparing estimates, scorekeepers try to predict how people will respond to a new tax law. For example, if Congress contemplates raising the excise tax on cigarettes, scorekeepers consider existing trends in cigarette consumption, the likelihood that the higher taxes will induce some smokers to quit, and the prospect that higher prices will increase incentives for cigarette smuggling. There are no truly “static” revenue estimates.

These conventional estimates do not, however, include any indirect feedback effects that tax law changes might have on overall national income. In other words, they do not incorporate macroeconomic behavioral changes.  Dynamic scoring does. Proponents point out, correctly, that if a tax proposal is large enough, then those sorts of feedback effects can aim the entire economy on a slightly different path.

In order to look at the effects across the entire economy, dynamic modeling relies on many simplifying assumptions, like how well people can predict the future or how much they care about their children’s future consumption versus their own.Economists disagree on the answers, and different models’ predicted feedback effects vary wildly, depending on the values selected for those uncertain assumptions. 

But the bigger problems lie deeper. Federal deficits are on an unsustainable path (as it happens, because of undertaxation, not excessive spending). Simply cutting taxes against the headwind of structural deficits leads to lower growth, as government borrowing soaks up an ever-increasing share of savings.

In practice, these models are political statements. They show the biggest economic effects by assuming that tax cuts are financed by unspecified future spending cuts. The smaller size of government, not the tax cuts by themselves, largely drives the models’ results.

The Republicans’ interest in dynamic scoring is not the result of a million-economist march on Washington; it comes from political factions convinced that tax cuts are the panacea for all economic ills. They will use dynamic scoring to justify a tax cut that, under conventional scorekeeping, loses revenue.

When revenues do in fact decline and deficits rise, those same proponents will push for steep cuts in government insurance or investment programs, because they will claim that the models demand it. That is what lies inside the Trojan horse of dynamic scoring.

Why Democrats Can’t Win White Working-Class Voters

This post in some ways follows up on the last one and looks at the lingering problems faced by Democrats who are seen as the party of minorities.   The good news in the long term is that eventually, minorities will be the majority and white voters the minority.  Until then, the issue becomes one of finding policies and candidates that can win back some of the white working class voter block.  A piece in Slate looks at the issue.  Here are excerpts:

The Democratic Party styles itself a fighter for the working class. But a substantial part of that class—the white part—wants nothing to do with it. If we count the white working class as whites without college degrees, then congressional Democrats lost them by 30 points in last week’s elections, contributing to losses in states as diverse as Iowa, Maine, Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida.

Democrats don’t have to win this group as much as they have to avoid a rout. If they can do that—and hold Republicans to a majority rather than a supermajority—then they can avoid the Republican waves of the recent midterm elections, and strengthen their presidential majority.

Hence the recurring debate of how to win these voters, or at least a portion of them. In a recent feature for the Washington Monthly, for example, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin argue that Democrats can capitalize on the generational divide in the white working class.  . . . “Today’s young white working-class voters are notably more liberal on issues concerning the role of government” than their older counterparts note Teixeira and Halpin. And significantly these young whites are “significantly more open to rising diversity than the white working class as a whole.”

Implicit in all of this is the assumption voters will believe the pitch. That they’ll hear the case for stronger programs, higher minimum wages, and higher taxes on the rich, and believe Democrats are advocating for them, and not some other group.

The problem is I don’t think we can make that assumption.

After all, working-class whites didn’t leave the Democratic Party over insufficiently populist policy and rhetoric. . . . . No, the proximate cause of the break was the Democratic Party’s close identification with black Americans, who—after the riots of the late ’60s and ’70s—became identified with urban disorder and welfare.

 Specifically, whites were bewildered and infuriated with liberals who defended rioting communities—correctly noting the decades of deprivation and abuse that led to those violent outbursts—and pushed anti-poverty programs to address the underlying conditions. Black incomes rose while at the same time, many white incomes were beginning to stagnate or even fall. Why was the government spending our tax dollars on them, working-class whites asked, when they destroy their neighborhoods and refuse to work, and we’re losing our jobs and our homes?

Part of this was just racism. For most of the post-war era, whites were empowered by the federal government to separate themselves and their lives from black Americans. 

