Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

We can learn from Judah the Maccabee

chasdarwin1 Comment

Aaron Zelinski, HuffPost:

“Tonight is the first night of Chanukah. Modern celebrants (including Senator Hatch) focus on the miracle of the Menorah, which tradition tells us stayed lit for eight days on a single day’s oil. However, Chanukah is also the political story of a few determined Maccabees leading an uprising against the much stronger Seleucid Empire.

Though the events Chanukah commemorates took place over 2,000 years ago, the historical story of the Maccabees provides useful lessons for our modern era. From the Seleucids, we see how not to fight a guerrilla insurgency. From the Maccabees, we learn how to rally a people and a nation.

Here are Chanukah’s five geopolitical lessons:

1) Corrupt governments propped up by outsiders are inherently unstable. …Massive military force cannot prop up a deeply corrupt regime indefinitely. If we want to end the insurgency, we must clean up the corruption.”

2) Insurgencies feed off charismatic leaders…In the modern fight against terrorism, the United States should not create figures like Judah, charismatic leaders for the other side to rally around. President George W. Bush did exactly the opposite: He promoted the cult of Bin Laden after September 11th, focusing the world’s attention on one man who was wanted “Dead or Alive.” Such pronouncements give guerilla insurgencies a guiding symbol.

3) Rebuilding symbolic structures matters… The literal meaning of Chanukah is “rededication.”

4) Israel was an independent state when much of Europe was untamed wilderness. The modern State of Israel is not a post-Holocaust reparation to the Jewish people, but rather the restoration of an ancient independent state of the Jewish people.

5) The world marches on…For us, even as we confront difficult decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq, we must not lose sight of the broader political ebbs and flows of the world.”


Remembering Anne Marie Niedorf

Take a sad song and make it better.

chasdarwin6 Comments

“That though the radiance which was once so bright, be now forever taken from my sight.

Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, glory in the flower.

We will grieve not, rather find, strength in what remains behind.

In the primal sympathy, which having been must ever be, in the soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death, in the years that bring the philosophic mind…”

(from ” Intimations of Immortality, from recollections of Early Childhood”, William Wordsworth)”

Our friend of more than 40 years, Anne Marie Niedorf, passed away on November 15, 2009, of complications incurred in a severe fall at her home several weeks before. She had been diabetic since an early age, and her 67 years – far too few – were many more than were given her at one time.

She was my very first girlfriend. We met in April 1967 – the year we both turned 25. She lived next to my brother (in St. Louis), who got married on April 2 of that year. I came down to be in the wedding, and  Anne Marie and I gravitated together.

Anne Maries house at 4603 Westminister
Anne Maries house at 4603 Westminister

This quickly became a Long Distance Romance, and I became a frequent flier to St. Louis.

We had many attributes in common: cars, politics, and others. She provided many entries for me into pop culture. Among our warmest times together were seeing the Fifth Dimension live at Leo’s in Cleveland: – a close, nearly intimate environment, and Aretha Franklin in concert in St. Louis. Anne Marie was into live theater, and she loved seeing Sheridan’s “The Rivals” at Karamu, a culturally diverse, integrated theater in Cleveland.  I fondly recall calling her on the first Tuesday in November in 1967 to tell her that Carl Stokes had just been elected Mayor of Cleveland:a link in a chain that led from RosaParks to Nov 4, 2008.  We went to “Man and his World” – the world’s fair in Montreal in 1969, and she was in heaven with all of the culture and foods available.  We also attended the 1969 USGP at Watkins Glen. The environment where she lived in St. Louis was an older neighborhood with a group of artistic, academic, social worker types – much different from my life at IBM.

IMG_3203(We didn’t know it then, but Tennessee Williams once live down the street.)

Anne Marie was always way ahead of the times in feminism, racial equality, and respect for gays.

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow! ”  (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam).

In March of 1970, I stopped off in St. Louis to visit her, and she told me in a very gentle, sweet, considerate way that she had found someone else. He was Dr. Saul Niedorf, and they got married and lived in Maine and then his home town of LA. Anne Marie and I remained good friends. Saul was an MD and a psychiatrist.  In 1973, I got married to  Sharon, and we had Allen in 1977 and Valerie in 1980.  Anne Marie was pleased that we had children, and we consulted with Saul before sending them to Montessori school – he was supportive.  (To converse with Saul (aka  Mickey)  was always a calming, reassuring experience – a handy attribute for a shrink!.)

Our daughter (Valerie) and a friend of hers travelled to LA after college where the friend was going to start a career, and Sharon and I were thrilled when they were able to stay for a few days with Anne Marie and Saul: it was interesting for me to have them meet my daughter, and to be there when things didn’t go as planned.  (As she was unable to have children, I was pleased to share our daughter with her.)

