Ten A Dozen Essential Ideas For Fixing The American Economy — Robert Reich

Robert Reich has completed, not his scheduled ten, but an even dozen videos succinctly expressing the great ideas essential to making the American economy more robust for all its participants and transforming American society into one more committed to equality of treatment of all its members under the law.

The 12 Videos appear (in reverse order) in the right-hand column of Reich's blog, and each video runs about 2-3 minutes. I can't think of a better way for an adult or adolescent American to spend about a half hour than in watching these videos. (In addition to his insight, Reich has a great hand as a cartoonist, which he exercises along with voiceovers on the current topic. You'll have fun learning some excellently framed talking points!)

SCOTUS Declines To Review Farmers Branch Immigration Ordinance Case — Lower Courts' ‘Unconstitutional’ Verdict Upheld

Dianne Solis at Dallas Morning News:

The U.S. Supreme Court brought closure Monday to the seven-year legal battle in Farmers Branch over a local ordinance that sought to ban landlords from renting property to people who are in the U.S. unlawfully.

The high court declined to review a lower-court ruling that declared the ordinance unconstitutional.

The measure was never enforced, but it fractured the suburb of about 29,000 residents and saddled its budget with more than $6.1 million in legal expenses. Bills of more than $2 million are pending. Payment was stalled by three different appeals.

...

Farmers Branch is a town near Dallas/Ft. Worth. Such ordinances have popped up in various parts of the country, with circuit courts ruling variously. Some had hoped the Supreme Court would grant cert and resolve the matter nationwide. No luck, at least not in this case.

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The latest ordinance called on all prospective tenants to prove they are in the U.S. lawfully as part of obtaining a $5 residential occupancy license. Tenants and landlords who violated the ordinance would have faced a Class C misdemeanor charge.

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Several lower courts ruled against the city ordinance, saying immigration policy was a federal issue. In New Orleans, at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the city received a split decision that largely went against the ordinance.

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Hispanic legal groups including MALDEF brought suit against the ordinance. Courts ruling against the ordinance explained, as one would expect, that immigration policy is a federal matter, not state and (certainly) not local. Many Hispanic American citizens also objected on the basis that because of their appearance they would repeatedly have to prove their citizenship in circumstances in which whites and African Americans would not. I know a few Hispanic Americans well enough to understand that such things are not merely theoretical; they actually happen to most Hispanic Americans.

I really wish the Supreme Court had taken the case. Such cases are an utter waste of human emotional energy and financial resources, and they need to be brought to an end. At least this should settle the matter for Texas.

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(H/T Charles Kuffner for his steadfast blogging through the length of this interminable case.)

DOMA: From The Capitol Dome To The West Façade

US Capitol Dome

Supreme Court

The inappropriately named Defense of Marriage Act... so many laws serving only right-wing Republican interests also have absurd or Orwellian names... has been found in part (Section 3) unconstitutional in eight federal courts including the First and Second Circuit Courts of Appeal. The Obama DoJ has been instructed not to defend the law in court, but the law is nonetheless still enforced. The House Republican leadership, which is permitted to practice before the Supreme Court, has taken it upon itself to defend the law in place of the DoJ. So we aren't rid of the law yet. It's done for under the Capitol Dome, but not yet under the Supreme Court's West Façade.

Here are the primary provisions according to Wikipedia:

Section 2. Powers reserved to the states

No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.

Section 3. Definition of marriage

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.

From its passage in 1996, this has been a law looking for a reason to exist. While there may be some legitimate federal interest in restricting marriage, say, to two people, there is none whatsoever in restricting it to opposite-sex couples: indeed, the law seems to me (note IANAL) to violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. But Republicans seem determined to defend it come hell or high water (you'd think they would have had enough of both hell and high water during the last election), and so the court battle may well proceed no matter how few rank-and-file Americans support the law today.

So the Supreme Court will meet tomorrow (Friday 11/30) to decide whether to take a DOMA case, and if so, which case(s)... there are about eight possibilities. According to "experts," current odds are in favor of their taking such a case, and if so, actually rendering a decision rather than declining to decide (which would have the unfortunate consequence of allowing the law to apply in some jurisdictions and not in others).

And now for a brief sermon. How long, and how many times, is it going to take the United States of America to learn that ultimately it cannot reserve to itself the privilege of discriminating against some of its citizens? How long was it before slavery was ended, and at what cost? How long before women received the franchise? (And make no mistake: women are not yet equal before the law, and the GOP is determined to keep the law that way.) How long before LGBTQ individuals and their families can engage in normal life activities such as insuring a spouse or visiting a spouse in the hospital (possibly making life-or-death decisions for one another) or receiving federal benefits already long since available to straight married couples?

