Monday Morning Male Beauty

Rising Sea Levels Threaten South Florida

Like the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, the problem of rising sea levels is very real even if the Republican Party refuses to use the terms "climate change" or "global warming" or "rising sea levels."  One need only watch the increase in tidal flooding and the relentless increase in sea levels compared to historic levels.  Sticking one's head in the sand doesn't make the reality go away.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the problems facing South Florida and the current lack of political will at the state and national level to face the problem head on.  Here are excerpts:

In the most dire predictions, South Florida’s delicate barrier islands, coastal communities and captivating subtropical beaches will be lost to the rising waters in as few as 100 years. 

Further inland, the Everglades, the river of grass that gives the region its fresh water, could one day be useless, some scientists fear, contaminated by the inexorable advance of the salt-filled ocean. The Florida Keys, the pearl-like strand of islands that stretches into the Gulf of Mexico, would be mostly submerged alongside their exotic crown jewel, Key West. 

“I don’t think people realize how vulnerable Florida is,” Harold R. Wanless, the chairman of the geological sciences department at the University of Miami, said in an interview last week. “We’re going to get four or five or six feet of water, or more, by the end of the century. You have to wake up to the reality of what’s coming.” 

Concern about rising seas is stirring not only in the halls of academia but also in local governments along the state’s southeastern coast.  The four counties there — Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach, with a combined population of 5.6 million — have formed an alliance to figure out solutions.

Much of Florida’s 1,197-mile coastline is only a few feet above the current sea level, and billions of dollars’ worth of buildings, roads and other infrastructure lies on highly porous limestone that leaches water like a sponge. 

But while officials here and in other coastal cities, many of whom attended a two-day conference on climate change last week in Fort Lauderdale, have begun to address the problem, the issue has gotten little traction among state legislators in Tallahassee. 

The issue appears to be similarly opaque to segments of the community — business, real estate, tourism — that have a vested interest in protecting South Florida’s bustling economy.

Ultimately, he said, the most salient indicator of the crisis will be the insurance industry’s refusal to handle risk in coastal areas here and around the country that are deemed too exposed to rising seas. 

“People tend to underestimate the gravity here, I think, because it sounds far off,” said Ben Strauss, the director of the Program on Sea Level Rise at Climate Central, an independent organization of scientists. “People are starting to tune in, but it’s not front and center. Miami is a boom town now, but in the future that I’m very confident will come, it will be obvious to everyone that the sea is marching inland and it’s not going to stop.” 

The effects on real estate value alone could be devastating, Mr. Strauss said. His research shows that there is about $156 billion worth of property, and 300,000 homes, on 2,120 square miles of land that is less than three feet above the high tide line in Florida.

Professor Wanless insists that no amount of engineering proposals will stop the onslaught of the seas. “At two to three feet, we start to lose everything,” he said.  The only answer, he said, is to consider drastic measures like establishing a moratorium on development along coastal areas and to compel residents whose homes are threatened to move inland.

Local officials say they are doing what they can. Jason King, a consultant for the Seven50 Southeast Florida Prosperity Plan, an economic blueprint for seven southeastern counties over the next half-century, said it proposed further replenishing of beaches and mangrove forests, raising roads, and building flood-control gates, backflow preventers and higher sea walls. 

Officials here are seeking advice from the Netherlands, famous for its highly effective levees and dikes, but the very different topography of Miami Beach and its sister coastal cities does not lend itself to the fixes engineered by the Dutch. 

It disturbs me to no end that the GOP - including the Virginia GOP -  continues to pretend the problem doesn't exist.

The Frightening Number of Americans Who Believe the Earth is only 6,000 Years Old

If one wants a good place to start in determining why America is so beleaguered with problems it might be the idiocy of much of the American populace who believe the Bible and say that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.  As the rest of the world modernizes and moves to embrace the 21st century,  Gallop reports that "forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”  Why not just get in line for a lobotomy?!  It's frightening and suggests that part of America's decline stems for the ignorance of much of the populace.  True, historically other nations once held similar beliefs, but outside of backward regions, most of the world has moved on to embrace science and knowledge.  Even if the number of creationists is significantly lower than the 46% figure, it underscores the toxic influence that conservative Christians continue to exert on the nation. Not so for millions of Americans.  Here are excerpts from a piece in The Raw Story:

For thirty years, Gallup has been asking Americans their views about evolution and human beings, and the results have been remarkably consistent and stable. Last year, Gallup once again reported that nearly half of the country believe the Biblical version of events: “Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”

The Bible doesn’t actually say how long ago the account of creation in the book of Genesis was supposed to have taken place. But in 1650, Church of Ireland Archbishop James Ussher used the stories of the Old Testament to calculate that the world had been created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. His wasn’t the only calculus based on the Bible, but it became the most popular and is still influential with creationists today.