I once asked Anne Marie if she still had the beveled glass jewelery box I had given her for a present.  “Of course I do!”, she replied.  She gave me several memorable presents including an original art cell from the Beatles motion picture The Yellow Submarine (which has substantially appreciated in value), and a peace symbol medal. The latter stayed safely in my jewelery box for decades, having been worn in the 80’s by me to a 60’s party, and by my daughter to a middle school 60’s day. In March of 2006, I wore it – with jacket and tie – to a political rally, and took it off my head and put it over that of a visiting celebriity. I told Anne Marie about this in an email – not revealing until the last sentence that the recipient was Cindy Sheehan – outspoken mother of a son who lost his life in Iraq. Anne Marie wrote back a few weeks later that she had been at a PDA fund raiser, in LA, and was seated between that same Cindy Sheehan and Tom Hayden. Cindy was wearing the medal, and Anne Marie admired it. “It was put over my head in Ohio several weeks ago”, Cindy said. “I know”, Anne Marie said: “The man who gave it to you was my last boyfriend before I met my husband, and I gave it to him nearly 40 years ago.” What a delightful journey that medal made, and we were all happy where it landed: connections over the decades and the miles…

Anne Marie was devastated by the loss of her beloved husband in 2008, endured a lower leg amputation in 2009, and shared her final days with a bouquet of flowers we had sent. She is the first close contemporary of mine to die.

“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad.
Take a sad song and make it better.
Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start to make it better.” (from “Hey Jude”, by Paul McCartney)

Charles Pervo

see: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/latimes/obituary.aspx?n=anne-marie-staas-niedorf&pid=138508895

Converting primitive people to atheism

Atheism isn’t an attack on diversity, it’s a defense of reality. Religion is a hypothesis.

chasdarwin1 Comment

Need a boost? Need to feel less alone – read this!

N.B.:Scientist don’t believe – we test hypothesis.

By Greta Christina, From Alternet: “Atheism isn’t an attack on diversity, it’s a defense of reality.

Do atheists hate diversity?

Is the very act of atheist activism (trying to persuade people that atheism is correct and working to change the world into one without religion) an act of attempted conformity? Are atheists trying to create a drab, gray, uniform world, where everyone else is just like them?…It’s probably pretty obvious that I think the answer is a big fat “No!”  But it certainly is the case that many atheist activists, myself among them, are working very hard to persuade religious believers out of their beliefs. Not all atheists do this, of course; many have the more modest goals of separation of church and state and religious tolerance, including tolerance of atheists and recognition of us as equal citizens. But a good number of atheists are, in fact, trying to convince religious believers to become atheists. I’m one of them….

If there’s one single idea I’d most like to get across to religious believers, it would be this:

Religion is a hypothesis.

Religion is a hypothesis about how the world works, and why it is the way it is. Religion is the hypothesis that the world is the way it is, at least in part, because of immaterial beings or forces that act on the material world.

Religion is many other things, of course. It’s communities, cultural traditions, political ideologies and philosophies.  But those things aren’t what make religion unique. What makes religion unique, among all other communities/philosophies, etc., is this hypothesis of an immaterial world acting on the material one. It’s thousands of different hypotheses, really, positing thousands of immaterial beings and/or forces, with thousands upon thousands of different qualities and temperaments. But all these diverse beliefs have this one hypothesis in common: The hypothesis that there is a supernatural world, and that the natural world is the way it is because of the supernatural one. Religion is not a subjective opinion, an ethical axiom or a personal perspective. (These things can be connected with religion, of course, but they’re not what make its unique core.) Opinions, axioms and personal perspectives can be debated, but ultimately, they’re up to each person to decide for themselves. Religion is none of these things. Religion is a hypothesis. It says, “Things are the way they are because of the effects of the immaterial world on the material one.” Things are the way they are because God made them that way. Because the Devil is making them that way. Because the World-Soul is evolving that way. Because we have spiritual energy animating our consciousness. Because guardian angels are watching us. Because witches are casting spells. Because we are the reincarnated souls of dead people. Whatever.

Seeing religion as a hypothesis is important for a lot of reasons. But the reason that’s most relevant to today’s topic:

If religion is a hypothesis, it is not hostile to diversity for atheists to oppose it.  It is no more hostile to diversity to oppose the religion hypothesis than it is to oppose the hypothesis that global warming is a hoax; that an unrestricted free market will cause the economy to flourish for everyone; that illness is caused by an imbalance in the four bodily humors; that the sun orbits the earth.  Arguing against hypotheses that aren’t supported by the evidence is not anti-diversity. That’s how we understand the world better. We understand the world by rigorously gathering and analyzing evidence… and by ruthlessly rejecting any hypothesis the evidence doesn’t support. Was it hostile to diversity for Pasteur to argue against the theory of spontaneous generation? For Georges Lemaitre to argue against the steady-state universe? For Galileo to argue against geocentrism?

Many believers will argue that religion doesn’t fall into these categories. They’ll argue that religion can’t be proven true or false with 100-percent certainty, and therefore it’s reasonable for people to believe in any religion that appeals to them. (And it’s unreasonable for anyone to make an argument against it.)