But part of it was something broader. After all, there wasn’t a backlash to government programs writ large. Then, as now, working-class whites are ardent supporters of Social Security and Medicare. But to them, our retirement programs came with an implicit social contract: If you work and contribute to society, society will care for you into your old age. By contrast, you didn’t have to work to benefit from anti-poverty programs, in fact, you could riot and still receive government benefits.

What matters is that they pay taxes but don’t get the same kind of benefits. Again, here’s Drum:

It’s pointless to argue that this perception is wrong. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But it’s there. And although it’s bound up with plenty of other grievances—many of them frankly racial, but also cultural, religious, and geographic—at its core you have a group of people who are struggling and need help, but instead feel like they simply get taxed and taxed for the benefit of someone else. Always someone else. If this were you, you wouldn't vote for Democrats either.

Democrats can adopt populist rhetoric, but there’s no guarantee working-class whites will buy it. Indeed, in parts of the country—like the Deep South—it’s a lost cause. The Democratic Party is too associated with blacks and too associated with welfare to win over enough whites to make a difference.

[F]or a new rhetoric of populism to work—or at least, attract the winnable whites identified by Teixeira and Halpin—it needs to come with a commitment to universal policies that working-class whites like and support . . . . But the United States doesn’t have a political party to support that kind of social democracy. Instead, it has the Democratic Party, a collection of disparate interests which—at its best—is nervous about economic liberalism and hesitant to push anything outside the mainstream.

Ken Cuccinelli’s Fuzzy Math - An Economic Plan That Doesn't Add Up

There's a lot wrong with both Ken Cuccinelli (including mentally, in my view) and his proposed policies.  On social issues, he'd pretty much bring back a religious inquisition to inflict his own bizarre beliefs on all Virginians while policing bedrooms across the Virginia.  On the economic front, his proposals are yet more of the GOP's failed voodoo economics which involve sound bites that excite the deranged GOP base while not adding up if one looks beyond the smoke and mirrors.  In a main editorial the Washington Post slams Cuccinelli's bogus economic plan.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he 2013 Cuccinelli economic plan relies on magical thinking.

The main difference between the two blueprints is the effort that went into drafting them. Mr. McDonnell’s [2009] plan was 19 single-spaced pages, resplendent with bullet points, subsections and wonderfully precise dollar totals. Mr. Cuccinelli’s plan consists of one sentence, plus four very brief bullet points. Grandly known as “The Cuccinelli Economic Growth & Virginia Jobs Plan,” it fits neatly onto about half a page.

The Cuccinelli economic plan, for all its brevity, does contain one idea. By slicing business income taxes by a third and personal income taxes by 13 percent, Mr. Cuccinelli would slash $1.4 billion in revenue — about 8 percent of Virginia’s overall annual tax base.

Yet somehow — here’s where the magical part comes in — Mr. Cuccinelli insists that, under his plan, revenue would hold steady and the state’s already lean budget would be held harmless.

By Mr. Cuccinelli’s facile account, squaring this circle would simply require eliminating loopholes and deductions for those who are coddled by the state’s tax code. That sounds great in the abstract, but which loopholes and deductions does Mr. Cuccinelli have in mind? Naturally, he isn’t saying.

Just as Mr. McDonnell’s proposal, for all its detail, was gobbledygook, so too is Mr. Cuccinelli’s — unless what he is really planning is a frontal assault on state spending. That would mean eviscerating education, public safety, infrastructure and social services, which together account for a large majority of that spending.

Mr. Cuccinelli suggests that cutting corporate income taxes by a third would transform Virginia into an irresistible magnet for businesses, which would grow at lightning speed. But what businesses, and which employees, would be content to live in a state whose budget starves its schools, social services and public safety?

At the heart of the Cuccinelli vision is the same fantasy that animated the McDonnell plan four years ago — sacrifice is for suckers; popular and vital services can be had for free; and Virginia voters are saps. In fact, revenue cannot be summoned from thin air, either by Mr. McDonnell or by Mr. Cuccinelli.

The editorial also fails to ask the question of what businesses and what employees would want to live in a state which has social policies that would like they were devised by the ayatollahs in Tehran?

Republicans go after Obamacare (and the Middle Class). Again.

