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Flint Michigan's Poisoned Water - the Result of Txoc Cnservative Ideology

Unless you are living under a rock, you have likely heard of the crisis in Flint, Michigan where the city water supply is laced with lead and threatening the lives and health of the city's citizens, especially the children.  The nightmare is the logical culmination of right wing ideology where government spending and government regulations are the biggest threat facing Americans today.  Especially if the beneficiaries of such spending are deemed "other" - read black, Hispanic, non-white LGBT, and, the horror, non-Christian.  Shockingly, some Republicans have tried to blame the Flint fiasco on "too many government regulations."  Paul Krugman had a piece in yesterday's New York Times that properly laid the disaster at the feet of conservative extremists who now dominate the GOP.  Here are column highlights:

What we know so far is that in 2014 the city’s emergency manager — appointed by Rick Snyder, the state’s Republican governor — decided to switch to an unsafe water source, with lead contamination and more, in order to save money. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that state officials knew that they were damaging public health, putting children in particular at risk, even as they stonewalled both residents and health experts.

This story — America in the 21st century, and you can trust neither the water nor what officials say about it — would be a horrifying outrage even if it were an accident or an isolated instance of bad policy. But it isn’t. On the contrary, the nightmare in Flint reflects the resurgence in American politics of exactly the same attitudes that led to London’s Great Stink more than a century and a half ago.

In the modern world, much government spending goes to social insurance programs — things like Social Security, Medicare and so on, that are supposed to protect citizens from the misfortunes of life. Such spending is the subject of fierce political debate, and understandably so.

There should, however, be much less debate about spending on what Econ 101 calls public goods — things that benefit everyone and can’t be provided by the private sector. Yes, we can differ over exactly how big a military we need or how dense and well-maintained the road network should be, but you wouldn’t expect controversy about spending enough to provide key public goods like basic education or safe drinking water.

Yet a funny thing has happened as hard-line conservatives have taken over many U.S. state governments. . . . . . Not surprisingly, they have sought to cut social insurance spending on the poor. In fact, many state governments dislike spending on the poor so much that they are rejecting a Medicaid expansion that wouldn’t cost them anything, because it’s federally financed. But what we also see is extreme penny pinching on public goods.

 It’s easy to come up with examples. Kansas, which made headlines with its failed strategy of cutting taxes in the expectation of an economic miracle, has tried to close the resulting budget gap largely with cuts in education. North Carolina has also imposed drastic cuts on schools.

Public construction spending as a share of national income has fallen sharply in recent years, reflecting cutbacks by state and local governments that are ever less interested in providing public goods for the future. And this includes sharp cuts in spending on water supply.

What we see in Flint is an all too typically American situation of (literally) poisonous interaction between ideology and race, in which small-government extremists are empowered by the sense of too many voters that good government is simply a giveaway to Those People.

But you can’t understand what happened in Flint, and what will happen in many other places if current trends continue, without understanding the ideology that made the disaster possible.

 Governor Snyder needs to be removed from office, as do others who allowed this disaster to happen.  Meanwhile, what I find most shocking is that far right conservatives are incapable of seeming common humanity in others unless they look just like them and cling to the same mythical religious beliefs.  Worse yet, these "conservatives" likely go to church on Sundays and congratulate themselves on their godliness and piety.  I think I am going to vomit simply thinking of these foul people.

Grand Jury Investigating Planned Parenthood Indicts Makers Of Doctored Videos

Indicted liar David Daleiden

As has been noted many timers on this blog, literally no one lies more than the "godly Christian" crowd.  Indeed, if a lie furthers their effort to force their ignorance embracing beliefs on all of society, these people lie without blinking an eye.  Their, hypocrisy, of course, is off the charts as they claim to worship the Bible and the Ten Commandments out of one side of their mouths while they ignore their precepts and lie through their teeth.  In an interesting twist of events, a grand jury in Texas seemingly recognized this reality and rather than indict Planned Parenthood which it had been assemble to investigate instead indicted two of the leaders of the extremist Christian - using the term Christian very loosely, of course - for the fraudulent videos they concocted to smear Planned Parenthood.  As I have said before, decent moral people need to shun the self-anointed godly folk and the tawdry whores in the Republican Party who prostitute themselves to these vile people.  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at this delicious turn of events.  Here are article highlights:

A Texas grand jury that was investigating Planned Parenthood just opted to not indict the women's reproductive health care provider. Instead, it has handed down indictments for two of the makers of the controversial videos.

