Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Obama v. Romney - Romney/GOP Plan Raises Taxes on Middle Class
Many in the middle class have been particularly hard hit by the winds of the great recession and have seen their net worth diminished if not wiped out by the collapse of the residential real estate market. So what is the GOP/Romney tax proposal? Raise taxes on the middle class while the wealthy such as Romney himself get more tax breaks. As I have noted before, I cannot fathom why the loons in the Tea Party cannot see that the GOP is out to use them and then f*ck them over. They rail against Obama - because he's black? - even though his policies are actually in their best interests and likely will support their real oppressors in the GOP. Yes, Romney and the GOP will deny that they are poised to screw over the middle class, but new analysis of the tax proposals says otherwise. And did I mention what the plan does to the national deficit? $4.5 trillion more in debt over the next decade. So much for the GOP's concern about "job killing deficits." Here are highlights from the Washington Post:
The tax reform plan that House Republicans have advanced would sharply cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and could leave middle-class households facing much larger tax bills, according to a new analysis set to be released Wednesday.
The report, prepared by Senate Democrats and reviewed by nonpartisan tax experts, marks the first attempt to quantify the trade-offs inherent in the GOP tax package, which would replace the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.
Those changes would benefit virtually every taxpayer, but they also would reduce federal tax collections by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. To avoid increasing the national debt by that amount, GOP leaders such as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.) have pledged to get rid of all the special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.
Republicans have declined to identify their targets. However, some of the biggest “loopholes” on the books are popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and retirement savings, which disproportionately benefit the upper middle class.
The net result: Married couples in that income range [$100,00 t0 $200,000] would pay an additional $2,700 annually to the Internal Revenue Service, on top of the tax increases that are scheduled to hit every American household when the George W. Bush-era cuts expire at the end of the year. Households earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.
“According to this report, while millionaires will receive a huge tax break, earners making under $200,000 will see their taxes rise significantly,” said Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), who chairs the Joint Economic Committee.
Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, reviewed the Joint Economic Committee report. Although the numbers are rough, he said, the conclusions are largely accurate.
“Even with eliminating fairly major tax preferences, the Ryan tax plan remains regressive. That’s the bottom line,” he said. “Unless you go after the tax preferences that benefit the wealthy” — capital gains, dividends, tax-free interest on municipal bonds — “it’s really hard to undo the regressivity of the rate changes. You’ll be shifting the burden of the tax code toward the middle class.”
Feel the "Christian" Love Rev. Donald Spitz Style
Give the nature of my law practice and the upscale nature of the boyfriend's salon clientele, it's sometimes easy to forget the very frightening Neanderthals that inhabit Hampton Roads, especially in Chesapeake and some of the more rural areas. I received a harsh reminder of the near life threatening hate harbored by some who claim to be "godly Christians." A case in point is a comment left on a post about the Tracy Thorne-Begland judicial appointment controversy in which the Richmond Circuit Court judges - at the urging of all of the five Virginia based mega law firms - appointed Tracy to a General District Court judgeship. The author of the comment? The Rev. Donald Spitz (pictured above left), a Chesapeake based anti-abortion extremist who has been written up by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Among other things, Spitz stated in his comment (which I did NOT publish):
Sodomites like Thorne-Begland belong in prison not on the bench. Homosexuals commit crimes against God, against nature, against the Holy Bible and against the human race.
After last year's Hampton Roads Pride event in Town Point Park in downtown Norfolk on the waterfront, Spitz nearly blew a gasket and ranted that Town Point Park had been taken over by sodomites who he says are worthy of death. He also accused gays of being sexual predators of children and lambasted members of Norfolk City Council "who did zero to stop this sodomite pollution to our city and to our children." But Spitz's hatred isn't limited to gays. He advocates the murder of abortion providers and the bombing of abortion clinics. And he's moved on to adding racism to his resume as the SPLC noted some years back:
The Rev. Donald Spitz has never been a pleasant man. Considered a wild-eyed extremist even among his colleagues on the radical anti-abortion scene, the head of Pro-Life Virginia and long-time principal of the Army of God Web site (armyofgod.com) applauds the murderers of physicians, clinic workers and secretaries.
He rails against "filthy faggots" and "lesbos." Islam is "Satanic," Arabs are "Rag-Heads," and Muslims "should not be allowed to live in the United States." New York City is a "sex perverted cesspool" that richly deserved Sept. 11.
But there is one type of vicious group hatred Don Spitz has always denied — the "false accusations of racism" against blacks "put out by desperate babykilling abortionists." If a black man accepts Christ, "then that man is my brother." Well, maybe. And maybe not.