The GOP indeed sounds like a broken record.  At least when it comes to ranting and raving about the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare and vowing to repeal it even thought the U.S. Supreme Court upheld most of the law last year.  And when it comes to slashing programs that assist the poor and the middle class.  Leading the charge is Joe McCarthy want to be and look alike, Senator Ted Cruz from Texas who makes one wonder what is in the water in the Lone Star State.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this weird obsession.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans campaigned for repeal in 2012, but President Obama was reelected and Democrats gained seats in the Senate and the House and won the popular vote. Since the election, Republican governors have begun to embrace the law. 

Here in Washington, though, it is as though tea party activists are still marching on the Capitol. On Wednesday, Senate Republicans supported legislation proposed by the freshman Cruz to defund Obamacare — the 35th attempt, give or take, to abolish the program.  This one failed, like all the others. 

Doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result, it has been said, defines insanity. But among Senate Republicans, the lunatics are running the asylum. A few of the most junior members, with support from conservative activists, are calling the shots, while the caucus’s nominal leaders, intimidated by the newcomers’ power, have become followers.

This time it was the quixotic repeal effort by Cruz, who has been on the job for all of two months; McConnell made an unscheduled appearance on the Senate floor to associate himself with the doomed effort.

Cruz, the 42-year-old junior senator from Texas who will be the keynote speaker at this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, was rallying his fellow Republicans in support of a dubious principle that implementing Obamacare means imminent economic ruin. “At a minimum, in my judgment, Obamacare should not be funded,” he said on the Senate floor, because “implementing it right now could well force us into a recession.”  “At a minimum.” That’s the same phrase Cruz used last month to imply that Chuck Hagel, now defense secretary, was on foreign payrolls.

At a minimum, Cruz is making Republican leadership look weak. Seniority has been tossed aside as McConnell of Kentucky and the No. 2 GOP leader, John Cornyn (Tex.), follow the cues of the junior senators from their home states, Paul and Cruz.  

The young Texan had managed to pull Senate Republicans even further to the right than their counterparts in the House, who opted not to seek a repeal of Obamacare in the legislation they just passed to fund the federal government. And House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget would repeal the health-care law but keep $1 trillion in tax increases associated with the program.

The GOP descent into utter insanity seems to be proceeding without let up.  Of course, here in Virginia we have the equally insane and unhinged Ken Cuccinelli as the ostensible GOP standard bearer.

Can the GOP Evolve?

The title of this post is a question I sometimes get  asked given that I am a former Republican.  My answer typically is an emphatic "No."  Not with the current Christianist/Tea Party base and the total lack of guts in the party leadership to stand up to hate and bigotry - not to mention calling out statements and positions that ignore objective reality.    Thus, I see only repeated electoral defeats as the route to any sort of evolution.    When and how such defeats will happen is anyone's guess, but sooner or later the aging bigoted core of the GOP will die off and defeat will be the norm for the GOP.  That process cannot happen soon enough in my book.  David Frum a rational conservative - something that is becoming an oxymoron - looks at this question of whether or not the GOP can evolve.  Here are some excerpts:

It’s 2024. The vast majority of baby boomers have arrived at retirement age. The pre-baby boomers are rapidly passing from the scene. (The youngest of them, born in 1945, are about to turn 80.) The long-predicted crisis of the American fiscal system has arrived.

The political scientist Harold Lasswell famously defined politics as a contest over “who gets what, when, and how.” Over the next dozen years, as the gap between the revenue lines and the expenditure lines of the federal and state governments widen, that definition could aptly be amended: Who gets disappointed—and by how much?   .  .  .  .  These harrowing questions have disconcerting political implications for the country’s two great political parties.

For Democrats, the trends pose a stark distributional question. The younger people of the 2020s, survivors of the Great Recession, will in the aggregate be poorer than their elders. Should these younger workers be taxed or see their own social services squeezed in order to support Medicare and public-service pensions in their full amplitude?

