The Commentariat -- February 21, 2012
** Reed Abelson of the New York Times: "Financially stronger Catholic-sponsored medical centers are increasingly joining with smaller secular hospitals, in some cases limiting access to treatments like contraception, abortion and sterilization.... Local and state officials, doctors and advocates in many communities are concerned that some procedures that run counter to Catholic doctrine may no longer be available or will be much more limited. Some doctors fear they may not be able to do what’s best for patients,"
Nelson Schwartz of the New York Times: "Even as government officials prepare to unveil new standards this week for how banks treat millions of Americans facing foreclosure, housing advocates and homeowners are skeptical the rules will be able to do something past efforts have not: provide a beleaguered borrower with one individual to help them navigate the mortgage maze." CW: one more nail in the coffin of Joe Nocera's cheerleading the settlement agreement.
Rod Norland & David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times: "The Egyptian prosecution’s summary of the case against at least 16 Americans and others from five democracy and human rights groups focuses largely on the testimony of their accusers, with evidence primarily limited to proof that their organizations used American and other foreign funds for payrolls and rent."
Matt Yglesias of Slate finds another use for a liberal arts education: it teaches students to read and write, skills that are necessary in most high-level jobs. AND "It's a fallacy to think that in an increasingly technology-performed society that technical skills will be the only sources of value.... Mastering a specific body of facts is not nearly as useful in 2012 as it was in 1962."
Here's an example of how Rachel Maddow is a one-woman public service (okay, she has help):
CW: yesterday I promised to link to some responses to Bill Keller's column dismissing WikiLeaks and Julian Assange:
... Kevin Gosztola of Firedoglake does a terrific job of unpacking & refuting Keller's claims. "The Times is a gate-keeping media organization. They see their role in society as one that involves deciding what the public needs to know and not know. WikiLeaks questions this process, which most media engage in. WikiLeaks makes it difficult for the news organization by exposing how the organization covers certain stories and ignores other stories." ...
... Chris Spannos of the New York Times eXaminer has another excellent critique, including "presponses" from Assange. ...
... Samir Chopra: Over at the New York Times, Bill Keller, who has been doing his best to make sure it will be hard to take him for a serious journalist, writes a piece–- bursting to the seams with snark –- on Wikileaks. Keller..., whose trafficking in superficiality has been embarrassingly on display for all too long on the NYT’s Op-Ed’s pages, simply cannot be bothered with seriously engaging with the issues that Wikileaks raised." ...
... Greg Mitchell of The Nation contributes his own take & adds a few others. ...
... Jack Goldsmith, former Bush II Office of Legal Counsel director: "Keller is right that the Wikileaks phenomenon was overblown.... But it does not follow that the government is more secretive than ever.... The government ... is losing the war against leaks. The size of the secrecy bureaucracy makes secrets harder than ever to keep. So too do modern information technologies.... The government ... has a harder time than ever keeping important secrets related to national security." ...
... Hamilton Nolan of Gawker: "Bill Keller eagerly reminds you that he still hates Julian Assange.... If you’re going to launch a crusade against something, at least make it something worthwhile."
ABC News has a breakdown of what the presidential campaigns & SuperPACs, including President Obama's, raised & spent in January.
"Barack Obama, the Greatest Gun Salesman in America." Joshua Green of Business Week: "Despite the fact that Obama hasn’t made the slightest feint toward regulating guns, firearms enthusiasts have whipped themselves into a paranoid frenzy, convinced that this is all just part of some elaborate conspiracy."
Right Wing World
Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches translates Santorum code. Meanwhile, Santorum's spokesperson Alice Stewart accuses President Obama of "radical Islamic policies," but she says she really meant "radical environmentalist poilices." (Post includes video.) Posner notes that, like "radical secular," both "radical Islamic" & "radical environmentalist" are anti-Christian, so it's no wonder Stewart mixed them up:
Santorum ... admitted to [Bob] Schieffer [of CBS News] that he believes humans are biblically commanded to take dominion over the earth, and that environmentalism is in conflict with that mandate.... In Michigan today, Santorum is rehashing this speech claiming that 'climate science' is actually 'political science.' Translation: there is no science, there is only God. Any attempt at science is necessarily political, and therefore illegitimate if in conflict with a 'Christian worldview.' ...
... In this post, Harold Posner points to a November 2011 article by Ben Adler of The Nation on Rick Santorum's opposition to an array of government programs that help the disabled. CW: here's why am I highlighting Adler's post now: Santorum opposes amneocentesis coverage for pregnant women because positive results for fetal anomalies often lead women to choose abortion. So Santorum wants these women to carry disabled fetuses to term, give birth, and then have no help in caring for them. The guy is a monster. ...
