Courage And Good Sense

This morning's ABC world news broadcast (at some hour) featured a San Bernadino city memorial gathering honoring those killed in the massacre. Visible front and center in the crowd was a young woman in conventional Muslim dress, her demeanor prayerful, her manner solemn. She had a choice to make, a decision about just what to risk, and in our society, no less rife with religious extremism than, say, Saudi Arabia, she put her own life on the line to make a simple declaration: typical Muslims do not approve of mass violence any more than, say, Christians, Jews or Unitarian Universalists. Kudos to her for her bravery.

My mind's eye looked back 14 years to Sept. 11, 2001. I lived in an apartment then. A young couple, my neighbors across the walkway at the time, were Muslim, she of American birth, he of Canadian. Neither their appearance nor their family name nor any audible accent distinguished them as being Muslim, but somehow, at the school attended by their two young sons, word got out that they were, and the kids... the older one might have been age 9... were harassed, both openly and (more troubling) also anonymously.

I regret to say this story has a happy ending: at the cost of both their jobs, and taking advantage of his Canadian birthright, the couple moved somewhere in Canada. Regret? Yes:  I grieve to see America lose potential solid, hardworking, honest and downright cheerful citizens. Happy ending? Yes: those kids did not deserve to be threatened with bodily harm because of their faith.

Yesterday and today, the young, visibly Muslim woman at the memorial gathering was courageous. Fourteen years ago, the young couple and their sons showed good sense. What kind of America do we put forth to the world, that any of these people have to reckon with consequences just for being who they are?

Here ends the lesson for the day. <sigh />.

Rev. Franklin Graham Employs Aggie Pistol

Graham

There is no version of the Far-Right Rev. Franklin Graham's argument here that does not point, like the infamous Aggie pistol, right back at the Rev. himself. Brendan James at TPM:

The Rev. Franklin Graham on Wednesday hypothesized that President Obama's hesitancy to fight the Islamic State terror group was because Obama's mother "must have been a Muslim."

In a clip flagged by Right Wing Watch, the son of renowned pastor Rev. Billy Graham spoke to Family Research Council head Tony Perkins in a radio interview.

"His mother must have been a Muslim," Graham said. "We don't know that, but she married two Muslim men, so there must have been something there."

"And the framework that the President has growing up, his influences in his life, was that of Islam," he added.

...

Aggie pistol

OK. Let's accept the Rev. Graham's stated opinion at face value, and render the quotation just a teensy bit different for the sake of argument:

President Barack Obama on Wednesday hypothesized that Rev. Franklin Graham's eagerness to fight the Islamic State terror group was because Graham's father "must have been a radical Christian fundamentalist."

[etc. ad nauseam]
...

Sauce for the goose and the gander, eh? D'ya think Billy just shifted a bit in his grave when his son let fly with that? [CORRECTION: per Mustang Bobby in comments, Billy is still alive. According to Wikipedia, he is 96.]

Radio Right To Rack And Ruin? Remarkably, Rush And [O']Reilly

Two articles at Kos about righties:

• Time Magazine Affirms - Rush Limbaugh Is In Trouble
• Meanwhile, O'Reilly Is Imploding...

Ahhhh, words to gladden the progressive/liberal heart...

Bachmann To Obama At White House Christmas Party: ‘Bomb, Bomb, Bomb... Bomb, Bomb Iran...’

Oh, wait, maybe it was John McCain, during his presidential campaign. But Michele Bachmann took the opportunity of the White House Christmas Party to urge Obama to order the bombing of Iran. Some folks are just full to overflowing with the Chrtistmas spirit...

WTF Is The Matter With America Today?

masaccio at FDL tells us what the religious RWNJs and other nutjobs truly believe:

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It’s a mirror image of the US. The “Other” is the problem. It isn’t the unjust distribution of wealth, it isn’t the exploitation of the worker by the filthy rich, it isn’t unequal schools, it isn’t poverty or any other structural condition. It’s witches. It’s demons. It’s unholiness. It’s impurity. It’s smoke.