How many years will the bigots run our country? Must we repeat this absurd exercise every few decades with a different cohort of our citizens, straining to discriminate unjustly against each group in turn, until finally there's no one left to discriminate against? Is that who we are? Are we bigots to the core?

One could never predict how this particular Supreme Court will rule on anything... how could one, considering leftover relics like Scalia still tyrannizing the process. But I think we have to be glad if the Court decides to go for it, to take a case, to rule on the matter for the entire nation. Before I die, I'd really like to live in a country "with liberty and justice for ALL."

LHC Makes New Type Of Matter... So Let's Discuss Religion!

If you're interested in the new type of matter, here's the post by Carl Franzen of TPM; it's not a bad job, and Carl has finally learned not to say "Dog particle" or whatever he used to say. Read it for the basics if you're interested in the physics.

Read the comments if you're interested in religion as a force for opposing science. By no means are all the commenters radical, but even the ones who are not, irritated me today. Here's an excerpt from a comment; I'll show mercy and not identify the commenter:

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... 2. There does seem to be a major issue in the world today of a lack of ethics and morals. Where do those come from lacking religion? (recognizing that religious people are pretty bad as well) ...

...

Oh, yeah, I know what s/he means. Like the other day, there was this woman in Ireland, not Irish and not Catholic but Hindu, pregnant, who had the misfortune to miscarry while in Ireland. Any Irish woman would have known that miscarrying while in Ireland is both a sin and a crime. Fortunately, the doctors at the hospital were trained in "ethics and morals" because they were not "lacking religion"; they knew the fetus was beyond any hope of survival, so they stood watching, waiting for the fetal heartbeat to stop, while the mother, in agony, begged them to terminate the pregnancy, only to be told "This is a Catholic hospital" by the docs, who stood there watching the fetal heartbeat monitor as the mother... slowly... horribly... excruciatingly*... died of septicemia. It was a good thing those docs had "ethics and morals" and weren't "lacking religion"; otherwise, that 31-year-old woman might have lived a long, possibly happy, possibly productive life. And that would have been a tragedy.

Here ends today's lesson in "ethics and morals" from people not "lacking religion." Please be generous with your offering when the plate comes your way...

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* Word chosen quite deliberately.

Second Circuit Becomes Second Circuit-Level Federal Court To Dump DOMA

This is a victory for LGBTQs. And straights. And every American under the Sun, whether they know it or not!

Congrats to my good friend's daughter and her wife; you know who you are. You were "early adopters" in Massachusetts, if I recall correctly, and now you can move anywhere in the States you want to go.

Marriage is a human right. Depriving gay people of it is a human rights violation. Pretty simple, eh? If you don't like the new reality, you're in the wrong country!

Of course the Repugnicans wlll take it to the Supremes, and Dog knows what the Supremes will do to the two decisions... First Circuit and Second Circuit Courts of Appeal... striking down DOMA as unconstitutional. But as some commenters have pointed out, Kennedy is more libertarian in his inclinations than social conservative, so there is some hope. Meanwhile... to those who have always been married in their own eyes and in mine, congratulations on being married in the eyes of the law of the land!

Wednesday Morning, 3 4 A.M. — Rmoney Still Doesn't Believe You Should Have Contraceptives As Part Of Your Government-Backed Health Care Plan

Thank you, Messrs. S & G, for an album title that has been meaningful to me more times than I care to count. For an hour or more, I was stuck with no exit from a dream of my Vietnam days, a horrifying variation on an English country house mystery except it was half a world away, with the inhabitants of the house... American GIs like me and an assortment of Asians... being killed off one by one, not in combat but rather murdered horribly by an unknown serial killer, and I was determined to stop the murders. Except... I have no "Vietnam days" in my past. IRL, I never went to Vietnam; I was 4F draft status for good reason. I've never even watched more than a couple of Vietnam war movies, and those under pressure from friends. Uncle Sam never taught me hand-to-hand combat skills, though I had them in this brain-driven movie of a past I never experienced. If anything good came out of my dream, it was that I learned that war is every bit as devastating, horrifying and gut-wrenchingly destructive as I ever imagined... or in this case dreamed. I'm very glad the Vietnam War... the real one as well as the one I dreamed... is behind us. Tomorrow night, I may think twice before taking that very effective OTC cough suppressant before bed... it's lovely not to be kept awake coughing, but not at any price!

So... "tree full of owls" ain't got nothin' on me. I checked my email, the usual assortment of serious political material, utter political crap, Planned Parenthood mailers (I love those, because they tell me that Rmoney hasn't gotten rid of the organization that is life's blood for millions of American women... yet), etc. One of the Planned Parenthood mailers, from the Action Fund, was Executive Vice President Dawn Laguena's take on Rmoney's truly frightening intentions if he becomes president: I'd rather go through that awful dream a dozen times than have even one woman, let alone millions, subjected to the deliberate evisceration of an org on which she depends for health care. Here's Vice President Laguena, from the letter:

Mitt Romney said a lot at tonight's debate that I disagreed with. No surprise there. But I am stunned by this brazen lie:

"I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they can have contraceptive care or not."