And according to Gallup, that calculation is still so popular, nearly half of America believes it describes the age of the earth.

But Josh Rosenau, with the National Center for Science Education, wrote this week that very different results emerge when slight changes are made to the questions that Gallup asks, and the actual number of “young-earth creationists” in the U.S. is probably much lower than Gallup claims.

[I]f Americans are asked if they believe whether plants and animals have evolved over millions of years (regardless of the reason why), a substantially higher number say yes — 60 percent did in a 2009 Pew poll, for example.

Removing religious context and human origins, people are much less likely to say that we’re living on a young earth. In another 2009 survey, only 18 percent agreed with the statement that “the earth is less than 10,000 years old,” for example.

But Rosenau thinks the number of truly committed young-earth creationists is even smaller than that.

. . . .   “In short, then, the hard core of young-earth creationists represents at most one in ten Americans — maybe about 31 million people — with another quarter favoring creationism but not necessarily committed to a young earth,” Rosenau concludes. “One or two in ten seem firmly committed to evolution, and another third leans heavily toward evolution. About a third of the public in the middle are open to evolution, but feel strongly that a god or gods must have been involved somehow, and wind up in different camps depending how a given poll is worded.”

True, these certins have the right to believe whatever they want, but the larger questions is why do the media and politicians give undeserved deference to such idiocy?

Mark Herring Now Within 17 Votes of Obenshain

If people think that their vote doesn't matter or count, the Virginia Attorney General race underscores the foolishness of such thinking.  As the counting of provisional ballots and absentee ballots continues, Mark Herring is now down only by 17 points from Ken Cuccinelli clone, Mark Obenshain.  Clearly, EVERY vote counts.  Hopefully, as the counting continues enough votes will be found to put Mark Herring over the top.  Here are excerpts from the Richmond Times Dispatch:

The latest count from the Virginia State Board of Elections shows Republican Mark D. Obenshain with a 17-vote edge over Democrat Mark R. Herring in the Virginia attorney general's race.

According to a tally posted this morning on the board's website, Obenshain has 1,103,443 votes. Herring has 1,103,426.

The updated totals reflect the counting of provisional ballots in the aftermath of Tuesday's general election, a tally that is not yet complete across Virginia.

With the post-election shifting of numbers _ Obenshain's apparent lead grew to more than 1,200 votes late last week _ the election that now seems likely headed for an official recount. That would mean Virginia voters won't know who their next attorney general is until next month.

The GOP's War on Maternity Coverage

The Republican Party claims to be pro-life and to support "family values" yet one aspect of its war against the Affordable Health Care Act is the requirement that health care policies include maternity coverage.  To me, it's yet another example of GOP hypocrisy much akin to the rabid "pro-life" crowd that love fetuses until they are born after which they don't give a damn about poor children.  It's one reason I hold these people in open contempt.  They don't practice what they preach and while they claim to be concerned about the unborn, all concern evaporates once children are born.  The same holds true with this opposition to maternity coverage which would help improve the odds that children are born healthy.  Here are highlights from a Washington Post column that looks at this GOP/Christofascist hypocrisy:

If you’re a conservative strongly opposed to abortion, shouldn’t you want to give all the help you can to women who want to bring their children into the world? In particular, wouldn’t you hope they’d get the proper medical attention during and after their pregnancy?

This would seem a safe assumption, which is why it ought to be astonishing that conservatives are positively obsessed with trashing the Affordable Care Act’s regulation requiring insurance policies to include maternity coverage.

[C]ritics of Obamacare apparently think there is something particularly odious when a person who might not have a baby pays premiums to assist someone who does. It’s true that men cannot have babies, although it is worth mentioning that they do play a rather important role in their creation. In any event, it is hardly very radical to argue that society is better off when kids are born healthy to healthy moms.

Yet the conservatives’ ire over this issue knows no bounds.   “And so what if a health policy lacks maternity care?” wrote Deroy Murdoch on National Review’s Web site , the italics on that impatient “so what” being his. “Not all women want to bear more children — or any children at all. . . . And how about lesbians who do not want kids, and are highly unlikely to become pregnant accidentally?” It’s touching, actually, to see such concern for lesbians in a conservative publication.

On “Fox News Sunday” this month, host Chris Wallace was very worked up as he pressed Zeke Emanuel, a former health-care adviser to President Obama, over how unfair it is that a single woman with a 24-year-old son would be forced to pay for such coverage.