But that’s not entirely true. Many religions, from young-earth creationism to astrology, do make testable claims. And every single time those claims have been rigorously tested, they’ve folded like a house of cards in a hurricane. They can’t be disproved with 100-percent certainty, but almost nothing can, and that isn’t the standard of evidence we use for any other claim.

Much more to the point, though: When you start seeing religion as a hypothesis, the fact that it’s unverifiable suddenly stops being a defense.

In fact, it’s completely the opposite. The fact that religion is unverifiable becomes one of the most devastating arguments against it.

One of the most important things about a hypothesis is that it has to be falsifiable. If any possible evidence could be used to support a hypothesis — if your hypothesis will be shown to be true whether the water in the beaker gets hotter or colder, stays the same temperature, boils away instantly or turns into a parrot and flies out the door — it is an utterly useless hypothesis. If any event at all can be fitted into it, then it has no power whatsoever to explain past events or predict future outcomes. It is, as they say, not even wrong.

And that’s just as true of religion as any other hypothesis. If any outcome of, for instance, an illness — recovering dramatically for no apparent reason, getting gradually better with medical intervention, getting worse, staying the same indefinitely, dying — could be explained as God’s work, then the God hypothesis is useless. It has no power to explain the world, to predict the future, or to tell us how our behavior will affect the outcomes of our lives. It serves no purpose. (Except, perhaps, a psychological one.)

The fact that religion is unfalsifiable doesn’t mean we have to accept it as a reasonable possibility. It means the exact opposite. It means we should reject it wholesale….

And I think the problem comes from how we think of diversity.

Historically, we pretty much have two models of dealing with religious beliefs that are different from ours. We have (a) intolerant evangelism and theocracy — forcing religious beliefs down other people’s throats, through social pressure at best, and legal strictures and even violence at worst. And we have (b) uncritical ecumenicalism: The idea that all religions are part of a rich, beautiful spiritual tapestry and they’re all at least a little bit true — and that even if they’re not, it’s religious bigotry to criticize them or try to persuade people out of them. It’s a model created largely in response to intolerant evangelism and theocracy… and therefore, it’s a model in which any criticism of any religion automatically gets slotted into that ugly category.

Atheism is offering a third option.

We’re offering the option of respecting the important freedom of religious belief, while retaining the right to criticize those beliefs, and to treat them just like we’d treat any other idea we think is mistaken.

The atheist movement is passionate about the right to religious freedom. (With the notable exception of a few assholes on the Internet. Name me one movement that doesn’t have its share of assholes on the Internet.) We fully support people’s right to believe whatever the hell they want, as long as they keep it out of government and don’t shove it down other people’s throats. We see the right to think what we like as a basic foundation of human ethics, one of the most fundamental rights we have — and we have no desire whatsoever to overturn that…We see religion as — yes, you guessed it — a hypothesis about the world. We see it as a hypothesis that has never once in all of human history been shown to be correct. We see it as a hypothesis that at the very least has been falsified numerous times, and at worst is unfalsifiable and should therefore be rejected on that basis alone. And we see no reason to treat it any differently from any other deeply flawed, completely unsupported hypothesis. We see no reason not to criticize it, to ask hard questions about it, to make fun of it, to point out flaws in it, to point out the good evidence contradicting it and the utter lack of good evidence supporting it… and to do our damndest to persuade people out of believing in it.”

 

Emphasis mine

see: http://www.alternet.org/story/144199/why_i_want_to_turn_religious_people_into_atheists

Reagan and the Cold War

chasdarwinLeave a comment

From alternet:Reagan was inspirational, but to claim he defeated Communism is a disservice to the millions of Eastern Europeans who struggled against great odds for their freedom.

“It was not the military might of NATO, but the power of nonviolent action by ordinary citizens which brought down the system. The popular uprising against the repressive system that had ruled their country for much of the previous four decades — along with comparable movements, which came to the fore that year in Poland, Hungary and East Germany — marks a great triumph of the human spirit.

These movements were largely led by democratic socialists who mobilized workers, church people, intellectuals, and others to face down the tanks with their bare hands. Yet here in the United States, we are told that it was a result of President Reagan’s militarism and the supposed inherent superiority of capitalism. It is this false narrative that has played such a major role in shifting discourse to the right in subsequent decades and has been used to discredit those struggling for a more just and egalitarian economic system and a more sane and less imperialistic foreign policy.

President Reagan’s verbal support for democracy had little credibility in many of these countries. For example, while he denounced Poland’s martial law regime, he was a strong supporter of the more repressive martial law regime then in power in NATO ally Turkey and scores of other dictatorships. In challenging left-wing governments in the Third World, Reagan gave little credence to nonviolent action and instead backed insurgents with ties to U.S.-backed dictatorships and — in the case of Afghanistan — even Islamic fundamentalists.While Reagan was certainly capable of inspirational leadership and personal charm, to claim that he is responsible for the downfall of Communism and the end of the Cold War is a disservice to the millions of Eastern Europeans and others who struggled against great odds for their freedom. For it was not American militarism, but massive nonviolent action — including strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, and other forms of noncooperation — which finally brought down these Communist regimes. Indeed, the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia and the Solidarity movement in Poland emerged during the period of U.S.-Soviet détente prior to Reagan taking office.”