I shouldn't be shocked, but I am — I can't believe that Romney would be so dishonest when speaking directly to undecided voters. He has been outspoken in his support for the Blunt amendment, which would give bosses the power to deny women coverage for birth control. And just last month, Paul Ryan was asked about the birth control coverage requirement. His response? "It will be gone. I can guarantee you that."

And tonight Romney went on national television and lied about where he stands. ...

...

"I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they can have contraceptive care or not." That's our Mitt!

In a completely different manner of speaking from that of Mr. Rmoney, neither do I: contraception is absolutely middling, mainstream health care, essential to women in career roles or in stay-at-home Mom roles. This is not rocket science. One way and another, women must have contraception available to them, and as for whether the government should order that it be provided, it should, on a simple economic basis if no other. Contraception costs vastly less money than unintended children... the issue here is that children at the wrong time can disrupt the life of a woman and her entire family. A woman, actually a family, but overwhelmingly an individual woman, must be fully empowered to plan when and under what circumstances she bears children. To deny a woman control of that choice is to impose upon her second-class citizenship... actually, second-class humanity. I wish the fundagelicals would think about that when they proclaim their intention to decide for everyone else whether and when to have children. "In Adam's fall, we sinned all..." unless, just maybe, you don't believe there was an Adam, or was ever a commandment from G*d to do whatever fundagelicals tell you.

But contraception has to do with SEX, and Mr. Rmoney knows his base well: they would never have sex, except to procreate... unless of course it's a second Wednesday night in a month with a full moon; see Rule 142857-B. In any case, SEX is bad, or at least SEX is bad when women or gays or non-Christians or unmarried people or anyone not just like the Rmoneys have it. So they feel called by G*d to stop SEX under those circumstances if they possibly can. One would think that as self-proclaimed Perfect Americans, they would have more commitment to personal freedoms. But no. They don't.

"I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they can have contraceptive care or not."

Mitt is a scary guy, never scarier than when he threatens to intervene in your sex life.

Unlike Mittens, I don't believe employers should tell someone... pretty much ever... that they can't have contraception through their employee medical insurance plan.

There has to be a line in the sand. Restrictions on abortion were probably inevitable (if still deeply, perniciously wrong); restrictions on contraception are outside the pale.

Send Mitt home on Nov. 6. Don't he and Ann have some babies to make, or something?

(Jeebus, now it's almost 5:00 A.M. ...)

On History Repeating Itself With Scarcely A Mumble

Japanese Internees

I have been reading the late lamented Studs Terkel's "The Good War", his book about (as he spells it) World War Two. The quote marks, says Terkel, are part of the book's title, because that's what some people called it, but the phrase, of itself and without quote marks, is an oxymoron. Have I mentioned how much I miss the lively, vibrant Terkel in his long and well-lived life? Few people elicited my unreserved admiration as he did.

Horse Stables as Internee Residences

In an early chapter, Terkel interviews Japanese-Americans who in various ways and degrees experienced the internment. Japanese-Americans' businesses were seized; some were surveilled individually by FBI agents (not all willing agents, as it turns out) and many... far too many... American citizens were arrested and interned in camps of various sorts; one described in the book was a stables, complete with all the smells and utter lack of personal privacy. Families were broken up, men and older boys confined in one place and their wives and daughters in another. The resemblance to slavery, another historical practice of our "home of the free and the brave," was all too graphic and obvious. Some 110,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese legal residents on the American Pacific coast were interned; a much smaller number of those in the Hawaiian Islands, where a large fraction of the total population were of Japanese ancestry, were also interned. Internment took place in other states as well, applied "unequally" as described by the wiki. Military rule was instituted; civil liberties were largely squelched... both with the blessing of the Supreme Court. No American apology was forthcoming until October 1993, when President Bill Clinton at long last issued one.

Fast-forward to September 2001, and refocus on Houston, TX, on an apartment complex housing an odd blogger/musician/etc. and his mate. A family living near me were Muslim, scarcely a surprise in a city boasting one of the best and largest medical centers in the nation... we have all kinds of nationalities and religious affiliations among our residents, many of them students in advanced fields, and most Houstonians like it that way.