David Daleiden (photo), the founder of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), an anti-choice group that worked with Republican members of Congress for over a year to create the videos and create a marketing plan to release them, and another activist, have been indicted.

"Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record and a misdemeanor count of related to purchasing human organs. Another activist was also indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record," the Associated Press just reported.

The second person indicted is Sandra Merritt, also of the CMP. Merritt is also "the founder and CEO of BioMax, the sham tissue procurement company created by the Center to gain entry into abortion clinics and medical conferences," the Dallas Morning News adds.

Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson "said the grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing."

The videos are highly and selectively edited, and have been used as "evidence" by anti-abortion activists and anti-choice conservatives to fraudulently claim "Planned Parenthood sells aborted baby parts."

Every state that has investigated Planned Parenthood in response to the videos has found no evidence of wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.

"If convicted of the top charge, Daleiden and Merritt could face up to 20 years behind bars," Buzzfeed reports.

Things are truly to a point where I have no desire to identify myself as a Christian.   Indeed, when I meet someone who starts telling me about their deep religious faith, I now assume that they are either (i) a truly horrible person, and/or (ii) a complete idiot and mental midget.   These folks are killing the Christian "brand" which is a positive development for mankind.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

Italy’s Gay Rights Showdown with the Vatican

For all those in the LGBT community who nearly had the vapors over Pope Francis' supposedly kinder and more accepting approach to LGBT individuals, look no farther than Italy to see the Catholic Church's real attitude towards gays.  With the Italian parliament now considering same sex partnership legislation, the Church is fighting tooth and claw to oppose any legislation that would grant gays increased rights.  Events in Italy mirror the Church's anti-gay efforts in Slovenia and across the globe where  keeping LGBT individuals third class citizens - or less - is a Church priority even as the cover up of sex crimes against children and youths continues. Meanwhile, Italy now finds itself as the last western European nation where religion still trumps equality under the civil laws.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the contest in Italy.  Here are excerpts:

ROME — Same-sex couples in Italy might as well be invisible. They cannot adopt children. They cannot inherit pensions or share state-funded benefits. They are not recognized as legal couples for the purpose of tax breaks. They cannot even visit each other if one partner is in the intensive care unit, or on his or her death bed, in a public hospital, no matter how long they may have been together — even if they were married legally in another country. But all that may soon change. 

Italy is the last major European nation with a complete blind spot when it comes to recognizing same-sex couples as legal partners. Last June, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy was in “breach of human rights” because it offered no option that would allow same-sex partners to share the same benefits as straight partners, specifically citing adoption, shared pension benefits, and tax breaks as key rights that are missing. 

On Jan. 28, Italy’s Senate will start debating the so-called Cirinna law, named after Monica Cirinna, the senator from Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party who officially introduced the bill last October. 

Renzi has made the recognition of civil unions a priority in his premiership and vows to pass the bill into law. “We can hardly think we can go to Europe beating our drum about immigration or the deficit limit, and then be last in the line when it comes to human rights," Cirinna told Reuters last week. "But we live under the shadow of the Vatican dome and Catholicism here is different than in other countries. It is a presence."

[T]he bill is simply about allowing same-sex couples the right to be recognized the same way non-married straight couples are, as a “social formation” or life-long partnership that isn’t bound by a marriage certificate, much as France has done with its PACS (civil solidarity pacts) for more than 15 years.  

One reason it has taken so long to get such a bill to a vote is because of the need to determine what exactly to call the same-sex unions to avoid any connotation of marriage. Meanwhile, naysayers have threatened to tack on thousands of amendments. The right-wing Nuovo Centro Destra or New Center Right party run by Angelino Alfano, Silvio Berlusconi’s former wingman, has had considerable success delaying the bill’s progress. 
 