N.B.: Who won the Cold War?  Japan won the cold war.

(Emphasis mine)

see: http://www.alternet.org/world/144069

Fox ‘News’? NOT!

chasdarwinLeave a comment

From AlterNet: “Eight Reasons Fox is Not a news Organization.

Even before Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, Rupert Murdoch had declared war on him via the personalities of Fox News Channel, a subsidiary of Murdoch’s media conglomerate, News Corp.

Since Obama’s election, the cable channel’s hosts and paid analysts have launched a full frontal assault on the president, smearing his nominees, calling him a racist and suggesting that his administration was trying to persuade disabled veterans to off themselves.

Now the fearmongers at Fox are crying foul since the president and his aides declared Fox not to be a news organization. Earlier this month, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Fox an “arm” of the Republican Party. Obama went even further, suggesting this week that Fox “is operating basically as a talk-radio format,” and we know what that means: A format in which the most provocative opinions dominate the discourse and facts are optional.

Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda — who operates his News Channel as a propaganda machine for his anti-government cause.

He even has his own community organizer, a fellow named Glenn Beck, who can turn out a mob on a dime at your local town-hall meeting. His big ratings-getter, Bill O’Reilly, is a professional bully, handsomely paid to physically intimidate progressive commentators — on video — and to vilify others.

Murdoch’s agenda is simple: He’s against regulation of any kind. Famous for smashing the unions at his U.K. properties, Murdoch also has a pronounced disdain for labor.

In essence, Murdoch’s agenda tracks closely with that of the current GOP, that far-right rump of a party that once claimed to embrace a range of views under the canvas of a big tent. So he uses the Fox airwaves to raise funds for Republican political action committees…

Why Fox News is not a news operation:

1. Glenn Beck, the community organizer — No other news operation in memory has ever hired its own community organizer, at least not one tasked with the mission of organizing paranoid people to march through the streets of the nation’s capital with signs depicting the president of the United States as a mass murderer.

Through his 9-12 Project, which he promotes on his Fox News Channel program, that’s exactly what Beck did, organizing with other right-wing organizations the 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington — AlterNet reported marchers sported signs comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin.

Beck was also instrumental in turning out angry mobs to disrupt this summer’s town hall meetings, where members of Congress attempted to discuss health care reform with their constituents. After participants in a scuffle at a Tampa, Fla., town hall named their local 9-12 Project site as their inspiration, the national 9-12 Project site stopped accepting comments.

Despite the loss of some 80 advertisers from The Glenn Beck Show, thanks to a campaign by Color of Change, which targeted the show’s sponsors after Beck claimed the president had “a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture,” Beck remains on the air at Fox. Could that be because he’s more valuable to his boss-daddy as an organizer than as a conduit for advertising dollars?..

2. Fox’s alliance with the corporate-funded astroturf group Americans for Prosperity — We’ve scratched our heads trying to come up with an analogous relationship between a cable news channel and a corporate-funded group that organizes fearful people to disrupt public meetings, but we came up empty.

Americans For Prosperity, a group that received funding from Koch Industries, an oil-and-energy company and major polluter, also organized this summer’s town hall disrupters. Although they kicked off their rabble-rousing campaign by galvanizing opposition to health care reform, their real target appears to be energy reform, especially the cap-and-trade provision that will make dirty industries pay a pretty penny to pollute.

3. On-air fundraising for Republican PACs — Fox News personalities encourage viewers to contribute money to, and visit the Web sites of, specific Republican-affiliated political action committees. We can’t find a single instance of either CNN or MSNBC doing anything of the kind for Democratic causes.

Oh, sure, Keith Olbermann raised money for free health clinics for the uninsured, but it’s our understanding that there are uninsured Republicans. And Rachel Maddow raised money for jerseys for an Iraqi baseball team (who learned the game from American troops), but last time we looked, baseball was the Great American Bipartisan Pastime.

4. Bill O’Reilly, stalker of those whose opinions he doesn’t like — We exhausted all avenues of research trying to find a news show host at another cable news channel who pays his producer to stalk people whose opinions he or she doesn’t like. Came up with bupkus. Nor could we find one who locked the media out of remarks she or he was delivering in acceptance of an award from a nonprofit group.

At the annual conference of the religious-right political group, Family Research Council Action, O’Reilly received an award for his vilification of Dr. George Tiller. Tiller was an abortion provider who was gunned down in his church by a man who obviously took to heart references by O’Reilly and others, “Tiller the baby-killer.”

5. Sunday talk-show host who promotes Republican falsehoods — Once upon a time, Chris Wallace, son of the aforementioned Mike, was a real journalist, just like his dad. Then he joined the Fox team, as host of Fox News Sunday, which airs on the Fox’s broadcast network.