For Republicans, the trends pose a coalition-management question. Throughout the Obama years, Republicans built a powerful coalition of the rich and the old. The coalition was built on two principles: militant rejection of any and all new taxes, and unyielding defense of existing government benefits for those at or near retirement age.   But as Medicare costs rise, the no-new-taxes/no-cuts-in-Medicare combination will become increasingly difficult to sustain. Already, polls show that Republican voters (as opposed to activists) prefer tax increases on upper-income earners to Medicare cuts. So long as the choice between taxes and Medicare cuts remains latent, the preferences of rank-and-file Republicans may not matter much. But as budget gaps widen, that tension will surely come to the fore.
  
If the fiscal squeeze tightens enough, Republicans will be forced to choose between their limited government ideology and their older voting base. If they choose their ideology, they will need to locate some new voters in upper-income America. They will need to draw back to the Grand Old Party the kind of voters who defected to Barack Obama in 2008: affluent professionals, especially women, in major urban centers. This was the kind of Republicanism practiced in the 1990s by governors like Christine Todd Whitman, John Engler, Tommy Thompson, and George Pataki. Such a Republicanism would not need to jettison its pro-life message, just de-emphasize it, as Democrats have, for example, de-emphasized their message on gun control.

At the beginning of the Tea Party era, there was much talk that Republicans might switch to a more economic, less culturally exclusive message. That talk came to nothing. Instead, Republicans infused cultural exclusion into their economics, drawing a sharp distinction between the “earned” benefit of Medicare and Social Security and other programs that serve supposedly less deserving populations: food stamps, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid.

Yet it does not have to be this way. The GOP can remain a culturally conservative party without needing to endorse vaginal inspections of women or miring itself in fights over birth control. The coming generational shift within the GOP on gay rights points the way to such future change.

Such a GOP would look more like conservative parties elsewhere on the planet—and less like the Southern Democrats of the 1950s. And while some Republicans might dismiss those non-U.S. conservative parties as squishy, it’s worth noting that at least some of them—notably the Germans and Canadians—managed successfully to complete the fiscal consolidation that in the United States still looms terrifyingly ahead.

Frum's views make sense but for one thing: the Christian Right. Until the GOP sends the Christofascists back to the political wilderness, the type of conservatism he contemplates will not be possible.  The big question is when will the Party realize this and take the steps to regain its soul.

Gays Happier and Healthier Where Gay Marriage Is Legal

I referenced a report from a new study in passing on the correlation between gay males leading healthier and happier lives in states where same sex marriage is legal. The savings in health care costs and benefits to human capital in general should make anyone truly concerned about run away health care costs reconsider banning gay marriage. Of course, the Christianists and their boot licking whores in the GOP will not do so since the Christianists' goal is to make life as much of a living Hell for gays as possible since we dare to reject their fear and hate based (emphasis on hate) religious beliefs. But if anti-gay Republicans were true to the supposed conservative economic beliefs and desire for social stability, they would support same sex marriage which is actually a conservative social approach by these measurements. An article in LGBTQ Nation looks at the study and here are some highlights:

Gay men who live in U.S. states where same-sex marriage is legal make fewer doctor visits, have lower healthcare costs, and in general lead happier and healthier lives, according to a new study being published in the American Journal of Public Health.

The researchers surveyed the demand for medical and mental healthcare from more than 1,200 gay men registered with a Massachusetts health clinic in the 12 months prior to the 2003 change and the 12 months afterwards and found a 13-percent drop in healthcare visits after the law was enacted.

This was regardless of whether the men were in a stable relationship, the American Journal of Public Health reported.

There was a reduction in blood pressure problems, depression and “adjustment disorders,” which could be the result of reduced stress, researchers said.

A spokesman for the Terrence Higgins Trust, a UK-based sexual health and HIV charity, told the BBC that “there is a known link between health and happiness.”

“It’s no surprise that people who are treated as second class citizens tend to have low self esteem, which in turn makes them more likely to take risks,” the spokesman said. “Whether this is drugs, alcohol abuse, or unsafe sex, treating gay men unequally has lasting repercussions for their health.”

More coverage on the study findings can be found here in the American Journal of Public Health. I especially like this policy finding that anyone honest about reducing health care costs ought to embrace:

Conclusions. Policies that confer protections to same-sex couples may be effective in reducing health care use and costs among sexual minority men.