Alfano, who recently said the use of surrogate mothers should be treated as a sex crime, is not-so-subtly backed by several high ranking Catholic cardinals, who have managed to keep this law out of parliament for years.

Late last year at the Vatican’s Synod on the Family under Pope Francis, those in attendance agreed that while gays are welcome in the Church pews, they will never be allowed to walk down the aisle. 

“Regarding proposals to place unions of homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family” the synod fathers wrote in their final document.

 

On Saturday, a coalition of gay-rights groups held demonstrations in more than 80 public squares across Italy under the banner “Svegliati Italia,” or “Wake up Italy.” Anyone attending was asked to bring alarm clocks and timers as props to make the wake-up point. 

“The law, if passed, will change the lives of many gay and lesbian people, and especially their children, whose lives it will undoubtedly improve,” says Arcigay’s Piazzoni. “We need to give people back their dignity to remind our government that their objective at hand is to ensure equality for all, a goal that so far remains elusive.” 

But not to be outdone, Italy’s Catholic bishops are holding their own demonstration on Jan. 30 under the banner “Family Day” . . .

The bill debate kicks off on Jan. 28, and, barring unforeseen delays, could come to a vote within a week. If it passes in any form, which it surely should, it will be seen as a major defeat to the conservatives of the Catholic church. And even if it passes as just a shell of its original incarnation, it will be seen as a worthy compromise by many in the LGTB community—a necessary first step toward equality for all. 

Tina Fey Reminds Us of Sarah Palin's [and the GOP's] Idiocy

For those who missed it, Tina Fey returned to Saturday Night Liver last night to reprise role as idiot of the North, Sarah Palin.  The only positive part of Palin's return to media coverage is the unleashing of Fey to remind us of the abject stupidity and idiocy of Palin and her followers.  Hollywood Life described it as follows:

Sarah Palin made a huge splash in the media this week, after endorsing Donald Trump. That’s not all. She also got up on stage and delivered one of the wackiest and absurd speeches we’ve ever heard. Seriously, it was comedic gold — and Tina knew that. Right off the bat, Tina had us laughing so hard. “She’s fun, she says whatever she wants!”

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Virginia Gave Birth to Gay Marriage in the South

Being gay has changed a lot since I "came out" and moved out of the family home in 2002.  Gay sex no longer exposes one to a potential felony conviction, same sex couples can now marry, and gay couples are being welcomed as members in local yacht and country clubs.   Much still needs to be done to end the lack of non-discrimination protections in employment, housing and public accommodations.  On the same sex marriage front, I had a front row seat if you will since the lead plaintiffs in the marriage litigation were personal friends.  The other strange twist was that David Oakley, the attorney representing the Norfolk Circuit Court Clerk, was also someone I knew both socially and professionally.  He did not take kindly to some of my comments on this blog and argued that he was involved in the case to ultimately have the issue resolved, not because he was anti-gay.  He has a guest editorial piece in the Virginian Pilot today that looks at this sea change for Virginia and the South.  Here are excerpts:

THE COURAGE shown by a few Virginians led our commonwealth to become the first Southern state to allow gay marriage, but the debate continues to define the parameters of Virginia law.

It all started on what was otherwise an ordinary day in the office of George Schaefer, the Norfolk Circuit Court clerk, when Timothy Bostic and Tony London asked for a marriage license.

Like others before them, they were politely and respectfully turned down because the Virginia Constitution allowed marriage only between one man and one woman. Yet, Bostic and London were the first gay couple ready to push forward, armed with a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court [the Windsor ruling]. That decision came close to, but ultimately deferred ruling on, whether same-sex marriage was protected by the Constitution — one of the defining social issues of the times.

It took courage of the Norfolk parties, whose personal and professional lives were subjected to intense scrutiny. Bostic and London chose to pursue their case in the federal court system knowing that many disagreed with their goal. Virginia’s newly elected attorney general, Mark Herring, showed courage in the face of backlash when he changed his position and vigorously argued to strike down Virginia’s marriage laws as unconstitutional.