... Trip Gabriel of the New York Times: "Visiting coal country, Rick Santorum repeated criticisms of President Obama‘s pro-environmental 'theology' and women’s health mandates...." ...
... ** Felicia Sonmez of the Washington Post: Santorum dogwhistles to a crowd President Obama is just like Hitler whom "the Greatest Generation" ignored because Americans are an optimistic people who were saying Hitler was a "nice guy." And now Americans are saying the same thing about Obama. Read the whole citation. It's chilling. ...
... Rick Santorum, International Diplomat. BuzzFeed: Santorum enrages the Dutch with his fact-free claim that the Low Country is so low it euthanizes its seniors against their will.
NEW. Excellent catch by Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: Mitt Romney's tortured position on the auto bailouts centers around his claim that private interests should have funded a "managed bankruptcy." BUT "both [Chrysler & GM] needed billions of dollars in financing, money that auto executives and government officials who were involved with Mr. Obama’s auto task force say ... no private companies would come to the industry’s aid, and the only path through bankruptcy would have been Chapter 7 liquidation, not the more orderly Chapter 11 reorganization, these people said. In fact, the [Obama] task force asked Bain Capital, the private equity company that Mr. Romney helped found, if it was interested in investing in General Motors’ European operations.... Bain declined.... Mr. Romney’s Republican allies in Michigan are seeking to shift attention to other topics."
... Steve Benen: "Romney would have voters believe he used his expertise as a businessman to get the Olympics back on track. What actually happened, however, was that Romney hired a team of lobbyists -- from five separate D.C. lobbying firms -- to get Congress to give him a lot of money.... This wasn't about corporate know-how or the skills of turnaround artist; this was a straightforward process involving Romney, lobbyists, and a truckload of taxpayer money." ...
Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times: "A “super PAC” supporting Mitt Romney blew through $14 million on a three-state advertising binge against his Republican rivals in January, according to campaign reports filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday. But the super PAC, Restore Our Future, also raised close to $7 million during the same month, and began February with more than $16 million in the bank, money that has helped pound Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum...."
Ross Ramsey of the Texas Tribune: "Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania has a commanding lead among Republican presidential candidates in Texas, according to a new University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll. Santorum would get the votes of 45 percent of the respondents if the election were held today, according to the survey.... Gingrich got 18 percent, Romney received 16 percent and Paul garnered 14 percent."
Steve Kornacki of Salon on why a white knight (and in the GOP the knight would be whitey-white) will not save the GOP from its Not-Romney, should Not-Romney a/k/a Santorum, win the overall state delegates vote.
CW: Hmm. I guess I'll limit my use of PayPal now that I know its billionaire founder is Peter Thiel, an anti-government loon & big Ron Paul backer.
T. W. Farnam of the Washington Post: "Four years ago, just 6 percent of campaign advertising in the GOP primaries amounted to attacks on other Republicans; in this election, that figure has shot up to more than 50 percent, according to an analysis of advertising trends. And the negative ads are not just more frequent — they also appear to be more vitriolic."
Local News
CW: I can't resist linking to this lovely profile by Marc Caputo of the Miami Herald of my very own Congressman, Connie Mack (R), who is running for the U.S. Senate. Yes, Connie Mack, public fiscal hawk/private deadbeat, absentee rep & bar brawler.
BUT my Wingnut of the Week is Indiana State Rep. Bob Morris (R-Fort Wayne), who wrote a long letter to his fellow statehouse Republicans, warning them of the "abundant evidence proves that the agenda of Planned Parenthood includes sexualizing young girls through the Girl Scouts, which is quickly becoming a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood." Also, the Scouts "promote homosexual lifestyles." And, "Of the fifty role models listed, only three have a briefly-mentioned religious background – all the rest are feminists, lesbians, or Communists." Morris has pulled his daughters out of this feminist, lesbian, Communist cabal. ...
... AP: "Morris is the only House member to refuse to sign a resolution honoring the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts that lawmakers approved last week."
News Ledes
Minneapolis Star Tribune: A Minnesota judicial panel on Tuesday released new political district lines that place U.S. Reps. Michele Bachmann, a Republican, and Betty McCollum, a Democrat, into the same congressional district, according to Bachmann's office. Bachmann said that she will run for her old 6th District seat even though newly drawn congressional maps put her home in the 4th District, currently represented by McCollum.... Members of Congress don't have to live in the district they represent, so Bachmann is free to run wherever she likes in Minnesota. She said she has not yet decided if she will move her home into the new district.... In a fundraising email, she accused the court of 'liberal bias.'" Yes, Mrs. Bachmann, it's a liberal conspiracy.