I continue to believe that Christianists hate gays intensely because we - like evolution - represent a huge threat to their house of cards religious belief system that is based on a selective reading of an increasing factually and scientific unreliable document: the Bible. If the Bible is wrong about the creation story, wrong about the existence of Adam and Eve and wrong about its condemnation of same sex relationships, the entire house of cards collapses and the fear stricken Christianists are left with nothing. Worse yet, many will be faced with the realization that they led their lives based on a lie. They will go to any lengths to avoid facing this truth - including seeking vengeance on those whose lives and loves underscore the falsity of their belief system.

USA's Largest Corporations Made $170 Billion Yet Paid No Taxes

Let's face it - the USA's tax code is beyond screwed up. As Forbes is reporting, twelve of the nation's largest Fortune 500 companies, while making $170 billion in profits during the period of The Great Recession, paid NO taxes. That's right, zero! The GOP, of course, would have you believe that businesses are over taxed. While this may be true in some cases for the little guys, the big corporation with in some cases obscene profits are paying little or nothing even as more and more homeowners find themselves wiped out financially. It drives me to distraction to watch as idiots in the Tea Party movement remain blind to the fact that they are being sold down the river by Republicans. Add to the list of fools, the Christianists who are more concerned about stigmatizing gays than looking out for the future of the nation. Here are highlights from the Forbes story:
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Yesterday, I wrote about how the GOP is falsely pushing the argument that America’s corporations are overtaxed. I included some great data courtesy of conservative commentator Bruce Bartlett whose New York Times piece did an extraordinary job of putting the lie to the Republican assertions.
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Today, and not a moment too soon, the non-profit Citizens For Tax Justice (CTJ) has put out their findings revealing that twelve of the nations largest Fortune 500 companies, while making $170 billion in profits during the period of The Great Recession, paid an effective tax rate of negative 1.5%.

Yes, you read that correctly. Not only have these twelve companies paid zero in taxes for the years 2008-2010, they actually received tax subsidies that added $62.4 billion to their bottom lines.
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The companies were chosen by the CTJ . . . include – in alphabetical order – American Electric Power, Boeing, Dupont, Exxon Mobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell International, IBM, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo and Yahoo.
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According to the study, not a single one of these companies paid an amount even close to the 35% statutory tax rate. In fact, the tax rate paid by Exxon Mobile, when spread over the full three years, was only 14.2% – a full 60% below the 35% rate that corporations are supposed to be paying. And if we take a look at what Exxon paid over just the past two years, it totals a mere 0.4% on their pre-tax profits of $9.9 billion. And get this – Exxon Mobile paid the most in taxes of any of the twelve companies on the list.
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We, as voters, also have a duty to react when the GOP majority in the House of Representatives tries to tell us we need to reduce this phantom corporate rate from 35% to 25% so that these corporations can pay even less in taxes while they pocket even greater amounts of taxpayer money via corporate subsidies.
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Worse still, Boehner, Ryan and friends have the unmitigated gall to make their pitch while asking the rest of us to give up the social programs that are so essential to most Americans. Seriously, people, do we need an anvil to fall on our heads before we get it?
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This chart from Think Progress tells it all:
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One in Six Americans Felt Pangs of Hunger in '08

In addition to the travesty that the USA does not provide guaranteed health care to its citizens - unlike the modern industrialized nations of Europe among other places - it is a national disgrace that the percentage of Americans experiencing hunger has increased rather than diminished. The irony, of course, is that the voters and politicians who oppose heath care reform and social services to disadvantaged Americans are precisely those who pretend to be supporters of "family values." Since when did hunger and lack of need medical care come to represent "family values" or what America is allegedly all about? But if one listens to the rants of the far right against health care reform, immigration reform and a host of other needed reforms, it is always the falsely pious ego centric members of the Christian Right who are in favor of denying assistance to the poor, etc. They are the antithesis of the Gospel message of Christ, yet the spineless mainstream media never challenges them on their hypocrisy and the disconnect between their actions and the Gospel they claim to worship. The Washington Post has coverage on the increasing presence of hunger in America. Here are some highlights:

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The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat.
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The magnitude of the increase in food shortages -- and, in some cases, outright hunger -- identified in the report startled even the nation's leading anti-poverty advocates, who have grown accustomed to longer lines lately at food banks and soup kitchens. The findings also intensify pressure on the White House to fulfill a pledge to stamp out childhood hunger made by President Obama, who called the report "unsettling."
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The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.
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Several independent advocates and policy experts on hunger said that they had been bracing for the latest report to show deepening shortages, but that they were nevertheless astonished by how much the problem has worsened. "This is unthinkable. It's like we are living in a Third-World country," said Vicki Escarra, president of Feeding America, the largest organization representing food banks and other emergency food sources.
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The report's main author at USDA, Mark Nord, noted that other recent research by the agency has found that most families in which food is scarce contain at least one adult with a full-time job, suggesting that the problem lies at least partly in wages, not entirely an absence of work. . . . The report suggests that federal food assistance programs are only partly fulfilling their purpose, although Vilsack said that shortages would be much worse without them. Just more than half of the people surveyed who reported they had food shortages said that they had, in the previous month, participated in one of the government's largest anti-hunger and nutrition programs: food stamps, subsidized school lunches or WIC, the nutrition program for women with babies or young children.

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Despite findings such as these, I know a number of Republicans who continue to chant the mantra of lower taxes as they stand by and let children suffer from hunger and lack of medical care resources. Naturally, all of these folks consider themselves "godly Christians" while in reality they are greedy, self-centered scrooges who car nothing for what happens to their fellow citizens. It's sick and it's disgusting, but that's the reality of today's GOP and its false Christian, self-centered bigots

Strong Economy Propels Brazil to World Stage

I have long found Brazil fascinating - and not just because it seems to produce some of the most beautiful guys in the world, although that's not a bad thing either. Now, the country seems poised to come into an age of prosperity and international influence that has heretofore escaped it as reported by the New York Times today. It is interesting to note that some of the trends and economic measures that are being implemented in Brazil run counter to what the Chimperator is foisting on the USA, where income disparities are sharply increasing and spending on infrastructure and social programs that strengthen citizens are being cut or subjected to veto threats. Here are some story highlights:

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Brazil, South America’s largest economy, is finally poised to realize its long-anticipated potential as a global player, economists say, as the country rides its biggest economic expansion in three decades. That growth is being felt in nearly all parts of the economy, creating a new class of super rich even as people like Ms. Sousa lift themselves into an expanding middle class.

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It has also given Brazil new swagger, providing it, for instance, with greater leverage to push for a tougher bargain with the United States and Europe in global trade talks. After seven years, those negotiations finally broke down this week over demands by India and China for safeguards for their farmers, a clear sign of the rising clout of these emerging economies.

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Despite investor fears about the leftist bent of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he was elected to lead Brazil in 2002, he has demonstrated a light touch when it comes to economic stewardship, avoiding the populist impulses of leaders in Venezuela and Bolivia. Instead, he has fueled Brazil’s growth through a deft combination of respect for financial markets and targeted social programs, which are lifting millions out of poverty, said David Fleischer, a political analyst and emeritus professor at the University of Brasília.

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Long famous for its unequal distribution of wealth, Brazil has shrunk its income gap by six percentage points since 2001, more than any other country in South America this decade, said Francisco Ferreira, a lead economist at the World Bank. While the top 10 percent of Brazil’s earners saw their cumulative income rise by 7 percent from 2001 to 2006, the bottom 10 percent shot up by 58 percent, according to Marcelo Côrtes Neri, the director of the Center for Social Policies at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro.

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The momentum of its economic expansion is expected to last. As the United States and parts of Europe struggle with recession and the fallout from housing crises, Brazil’s economy shows few of the vulnerabilities of other emerging powers. It has greatly diversified its industrial base, has huge potential to expand a booming agricultural sector into virgin fields and holds a tremendous pool of untapped natural resources. New oil discoveries will thrust Brazil into the ranks of the global oil powers within the next decade.

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President da Silva has deepened many of the social programs begun 10 years ago under Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who as president ushered in many of the structural reforms that laid the foundations of Brazil’s stable growth today.

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Should John McCain somehow - in my worse nightmare - win the election in November, Brazil may be a country to add to the list as possible emigration destinations for those fleeing the economically declining and increasing fascist USA.