Schaefer, an elected official, was now a necessary party to the case.  If he had refused to defend Virginia’s marriage laws as they existed, the courts would have lacked what is known as a justiciable issue. In other words, without a party to prosecute and defend both sides of an issue, the courts will not weigh in. . . . . Thus, he stood his ground and defended Virginia’s ban on gay marriage, asserting it was the commonwealth’s right to define marriage as voted upon by its citizens.

The presiding U.S. District judge was criticized by many in the days following her historic ruling. But her ruling was clear: Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the U.S. Constitution.

The split in opinion among the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal’s three-judge panel showed the battle was still unsettled; not everyone agreed. But the door had swung open to allow same-sex marriage in the Southern states. The public debate was no longer theoretical. Same-sex marriage arrived in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina. 

Recently, Judge Steven C. Frucci of the Virginia Beach Circuit Court was asked to rule in a custody dispute between two women going through a divorce.   Just a short time ago, the non-biological parent in that relationship would not have had custody or visitation rights, but Fruicci correctly ruled that today she does.

In the end, David Oakley was right and with his assistance, George Schaefer, the Norfolk Circuit Court Clerk, and Tim Bostic and Tony London helped force the courts to strike down unconstitutional laws.

Anti-intellectual Religious Wing-Nuts Run the GOP

The so-called GOP establishment - namely, money men on Wall Street and pundits who like to contemplate their navels - like to think that they still run the Republican Party, but those days are over as evidenced by the rise of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  Instead, the party is ow run by ignorance embracing religious fanatics, people the country club Republicans of my parents generation would have viewed with horror and deemed socially unacceptable. Why anyone in this segment of society has remained in the GOP is baffling to me. A piece in Salon looks at the evil posed by religion.  While the focus applies to Islam, the warning and call to opposition applies to virulent forms of Christianity now so favored by the Republican Party which has been taken over by religious fanatics and those who take pride in their ignorance.  Here are highlights:

Faith-inspired anarchy and bloodshed continue to spread around the globe, with no letup in sight.

January has proved especially sanguinary. Three days after President Obama’s State of the Union reminder to us all that he took out Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida (specifically, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) sprang back into action and launched one of its most lethal assaults in recent years, laying siege to a hotel in the West African country of Burkina Faso, killing 30, injuring 156, and taking hostage 176.

Yet here at home . . . . Those same faith-crazed seditionists are more entrenched than ever, and now pledge to “never, ever” return the Malheur facilities to the federal government. This they do without the slightest resistance from Washington – a matter that has irked Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown, who has called on the federal government to “move quickly to end the occupation and hold all of the wrongdoers accountable.”

In sum, these are times that try rationalists’ souls. Yet our politicians are offering precious little frank discourse on the one thing inspiring all the above-mentioned instances of murder and mayhem – religion. Which is to say, a congeries of ideologies mandating, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, belief in fantastic, often ludicrous, unverifiable assertions about the cosmos and mankind’s place in it.

Such anti-intellectual constructs would attract scorn and derision were they to obtain in any other sphere of human endeavor. Take science. If I were to proclaim, without offering a whit of proof, that the law of gravity does not apply to me, that I disobey it at will, that I have always disobeyed it, and that I demand all and sundry accept the veracity of my absurd proclamation, and respect it, cherish it, and even kill in its name, I would rightly be thought insane. 

Thomas Paine said, “The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.” He was right. I would, though, rephrase and update his statement: Those who, despite the torrents of evidence flowing forth from biology, physics and the other natural sciences, persist in believing the preposterous postulates of Abrahamic religions stand in urgent need of an intervention consisting of one treatment: forthright free speech from rationalists about their cherished delusions. We and our planet have ever less and less time to spare.

This question would be more amenable to resolution if the president would just come clean and state, flat-out, that the “killers and fanatics” of ISIS are implementing a literalist interpretation of the Quran, with strong emphasis on jihad and martyrdom, and that this poses a huge problem for us all today, one we need to discuss openly.

We need to have a candid conversation about this and recognize that there is a correlation between scripture and [the Islamic State] . . . . We cannot shoot our way out of this.” Shifting the blame from Islamic doctrine to a bunch of armed crazies amounts to a slap in the face of those, like Nawaz, who are trying to reform the religion from within.