This summer, on the Web site long run by Spitz, a remarkable series of headlines began to appear under "Current News Stories for Christians." To almost anyone but Spitz, these racy one-liners reflect the crudest kind of racism.
"African-American on bike randomly shoots people," screams one link to a legitimate news story. "83 Year old White Woman beaten to death by three African-Americans," says another. "African-American Killed her," a third reads under photos of the principals, "because she was White and her parents 'didn't allow her to have sex with a black man.'" And the list goes on.
With representatives like Spitz, it's little wonder why the under 30 generations of Americans are deserting institutional Christianity in droves.
And like most of his Christofacsist brethren, Spitz seems to have an utter contempt for the U. S. Constitution and its guarantee of freedom of religion to ALL citizens, not just the Christofascists. If one wants a glimpse of what America would be like under the rule of Spitz and his fellow Christianists, one need only look to this story out of Pakistan where the Islamic version of Spitz and his fellow hate merchants continue to cost innocent lives:
A popular female Pakistani singer who defied the Taliban's decree against singing and dancing was shot and killed in northwest Pakistan Monday night, police and hospital officials told CNN.
Ghazala Javed, who recorded scores of songs in her native Pashto language and became a household name among young, progressive ethnic Pashtuns in northwest Pakistan, had just left a beauty salon and was driving home with her father when gunmen on a motorcycle raced towards their car and sprayed it with bullets, Altaf said.
Javed was hit with six bullets and pronounced dead at a hospital in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, according to hospital official Rahim Afridi. Javed's father also was killed, police said.In recent years the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the region and the group's ban against singing and dancing made it difficult for Javed and other musical artists to perform and record songs in Pakistan. Javed recorded and taped many of her latest songs and music videos in nearby Dubai.Last year Javed made headlines when she asked for a divorce from her husband after she reportedly found out that he had at least one other wife. It was a rare decision in a deeply conservative and male-dominated society where many view a woman's demand for a divorce as a dishonor to the husband.
Javed is pictured above. Fundamentalist religion of whatever label is an evil. Individuals like Spitz are, in my opinion, a clear and present danger to the rule of law and constitutional government. His advocacy of what amounts to terrorism is indeed scary.
Virginian Pilot: University of Virginia Rector Helen Dragas Should Resign
As a double alumnus of the University of Virginia (The College as undergrad and Law) I've been holding my tongue at first on the machinations and behind closed doors intrigue that led to the ouster of the University's first woman president. Ironically, the ouster was engineered by another woman, Helen Dragas (pictured at right), the daughter of wealthy Virginia Beach developer George Dragas. While her defenders argue that Dragas is a bright and astute business woman, the truth is she inherited a thriving business from her family - i.e., construction company, real estate development company and a mortgage company division. And, in my opinion, like many other state board and board of visitors appointees, she basically bought her position as Rector of UVA by making the right (and large) political contributions. Sadly, that's the way things work in Virginia. Money ALWAYS trumps credentials, skills and true talent. Now, even the Virginian Pilot is calling for her resignation from the UVA Board of Visitors. Here are highlights:
In my view, Ms. Dragas is way over her head. She's not her father who likely would have known better than to engage in such tactics and would have avoided seriously wounding UVA. She needs to resign NOW.
Helen Dragas, rector of the University of Virginia, has failed repeatedly to explain why President Teresa Sullivan was forced out a week ago. Dragas has, however, built a convincing case for another departure - her own.The Virginia Beach developer and 1984 U.Va. grad was the architect of Sullivan's ouster. She is also the board's spokeswoman, a strange post for someone who has failed so utterly to communicate with everyone.The resulting chaos has caused substantial damage to the commonwealth's premier institution of higher education. That, as much as anything, brought 2,000 to the Lawn on Monday afternoon for an unprecedented protest against the school's leaders.At a special Board of Visitors meeting, Dragas continued to dodge demands - from students, faculty, lawmakers, taxpayers - for more details about the drastic differences between the board and Sullivan. Instead, Dragas doubled down on her initial generalities and platitudes. Worse, her efforts to strike a conciliatory tone devolved into parody.Dragas refused to address what happened or how. She was silent on reports that at least three board members knew nothing of efforts to remove Sullivan almost until a deal was struck. She declined to comment after one board member publicly opposed a motion to promote Carl Zeithaml, the dean of the McIntire School of Commerce, as interim president, effective Aug. 16.She failed to address the resignation of Peter Kiernan, chairman of the Darden School Foundation's board of trustees, just days after he sent an email saying he had worked for weeks with Dragas, at the behest of two "important Virginia alums," on a new presidential search.Sullivan addressed board members in private Monday. Her remarks, made public afterward, suggested she was unwilling to go along with demands for "corporate-style, top-down leadership." She talked about the culture of U.Va., and the need to protect and nurture it. She highlighted the administrative changes she had made, which provided a foundation for more significant change to come. It was a comprehensive defense of her tenure, and the contrast with the inadequate indictment by the board could not have been clearer.The Board of Visitors has the legal right to hire and fire the president. But it has a responsibility to explain its actions to the school's constituents. Dragas and other board members have failed to even try. The result is tumult, the likes of which U.Va. has never seen. She has shredded her credibility as a leader of the board, and so diminished the campus community's faith in her judgment that she is now simply ineffective.Dragas' term ends July 1, although she is eligible for reappointment by Gov. Bob McDonnell. In the best interests of herself, the governor and the university she professes to love, Dragas and her collaborators should resign, as the Faculty Senate's executive council demanded Monday.If Dragas does not, McDonnell should refuse to reappoint her. Otherwise he is signaling his support for what she and the board have done and how they've handled it.A tremendous amount of work must be done at U.Va. to quell the suspicion, the anger and the distrust that have roiled the campus. That work cannot be done if the person responsible for it remains there.