6. Fox News anchors, show hosts and pundits parrot GOP press releases, or just make up stuff — Promoting the notion that their organization is on some sort of Nixonian White House “enemies list,” Fox News personalities first trotted out the “enemies list” theme in August, when they suggested that the White House, asking for Americans to send the administration any unsolicited e-mails they received that promoted false information about health care reform legislation, was actually compiling an “enemies list.”

7. Fox News hosts urge viewers to join a particular political group — During the run-up to the big right-wing 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington, Fox News entities and personalities repeatedly flogged viewers to join the Tea Party Express, a bus tour of anti-Obama activists.

Advising viewers on “how you can join” the tour, Fox and Friends hosted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams, vice chairman of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, who is a part of the birther conspiracy movement of people who contend that Obama wasn’t born in America. At the Fox Nation Web site, viewers were treated to a promotional piece that asked, “Will You Join the Tea Party Express?” We don’t see the other cable news outlets soliciting members for, say, MoveOn.org.

8. Glenn Beck, deranged inventor of paranoid conspiracies — Here’s a Beck exclusive you won’t hear on any of the other cable news networks: OnStar, the GPS/emergency-alert system available in General Motors cars, is being indirectly funded by the auto-industry bailout so the government can spy on you.

To be fair, Beck said this on his radio program, which is not a Fox News product, which is also where he compared the situation of Fox News to that of Jews during the Holocaust (with other news outlets acting as silent bystanders). In the same segment, he cast Obama as a “brutal dictator.”

But statements such as these seem to serve no detriment to his Fox News career. (Compare this to MSNBC, where David Shuster got sidelined for a month during the height of campaign season for a bad choice of words regarding Chelsea Clinton stumping for her mom.) And there’s no shortage of outrageous and paranoid material to choose from from Beck’s television show, much of it reported, blogged or cataloged by AlterNet.”

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/143456/8_reasons_fox_is_not_a_news_organization?page=entire

Have heart- approval rising for Health Insurance Reform!

chasdarwinLeave a comment

The ship is turning!

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Trevor Tompson, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The fever has broken. The patient is out of intensive care. But if you’re President Barack Obama, you can’t stop pacing the waiting room. Health care overhaul is still in guarded condition.

The latest Associated Press-GfK poll has found that opposition to Obama’s health care remake dropped dramatically in just a matter of weeks. Still, Americans remain divided over complex legislation that Democrats are advancing in Congress.

The public is split 40-40 on supporting or opposing the health care legislation, the poll found. An even split is welcome news for Democrats, a sharp improvement from September, when 49 percent of Americans said they opposed the congressional proposals and just 34 percent supported them.

Anger about health care boiled over during August. Lawmakers returning home for town hall meetings faced outcries that the government was trying to take over the system, ushering in higher costs, lower quality — even rationing and euthanasia.

“It’s very significant that there’s an upturn in support for the plans because after August there was a sense that the whole effort was beginning to decline and would not come back in terms of public support,” said Robert Blendon, a Harvard professor who tracks public opinion on health care.

“Even with this,” added Blendon, “the country is still divided over whether or not moving ahead is the right thing to do.”

Behind the shift seems to be a growing determination among Democrats that going forward would be better. Meanwhile, political independents don’t appear as alarmed about the congressional proposals as they were just a few weeks ago. Still, opponents remain more passionate in their convictions than do supporters.

In a significant change, opposition among older Americans dropped 16 percentage points. Seniors have been concerned that Congress would stick them with the bill by cutting Medicare to pay for covering the uninsured. Among the most reliable voters, they were much more wary of the changes than the public as a whole. The gap has narrowed.

The poll found that 68 percent of Democrats support the congressional plans, up from 57 percent in early September. Opposition among independents plunged from 51 percent to 36 percent. However, only 29 percent of independents currently support the plans in Congress.

Among seniors, opposition fell from 59 percent in September to 43 percent now. Almost four in 10, 38 percent, now support it, compared with 31 percent in September…Republicans remain solidly against the congressional health care plans, with four out of five opposed.

Americans overwhelmingly say it’s important that health care legislation have the support of both parties.

Blendon credits Obama’s speech to Congress in early September and his blitz of media interviews and appearances since then for moving public opinion toward the positive column. What some have criticized as presidential hyperactivity, many Americans took as a sign that the president was taking ownership of the issue, Blendon said.

Before his prime-time speech to Congress, 52 percent disapproved of Obama’s handling of health care. Now the public is split, with 48 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving.

“Getting more directly involved in the outcome is what people expect a president to be doing,” said Blendon.

There’s still deep skepticism that the government can fix the health care system to expand coverage and tamp down rising costs…

The congressional bills would require all Americans to get health insurance, either through an employer, through a government program or on their own. Tax credits would be offered for many of those who buy their own coverage but failure to comply could result in a fine.

“I don’t think that the government should supply health care to the people,” said Newcomb.