Who knew that supporting motherhood was suddenly controversial?

All of which ought to present members of the right-to-life movement with a challenge. In the name of consistency, they need to break with their conservative allies and insist that maternity coverage be included in all health-care plans. Shouldn’t those who want to prevent abortion be in the forefront of making the case that a woman will be far more likely to choose to have her baby if she knows that both she and her child will get regular medical attention?

For too many politicians on the right, what they say about abortion is at odds with what they say about so many other issues. They speak with great concern and compassion for the unborn, and I respect that.
[C]onservatives would make abortion illegal and leave it at that. Thus we have the spectacle in Texas of right-wing politicians trying to make it as difficult as possible for a woman to obtain an abortion while proudly blocking the state’s participation in the expansion of Medicaid to cover the near-poor. Does it serve the cause of life to keep more than 1.8 million Texans from getting health insurance? 

If health coverage — yes, including maternity care — isn’t a right-to-life issue, I don’t know what is. 

Greed, hypocrisy and indifference towards others - if not open hatred - are key attributes of today's GOP and its supporters among the "godly Christian" folk. 

NOM Continues to Prove Itself a Hate Group, Not a "protector of Marriage"

Feel the Christian Love?

As often noted on this blog, no one lies more consistently than the self-congratulatory "godly Christian" crowd.  Especially those involved in "family values" organizations or  groups claiming to be motivated solely by a desire to "protect the sanctity of marriage."  The National Organization for Marriage ("NOM") is a case in point.  Instead of focusing on marriage, NOM has been documented to have (i) sought to spread hate and discord between blacks and gays, (ii) supported fraudulent and discredited "ex-gay" therapy, (iii) worked to breed homophobia and the persecution of gays in Russia, and (iv) pretty much repeated every anti-gay lie imaginable.  In the process, of course, NOM has totally ignored the mess heterosexuals have made of marriage.   Jeremy Hooper at Good As You reports on NOM's latest activities to sabotage passage of ENDA that make it clear that NOM is really just another virulent anti-gay hate group.  Any claims to the contrary are simply lies.  Here are excerpts:

The National Organization For Marriage, a once pragmatic organization that was very protective of the idea that it is simply a "traditional marriage" rather than an animus-driven anti-LGBT group, is continue its drift toward full-blown extremism. In yet another piece pertaining to the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, NOM president Brian Brown, who is on apparent break from stirring up ill feelings toward LGBT people in Russia, goes after the U.S. Senate (and particularly the ten Republicans who backed ENDA) for daring to believe that LGBT workers should be judged on the basis of their work performance rather than who they are or who they love:  

"We are very disappointed by the Senate's passage of this bill," said Brian Brown, NOM's President. "While protecting people against discrimination is a very important goal, this legislation is problematic because of its broad and unclear definitions. Concepts like 'sexual orientation' and 'gender identity' are too vague to be a basis for such a law which could lead to individuals facing reprisals or even criminal action simply for expressing their values in the workplace."

"We are disappointed with the Republican Senators who voted for this bill for failing to see its dangerous implications for pro-family Americans. Many of these Senators' constituents hold to traditional values like the belief in marriage as the union of one man and one woman, but ENDA could be a Trojan horse that enables the marriage redefinition agenda to be forced on the entire nation through the courts."

"We will be asking all of NOM's supporters to contact the House of Representatives urging that they reject ENDA," Brown said.

I "love" how sexual orientation and gender identity are supposedly vague, yet Brian thinks the completely chosen, diverse, fluctuating concept of faith is to be protected above all else (*including in workplace protection, where religion is, in fact, protected under federal law).

Now that the cat is so fully out of the bag, we'll have to wait and see if the "for marriage" organization finally changes its name to reflect is patently obvious cause "for discrimination. NOD does have a certain ring to it.

Jeremy is correct.  NOM's real goal is to keep LGBT Americans inferior under the law and to give bigots who hide under the banner of religious freedom to discriminate and disseminate hat at will.   Oh, and let's not forget that Brown and similar hate merchants are pulling down nice salaries well into the six figures by marketing hatred.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Federal Court Upholds New Jersey Ban on "Ex-Gay" Therapy for Minors

A federal judge upheld New Jersey's law banning therapist from subjecting minors to fraudulent "ex-gay" therapy, rejecting claims that the ban violates the rights of free speech and religious expression.   The law protects minors from being forced to undergo dangerous and bogus "therapy" by their self-centered and often religiously extreme parents.  Similar laws need to be enacted nationwide just as every state has laws against other forms of child abuse.  I applaud the ruling because it recognizes that children have rights and should not be treated as chattel belonging to parents.  The National Center for Lesbian Rights has a press release detailing the court's ruling.  Here are highlights:

(Trenton, NJ, November 8, 2013)—Today, Judge Freda Wolfson of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey upheld a 2013 New Jersey law prohibiting licensed therapists from attempting to change the sexual orientation or gender identity or expression of a patient under 18 years old. The ruling dismissed a legal challenge to the law filed on behalf of therapists who wish to engage in these dangerous and long-discredited practices. The judge also granted a request by Garden State Equality, the state’s largest civil rights organization and the leading organization supporting passage of the law, to intervene in the case in defense of the law.