Bryan Fischer's Foul "Family Values"
In a previous post I noted the profile done on gay-hater extraordinaire Bryan Fischer of the hate group American Family Association done by The New Yorker. The picture left by the article indeed suggests that Fischer has more than a few screws loose and might do well to seek a mental health care intervention. Fischer apparently was not pleased with the piece - probably because it all to clearly showed him to be a self-promoting hypocrite and demagogue, not to mention a major league asshole. He directed his wrath at the articles author who found one of Fischer's former compatriots coming to her defense and substantiating facts that Fischer claimed to be untrue. As I often note, no one lies more than the professional Christian crowd and no one disseminates more hate that the "godly Christian" crowd. One can only hope for the death of Fischer's form of Christianity. Right Wing Watch looks at the contretemps. Here are excerpts:
Last week we told you about an excellent profile of Bryan Fischer in the New Yorker and Fischer’s predictably over-the-top and inaccurate attacks on the article and author, Jane Mayer. In the wake of those attacks, Mayer has posted a follow-up blog post, “Have Not Love: How Bryan Fischer Turned on a Friend,” that sets the record straight and explores the twisted family values of Fischer, a so-called family values advocate:
As I worked on my profile of the influential conservative radio-host Bryan Fischer, I was struck by the difference between the “pro-family” values he espouses and some of the choices he has made in his own life. For example, Fischer has not seen his only sibling in something like a decade—a sister with serious health problems who lives on social security and welfare disability payments. Perhaps more revealing, though, is the broken friendship between Fischer and another conservative Christian activist, Dennis Mansfield.
After the article came out, Fischer accused me of misrepresenting an anecdote concerning his relationship with Mansfield. Since then, Mansfield has weighed in on his own blog to defend the accuracy of the New Yorker story, and expanded on what he calls Fischer’s “divisive” politics as a dead end for this country.Mansfield, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress, parted ways with Fischer after his son was arrested for drug possession:The public arrest torpedoed Mansfield’s congressional bid. More importantly, he says, the episode, and the subsequent humility he learned from his son’s struggle, caused him to reëxamine the way in which he was using his Christian faith as a cudgel in politics. As Mansfield told me, he concluded that “faith-based conservatives are either purposefully or inadvertently looking punitively at other people” rather than “lifting each other up.”Writing on his blog last Thursday, Mansfield said this about Fischer:Pushing your own agenda using the veil of religion has been used all throughout history. Today is no exception, and individuals in the evangelical community do it as much as anyone else. When someone wraps their own hate speech in a "god blanket" it makes it easier for a subset of people to accept, and eventually it may even gather a following. The problem is that anyone outside of that subset is turned away from not only that particular subset, but from the entire religion.
Today's Republicans Really Are Worse
As a former Republican - what some might even call an activist - I continue to be dismayed by what the GOP has become: the party of ignorance, greed, obstruction and a largely sectarian party. Then there's the GOP's official policy of denigrating and maligning gays, minorities and immigrants often using language that comes close to urging violence against these targeted groups. I get accused of being too hard on the GOP while giving the Democrats a pass. But there is a huge difference between the parties and the hypocrisy falls mostly on the GOP. A column in the Washington Post looks at what's become of the GOP. Here are highlights:
If you’re thinking about dysfunctional government, there’s one main point that you have to know: The parties are not equally guilty. Dysfunctional government isn’t about ideological polarization; it’s about a rejectionist Republican Party that, among other things, is, while Democrats are in office, dedicated to opposing anything the Democratic president proposes — regardless of whether they have a history of opposing it or not.