Guantánamo Detainees

I will call the couple "Mary and Joseph," mainly to annoy any jeebus-botherers who may be lurking about. They had two lovely, very young children. Both had good jobs in Houston. Within a few weeks of 9/11/2001, it became apparent to them that things were not going to return to normal in America for our Muslim residents. Fortunately for them, unfortunately for us, Joseph was Canadian by birth. When the handwriting was on the wall and John Ashcroft & Co. were at their most strident, even before Guantánamo was known for what it is today, the couple decided that life in America was about to become very difficult for Muslims, be they citizens or (especially) not, even basically apolitical Muslims like themselves. Rumors of possible internment, ultimately never realized in mass quantities, were all too plausible at the time. Nasty remarks were occasionally leveled at the children, who were probably just old enough to understand what was going on. So Joseph contacted his family in Canada, and the whole family packed up and moved home, rather than face what America had in store for Muslims. I don't blame them one bit. The whole incident was America's loss.

How many more times will America alienate... word chosen very deliberately... members of its population who do not suit the current majority's opinion? If, say, Rmoney were to become president, what would he order done to the 47% he spoke so ill of, and how far would his exclusionary policies reach, among Americans and generally desirable noncitizen aliens?

Our nation's ancestors surely turn in their graves every time an American government undertakes to divide, suppress and exclude some of us from the body politic. I believe we owe those ancestors a debt, payment of which means putting a stop to all the exclusion so popular in certain political circles. Either it stops, or America goes to ground, at least the America descended from those founders. Rmoney and crew may be prepared for that. I most emphatically am not.

Texas Has A New Law Against Bullying...

... and the ACLU, which has worked tirelessly on this issue across the nation including in Texas, has the details for parents and students. Are you being bullied? is your child being bullied? is your child afraid to go to school? It doesn't have to be that way!

Obama And 'The Church Of St. Drone'

Tom Engelhardt explains:

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they -- and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self -- are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against. They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.

Thanks to a long New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” we now know that the president has spent startling amounts of time overseeing the “nomination” of terrorist suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush and which he has expanded exponentially. Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” In other words, it was essentially an administration-inspired piece -- columnist Robert Scheer calls it “planted” -- on a “secret” program the president and those closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an election year.

...

(More links available in original.)

Obama seems determined to make it as difficult as possible for me to vote for him. Each new revelation about his supposed counterterrorism efforts involves still more human rights violations. I am down to advocating, for the first time in many presidential elections, voting for the lesser of two evils. But this kind of behavior is still undeniably evil, and I hate supporting it even with one vote, even considering the truly horrifying alternative in Mitt Rmoney.

Catholic Hospitals In America: 'We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To Anyone'

Americans of a certain minimum age will remember the signs on the doors of dining establishments back in the 1950s, mostly but not exclusively in the Deep South: "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone". What they meant, of course, was "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to People of Color". Lunch counter occupations were among the early protest events of the Civil Rights movement.

Via Adgita Diaries, from AMERICAblog's John Aravosis, we learn that

...

The Catholic church is now making rumblings about turning away non-Catholics from the emergency rooms of Catholic hospitals. I shudder to make a Nazi analogy, so I won't. But what other analogy is there for a hospital to even dare start talking about picking and choosing who lives and who dies based on their religion?

...

From Maureen Dowd, writing about the latest Catholic scare tactic, distributed in tax-exempt churches, to oppose President Obama's new contraceptive policy that Mitt Romney previously endorsed as well.

The Archdiocese of Washington put an equally alarmist message in the church bulletins at Sunday’s Masses, warning of apocalyptic risk:

“1. Our more than 600 hospitals nationwide, which will need to stop non-Catholics at the emergency room door and say, ‘We are only allowed by the government to heal Catholics.’

Aravosis goes on to note the cognitive dissonance experienced by many non-Catholic Americans over the difference between the surveyed beliefs of Catholic Americans regarding contraception, abortion, premarital sex, etc. on the one hand, and on the other hand the fist-of-iron approach of the newly mean-spirited Catholic hierarchy in America. And he's right; it bugs the Hell out of me.

But hospitals are institutions that are necessarily ultimately under secular law, laws not about the practice of faith but the practice of medicine. Any hospital that decides to threaten to deny emergency care to any human being for reasons not related to the current best practices of medicine should have its doors shut and padlocked until it recants the threat. Every institution that calls itself "hospital" should without hesitation render emergency medical aid to any person... no exemptions, no qualifications... who needs it. Enough is enough.

At Least Obama Landed On The Pro-Human-Rights Side Of The Gay-Marriage Issue. Romney, However...

Whatever Obama may have done, whatever he neglected to do, however tepid his affirmation of support for marriage equality, at least he doesn't have this in his background, as revealed in WaPo about Romney in an incident with an allegedly gay student at Romney's prep school:

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A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be identified. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

...

And you thought Romney's tying the poor dog to the roof of the car was bad!

If what these five men have independently described, reported in the Washington Post, is true, Romney effectively committed assault, bullying a young gay man... and got away with it.

Romney claims not to remember the incident. Then again, Romney lies a lot.

Maybe this story will endear Romney to his base. But jeebus on a crutch... assault? What are they willing to forgive? I suppose the answer is "anything in pursuit of power."