It isn’t fixable. The most you can hope for is bottling up that rage and fear in fewer and fewer people. Instead the media stokes those fires. Self-ordained ministers tell people that it’s sin that cause fires and floods and earthquakes and eclipses. Rage freaks like O’Reilly and Limbaugh and the incomparably stupid Hannity tell their listeners that the end times are coming. Politicians like Lindsey Graham shriek that terrorists are coming to kill them while they sleep. These pre-moderns are now in control of both the House and Senate, and the Supreme Court.

...

No fxxking kidding! These people may or may not hearken back to the actual Dark Ages, but as masaccio said, they damned surely missed the Enlightenment altogether. Yet they have every intention of taking it away from those of us who didn't miss it, and they have the money backing them to do the taking. Welcome to today's America... where the medieval get medieval on your buttocks.

Republican Rejection Of Reality

Krugman and Friend

Paul Krugman comments on the extreme ideological obsession Republicans have in two areas, health care and monetary policy, and their utter refusal to accommodate reality in either area. He gauges right‑wing views based on the hate mail in his inbox, a source most of us small-time blog owners don't have in anything near the quantity Krugman sustains:

...

... is what I see a lot in my inbox (and in my reading): the furious insistence that nothing resembling a government guarantee of health insurance can possibly work.

That’s a curious belief to hold, given the fact that every other advanced country has such a guarantee, and that we ourselves have a 45-year-old single-payer system for seniors that has worked pretty well all this time. But nothing makes these people as angry as the suggestion that Obamacare might actually prove workable.

...

Indeed that is a curious belief, and a simple, compelling debunking. We already have such a system, which unfortunately we have limited to old people, and even the success of that system sends some right‑wing nut‑jobs shrieking about socialism and "death panels" (hearing Palin's atrociously stupid phrase, I can't help imagining Captain Kirk delivering the line, "Scotty! it's all those tribbles, hiding behind the death panels!"). Putting aside the wingnut demagoguery, the only thing that is "wrong" with the concept of Medicare for all is that it puts the insurance companies out of business.

And Krugman on inflation:

...

As I said, the other issue where I see this kind of enraged denial is monetary policy. There are a lot of people on the right who know, just know, that the Fed is debasing the dollar and creating runaway inflation. This belief doesn’t seem to have been dented at all by five years of failed predictions of inflation just around the corner.

...

I believe Krugman is as tired of the endless nut‑job repetition of fantasy horror stories as I am. And I think someone as inclined to accept actual socialism for some obvious governmental functions as I am would recognize it if it ever arrived in the morning email.

Krugman's conclusion:

...

On both the healthcare and inflation fronts, what you have to conclude is that there are a large number of people who find reality — the reality that governments are actually pretty good at providing health insurance, that fiat money can be a useful tool of economic management rather than the road to socialist disaster — just unacceptable. I think that in both cases it has to do with the underlying desire to see market outcomes as moral imperatives.

And I suppose there have always been such people out there. What’s new is that these days they control one of our two major political parties.

Damned if they don't. As Americans seems stuck in a permanent two‑party system, they can't really afford one party comprising unbridled economic right‑wing extremists. But I don't see how we get rid of them any time soon.

Vile, Vile, Miss 'American Bile'...

Robert Reich, in his post "American Bile," explores the raw anger, the ad hominem hostility, the obscene, profane and personally insulting language one encounters in today's American society, especially in the political context. He concludes:

I’m 67 and have lived through some angry times: Joseph R. McCarthy’s witch hunts of the 1950s, the struggle for civil rights and the Vietnam protests in the 1960s, Watergate and its aftermath in the 1970s. But I don’t recall the degree of generalized bile that seems to have gripped the nation in recent years.

...

... we increasingly live in hermetically sealed ideological zones that are almost immune to compromise or nuance. Internet algorithms and the proliferation of media have let us surround ourselves with opinions that confirm our biases. We’re also segregating geographically into red or blue territories: chances are that our neighbors share our views, and magnify them. So when we come across someone outside these zones, whose views have been summarily dismissed or vilified, our minds are closed.

...

No kidding. When someone on the radical Right makes shit up and throws it, sometimes every five minutes or so, who's going to be able to correct every instance of deliberate falsehood, let alone mitigate the effects of quickly spreading innocent misunderstandings? Lies and even nonmalicious errors simply can't be combated quickly enough. To try or not to try? That's a damned good question

The End Of Science In America?