The AP-GfK poll was conducted Oct. 1-5, based on a nationally representative sample of 1,003 adults age 18 or older, contacted by telephone on land lines and cell phones. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points for results based on the entire sample.”

(Emphasis mine)

see:http://www.cleveland.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2009/10/opposition_to_obamas_health_re.html

Emotional maturity and the politics of spite

the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Krugman, NY Times: ” There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.

“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

To be sure, while celebrating America’s rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn’t do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences — in particular, in the debate over health care reform.

Now, it’s understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage — just as most Democrats opposed President Bush’s attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.

But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.

The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim — based mainly on lies about death panels and so on — that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.

Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan — and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare’s creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending — growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.

But the Obama administration’s plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.

The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.

It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.”

Right on – emphasis mine.

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/opinion/05krugman.html?ref=todayspaper

Progress on our public option

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Don’t despair, the public option is still there…

Robert Creamer writes in HuffPost: “In a surprising vote Tuesday, ten Democrats voted to add a public option to the most conservative of the five health insurance reform bills working their way through Congress. That’s just two votes short of passage.

This robust support for the public option — in what most observers consider the most conservative committee in the Senate — signals a sea change in Congressional opinion toward the public option. The odds are now very high that some form of public health insurance option will be included on the final bill when it emerges from a House-Senate Conference Committee later this fall and is ultimately passed by Congress.  In the midst of the right-wing, town hall onslaught last August, the pundits…

The three bills that have passed House Committees, and the Senate Health Committee bill, all contain a public option. And increasingly it appears that the strongest form of public option will come out of the House.

A Robert Woods Johnson Report indicates that over the last ten years wages have gone up 29%, health insurance rates have gone up 120% and the profits of the private health insurance industry have gone up 428%. No wonder they don’t want competition.

So why the resurgent Congressional support for a strong public option? There are three reasons:

1) First and foremost, voters’ support for a public health insurance option is as strong as ever. All of the right-wing talk about a “government takeover” has not fooled voters who are forced every day to deal with the stranglehold that the private insurance industry has on their health care.

Last weekend’s New York Times poll showed that 65% of all voters support giving Americans the choice of a public option and only 26% oppose it.

More importantly, the public option is also popular in swing Congressional districts. The firm of Anzeloni Liszt just released the results of a poll it conducted in 91 Blue Dog, Rural Caucus and Frontline districts. The poll found that 54% of the voters in these battleground districts support the choice of a public option.

And the poll also found that the voters in these districts want reform and want it this year. The polling report says:

Overall, 58% of voters believe the health care system is in need of major reform or a complete overhaul, and almost 59% are concerned that Congress will not take action on health care reform this year. The risks of inaction to Democrats in swing districts increases if voters perceive opposition stems from ties to the insurance industry, as 74% are concerned that the health insurance industry will have too much influence over reform.

Those kinds of polling results get the attention of Members of Congress.

2) Members of Congress have begun to realize that they will have to live with the consequences of what they pass for years to come. And what the voters will care about in the future will not be slogans or ideology. Once the program is passed, the voters will care most about one thing: affordability.”

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/growing-momentum-for-publ_b_303415.html?view=print

How will the growing number of ‘no religion’ voters impact politics?

How will the boom in Americans claiming “no religion”—25 percent of the country will fit into that category in 20 years, according to a Trinity College survey out today—alter national politics?

chasdarwin2 Comments

Dan Gilgoff, US News:”How will the boom in Americans claiming “no religion”—25 percent of the country will fit into that category in 20 years, according to a Trinity College survey out today—alter national politics?

I see four big ways:

1. Secular voters will become an increasingly important component of the Democratic base.

In the 1990s, so-called religious nones comprised 6 percent of the Democratic Party and 6 percent of theGOP. Today, there are two and a half times as many nones—34 million Americans, or 15 percent of the country—and they account for 16 percent of Democrats, compared with just 8 percent of Republicans. Three in four of them voted for Barack Obama in the last election. Every indication is that these political trends will continue.

Even as the Democratic Party has seriously stepped up its faith outreach, then, the fact that the fastest-growing religious group in the United States is those with no religious affiliation—and that members of that group are leaning dramatically in the Democratic direction—will make the Dems pay closer attention to them.

2. American politics will become more polarized.

As more Americans leave religion, the ones left in the pews are those most committed to their faith. In a nation where church attendance is one of the best predictors of voting behavior—the more often you attend, the more likely you are to vote Republican—this polarization of religious life will spill over into the political arena, setting off more culture-war battles.

3. Republicans will have to choose between becoming a more overtly religious party and reaching out more seriously to the growing secular middle.

Secular voters once constituted an important part of the GOP coalition, but fewer than 10 percent of religious nones under age 30 are Republican. “Republican nones are getting older and continue to show an affinity to the GOP,” says Juhen Navarro-Rivera, a Trinity College research fellow who helped compile the new report. “But they’re not making new Republican nones.”