AP: "It came and went in a flash each time, a number on a board for mere seconds, but its symbolic power couldn't be dismissed. The Dow Jones industrial average, powered higher all year by optimism that the economic recovery is finally for real, crossed 13,000 on Tuesday for the first time since May 2008."
New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear a major case on affirmative action in higher education, adding another potential blockbuster to a docket already studded with them. The court’s decision in the new case holds the potential to undo an accommodation reached in the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger: that public colleges and universities could not use a point system to boost minority enrollment but could take race into account in vaguer way to ensure academic diversity."
Politico: "The Supreme Court on Tuesday allotted an extra 30 minutes to oral arguments on the health care reform law, giving another half an hour to the debate over whether a federal tax law should prevent a ruling this year. The decision bumps up the total argument time to six hours over three days in late March."
New York Times: "Greece finally secured its second giant bailout early Tuesday after euro zone finance ministers agreed to save it from bankruptcy in exchange for severe austerity measures and strict conditions."
New York Times: "In a rare move for an Arab state where popular dissent worked to unseat a dictator, Yemenis went to polling stations on Tuesday to vote out President Ali Abdullah Saleh."
New York Times: "As tension grew in its nuclear dispute with the West, was reported on Tuesday to have struck an increasingly bellicose tone, warning that it would take pre-emptive action against perceived foes if it felt its national interests were threatened."
Reuters: "Syrian government forces killed at least 16 people and wounded some 340 on Tuesday when they unleashed a heavy artillery barrage on a rebel-held district of the city of Homs, activists said. The bombardment rained down as International Committee of the Red Cross officials tried to negotiate a halt to the fighting to allow them to bring aid to civilians suffering in horrendous conditions after 18 days of attacks on Homs."
Washington Post: "Deeply angered over the improper disposal of copies of the Koran by U.S. troops, thousands of Afghans on Tuesday tried to storm the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan. The protests erupted early in the morning, after Afghans working inside the Bagram air base reported to local residents that a number of copies of the Koran had been burned."
Reuters: "Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was taken in for questioning on Tuesday by police investigating an alleged prostitution ring run out of the northern French city of Lille."
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Reader Comments (6)
"I just said that when you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can't take those resources because we're going to harm the Earth". Congratulations Rick, you just beat the guy who didn't want the government to interfere with his Medicare for the truly most illogical, irrational and genuinely dumbest thing a human being has ever said.
@ Marvin Schwalb: here's the basis for the environmental "theology" of Rick Santorum:
"Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." -- Genesis 1:26
While this verse suggests to pro-environmental believers that god wants us to take care of the earth, which is also god's creation, many fundamentalists say it means man can exploit the earth. One of the rationales here is -- and I'm not making this up -- the faster we ruin the earth, the sooner the Rapture will come. Our ability to destroy the earth is thus all part of "god's plan." Oddly enough, we are allowed to destroy it using sciencey stuff like big rigs. Consistency is not a theological requirement.
When apostates like Obama with his "radical environmental theology" try to save trees & owls & stuff, they are just prolonging the wait for the Rapture. Beam me up.
P.S. The world is 6,000 years old, give or take, & Adam & Eve were real people.
The primitive people of the third century believed in talking snakes and were a society they had no literature because few could read or write. Information and beliefs were formed and distributed by story tellers. The best story tellers got the most attention and were the most quoted. The best story tellers were described as prophets. The talking snake was probably the product of the best story teller of his time.
Fortunately, groups of people became followers of the best story teller and became a group with common interests. As a result, these people with a common interest began to help each other. They helped each other with illness and with child care and with big jobs that needed a group of men working together.
People that did not belong to a group of story teller followers were not as able to defend themselves from the elements and from wars.
Those people grouped behind a story teller and helping each other evolved over centuries into successful societies and are wired to follow a story teller. Some of these followers are still enthralled by the story tellers that believe in talking snakes.
The antipathy towards science and truth regarding the natural world on shocking display in the warped funhouse mirror that is the Republican Presidential primary campaign represents a new low in the right’s never-ending search for more and more insidious ways to grab onto power with every sucker on each of its slimy tentacles.
The Rick Santorum quotes about the environment offer a chance to consider how far we've come--and how low we've sunk.