The overarching problem is, yes, religion, and the determination of almost everyone in power to accord it respect. But posit a mass outbreak of atheism in the Middle East, and what would happen to ISIS? To the Sunni-Shia schism?

Such a turn of events is, yes, improbable. But as I proposed above, religion can be cured with rationalist free speech. We should begin therapy now. This means, for starters, the cessation, in public and private life, of respect for all faiths, including Islam. Nonbelievers should stop pussyfooting around the Abrahamic creeds’ manifold absurdities – including, inter alia, a metaphysical despot siring a kid with a hapless earthling virgin, the notion that our morality derives from a message supernaturally chiseled on slabs of stone, and that a member of our species soared heavenward on a winged ungulate – and let believers know what they really think, recalling, always, that they are helping them become the atheists of tomorrow.

For now, though, we do need Thomas Paine’s lunatic asylum. Potential inmates, to be sure, we have aplenty. But no matter how much damage the faith-deranged are doing these days, the rising tide of godlessness is with us.

We need to treat the deeply religious as mental patients in need of treatment and end all deference or politeness towards them.  Deferring to those who believe in myths and fantasies is no way to lead a 21st century superpower.   We are living in 2016, not 1016.

The RNC Sells its Soul to Trump

The moral corruption and retreat from sanity and decency of the Republican Party began years ago and ironically traces, in my view, to the rise of the "godly folks" in the party base.  The Christofascists, as I call them, who are neither sane nor decent people.  Hate, bigotry and a world view based on myths and - as one blogger friend puts it - belief in an imaginary invisible friend are now what drives the GOP and demagogues like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are the natural result of the party's throwing aside of logic, reason, and belief in science in favor of racism and superstition.  Now, even the RNC seems ready to put the final nails in the coffin of the party by signalling that it will sell itself to Trump and Trumpism.   A column in the Washington Post looks at this final surrender.  Here are excerpts:

Late Thursday night, National Review, the storied conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley, published an issue denouncing Donald Trump. . . . The Republican National Committee reacted swiftly — immediately revoking the permission it had given National Review to host a Republican presidential debate next month. 

That soft flapping sound you hear is the Grand Old Party waving the flag of surrender to Trump. Party elites — what’s left of the now-derided “establishment” — are acquiescing to the once inconceivable: that a xenophobic and bigoted showman is now the face of the Republican Party and of American conservatism. 

In recent days, influential Republicans including Bob Dole, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Rupert Murdoch and, as my Post colleagues reported, Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Peter King (N.Y.) have made noises about being able to stomach Trump. Republican donors are trying to insinuate themselves in the billionaire’s orbit. 

The Wall Street Journal editorial page had long criticized Trump’s candidacy, publishing an editorial in July arguing that the conservative media who applaud Trump “are hurting the cause.” The editors opined: “If Donald Trump becomes the voice of conservatives, conservatism will implode along with him.”

A week ago, the Journal reversed course. “Mr. Trump is a better politician than we ever imagined, and he is becoming a better candidate,” the editorialists wrote, speculating that “he might possibly be able to appeal to a larger set of voters than he has so far.”

[H]ow do you un-ring all these bells? Trump has in word and deed built his candidacy by antagonizing Latinos and Muslims, immigrants and women, Jews and African Americans, Asian Americans and the disabled. And if he walked away from his vows to deport 11 million illegal immigrants and to block Muslims from coming into the United States, he’d abandon the source of his power: the rage of angry, less-educated white men.

[T]he only thing more likely to devastate the Republican Party and the conservative movement than a Trump wipeout in November would be a Trump victory. Either way, he’d cement the Republican Party’s long-term demographic problems and bind conservatism to bigotry and nativism.

 

This is why I wonder about the self-deception of those GOP elites now cozying up to Trump. . . . . If, in future years, Republicans and conservatives are called to explain how Trump happened, they might recall this: Good people could have stopped him, but they didn’t.

Once again we see the RNC looking for a current election cycle  victory with no thought to the long terms consequences.  This is how those who once would have been shunned and looked at as a form of contagion were welcomed into the GOP only to ultimately hijack the party. This is precisely how the GOP has come to be the party of insanity and hate.  The RNC and the so-called establishment have seemingly learned nothing.