Navarro-Rivera is still running the numbers, but his hunch is that the new generation of religious nones has been scared away from the Republican Party because of its ties to the Christian right. Does the GOP continue to embrace that movement or move more to the middle? Call it the Sarah Palin option versus the John McCain option. (Though opposition to healthcare reform, it should be noted, is helping bring the two camps together.)

4. If secular voters become more aggressively antireligious, the Democrats’ newfound faithiness faces big challenges.

If religious nones congeal into a coherent voting bloc with their own issues, Democrats will have to pay more attention to their political agenda. Most religious nones aren’t hostile to religion; few are atheists. “They’re aligning with the Democrats because the party has lots of religious people, but they’re not pushy about it,” says Navarro-Rivera.

At the same time, religious nones aren’t crazy about a huge role for religion in government and politics. And as their numbers grow, some expect them to turn more overtly antireligious. Will they continue to tolerate a party leader who invites Rick Warren to his inauguration and who refuses to decide whether religious groups can hire based on religion with government funds? Doubtful.

see: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/09/22/4-ways-the-no-religion-boom-will-alter-american-politics.html

Conservative Radicals and the Politics of Vengeance

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Bill Moyers: In the following interview, Bill Moyers and powerhouse NYT editor and author of “The Death of Conservatism Sam Tanenhaus discuss the last gasps of the conservative movement. Tanenhaus says that far from signifying a resurgence of conservative ideals, the Tea Party protesters and shock jocks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh spell the doom of the conservative movement.

BILL MOYERS: Conservatives were out in force in Washington last weekend. They had come to express their opposition to big government, to taxes and wasteful spending, and health care reform they fear would lead to a nightmare of bureaucracy. Max Blumenthal, author of REPUBLICAN GOMORRAH waded into their midst to sample opinions.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So you’re saying if the government eliminates Social Security and Medicare then you’ll get out of the program?

WOMAN: No, I said if they get out of my life.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Out of your Social Security and-

WOMAN: No, out of everything.

BILL MOYERS: But they had also come to deplore and denounce President Obama- in their minds a tyrant akin to Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein.

MAN: I’m afraid he’s going to do what Hitler could never do and that’s destroy the United States of America.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And what’s the Obama revolution, what’s going to happen?

MAN: Similar to Germany, like what Hitler did. He took over the auto industry, did he not? He took over the banking, did he not? And Hitler had his own personal secret service police, Acorn is an extension of that.

BILL MOYERS: They had found a new hero in Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican whose shout heard ’round the world was now the rallying cry of the weekend.

CROWD: You lie! You lie!

BILL MOYERS: Glenn Beck, their favorite pundit, had promoted this march and was reveling in its success….

So what do we make of this new book titled THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM? Has the author Sam Tanenhaus spent his time and considerable talent on a premature obituary?

Sam Tanenhaus edits two of the most influential sections of the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES – the Book Review and the Week in Review. He’s has had a long fascination with conservatives and conservative ideas. He wrote this acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, the journalist who spied for the Russians before he became fiercely anti-communist and a hero to conservatives. Now Tanenhaus is working on a biography of the conservative icon William F. Buckley JR.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL, Sam Tanenhaus.

SAM TANENHAUS: Oh my pleasure to be here, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: So, if you’re right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television?

SAM TANENHAUS: I’m afraid they’re radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time — this is what my book describes narratively — between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We’re seeing the revanchist side.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?

SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that’s based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that’s been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for ‘revenge.’ It’s a politics of vengeance….

And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we’re seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We’re seeing it now– they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.

BILL MOYERS: What gives them their certainty? You know, your hero of the 18th Century, Burke, Edmund Burke, warned against extremism and dogmatic orthodoxy.

SAM TANENHAUS: Well, it’s a very deep strain in our politics, Bill. Some of our great historians like Richard Hofstadter and Garry Wills have written about this. If you go back to the foundations of our Republic, first of all, we have two documents, “creedal documents” they’re sometimes called, more or less at war with one another. The Declaration of Independence says one thing and the Constitution says another.

BILL MOYERS: The Declaration says–

SAM TANENHAUS: …says that we will be an egalitarian society in which all rights will be available to one and all, and the Constitution creates a complex political system that stops that change from happening. So, there’s a clash right at the beginning. Now, what we’ve seen is that certain groups among us– and sometimes it’s been the left– have been able to dominate the conversation and transform politics into a kind of theater. And that’s what we’re seeing now.

BILL MOYERS: When you see these people in the theater of television, you call them the insurrectionists, in your book, what do you think motivates them?

SAM TANENHAUS: One of the interesting developments in our politics, in just the past few months, although you could see signs of it earlier, is the emergence of the demographic we always overlook in our youth obsessed culture: the elderly. That was the group that did not support Barack Obama. They voted for John McCain. It was also the group that rose up and defied George W. Bush, when he wanted to add private Social Scurity accounts. It was a similar kind of protest.