Paul Krugman:

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Like others doing similar exercises — Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, and Pollster — Nate[ Silver]’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver, and has shown that edge widening over the past couple of weeks.

This could be wrong, obviously. And we’ll find out on Election Day. But the methodology has been very clear, and all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may.

Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all.

This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.

This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.

...

This strikes me as yet another manifestation of the right-wing concept of science as simply a belief system, like Catholicism or Islam or Mormonism: as though, if you don't like one "faith," you can choose another; if you are offended by one scientific theory, you can replace it, based not on whether the replacement truly describes the world we live in, but on whether it is compatible with your political outlook. It's the same situation as in any other search for truth in reality: you don't get to choose your own facts. Honest seekers across the spectrum freely acknowledge this. Right-wingers, even the ones who are not utterly nuts, do not: the facts themselves, as they see them, are subject to reshaping based on one's political philosophy.

That simply doesn't work... at all... in scientific research. You cannot "pray away" global climate change. You cannot merely assert loudly, or even pass a law in Congress, that the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe has no ongoing environmental consequences. You cannot pass a law about when human life begins, and thereby change the physiology of the process. And as Krugman reminds us, you cannot legislate underlying motivations for human economic behavior, the ones that are truly wired in, as if they were simple matters of policy. You can't make trickle-down supply-side economics "true" by fiat. You can deny Keynes until you're blue in the face, but his message will nonetheless haunt you in the real world if you ignore it.

Newton

Galileo

There have always been science deniers; this is nothing new. Indeed, before a few people in 17^th-century England, Italy and Germany framed the basics of how one does science, of the notion of a hypothesis to be tested, of experimental confirmation, of mathematical description, there was not a great deal of science done anywhere. (The age of Archimedes, c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC, mathematically enlightened and technologically clever as he was, was all too brief, and had no thread of historical succession directly connecting him with the beginnings of science as we know it.) For millennia, most people did not think in scientific terms; those who did often paid dearly for their troubles. Today's science deniers would take us back to that time. (Hey, the torture apparatuses are already in place, thanks to the political system!)

And that is the crux (!) of what is frightening about right-wing politics: the wingers wish to establish a new age of "truth" by fiat, not truth through research in scientific matters, not even political truth by honest debate among people of differing interests, but truth by reference to authority. Regular use of the argument from authority leads almost inexorably to more emphasis on the authority than the argument. Spare us, please!

Scott Walker's Anti-Collective Bargaining Law Struck Down

A Wisconsin county judge has struck down Gov. Walker's draconian anti-collective bargaining law as a violation of both state and US constitutions. Here's Scott Bauer at HuffPo:

...

Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas ruled that the law violates both the state and U.S. Constitution and is null and void.

In his 27-page ruling, the judge said sections of the law "single out and encumber the rights of those employees who choose union membership and representation solely because of that association and therefore infringe upon the rights of free speech and association guaranteed by both the Wisconsin and United States Constitutions."

Colas also said the law violates the equal protection clause by creating separate classes of workers who are treated differently and unequally.

The ruling applies to all local public workers affected by the law, including teachers and city and county government employees, but not those who work for the state. They were not a party to the lawsuit, which was brought by a Madison teachers union and a Milwaukee public workers union.

Walker issued a statement accusing the judge of being a "liberal activist" who "wants to go backwards and take away the lawmaking responsibilities of the legislature and the governor. We are confident that the state will ultimately prevail in the appeals process."

...

It is good to see Walker brought up short, even if only temporarily. An appeal is planned. Let the judge-shopping begin.

AFTERTHOUGHT: the right to bargain collectively by forming unions is central to achieving fairness in employer treatment of workers. This is no less true of public employees. As it has been repeatedly shown that quality and productivity rest squarely on fair worker compensation and working conditions, I am forever mystified that some "conservatives" demand the most unequal possible relationship between management and labor. Forcing workers into effective wage slavery by denying their bargaining rights is not just wrong... it's also stupid beyond words. In other words, it's Republican.

Robert Reich: What's At Stake In The 2012 Election

Reich explains the radical Right's four-point plan to change the fundamental nature of America from representative democracy with wide public participation in policy decisions into something downright unsavory: