Politics Archives - Page 28 of 32

Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay

Mitt Romney let religious right activists bully his campaign over its hiring of an openly gay foreign policy staffer, Richard Grenell. After the campaign froze him out of press briefings to quell the controversy, Grenell finally quit…, with no effort by the presumptive nominee to persuade him to stay.

In the “nobody said progress was linear” department, I note that in short order:
* Joe Biden Says He’s Comfortable with Gay Marriage, a remark which sent all the tea leaf watchers to ponder whether it was a “gaffe”
* US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Supports Gay Marriage
* Despite the pleas of good Christian folks such as this guy, the voters of North Carolina voted for constitutional Amendment 1, which not only reemphasizes an already codified law, which will also complicate the lives of unmarried heterosexual couples

* President Barack Obama said:
I was asked a direct question and gave a direct answer:
I’ve always believed that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally. I was reluctant to use the term marriage because of the very powerful traditions it evokes. And I thought civil union laws that conferred legal rights upon gay and lesbian couples were a solution.

But over the course of several years, I’ve talked to friends and family about this. I’ve thought about members of my staff in long-term, committed, same-sex relationships who are raising kids together. Through our efforts to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, I’ve gotten to know some of the gay and lesbian troops who are serving our country with honor and distinction.

What I’ve come to realize is that for loving, same-sex couples, the denial of marriage equality means that, in their eyes and the eyes of their children, they are still considered less than full citizens.

Even at my own dinner table, when I look at Sasha and Malia, who have friends whose parents are same-sex couples, I know it wouldn’t dawn on them that their friends’ parents should be treated differently.

So I decided it was time to affirm my personal belief that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

I respect the beliefs of others, and the right of religious institutions to act in accordance with their own doctrines. But I believe that in the eyes of the law, all Americans should be treated equally. And where states enact same-sex marriage, no federal act should invalidate them.

Even before the President’s latest pronouncement, Arthur had noted the President’s accomplishments on the GLBT front. Meanwhile, “Speaker John Boehner decided to use our tax dollars to intervene and stand up for DOMA to deny LGBT Americans the rights they deserve.” And only last week, Mitt Romney… let religious right activists bully his campaign over its hiring of an openly gay foreign policy staffer, Richard Grenell. After the campaign froze him out of press briefings to quell the controversy, Grenell finally quit…, with no effort by the presumptive nominee to persuade him to stay. If Grenell was qualified to hold the sensitive post of foreign policy spokesman, why did Romney cave instantly to demands from radio hosts and other ignorant bigots to let him go? I find that far more telling than the bullying incident from Romney’s youth.

I’m not a single-issue voter, but on this issue, the courage and cowardice are clear.

I’ve read suggestions that Charlotte, North Carolina should be stripped of the Democratic National Convention this summer, in response to the state’s vote; whether it should or shouldn’t, it’s not going to happen. Planning national conventions take months of preparation for security and other considerations.
**
Gay Pride events, mostly in June

*God v. Gay?, where I link to an important video piece

*Mark Evanier wrote: “My friend Shelly Goldstein…on this blog, writes a monthly column for a Gay Rights website arguing for more tolerance and also some of those ‘equality’ things like marriage. When I mentioned her gig to someone once, he furrowed his brow and said, ‘She’s not gay, is she?’ No, she’s not and it’s sad that there are some people out there who can’t seem to grasp the concept of taking a stand on behalf of others, as opposed to your own immediate self-interest.”

Glad To Be Gay- Tom Robinson Band, a most significant song from 30+ years ago that’s been rolling around my head. I first heard a live, solo version on the Secret Policeman’s Ball album c. 1979.

Storage media creep, dismal future, and what if Lincoln had lived

Would Lincoln have run for a third term?

Jaquandor, Buffalo’s favorite blogger, who answered so many of my questions that you’d think I was from New Jersey, writes:
(Sorry to be so late in the game with these!)

You’re not late. One can ask me questions anytime, though I specifically request them periodically. Hey, if anyone else has questions, ask away.

To what degree are you tired of “storage media creep” — meaning, the progression from LPs to CDs to MP3s or from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray to streaming?

I am EXHAUSTED by it. I rant about it periodically, especially when it leads to what I like to call W.W.C.T.G.Y.T.B.N.C.O.S.Y.A.O. (the World Wide Conspiracy To Get You To Buy New Copies Of Stuff You Already Own). This is why I 1) still have an LP player, a CD player, a VHS player, DVD player, and 2) don’t jump on the next technology bandwagon very quickly. I’m not going to get all of those newfangled things, because of cost and some incompatibility with each other. I do have music in the cloud – I have no idea what that means – but it’s mostly stuff I got from Amazon for free or cheap (Lady Gaga’s last album for 99 cents.)

And what do you think of the increasing sense in which when we buy something, we’re not getting ownership of anything for our money, but merely permission to use it?

It angers me. One library vendor decided, after the fact, that library patrons can only take out an e-book, I believe, 28 times, because that’s some average book circulation number. Then the “book” would cease to operate. It’s also true of library databases, where what’s available seems to change from year to year, not to mention soaring prices.

To this day, I get peeved around Neil Diamond’s birthday. I bought his CD, 12 Songs. Then I discovered that SONY had placed essentially malware on its own disc which prevents me from copying an album that I own onto my iTunes or other devices; indeed, I believe that even playing the album on my computer could damage the computer. So I must play it on a CD player. I read, well after the fact, that there was a recall, but I keep the disc as a reminder of corporate copyright overreach.

When you think of the long-term problems we face, which one(s) bother you the most from the perspective of your daughter having to be part of the generation that deals with them?

The environment, clearly. I think that the melting ice caps will mean catastrophic weather. Corporations will dupe people into thinking that hydrofracking is a good thing until some disaster that will make the BP oil spill look like lint on a new pair of pants. I also expect that there will be major wars in the 21st century over potable water, more so than fuel.

We may have already passed the tipping points on global warming, say scientists at the Planet Under Pressure conference. Worse. on March 19, Tennessee became “the fourth state with a legal mandate to incorporate climate change denial as part of the science education curriculum when discussing climate change… The ALEC bill passed as H.B. 368 and S.B. 893, with 70-23 and 24-8 roll call votes, respectively.”

How different do you think the post-Civil War era would have been had Lincoln not been assassinated?

Wow, this is SUCH a good question, because it’s so TOTALLY UNANSWERABLE. Which won’t keep me from trying.

Like an assassinated President a century later, I believe that Lincoln was evolving on civil rights issues. I can only wonder how he would have dealt with the Radical Republicans that drove much of Reconstruction in his absence. Would there have been compensation to slave owners that remained loyal to the Union? Would blacks ex-slaves have gotten their 40 acres and a mule, which Lincoln supported but which Andrew Johnson rescinded? If these two things had taken place, might some of the racial animosity that exists in America today have been better ameliorated?

And here’s yet another question: would Lincoln have run for a third term? I always thought he felt his destiny to serve. It was only tradition, not the Constitution, which barred it at the time. And he may have proved more tolerable terms for Southern states to re-enter the union, without the seceding states feeling totally demoralized. I think it was the quick end to Reconstruction that helped allow for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, and the like.

And I just had a debate with someone online about this, so I’ll ask your opinion: how much does the common usage of the phrase ‘begging the question’ bother you? This to me leads to a lot of interesting issues regarding how languages evolve. Thoughts?

It doesn’t annoy me. It has an ancient construction that most people don’t understand. Maybe because it involves “proof” and “logic”, and those are not elements of modern discourse. Politicians beg the question, in the classic sense, all the time.

Its more modern meaning, “raising the question,” the more pedantic complain about, and I can be rather that way, but not on this. Language changes.

I remember that my good Internet friend Arthur was complaining about those folks in the Guy Fawkes masks not knowing who Fawkes really was, or what he stood for. Didn’t bother me.

Whereas I’m still bugged by it’s/its, et al. And the word among no longer seems to be in use at all. I learned that it was between two, but among three or more, yet between is now being used to the exclusion of among. I’ve pretty much given up that fight.

Jaquandor, this begs the question (modern sense): what was the nature of the debate you were having?

G is for Gerrymander

The US Supreme Court ruled that Congressional and state legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population, consistent with the “one man (later, one person), one vote” doctrine.

Gerrymandering is a word that means “a practice that attempts to establish [in the process of setting electoral districts] a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan, incumbent-protected districts. Gerrymandering may be used to achieve desired electoral results for a particular party, or may be used to help or hinder a particular demographic, such as a political, racial, linguistic, religious or class group.”

The term was created way back in the early 19th century concerning the redrawing of the “Massachusetts state senate election districts under the then-governor Elbridge Gerry…to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a salamander.”

Thus GERRY+SALAMANDER=GERYYMANDER. Oddly, though, the first syllable in gerrymander sounds like JERRY, Gerry’s name sounds like Gary. Gerry, incidentally was the second Vice President of the US to die in office, after George Clinton, both under James Madison.

The US Supreme Court ruled, in Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), that Congressional and state legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population, consistent with the “one man (later, one person), one vote” doctrine. This was a good thing: some districts had 10 or 14 times as many people as other districts. Invariably, though, the lines drawn shortly after each decennial Census become fraught with controversy.