In today’s ruling, Judge Wolfson concluded that the New Jersey law “restricts neither speech nor religious expression.”  She noted that the therapists’ challenge to the law “runs counter to the longstanding principle that a state generally may enact laws rationally regulating professionals, including those providing medicine and mental health services.”

In August, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a decision upholding a similar law in California protecting youth from these harmful practices by licensed therapists.  Judge Wolfson’s decision applied similar reasoning in ruling that the New Jersey statute does not violate therapists’ constitutional rights.

NCLR Legal Director Shannon Minter, who represents Garden State Equality in the case, added: “This law protects youth from practices that have been rejected by all leading medical and mental health professional organizations. The court issued a clear and thorough decision explaining that state-licensed therapists do not have a constitutional right to engage in discredited practices that do not improve patients’ health and put young people at risk of severe harm, including depression and suicide.”

Far Right Catholics Not Pleased with Pope Francis

Having grown up Catholic in the 1950's and 1960's I certainly had in depth exposure to far right elements of Roman Catholicism and people who seemingly put legalism and a desire to look down on others far ahead of the message of the Gospels in terms of love for others, helping the poor and hungry, etc.  This sick element in the Catholic Church continues to exist, including within the ranks of the morally bankrupt hierarchy which happily engaged in the worldwide sex abuse scandal cover up.  While no formal or official changes have yet occurred in the Church's dogma, the very different tone being set by Pope Francis - especially in contrast to that set by Nazi Pope, Benedict XVI - is not welcome in far rights circles of the Church.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the unhappiness with Francis among those who are, in my view, modern day Pharisees like so many "conservative Christians."  Here are highlights:

SMYRNA, Ga. — When Pope Francis was elected in March, Bridget Kurt received a small prayer card with his picture at her church and put it up on her refrigerator at home, next to pictures of her friends and her favorite saints.

She is a regular attender of Mass, a longtime stalwart in her church’s anti-abortion movement and a believer that all the church’s doctrines are true and beautiful and should be obeyed. She loved the last two popes, and keeps a scrapbook with memorabilia from her road trip to Denver in 1993 to see Pope John Paul II at World Youth Day. 

But Ms. Kurt recently took the Pope Francis prayer card down and threw it away.  "It seems he’s focusing on bringing back the left that’s fallen away, but what about the conservatives?" . . . . 

Now I feel kind of thrown under the bus.” 

In the eight months since he became pope, Francis has won affection worldwide for his humble mien and common touch. His approval numbers are skyrocketing. Even atheists are applauding.

But not everyone is so enchanted. Some Catholics in the church’s conservative wing in the United States say Francis has left them feeling abandoned and deeply unsettled. On the Internet and in conversations among themselves, they despair that after 35 years in which the previous popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, drew clear boundaries between right and wrong, Francis is muddying Catholic doctrine to appeal to the broadest possible audience. 

They were particularly alarmed when he told a prominent Italian atheist in an interview published in October, and translated into English, that “everyone has his own idea of good and evil” and that everyone should “follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them” — a remark that many conservatives interpreted as appearing to condone relativism. He called proselytizing “solemn nonsense.” 

They were shocked when they saw that Francis said in the interview that “the most serious of the evils” today are “youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old.” It compounded the chagrin after he said in an earlier interview that he had intentionally “not spoken much” about abortion, same-sex marriage or contraception because the church could not be “obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines.”

Steve Skojec, the vice president of a real estate firm in Virginia and a blogger who has written for several conservative Catholic websites, wrote of Francis’ statements: “Are they explicitly heretical? No. Are they dangerously close? Absolutely.

“There have been bad popes in the history of the church,” Mr. Skojec said. “Popes that murdered, popes that had mistresses. I’m not saying Pope Francis is terrible, but there’s no divine protection that keeps him from being the type of guy who with subtlety undermines the teachings of the church to bring about a different vision.” 