BILL MOYERS: There’s a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they’re against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don’t want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying “Don’t touch my Medicare.” You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.

SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it’s very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. “Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won’t take my Medicare away. Don’t know Medicare is a government program?” That’s not really what’s going on, I think. I think there’s something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we’ve become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, “We all expect too much from government.” We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life”. So, when people say, “Don’t take my Medicare away,” what they really mean is, “We’re entirely dependent on this government and we’re afraid they’ll take one thing away that we’ve gotten used to and replace it with something that won’t be so good. And there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re powerless before the very guardian that protects us.”

BILL MOYERS: So, how do you see this contradiction playing out in the health care debate? Where what’s the dominant force that’s going to prevail here at the end? Is it going to be, “We want reform and we want the government involved?” Or are we going to privatize it the way people on the conservative side want to do? The insurance companies, the drug companies, all of that?

SAM TANENHAUS: I think what we’ll see is a kind of incremental reform. Look, we know that health care has become the third rail of American politics, going back to Theodore Roosevelt. The greatest retail politician in modern history, Bill Clinton, could not sell it. But here’s another thing to think about. In the book I discuss one of the most interesting political theories of the modern era, Samuel Lubell’s theory of the solar system of politics. And what he says is what we think of as an equally balanced, two-party system, is really a rotating one-party system. Either the Republicans or Democrats have ruled since the Civil War for periods of some 30-36 years. And in those periods, all the great debates have occurred within a single party. So, if you go back to the 1980s, which some would say was the peak of the modern conservative period, the fight’s about how to end the Cold War, how to unleash market forces– were really Republican issues.

Today, when we look at the great questions — how to stimulate the economy, how to provide and expand and improve a sustainable health care system, the fight is taking place among Democrats. So, in a sense what Republicans have done is to put themselves on the sidelines. They’ve vacated the field and left it to the other party, the Democratic Party, to resolve these issues among themselves. That’s one reason I think conservatism is in trouble.

BILL MOYERS: You write in here that they’re not simply in retreat, they’re outmoded. They don’t act like it, you know?

SAM TANENHAUS: They do and they don’t. What I also say in the book is that the voices are louder than ever. And I wrote that back in March. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats, “The Democrat Socialist Party.” This started from the beginning. So, the noise is there. William Buckley has a wonderful expression. He says, “The pyrotechnicians and noise-makers have always been there on the right.” I think we’re hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that the news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Why are those organs of information and/or propaganda so powerful?

SAM TANENHAUS: Well, there’s been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time. The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The great, brilliant thinker, James Burnham. A less known but equally brilliant figure, Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers. And they were essentially philosophical in their outlook. Now, there are conservative intellectuals, but we don’t think of them as conservative anymore– Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukayama, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, the great Columbia professor, Mark Lilla– they’ve all left the movement. And so, it’s become dominated instead by very monotonic, theatrically impressive voices and faces.

BILL MOYERS: Well, what does it say that a tradition that begins with Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the years, the decades, to William Buckley, and now the icon is Rush Limbaugh?

SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in my interpretation it means that it’s ideologically depleted. That what we’re seeing now and hearing are the noise-makers in Buckley’s phrase. There’s a very important incident described in this book that occurred in 1965, when the John Birch Society, an organization these new Americanist groups resemble — the ones who are marching in Washington and holding tea parties. Essentially, very extremist revanchist groups that view politics in a conspiratorial way.

And the John Birch Society during the peak of the Cold War struggle was convinced, and you’re well aware of this, that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, who reported to his brother Milton, and 80 percent of the government was dominated by Communists. Communists were in charge of American education, American health care. They were fluoridating the water to weaken our brains. All of this happened. And at first, Buckley and his fellow intellectuals at NATIONAL REVIEW indulged this. They said, “You know what? Their arguments are absurd, but they believe in the right things. They’re anti-communists. And they’re helping our movement.”

Cause many of them helped Barry Goldwater get nominated in 1964. And then in 1965, Buckley said, “Enough.” Buckley himself had matured politically. He’d run for Mayor of New York. He’d seen how politics really worked. And he said, “We can’t allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe.” So, he turned over his own magazine to a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its “drivel” were circulated in advance to three of the great conservative Republicans of the day, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, from your home state of Texas, and Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line. And that’s what we may not see if we don’t have that kind of leadership on the right now.

BILL MOYERS: To what extent is race an irritant here? Because, you know, I was in that era of the ’60s, I was deeply troubled as we moved on to try to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by William Buckley’s seeming embrace of white supremacy. It seemed to me to taint– to leave something in the DNA of the modern conservative movement that is still there.

SAM TANENHAUS: It is. And one of the few regrets Bill Buckley ever expressed was that his magazine had not supported the Civil Rights Act–…Look who some of the great protestors are against Barack Obama. Three of them come from South Carolina, the state that led the secession. Joe Wilson and Senator DeMint, Mark Sanford who got in trouble. These are South Carolinians. And there’s no question that that side of the insurrectionist South remains in our politics.

see: http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/142754