Ezra Klein has been writing a series of great items about this lately, taking as a key example the Republican history on the individual mandate. The history is pretty basic: it was their idea; many leading Republicans supported it until January 2009; and then overnight it became for them not just a bad idea, but clearly unconstitutional — and not just unconstitutional, but a grave threat to basic liberty. It’s not hard to find more: the DREAM Act, the basic idea of fiscal and monetary stimulus during a recession, TARP . . . it’s a long list. Granted, not every Republican supported these things before Barack Obama did, but quite a few did, and now practically none can be found.
[S]ome of this is normal; some of it, in fact, is healthy — part of what parties do is provide alternatives, and it’s not at all a bad thing that the out-party reexamines things a bit if they find the president embraces a position they used to hold. But it’s the difference, as the Pythons explained long ago, between an argument and contradiction. What we’re seeing, as Michael Palin explained, is “just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.” And as long as that’s all that Republicans are doing, the political system isn’t going to function very well at all. And the fact that the parties are just not at all the same on this is one of the key things to know if you're trying to understand American politics right now.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Pope Says Cause of Sex Abuse Scandal a "Mystery"
The utter lies and batshitery that emanate from the Vatican and the Nazi Pope, Benedict XVI never cease to amaze me. In addressing the sex abuse to Irish Catholics - the Church in Ireland is in a veritable free fall - Benedict said that the cause of the sex abuse was a mystery. Actually, it's no mystery at all and the abuse of children and youths that occurred with an almost "droit de seigneur" attitude are the result of the deliberate policies of secrecy and denial implemented by and then perpetuated by Benedict XVI's and his predecessors. And then there's the Vatican's obsession with sex and sexuality as things that are sinful and filthy. The resulst of these policies and distorted views on sexuality left many tens of thousands of children and youths as hapless prey for predator priests. Irish Central has highlights from the drivel put forth by Benedict XVI as to the "Mystery" that caused the sex abuse of children and youths:
Pope Benedict has described clerical sex abuse as a mystery in an address to Irish Catholics. The Vatican leader expressed his views via a broadcast at the Mass to close the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. Almost 80,000 mass goers at Croke Park on Sunday heard the Papal address.
Irish President Michael D Higgins and Prime Minister Enda Kenny were among the crowd at the final event of the 50th International Eucharistic Congress. They heard the Pope say: “It is a mystery the fact that people who regularly received the Lord’s body and confessed their sins in the sacrament of Penance could abuse children.”
He added: “Evidently, their Christianity was no longer nourished by joyful encounter with Jesus Christ: it had become merely a matter of habit.”
Bigoted Professor Stands By Biased Gay Parenting Study
I used to have respect for the University of Texas which often represents an island of sanity in the otherwise insane world known as Texas. But the deeply flawed "study" questioning the abilities of gay and lesbian couples as parents authored by UT professor Mark Regnerus (pictured at left) suggests that even that august university is succumbing to the wingnut fanaticism of the Christofascists. Despite universal condemnation and criticism - other than from anti-gay hate groups and the professional Christian set, of course - Regnerus issued a statement that he stands by his "study" which says nothing in fact about parenting by committed same sex parents. The real irony is that the Christofascists will combine this study with their promotion of the "ex-gay" myth so as to guaranty that there will be more doomed marriages where LGBT individuals marry a straight spouse, have children, and then divorce thereby causing more fractured families. The "godly Christians" always claim their first concern is "about the children" but it's not. It's all about promoting anti-gay hatred and discrimination. Here are highlights from the Advocate on Regnerus' statement:
Professor Mark Regnerus sought to examine whether there is a difference between growing up with a gay parent as opposed to other forms of family structures. Several have blasted his research, including the American Psychological Association, which has even submitted briefs for court cases, citing that "lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children."
Additionally, a joint press release by the Human Rights Campaign, Freedom to Marry, Family Equality Council, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said Regnerus is a right-wing author, and that his study was biased in part because it was funded with $695,000 from the antigay Witherspoon Institute and $90,000 from the Bradley Foundation. Activist organization Truth Wins Out has launched a campaign calling for the University to investigate the study.
However, Regnerus told The Daily Texan that he stands by his research, which appears in the July issue of Social Science Research. . . . . The study was criticized for not examining the lives of adult children of stable lesbian parents. Many of the study's children considered to be raised in gay households were not being raised by parents in a committed same-sex relationship, whereas many of the children in heterosexual households had two married parents. Children of parents who had at one time in their lives been in a same-sex relationship were considered to be part of a "gay household."
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