Most American Catholics do not share Mr. Skojec’s objections. A poll released last month by Quinnipiac University found that two in three agreed with Francis that the church was too “obsessed” with a few issues. 

Some conservative Catholics are sharing prophecies online that foretell of tribulations for the church. In one, an Irish woman predicted that Benedict would be held hostage. Others cite the German mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, who wrote of a “relationship between two popes,” one who “lives in a palace other than before,” which some now see as a reference to Benedict, who resigned as pope early this year but still lives in Vatican City. During this time there arises a “false church of darkness.” 

Will the GOP Establishment Declare War on the Tea Party?

It is continuing to watch the blame game in the wake of the GOP's losses in Virginia last Tuesday.  The lunatic Christofascist/Tea Party base of the Virginia GOP refuses to admit that nominating extreme candidates id the ultimate reason for their losses or that, had the Democrats had a strong gubernatorial candidate without Terry McAuliffe's perceived baggage, the losses would have been far worse.  Instead, the Bible thumpers and Tea Party crackpots are blaming the so-called GOP establishment - even though many of the most critical Tea Party organizations contributed little or no money to dream ticket of The Family Foundation theocrats.  Here are excerpts from a piece in Time:

Since Republicans lost Virginia’s gubernatorial election Nov. 5, conservative and Tea Party groups have rushed to pin the blame on the party’s establishment, which reduced its financial support in the final weeks of the race. More money, they argue, may have made the difference in Ken Cuccinelli’s close loss to Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

But many of the most vocal critics of mainstream Republicans never actually contributed to Cuccinelli’s campaign.

In an email to supporters in the days before the election, the National Organization for Marriage blasted national Republicans and warned that a Cuccinelli defeat would be used to marginalize the conservative grassroots. Yet the organization spent under $2,000 on this year’s race, according to the latest Virginia campaign finance reports.

The Tea Party Patriots, another leading grassroots conservative organization, was similarly critical of party leaders. “Because the Republican establishment cut funding to its own candidate by two thirds from the 2009 election they robbed the people of Virginia of the good governor they almost had,” Jenny Beth Martin, the group’s national coordinator, said in a statement last week.

Neither the Tea Party Patriots nor Martin appear in campaign finance records as having given to Cuccinelli. 

Rush Limbaugh said the GOP “betrayed” Cuccinelli and fellow conservative radio personality Mark Levin called it “RINO sabotage,” a derisive reference to moderates considered “Republicans in name only.” Neither man is listed as a donor in Cuccinelli’s campaign filings.  The same pattern held for other establishment critics.

Fortunately, the GOP establishment has seemingly had about enough of the Christofascist and Tea Party elements (who are largely one and the same).  Here are excerpts from a piece in the Washington Post:

Those results convinced some establishment Republicans that they need to confront the GOP’s conservative base more aggressively, both as a way to protect the candidacies of mainstream conservatives and to deflect damaging policy proposals that have limited appeal beyond far-right conservatives from advancing in Washington.

This counterinsurgency effort emerged recently after the party’s establishment spent the past three years tolerating the tea party movement on the assumption that it was a fad that would fade away.

Instead, those Republicans aligned with the tea party grew more forceful and drove a strategy that led to the partial government shutdown in October. The outside constellation of Washington-based groups that funded these arch-conservative campaigns has helped line up a historically large contingent of primary challengers to Senate incumbents in 2014.

The simmering feud between the tea party and the GOP establishment reached a boil last month when the Senate Conservatives Fund endorsed the primary opponent of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). That move unleashed a new level of vitriol from establishment figures at those outside groups, and some worry that the infighting will hurt Republicans in upcoming elections.

Hatch all but endorsed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.) for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination after Christie’s landslide reelection Tuesday in a Democratic-leaning state. Hatch lamented that the GOP might be “too stupid” and push Christie away because the governor does not embrace tea party tactics.

In recent years, the NRSC [National Republican Senatorial Committee] has stayed out of most primaries only to watch Republican chances in the general election evaporate as contentious primaries produced what they regard as less-than-desirable candidates. This time, Collins said, his group is in the “wins business” and will try to knock out some candidates if it means long-term victory.

“One of our post-election takeaways was, we need to be more involved in primaries,” said Scott Reed, political adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  Byrne won narrowly, sounding what some described as a wake-up call.

“When somebody runs a campaign still saying that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, that ought to be the first clue — probably the only clue you need — that we probably ought to support the other guy,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a 12-year House veteran who won his Senate seat after a contested primary last year.

It will be sweet to watch the intra-party bloodbath continue.  The Christofascists and Tea Party are a cancer that needs to be removed from relevance in the GOP.