The 2012 tentative New York State Senate redistricting was described as being in its gerrymandered glory. The Los Angeles Redistricting Commission released its proposed boundary lines for 15 City Council seats in 2012, which led one councilman to call it an “outrageous case of gerrymandering” against his coastal district.

Not all gerrymandering is done with nefarious intent, to keep a political party safe. Some was done to try to create fairness. For decades, concentrations of black voters were parceled into various predominately white districts to minimize the possibility of a “majority-minority district”. That behavior too has been deemed unconstitutional as well.

But sometimes the solution is as bad as the disease. Look at North Carolina congressional district 12 (in purple), which is long and narrow and practically bisects the state. I’m sure that it was designed to give a better chance for a black candidate to win. But it runs along the interstate without any sort of community cohesiveness. Similar maps have been struck down for that very reason.

Another big issue in New York is so-called prison-based gerrymandering. Most prisons are in upstate New York; many prisoners are from downstate New York. Critics say the census should count prisoners in the district where they lived BEFORE they were incarcerated, which would lessen the power of the most rural districts where prisons tend to be situated.

There has been a move toward “non-partisan” reapportionment. For most places, though, that is easier said than done.

ABC Wednesday – Round 10

Not Letting the Truth Get in the Way

You know that old cliche about you’re entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts? I guess that depends on whether it’s politically expedient.

I’m an old political science major. I appreciate differing points of view on the issues. I even solicit varying positions by reading a mix of publications. But what’s been going on in US politics is not that anymore. Reading this article, originally from the Guardian (UK), called The Right’s Stupidity Spreads, Enabled by a Too-Polite Left, I was particularly fascinated by this section:

Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum, and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that “conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics”. The result is a “shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology” which has “ominous real-world consequences for American society”.

Lofgren complains that “the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today”. The Republican party, with its “prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science” is appealing to what he calls the “low-information voter”, or the “misinformation voter”. While most office holders probably don’t believe the “reactionary and paranoid claptrap” they peddle, “they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base”.

And, it’s not that I wasn’t already generally aware of this. But it does confirm that I’m not totally crazy.

I’m watching ABC News This Week a couple of Sundays ago. Someone, I think it was Austin Goolsby, President Obama’s former economic czar, who was talking about the economic recovery. He noted that it might be going even better if we hadn’t lost jobs in the public sector. And some conservative woman rolls her eyes and says, “Yeah, right.”

Well, yeah, right. In a Bureau of Labor Statistics report citing the drop in the unemployment rate from 8.5% to 8.3%, it read: Over the past 12 months, the [public] sector has lost 276,000 jobs, with declines in local government; state government, excluding education; and the U.S. Postal Service.

This is also an interesting read: “Among the people who saw this [economic] crisis coming was the conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, the supply-side champion who wrote the manifesto for the Reagan Revolution… Yet for all those credentials, he is today an outcast from the very conservative ranks where he was once so influential. That’s because Bruce Bartlett dared to write a book criticizing the second George Bush as a pretend conservative who slashed taxes but still spent with wild abandon.” Watch and/or read the interview about Where the Right Went Wrong.

Do you know that old cliche about you’re entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts? I guess that depends on whether it’s politically expedient. And it does explain folks such as Donald Trump promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US or tweeting in October 2011 that the freak snowstorm was proof that man-made climate change is, in the words of the article, “an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy,” or that “the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.”

Worse, though, for this librarian is the egregious ignoring of factual evidence, by creating pseudoscience and ignoring facts (Obama DID provide his “long-form” birth certificate) for political gain.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Allowing Ex-Felons to Vote QUESTION

What is the possible benefit of disenfranchising a whole class of people? Even Santorum notes its racial aspect.

There were some discussions among Republicans recently about whether ex-felons should be able to vote. Rick Santorum favored allowing felons to vote after they’ve served their prison sentences. Mitt Romney said he didn’t think people who have committed violent crimes should be allowed to vote again. You won’t hear me say this much, but I agree with Santorum.

I used to believe ex-felons should have the right to vote restored because they had served their time. NOW, I believe ex-felons should have the right to vote restored because not doing so essentially criminalizes them for life, making any chance of reintegration into society even more difficult, possibly aggravating the recidivism problem.

Also, if a law is unfair or unjust – that HAS been known to happen – those who might have been convicted under it would have no real say in overturning it. This article addresses that aspect, and shows that NOT allowing them to vote isn’t even a common position among the states; adding restrictions would be a retrograde move.

And not all crimes are equal. A 19-year-old guy having sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend could get him on a sex offender list as a felon in some states. Chaos at an Occupy demonstration could give someone a permanent police record.

What do you think? What is the possible benefit of disenfranchising a whole class of people? Even Santorum notes its racial aspect.