The contemporary hatred and distrust of science by the religious right and right-wingers in general has not always had this kind of power, even in the Dark Ages during which the pursuit of scientific knowledge was highly regarded among many religious teachers, scholars, and leaders. Robert Grossteste, an English bishop and master of theology, wrote extensively on optics, mathematics, astronomy, and even composed a treatise explaining the scientific basis for tidal activity (Bill O’Reilly’s mental capacity has yet to rise to the level of a guy who was writing on parchment paper in the 13th century).
The rise of methods of investigating the natural world and which prompted several scientific revolutions was supported and, largely, created by medieval churchmen like Grossteste, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Henry of Ghent, William of Ockham, and one of the big guns in Church history, Thomas Aquinas hisself.
Aquinas, at least according to my reading of his work, would kick the intelligent design people down the stairs. They just don't fit in with his understanding of the workings of the natural world. This isn’t to compare Aquinas with Einstein as a pure scientist, but it is a recognition that for these scholars, science and religion could live together. In fact, many of them went toe to toe with the less enlightened clerics of their day. They didn’t always win, but in some cases (Roger Bacon) they were even supported by the pope (Clement IV, I believe).
These guys laid the groundwork for what became the empirical method eventually taken up by beacons of enlightened thought such as John Locke and David Hume, neither of whom were buddies of reactionary religious troglodytes.
So why the regression? Why is today’s religious right and their political enablers and supporters like Santorum and Gingrich even more benighted, more backward than ignorant, uneducated pissants who lived nearly a thousand years ago? Why do today’s religiously (un)informed right-wingers scream bloody murder at the very mention of climate change, stem cell research, natural selection, and a myriad other scientific topics when many of these same fields of study were avidly pursued by prominent members of the Church centuries ago with an eye toward increasing, rather than diminishing, humanity’s knowledge and understanding of the natural world?
The best guess is power and control. Empowering ignorance is a useful way to to stave off the sovereignty of truth. Holding up science as a straw-man/boogieman enables the right to distract the masses from the real problems facing them, problems often directly caused by right-wing policies. The religion vs. science screamfest is a handy smokescreen for the right as they attempt to divert scrutiny away from their actual plan of taking control of the country away from anyone who is not of their tribe and handing it to the wealthy, the oligarchs, and those whose motives are firmly grounded in their book of rules, the right-wing quarto of money, power, war, and control.
There’ve been a number of pieces written recently pointing out the strategic problems of this scheme. First, by elevating the ignorant, they have inadvertently ceded a certain amount of power and now the ringmasters are the ones having to jump through hoops of fire and stumble around the big top after tumbling out of their primary season clown car. The masses, fired up with the fury of imbecility, hatred, and ignorance, now want their show trials in which their enemies (science, truth, rationality) are hung in effigy, if not in reality. And what the rest of the country is left with is the very real possibility of an uninformed, willfully ignorant, hate-spewing birdbrain like Rick Santorum, as President of the United States.
It’s one thing when hypocrisy and rank desire for power cause you to foul your own house with the stinking sluice of sluggish stupefaction and feeble-minded ineptitude, but when you drench the rest of the country with this effluence, you deserve nothing less than perdition and infamy.
And demanding that schoolchildren learn magical thinking in place of scientific truth is more than a step backwards. It’s a descent into insignificance and complete collapse.
But that's the Way of the Right: If we can't be in charge, we'll burn it all down.
Any better reason to go out and vote against these monsters?
I can't use PayPal, and I can't wear pink. I have no idea where I should buy the gas that I must put into my vehicle to commute to my job, because either I'm supporting Saudi fundamentalism or I'm supporting the Koch brothers. (Tough call). I can't buy an Apple product (too late, I own an Ipod) because they exploit child/slave labor in China and I can't buy diamonds from Africa, or canned tuna because they kill Flipper to catch the tuna. My son can't join the Boy Scouts and my business can't join Chamber of Commerce. I'm afraid to drink the tap water because who knows how many carcinogens are in it, but I can't drink bottled water either because of the carcinogens in the plastic, and because the plastic bottles are an environmental hazard (beer and wine are looking pretty good about now). I no longer know what to buy or where to buy it. I'd go live on a farm somewhere except that agribusiness has driven up the price of land and I don't know how long either my 401(k) or my social security will hold out.
Akhilleus thanks for the excellent post. Let me add another view of fundamentalist religion. The faith is so weak that fear is the driving force. That is what makes them so easy for the greedy.