Lily Salter's Blog, page 1021
August 13, 2015
Being Blunt: The Price of Workplace Pandemonium
The late Dorothy Schiff, longtime owner of the New York Post, once remarked that she rarely fraternized with her employees because she found it difficult not to think of them as “personnel problems.” Of course, when it came to problematic workplace situations, Schiff didn't know the half of it. In the stressful world of Big Media, where job issues are often amplified beyond recognition by a 24-hour-a-day commentariat, the stakes can be especially high. Unlike the occasional malcontents or drunks that Schiff contended with (before she sold the Post to Rupert Murdoch in 1976), high-profile substance abusers, serial plagiarists and flame-out artists are dealt with in one way or another by today’s media captains -- all under the watchful eye of hyper-attentive media critics. STARZ considers the dilemma of destructive media personalities in its new comedy series “Blunt Talk.” The show’s protagonist, Walter Blunt, hosts a nightly cable news show. Played by Patrick Stewart, he’s one big personnel problem, openly snorting cocaine, getting busted for soliciting and generally creating havoc wherever he goes. Treatment Costs, Lost Work Days In the real world, problems like Blunt’s are more than comedic fodder. Today’s bosses must cobble together remedies that vary from a little readjustment of workplace lighting to usage of a psychiatric arsenal. Mental health issues cost employers an estimated $200 billion a year, according to the American Journal of Psychiatry. The magazine Psychology Today says that, for a company of 500 employees, “untreated depression costs $1.4 million per annum, and that does not include costs related to bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders.” The Centers for Disease Control says that depression causes 200 million lost workdays a year, and it estimates that 20% of people over 55 have a mental health issue affecting their work. Employers have recognized a need to address mental health issues -- partly because they’re receiving a nudge from the federal government, which enforces the American Disabilities Act, requiring “reasonable accommodation” for employees with mental health problems. Many have established employee assistance programs, offering therapy and other mental health services. “A lot of times, more mundane kinds of accommodations can make a huge difference,” says Lee Ann Browning-McNee, chief program officer for the Mental Health Association of Maryland. “It could mean adjusting somebody’s schedule to reduce anxiety or finding alternate settings for people who get tense around loud noises. Accommodations should be made just as they would be for someone with a physical disability.” In the rarefied world of Big Media, heftier measures are often called for: Therapists, psychotropic drugs, bodyguards, “babysitters.” In “Blunt Talk,” a long-suffering therapist played by comedian Richard Lewis, offers the front line of defense. First Steps How would a real-life therapist approach a dysfunctional yet well-intentioned subject like Blunt? Brentwood, Calif. psychologist William Rolfe, who has treated high-profile Hollywood celebrities, says that fame itself represents a big mental health challenge. “Whether a person is in that position because it scratches some deep itch, I don't know,” Rolfe says. “Once somebody becomes so high profile, there’s a whole set of problems and challenges.” Like the sense of isolation that famous people sometimes discuss? Right. “People aren't challenging them,” Rolfe says. “They're saying yes to everything. The celebrity is insulated by his status.” Even before addressing some media star’s egomania, though, there are big obstacles. “The first step would be to address the substance abuse problem,” Rolfe says. “It’s unlikely to be helpful to address other things without addressing that first.” And then? “Find out what help he wants. The hard part is he has to be motivated. In that, I have no power at all.” If therapy doesn’t work, it may be time to involve the lawyers, says Steve Jaffe, a veteran Beverly Hills crisis management expert. The ultimate crucible for withstanding mental health stress is the movie set, where a star struggling with addiction to can scuttle a production. Working as an associate producer on a film 25 years ago, Jaffe encountered such a situation. Leading actor and a supporting actor – both crucial to the project’s success – were notorious alcoholics. The production company, rather than relying on the actors’ promises to go straight, negotiated a payment deal to keep them focused. “The star got a cashier’s check every day after he completed shooting,” Jaffe says. ”The other guy got paid at the end of the shooting. It worked. The movie opened as the number one movie in the country.” The new STARZ Original Series “Blunt Talk,” created by Jonathan Ames and Executive Produced by Seth MacFarlane, stars Patrick Stewart as a British import intent on conquering the world of American cable news. Don’t miss the premiere of the half-hour scripted comedy, Saturday, August 22 at 9P only on STARZThe late Dorothy Schiff, longtime owner of the New York Post, once remarked that she rarely fraternized with her employees because she found it difficult not to think of them as “personnel problems.” Of course, when it came to problematic workplace situations, Schiff didn't know the half of it. In the stressful world of Big Media, where job issues are often amplified beyond recognition by a 24-hour-a-day commentariat, the stakes can be especially high. Unlike the occasional malcontents or drunks that Schiff contended with (before she sold the Post to Rupert Murdoch in 1976), high-profile substance abusers, serial plagiarists and flame-out artists are dealt with in one way or another by today’s media captains -- all under the watchful eye of hyper-attentive media critics. STARZ considers the dilemma of destructive media personalities in its new comedy series “Blunt Talk.” The show’s protagonist, Walter Blunt, hosts a nightly cable news show. Played by Patrick Stewart, he’s one big personnel problem, openly snorting cocaine, getting busted for soliciting and generally creating havoc wherever he goes. Treatment Costs, Lost Work Days In the real world, problems like Blunt’s are more than comedic fodder. Today’s bosses must cobble together remedies that vary from a little readjustment of workplace lighting to usage of a psychiatric arsenal. Mental health issues cost employers an estimated $200 billion a year, according to the American Journal of Psychiatry. The magazine Psychology Today says that, for a company of 500 employees, “untreated depression costs $1.4 million per annum, and that does not include costs related to bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders.” The Centers for Disease Control says that depression causes 200 million lost workdays a year, and it estimates that 20% of people over 55 have a mental health issue affecting their work. Employers have recognized a need to address mental health issues -- partly because they’re receiving a nudge from the federal government, which enforces the American Disabilities Act, requiring “reasonable accommodation” for employees with mental health problems. Many have established employee assistance programs, offering therapy and other mental health services. “A lot of times, more mundane kinds of accommodations can make a huge difference,” says Lee Ann Browning-McNee, chief program officer for the Mental Health Association of Maryland. “It could mean adjusting somebody’s schedule to reduce anxiety or finding alternate settings for people who get tense around loud noises. Accommodations should be made just as they would be for someone with a physical disability.” In the rarefied world of Big Media, heftier measures are often called for: Therapists, psychotropic drugs, bodyguards, “babysitters.” In “Blunt Talk,” a long-suffering therapist played by comedian Richard Lewis, offers the front line of defense. First Steps How would a real-life therapist approach a dysfunctional yet well-intentioned subject like Blunt? Brentwood, Calif. psychologist William Rolfe, who has treated high-profile Hollywood celebrities, says that fame itself represents a big mental health challenge. “Whether a person is in that position because it scratches some deep itch, I don't know,” Rolfe says. “Once somebody becomes so high profile, there’s a whole set of problems and challenges.” Like the sense of isolation that famous people sometimes discuss? Right. “People aren't challenging them,” Rolfe says. “They're saying yes to everything. The celebrity is insulated by his status.” Even before addressing some media star’s egomania, though, there are big obstacles. “The first step would be to address the substance abuse problem,” Rolfe says. “It’s unlikely to be helpful to address other things without addressing that first.” And then? “Find out what help he wants. The hard part is he has to be motivated. In that, I have no power at all.” If therapy doesn’t work, it may be time to involve the lawyers, says Steve Jaffe, a veteran Beverly Hills crisis management expert. The ultimate crucible for withstanding mental health stress is the movie set, where a star struggling with addiction to can scuttle a production. Working as an associate producer on a film 25 years ago, Jaffe encountered such a situation. Leading actor and a supporting actor – both crucial to the project’s success – were notorious alcoholics. The production company, rather than relying on the actors’ promises to go straight, negotiated a payment deal to keep them focused. “The star got a cashier’s check every day after he completed shooting,” Jaffe says. ”The other guy got paid at the end of the shooting. It worked. The movie opened as the number one movie in the country.” The new STARZ Original Series “Blunt Talk,” created by Jonathan Ames and Executive Produced by Seth MacFarlane, stars Patrick Stewart as a British import intent on conquering the world of American cable news. Don’t miss the premiere of the half-hour scripted comedy, Saturday, August 22 at 9P only on STARZThe late Dorothy Schiff, longtime owner of the New York Post, once remarked that she rarely fraternized with her employees because she found it difficult not to think of them as “personnel problems.” Of course, when it came to problematic workplace situations, Schiff didn't know the half of it. In the stressful world of Big Media, where job issues are often amplified beyond recognition by a 24-hour-a-day commentariat, the stakes can be especially high. Unlike the occasional malcontents or drunks that Schiff contended with (before she sold the Post to Rupert Murdoch in 1976), high-profile substance abusers, serial plagiarists and flame-out artists are dealt with in one way or another by today’s media captains -- all under the watchful eye of hyper-attentive media critics. STARZ considers the dilemma of destructive media personalities in its new comedy series “Blunt Talk.” The show’s protagonist, Walter Blunt, hosts a nightly cable news show. Played by Patrick Stewart, he’s one big personnel problem, openly snorting cocaine, getting busted for soliciting and generally creating havoc wherever he goes. Treatment Costs, Lost Work Days In the real world, problems like Blunt’s are more than comedic fodder. Today’s bosses must cobble together remedies that vary from a little readjustment of workplace lighting to usage of a psychiatric arsenal. Mental health issues cost employers an estimated $200 billion a year, according to the American Journal of Psychiatry. The magazine Psychology Today says that, for a company of 500 employees, “untreated depression costs $1.4 million per annum, and that does not include costs related to bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders.” The Centers for Disease Control says that depression causes 200 million lost workdays a year, and it estimates that 20% of people over 55 have a mental health issue affecting their work. Employers have recognized a need to address mental health issues -- partly because they’re receiving a nudge from the federal government, which enforces the American Disabilities Act, requiring “reasonable accommodation” for employees with mental health problems. Many have established employee assistance programs, offering therapy and other mental health services. “A lot of times, more mundane kinds of accommodations can make a huge difference,” says Lee Ann Browning-McNee, chief program officer for the Mental Health Association of Maryland. “It could mean adjusting somebody’s schedule to reduce anxiety or finding alternate settings for people who get tense around loud noises. Accommodations should be made just as they would be for someone with a physical disability.” In the rarefied world of Big Media, heftier measures are often called for: Therapists, psychotropic drugs, bodyguards, “babysitters.” In “Blunt Talk,” a long-suffering therapist played by comedian Richard Lewis, offers the front line of defense. First Steps How would a real-life therapist approach a dysfunctional yet well-intentioned subject like Blunt? Brentwood, Calif. psychologist William Rolfe, who has treated high-profile Hollywood celebrities, says that fame itself represents a big mental health challenge. “Whether a person is in that position because it scratches some deep itch, I don't know,” Rolfe says. “Once somebody becomes so high profile, there’s a whole set of problems and challenges.” Like the sense of isolation that famous people sometimes discuss? Right. “People aren't challenging them,” Rolfe says. “They're saying yes to everything. The celebrity is insulated by his status.” Even before addressing some media star’s egomania, though, there are big obstacles. “The first step would be to address the substance abuse problem,” Rolfe says. “It’s unlikely to be helpful to address other things without addressing that first.” And then? “Find out what help he wants. The hard part is he has to be motivated. In that, I have no power at all.” If therapy doesn’t work, it may be time to involve the lawyers, says Steve Jaffe, a veteran Beverly Hills crisis management expert. The ultimate crucible for withstanding mental health stress is the movie set, where a star struggling with addiction to can scuttle a production. Working as an associate producer on a film 25 years ago, Jaffe encountered such a situation. Leading actor and a supporting actor – both crucial to the project’s success – were notorious alcoholics. The production company, rather than relying on the actors’ promises to go straight, negotiated a payment deal to keep them focused. “The star got a cashier’s check every day after he completed shooting,” Jaffe says. ”The other guy got paid at the end of the shooting. It worked. The movie opened as the number one movie in the country.” The new STARZ Original Series “Blunt Talk,” created by Jonathan Ames and Executive Produced by Seth MacFarlane, stars Patrick Stewart as a British import intent on conquering the world of American cable news. Don’t miss the premiere of the half-hour scripted comedy, Saturday, August 22 at 9P only on STARZ
Megyn Kelly admits that GOP candidate addressing race is “a remarkable moment in the GOP race for the White House”
In what Megyn Kelly actually called "a remarkable moment in the Republican race for the White House," a conservative candidate shocked the nation with his decision "to tackle the issue of race and opportunity" by going to Harlem and speaking to -- or more accurately, at -- members of the black community. "Of course black lives matter," neurosurgeon Ben Carson told what was largely a group reporters who happened to be in Harlem, "but what we ought to be talking about is how do we solve the problem in the black community of murder." The good doctor repeated Republican talking points about the prevalence of black-on-black crime, adding that they "need to instill values in them so that do, in fact, believe that their brothers' lives matter." The values in question are "family and faith, and as we throw those away you can see the carnage that is happening." Carson blamed "the [political correctness] police and the liberal progressives" for the problem, saying that they declared the subject of out-of-wedlock births in the black community to be beyond the bounds of civilized discourse. He added that black people shouldn't be satisfied by being "kept like a pet and patted on the head." Kelly asked him what he meant by that comment, to which he replied, "people who don't truly respect you, don't see you as an equal, but just take care of you, so you can take care of them." He was referring, of course, to the idea African-Americans only vote for the Democratic party because it "bribes" them by allowing access to the social safety net. Carson reiterated his points about being unable to criticize sections of the black community without being called an "Uncle Tom," and said that it's critical that people stop calling him that if there's any hope of ever improving the situation in impoverished black communities. Watch the entire segment via Fox News below. In what Megyn Kelly actually called "a remarkable moment in the Republican race for the White House," a conservative candidate shocked the nation with his decision "to tackle the issue of race and opportunity" by going to Harlem and speaking to -- or more accurately, at -- members of the black community. "Of course black lives matter," neurosurgeon Ben Carson told what was largely a group reporters who happened to be in Harlem, "but what we ought to be talking about is how do we solve the problem in the black community of murder." The good doctor repeated Republican talking points about the prevalence of black-on-black crime, adding that they "need to instill values in them so that do, in fact, believe that their brothers' lives matter." The values in question are "family and faith, and as we throw those away you can see the carnage that is happening." Carson blamed "the [political correctness] police and the liberal progressives" for the problem, saying that they declared the subject of out-of-wedlock births in the black community to be beyond the bounds of civilized discourse. He added that black people shouldn't be satisfied by being "kept like a pet and patted on the head." Kelly asked him what he meant by that comment, to which he replied, "people who don't truly respect you, don't see you as an equal, but just take care of you, so you can take care of them." He was referring, of course, to the idea African-Americans only vote for the Democratic party because it "bribes" them by allowing access to the social safety net. Carson reiterated his points about being unable to criticize sections of the black community without being called an "Uncle Tom," and said that it's critical that people stop calling him that if there's any hope of ever improving the situation in impoverished black communities. Watch the entire segment via Fox News below. In what Megyn Kelly actually called "a remarkable moment in the Republican race for the White House," a conservative candidate shocked the nation with his decision "to tackle the issue of race and opportunity" by going to Harlem and speaking to -- or more accurately, at -- members of the black community. "Of course black lives matter," neurosurgeon Ben Carson told what was largely a group reporters who happened to be in Harlem, "but what we ought to be talking about is how do we solve the problem in the black community of murder." The good doctor repeated Republican talking points about the prevalence of black-on-black crime, adding that they "need to instill values in them so that do, in fact, believe that their brothers' lives matter." The values in question are "family and faith, and as we throw those away you can see the carnage that is happening." Carson blamed "the [political correctness] police and the liberal progressives" for the problem, saying that they declared the subject of out-of-wedlock births in the black community to be beyond the bounds of civilized discourse. He added that black people shouldn't be satisfied by being "kept like a pet and patted on the head." Kelly asked him what he meant by that comment, to which he replied, "people who don't truly respect you, don't see you as an equal, but just take care of you, so you can take care of them." He was referring, of course, to the idea African-Americans only vote for the Democratic party because it "bribes" them by allowing access to the social safety net. Carson reiterated his points about being unable to criticize sections of the black community without being called an "Uncle Tom," and said that it's critical that people stop calling him that if there's any hope of ever improving the situation in impoverished black communities. Watch the entire segment via Fox News below.
“We will not accept trickle-down justice”: Van Jones on mass incarceration, white liberals and “the black freedom struggle”
In an Op-Ed published by CNN.com last month, Christine Leonard, the executive director of the Coalition for Public Safety, and Van Jones, a former green jobs adviser to President Obama and the president/co-founder of #cut50, claimed that "a historic surge of momentum" had made "bipartisan criminal justice reform" a real possibility in Washington, D.C. Noting the president's much-publicized efforts to raise public consciousness of the problem, the significant number of pro-reform figures among the leadership of both parties, and polling that shows Americans of all stripes — Democratic, Republican and Independent — want to see systemic changes, Jones and Leonard argued that after "[d]ecades of failed policies and wrongheaded politics," America had finally "reached a tipping point in the quest for justice." But though the culture has "tipped," they wrote, there was a lot of work left to be done. One piece of that broader effort will take place in mid-November, when #cut50, Operation New Hope and the Ford Foundation will come together to launch "Operation Reform," a bipartisan two-day summit for experts and activists to discuss systemic and realistic fixes. And many reformers also hope Speaker Boehner will make good on his promise to bring the Safe Justice Act up for a vote in the House soon. If the bill passes, and if reports of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley's willingness to compromise are true, change may arrive sooner than you think. Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Jones about #cut50 and the Safe Justice Act. Our conversation, which also touched on reformers' strategies and the relationship between the progressive establishment and the Black Lives Matter movement, has been edited for clarity and length and can be found below. What is #cut50? #cut50 is a campaign to safely and smartly reduce the U.S. incarcerated population by 50 percent. The key for us is using proven, bi-partisan solutions as the basis of the campaign. So, we're a bunch of progressives at our core, but we work hand-in-glove with everybody from [Sen.] Cory Booker to the Koch brothers [for] change. Actual bipartisanship is pretty rare nowadays. So how did this project get started? I was working with [former Speaker of the House] Newt Gingrich on CNN on a show we were doing together called "Crossfire," and Newt and I basically disagreed on every topic — except for the problem of excessive incarceration. And we had so many discussions in which he helped me understand that conservatives were becoming very uncomfortable with the direction of things. He pointed out that it was beginning to look like the incarceration industry was a big, failed government bureaucracy that was gobbling-up more money and stealing more liberties without producing defensible results; and that everyone [on the right], from fiscal conservatives/libertarians to Christian evangelicals, was unhappy with how the criminal justice system was functioning. And you're concentrating right now on getting the Safe Justice Act through Congress? That is our current focus, yes. I had some questions about the bill, or rather some of the strategic decisions it represents. For example, why such a focus on the policies of the federal government when so many of the people who are incarcerated right now are locked up in state programs? Because if you have President Obama in the Rose Garden, with Senate Majority Leader McConnell and Speaker of the House Boehner next to him, signing a federal bill — with law enforcement and formerly incarcerated people in the front row — that sends a huge signal to the rest of the system; that means every governor, sheriff, county executive knows that the water is safe and that they can push their own set of reforms. So what are the points of agreement, policy-wise, that both sides are supporting and trying to implement? Well, from a data-driven and evidence-based point of view, lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses cannot be justified any more. We no longer let judges judge; prosecutors have massive super-weapons to aim at anybody who's caught with any quantity of drugs; and we've basically criminalized addiction. That's a point where I think conservatives and progressives agree — that it doesn't make sense to put somebody in jail for 30 years for a nonviolent drug offense. You only get 25 years for shooting a cop. So rolling back some of those mandatory minimums is common ground. That raises another question I have about the strategy. We talk a lot about nonviolent drug offenders, and I get why, since those tend to be the most sympathetic victims of the system, in the abstract. But the problem can't really be solved without dealing with violent offenders, too, right? Because you can't split a log with the fat end of a wedge. Probably 80 percent are nonviolent drug offenders — they just didn't get caught [laughs]. So I think people can really have sympathy and understanding for those kinds of mistakes. The tougher offenses that people commit, we have to have a discussion about those at some point as well. Since about 90 percent of these people are coming home anyway at some point, how long do we want to keep people [incarcerated]? And what can we do to make sure that when people come home, they're able to stay out of trouble? So at some point it has to extend beyond nonviolent drug offenders; but I think that it's important that we try to start where there is common ground. OK. So where else is there common ground between the left and the right? Also the fact that not only do we criminalize addiction but we also criminalize mental illness. We have a lot of people who are in prison because they're mentally ill — and who get worse while they're incarcerated, not better. That's another area of common concern. And everybody agrees that when people return home from prison, they need to be leaving better than they were when they went in, and more capable of being a good citizen than they were when they went in; and that is just a massive failure across the board. Corrections does not correct anything any more (if it ever did). And lastly, there are issues about [the experience of] confinement, issues including prison rape and the abuse of solitary confinement. How do you and your partners decide how to divide your energies between keeping people out of prison and changing what it's like to be in prison? The whole system is the problem, which is why we're fighting for a comprehensive [reform] bill. You do have, unfortunately, some reluctance on the part of both Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Goodlatte to really take up a comprehensive bill. But the reality is that a series of tiny, piecemeal bills — some of which may pass, some of which may not — is not going to get us to the outcome that we want. Well, that brings me to something that I wanted to ask you about, because it's an aspect of the criminal justice reform movement — and especially its more avowedly bipartisan corners — that gives me pause. Namely, it's the emphasis often placed on how criminal jutice reform will reduce costs. Do you ever worry that, by focusing so much on costs, the movement makes itself vulnerable if the crime rate were to reverse itself from its longtime downward trajectory? That focus on costs would absolutely be a thin foundation on which to build the movement. But the interesting thing is, that doesn't seem to be the main motivator [for conservatives]. Let me put it this way: If we were just talking about trying to find a low-cost solution, maybe we could just put a chip in people's heads and, y'know, bug-zap them in their homes; that might be the lowest-cost solution. But I don't think [cost-cutting] the full motivator for either the left or the right. There's a stereotype of conservatives only caring about money; they may argue in those terms, but when you talk to them, there's a whole array of motivations for the conservatives who are engaged. I wanted to ask you another question about the experience of working in a bipartisan way on this issue. How do you handle race? It is obviously so central to this whole dynamic, but we usually try to keep race on the sidelines when the goal is maintaining bipartisan support for something. Do you try to avoid it when working with conservative partners? Well, whether you're talking about Sen. Rand Paul or Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, they've been willing to say the obvious, which is that [our criminal justice system delivers] an especially horrible set of consequences to people of color — and young men of color, in particular. So I think that, from a rhetorical point of view, more conservatives are comfortable acknowledging the obvious. From a solutions point of view, we'll see how they respond to policies that are explicitly racial in their intentions. But, right now, just trying to reduce the overall size and scope [of the criminal justice system] is the main thing. But, listen, at #cut50, we talk about race all the time, and it doesn't seem to have blown-up any of our relationships [with people on the right]. Where we disagree, we just disagree. People have so little experience having a decent conversation ... that they can't imagine that people could actually sit down and actually work together even though they don't agree on everything. What do you mean? I just don't agree with the Koch brothers on environmental policy — and I fight them on it every day. I don't agree with them on their "$1-for-1-vote" view of American democracy — and I fight them on it every day. When I'm on the phone [with their representatives], I'll sometimes mention that [my team] was just talking about how to beat them on this thing or stop them on some other thing. And they'll laugh and indicate they've had similar conversation on their side. But then we talk about the one thing we want to work on together. That's how democracy is supposed to work. A dictatorship, everybody has to agree; a democracy, nobody has to agree and where you disagree is where you're supposed to fight. That is very basic. But our culture has become so addicted to conflict ... that the idea that people who passionately disagree about something could work together [on something else] — they can't get their heads around it. On that conflict-addiction point, I wanted to ask you for your thoughts about the moment between former Gov. Martin O'Malley, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Black Lives Matter protestors at Netroots Nation last month? Was that an example of the kind of short-sighted fighting you're criticizing? Or was that a good thing because it pushed the Black Lives Matter movement's issues to center-stage? That was an absolutely important and necessary moment for the Democratic Party. I've been warning the white populists in the party, behind the scenes, for several months, that their continued insistence on advancing a color-blind, race-neutral populism was going to blow up in their faces; that they literally are in the middle of the next chapter of the black freedom struggle; and that they have to acknowledge it. The next chapter in that struggle is being written before our eyes. And to be a part of a political party that has to have 95 percent of black voters vote for Democrats every presidential election, and to refuse to acknowledge that? It's stupid and wrong. And I've been saying that behind the scenes for months: You cannot have people — even people I love, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren — stand-up and describe the 1950s as some kind of utopia to this generation of African-Americans. It's not going to work. The Obama era of black silence on issues of specific important to black people is over. Period. We will not accept trickle-down economics from the right wing and we will not accept trickle-down justice from white populists in the Democratic Party. We have specific pain and specific problems and they need to be addressed specifically. And every other part of the [Democratic Party] coalition gets that treatment without controversy. Go on? There's no controversy about specifically addressing the needs of the Latino community with regards to immigration; there's no controversy about specifically addressing the needs of our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender sisters and brothers when it comes to marriage and other rights; there's no controversy about specifically addressing the interests, needs and passions of the women's rights movement; there's no controversy about specifically talking about the environmental agenda. We are the only part of the coalition that if you speak specifically about our issues, people get uncomfortable. And that's not fair. So that moment [between Sanders and the Black Lives Matter protestors] was incredibly important and had to happen — and Bernie Sanders should know better. How so? How can you be a politician of his age and standing, and want to be president of the United States, and in a part as diverse as [the Democratic Party] and then give speeches that sound like they come out of the 1930s when it comes to race? You can't do it that way. Listen, real economic populism that tries to deal with the question of income inequality cannot fail to talk about the criminal justice system. I mean, a major driver of income inequality — and certainly racial inequality — is that you have whole categories of people who are being herded off to prison for stuff that kids are doing on Ivy League campuses right now. But they have nothing on their records, while you've got poor kids, living 20 minutes away, who are called felons. As long as that's happening, you will have income and racial inequality in this country. I'm focusing on Sanders here but, as you said, this isn't really a problem specific to him so much as it is one generally for white, populist Democrats. Are you seeing any signs that this bloc of the party coalition is starting to understand the issue here? I think that, at least rhetorically, that was the last that you will hear of this kind of bullshit — trying to replace "Black Lives Matter" with "All Lives Matter" and all that nonsense. That's over.
Three more women accuse Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting them
Less than three months after two more women stepped forward, and less than three weeks after New York magazine featured 35 of his victims on its cover along with an empty chair meant to signify those who had yet to step forward, three more women have alleged that Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them in the 1970s and 1980s. In a Wednesday press conference, civil rights attorney Gloria Allred introduced Colleen Hughes, Linda Ridgeway Whitedeer, and Eden Tiri. Hughes said that she had been working as a flight attendant in the early 1970s when she met Cosby, who invited her out to lunch. She agreed, but stipulated that a fellow flight attendant accompany them. Cosby met her at her hotel room, and watched television while she readied herself. The last thing she remembered, Hughes said, was him trying to hold her hand while they watched television. She awoke at 5:15 p.m. naked, with semen on her back and her closed tossed haphazardly around the room. "It was disgusting," she said. "Bill obviously did not use a condom and there was no lunch and Bill was nowhere to be seen. I was confused and ashamed and never told anyone about what happened to me." Whitedeer, a former actress who had, at the time, just recently divorced from Fred Apollo, the head of live television for the William Morris Agency, said that Cosby had lured her into the office of a director on the pretense of interviewing her for a part. Instead, he grabbed her by the head and forced her to perform oral sex. "His attack was fast with surgical precision and surprise on his side," she said. "When Cosby was done there was a horrible mess of semen all over my face, my clothes and in my hair." "He was mumbling that I had been blessed with his semen as if it were holy water," she added. "He gloated over my humiliation. He had planned it. I was in shock." Tiri told a similar story, saying that in 1989 she won the part of a police officer on an episode of "The Cosby Show," and that after a take she was led to Cosby's dressing room. Once in there, he wrapped his arms around her and said, "that's all we were going to do, make love. This is making love," she said. "He turned me around, hugged me, and I left without saying a word." Less than three months after two more women stepped forward, and less than three weeks after New York magazine featured 35 of his victims on its cover along with an empty chair meant to signify those who had yet to step forward, three more women have alleged that Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them in the 1970s and 1980s. In a Wednesday press conference, civil rights attorney Gloria Allred introduced Colleen Hughes, Linda Ridgeway Whitedeer, and Eden Tiri. Hughes said that she had been working as a flight attendant in the early 1970s when she met Cosby, who invited her out to lunch. She agreed, but stipulated that a fellow flight attendant accompany them. Cosby met her at her hotel room, and watched television while she readied herself. The last thing she remembered, Hughes said, was him trying to hold her hand while they watched television. She awoke at 5:15 p.m. naked, with semen on her back and her closed tossed haphazardly around the room. "It was disgusting," she said. "Bill obviously did not use a condom and there was no lunch and Bill was nowhere to be seen. I was confused and ashamed and never told anyone about what happened to me." Whitedeer, a former actress who had, at the time, just recently divorced from Fred Apollo, the head of live television for the William Morris Agency, said that Cosby had lured her into the office of a director on the pretense of interviewing her for a part. Instead, he grabbed her by the head and forced her to perform oral sex. "His attack was fast with surgical precision and surprise on his side," she said. "When Cosby was done there was a horrible mess of semen all over my face, my clothes and in my hair." "He was mumbling that I had been blessed with his semen as if it were holy water," she added. "He gloated over my humiliation. He had planned it. I was in shock." Tiri told a similar story, saying that in 1989 she won the part of a police officer on an episode of "The Cosby Show," and that after a take she was led to Cosby's dressing room. Once in there, he wrapped his arms around her and said, "that's all we were going to do, make love. This is making love," she said. "He turned me around, hugged me, and I left without saying a word."
Pope Francis is coming to Washington: Why congressional GOPers are about to get a papal smackdown
When John Boehner announced in March of 2014 that he had invited Pope Francis to address a joint meeting of Congress, it seemed like a great idea. The popular pontiff had been in office for just one year and his doctrinal persona was still somewhat of a tabula rasa. Sure, he had condemned “trickle-down” economics as an unproven theory that “expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.” But he had also spoken out strongly against abortion and signaled that he had no intention of changing the Catholic Church’s signature conservative teachings on issues like gay marriage. And his very popularity seemed to auger well for the insistence of many in the GOP that religion should be at the center of public life. And when the pontiff accepted the invitation in early 2015, it seemed like a coup for the GOP. Boehner clearly saw an opportunity to marry some of Francis' rhetoric about caring for the poor and less fortunate with Republican economic doctrine, to reframe it as “compassionate conservatism” much the way that George W. Bush did to appeal to Catholics and moderates worried that the party’s policies toward the poor were too harsh. “His tireless call for the protection of the most vulnerable among us—the ailing, the disadvantaged, the unemployed, the impoverished, the unborn—has awakened hearts on every continent,” said Boehner. “Many in the United States believe these principles are undermined by ‘crony capitalism’ and the ongoing centralization of political power in the institutions of our federal government, which threaten to disrupt the delicate balance between the twin virtues of subsidiarity and solidarity. They have embraced Pope Francis’ reminder that we cannot meet our responsibility to the poor with a welfare mentality based on business calculations.” But now, as the date of the pope’s historic speech approaches, more and more members of the party are bracing for what some are predicting could be a very bumpy ride on Sept. 24. In the past year, Francis has emerged as a proto-socialist who leaves no doubt about where he stands on the current economic system. He has criticized capitalism as the “dung of the devil” and the foundation of a fundamentally unjust world order that leaves the poor and marginalized struggling to obtain “so elementary and undeniably necessary a right as that of the three ‘Ls’: land, lodging and labor.” Francis has also called for a complete restructuring of the economic order. “Let us not be afraid to say it: we want change, real change, structural change,” Francis said during his July trip to Bolivia. “This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable.” Not only has he blown a hole in longtime Republican efforts to suggest that free-market capitalism is the answer to helping the poor both in the U.S. and in the developing world; Francis has also linked this immoral capitalist system to the unsustainable exploitation of the planet. In his climate change encyclical "Laudato Si," he not only calls out climate deniers for failing to heed the “very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system,” but explicitly denounces the belief of many on the Christian right that God had given man “dominion” over the earth to exploit its resources as they see fit. “Our ‘dominion’ over the universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship,” said Francis. So Republicans can expect to have to sit and listen to one of the most respected and beloved voices on the planet extricate an economic scheme that has been at the center of their identity since Ronald Reagan, call for immediate action to reduce the use of their beloved fossil fuels, and lobby for a massive redistribution of income. And that’s before he even gets to immigration. Catholic candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio had tried to stake out a relatively moderate position on immigration that reflected the longtime emphasis of the church that undocumented immigrants should be welcomed. But they abandoned that even before Donald Trump joined the party and got the GOP candidates competing to see who could build the biggest wall to keep out migrants. Francis, on the other hand, has made compassion for migrants around the world a hallmark of his papacy. He has decried “racist and xenophobic attitudes” regarding immigrants and called on the U.S. to implement more humane policies along the U.S.-Mexican border, saying the number of undocumented immigrants, particularly children, fleeing poverty and violence is a “humanitarian emergency.” One of his key Vatican allies on an advance trip to Washington said recently that if time had allowed, Francis would have liked to enter the U.S. via the Mexican border to make the ”point about welcoming immigrants, not building walls to keep them out.” To be sure, the Vatican has been clear that Francis’ speech won’t be about dressing down any one party. And some have suggested that Democrats are just as vulnerable to criticism from Francis on the issue of abortion. But Democrats are confident that their agenda lines up with the social justice teachings of the church much more squarely. “Whether it's climate change or hunger or taking care of the poor, the Pope's message is really the embodiment of what Catholic social teaching has been about, historically,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., told the AP. DeLauro has long been at the forefront of efforts to highlight Catholic Democrats’ alignment with Catholic social teaching and to place the party’s support for abortion rights within this context. In 2006, she corralled 55 pro-choice and pro-life House Democrats to sign a "Statement of Catholic Principles" that called for social justice-based policies aimed at reducing poverty and “the number of unwanted pregnancies,” expanding universal health care, and “taking seriously the decision to go to war.” To DeLauro and many others, it sounds like something Pope Francis would say. Patricia Miller is the author of “Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church.” Her work on politics, sex and religion has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, Huffington Post, RH Reality Check and Ms. Magazine. When John Boehner announced in March of 2014 that he had invited Pope Francis to address a joint meeting of Congress, it seemed like a great idea. The popular pontiff had been in office for just one year and his doctrinal persona was still somewhat of a tabula rasa. Sure, he had condemned “trickle-down” economics as an unproven theory that “expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.” But he had also spoken out strongly against abortion and signaled that he had no intention of changing the Catholic Church’s signature conservative teachings on issues like gay marriage. And his very popularity seemed to auger well for the insistence of many in the GOP that religion should be at the center of public life. And when the pontiff accepted the invitation in early 2015, it seemed like a coup for the GOP. Boehner clearly saw an opportunity to marry some of Francis' rhetoric about caring for the poor and less fortunate with Republican economic doctrine, to reframe it as “compassionate conservatism” much the way that George W. Bush did to appeal to Catholics and moderates worried that the party’s policies toward the poor were too harsh. “His tireless call for the protection of the most vulnerable among us—the ailing, the disadvantaged, the unemployed, the impoverished, the unborn—has awakened hearts on every continent,” said Boehner. “Many in the United States believe these principles are undermined by ‘crony capitalism’ and the ongoing centralization of political power in the institutions of our federal government, which threaten to disrupt the delicate balance between the twin virtues of subsidiarity and solidarity. They have embraced Pope Francis’ reminder that we cannot meet our responsibility to the poor with a welfare mentality based on business calculations.” But now, as the date of the pope’s historic speech approaches, more and more members of the party are bracing for what some are predicting could be a very bumpy ride on Sept. 24. In the past year, Francis has emerged as a proto-socialist who leaves no doubt about where he stands on the current economic system. He has criticized capitalism as the “dung of the devil” and the foundation of a fundamentally unjust world order that leaves the poor and marginalized struggling to obtain “so elementary and undeniably necessary a right as that of the three ‘Ls’: land, lodging and labor.” Francis has also called for a complete restructuring of the economic order. “Let us not be afraid to say it: we want change, real change, structural change,” Francis said during his July trip to Bolivia. “This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable.” Not only has he blown a hole in longtime Republican efforts to suggest that free-market capitalism is the answer to helping the poor both in the U.S. and in the developing world; Francis has also linked this immoral capitalist system to the unsustainable exploitation of the planet. In his climate change encyclical "Laudato Si," he not only calls out climate deniers for failing to heed the “very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system,” but explicitly denounces the belief of many on the Christian right that God had given man “dominion” over the earth to exploit its resources as they see fit. “Our ‘dominion’ over the universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship,” said Francis. So Republicans can expect to have to sit and listen to one of the most respected and beloved voices on the planet extricate an economic scheme that has been at the center of their identity since Ronald Reagan, call for immediate action to reduce the use of their beloved fossil fuels, and lobby for a massive redistribution of income. And that’s before he even gets to immigration. Catholic candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio had tried to stake out a relatively moderate position on immigration that reflected the longtime emphasis of the church that undocumented immigrants should be welcomed. But they abandoned that even before Donald Trump joined the party and got the GOP candidates competing to see who could build the biggest wall to keep out migrants. Francis, on the other hand, has made compassion for migrants around the world a hallmark of his papacy. He has decried “racist and xenophobic attitudes” regarding immigrants and called on the U.S. to implement more humane policies along the U.S.-Mexican border, saying the number of undocumented immigrants, particularly children, fleeing poverty and violence is a “humanitarian emergency.” One of his key Vatican allies on an advance trip to Washington said recently that if time had allowed, Francis would have liked to enter the U.S. via the Mexican border to make the ”point about welcoming immigrants, not building walls to keep them out.” To be sure, the Vatican has been clear that Francis’ speech won’t be about dressing down any one party. And some have suggested that Democrats are just as vulnerable to criticism from Francis on the issue of abortion. But Democrats are confident that their agenda lines up with the social justice teachings of the church much more squarely. “Whether it's climate change or hunger or taking care of the poor, the Pope's message is really the embodiment of what Catholic social teaching has been about, historically,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., told the AP. DeLauro has long been at the forefront of efforts to highlight Catholic Democrats’ alignment with Catholic social teaching and to place the party’s support for abortion rights within this context. In 2006, she corralled 55 pro-choice and pro-life House Democrats to sign a "Statement of Catholic Principles" that called for social justice-based policies aimed at reducing poverty and “the number of unwanted pregnancies,” expanding universal health care, and “taking seriously the decision to go to war.” To DeLauro and many others, it sounds like something Pope Francis would say. Patricia Miller is the author of “Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church.” Her work on politics, sex and religion has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, Huffington Post, RH Reality Check and Ms. Magazine.
8 impossibly dumb things we teach kids about sex
“It was like that scene in Mean Girls,” my 13-year-old reported after seventh-grade sex ed. “'Don't have sex, 'cause you will get pregnant and die.'” In the class, which lasted for just a few weeks at the end of the semester, she learned a lot (perhaps too much) about biological inner bits like Fallopian tubes and the harrowing effects of STIs, but nothing about arousal, consent, orgasm, masturbation, sex, technology or anything about the mechanics of sex beyond vague notions of the “sperm meeting the egg.” (“Pleased to make your acquaintance.”) It was a shockingly half-assed education, and she's one of the lucky ones. Her school's in California, one of only 22 that requires sex ed and of 19 (!) requiring it be “medically, factually or technically accurate.” Sex is a hugely important, sometimes harrowing, all-around amazing part of being a human. To leave young people to just fend for themselves with scraps of iffy knowledge gleaned from friends, porn and furtive looks at dirty books is a travesty. The U.S. has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any developed country and U.S. teens are not only less likely to use contraceptives than their European counterparts, when they do, they use less effective methods. We need to rethink how we're doing this. Here are some dumb things we teach kids about sex and what we should be teaching them instead. 1. Abstinence-Only Is the Best Way to Prevent Pregnancy and Disease Abstinence is great for preventing pregnancy and disease—if people actually practice it. But despite threats of damnation, hideous diseases, emotional havoc, etc., 95 percent of people have premarital sex. We need to accept that even though some of us reallyreallyreally hope that kids will suddenly stop it with the premarital fucking, it's not going to happen. Kids who are taught abstinence-only are statistically more likely to be involved in a teen pregnancy. The irresponsibility here is not on the kids, but on us. (See also: Professor Live Tweets Her Son's Abstinence Class.) Teaching abstinence as a safe option is great. But it shouldn't be abstinence vs. full-on babymaking intercourse. By focusing only on forbidden heterosexual P-in-V sex, we are inadvertently pointing teens toward the one sexual act most likely to cause disease and/or pregnancy. Mutual masturbation and dry humping are much safer options that provide connection and relief from sexual tension. 2. ”The Sperm Meets the Egg” and Other Unexplained, Vague Allusions to ... Something How many kids have struggled to parse phrases like "the sperm meets the egg"? We need to stop being coy and explain the real mechanics of sex. Warnings like “you can catch X from oral sex” are confusing and useless if a kid doesn't know what “oral sex” is. Let them know what various acts entail, including benefits and risks, plus info about masturbation. Teach them how male and females bodies work and how they respond. Having sex is an important life skill, and it would be nice if they learned how to do it well. 3. Sex Is All About the Biology of Reproductive Internal Organs It's great to have a working knowledge of what's going on inside, but what kids really care about are the outside parts. Letting them see photos of the range and variety of real genitalia—an oddly radical concept—is a great way to start. “It's really a process of desensitizing them to what real genitals look like so they’ll be less freaked out by their own and, one day, their partner’s,” said human sexuality educator Al Vernacchio in New York Times Magazine. 4. Sex Ed Is a One-Time, One Semester Class (If That) Canadian kids get sex ed every year until 12th grade, learning proper names for body parts in first-grade (based on suggestion of child abuse educators) to sexting, gender identity, masturbation and healthy relationships in later grades. In the Netherlands, kids start sex ed in kindergarten. In quite related news, the Netherlands has one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates among developed nations. 5. Sex = Penis in Vagina “A definition that needs to change based on the orientation of the people involved is a problem,” says Vernacchio in a TEDx talk. “Let's redefine having sex as consensual activity designed to bring sexual pleasure and satisfaction to the people involved.” “Even though sex ed is invariably aimed at straight kids, it totally fails them. We need to 'queer' sex ed so that it is valuable to absolutely everyone (even those that don't want to have sex)," says Justin Hancock at cheeky sex ed site Bish. Besides, even for some heteros, penis in vagina sex can be meh. 6. Girls Are Responsible for Fending Off Boys Who Can't Control Themselves It's important for everyone to know how to say no and recognize a no, but there's far more to sexual communication. “We also need to learn how to offer consent, how to negotiate safer sex practices, as well as how to begin healthy conversations about sex more generally. We could save our kids a lot of future grief and anxiety if we started teaching them more about sexual communication than just how to avoid having sex,” says Justin Lehmiller, social psychologist and author of the blog Sex and Psychology. (Here's an excellent video on consent using tea as a metaphor, i.e. "Unconscious people don't want tea.”) Plus, implying that boys like sex and girls don't disempowers everyone. For the record, plenty of girls dig sex and plenty of boys don't. 7. Sex Is About What Happens IRL Tech has exploded what “sex” is and sex ed needs to keep up. Kids need open, honest information about sexting, online safety and posting pictures of their bums. Give them a framework for thinking about porn, too; while it can be sexy, much of it is also male-centered or degrading to women. Point out the ways porn is unrealistic (99.9% of pizza deliveries do not lead to sex; a lot of women actually don't like mechanical pounding, etc.). 8. There's a “Normal” Way to Have Sex “Even in more comprehensive sex ed, I think the idea [of 'normal' sex being married, heterosexual sex] still gets communicated implicitly. We see a lot of users who are anxious that they're somehow doing sex 'wrong' or that they're weird for wanting or doing what they do,” says Sam Wall of Scarleteen. “Sex and sexuality are learning process, one that continues throughout life as you meet new partners, or your partner's desires change, or you figure out new things about your own desires. And, as long as everyone is consenting, there is no wrong way to have sex. Human sexual desire is a vast, weird, and wonderful tapestry, and exploring it can be fun.” Sex is a “vast, weird, and wonderful tapestry.” We need to be brave, responsible grownups and give kids the information that they want and need. Jill Hamilton writes In Bed With Married Women (www.inbedwithmarriedwomen.com). Follow her on Twitter @Jill_Hamilton.
“It was like that scene in Mean Girls,” my 13-year-old reported after seventh-grade sex ed. “'Don't have sex, 'cause you will get pregnant and die.'” In the class, which lasted for just a few weeks at the end of the semester, she learned a lot (perhaps too much) about biological inner bits like Fallopian tubes and the harrowing effects of STIs, but nothing about arousal, consent, orgasm, masturbation, sex, technology or anything about the mechanics of sex beyond vague notions of the “sperm meeting the egg.” (“Pleased to make your acquaintance.”) It was a shockingly half-assed education, and she's one of the lucky ones. Her school's in California, one of only 22 that requires sex ed and of 19 (!) requiring it be “medically, factually or technically accurate.” Sex is a hugely important, sometimes harrowing, all-around amazing part of being a human. To leave young people to just fend for themselves with scraps of iffy knowledge gleaned from friends, porn and furtive looks at dirty books is a travesty. The U.S. has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any developed country and U.S. teens are not only less likely to use contraceptives than their European counterparts, when they do, they use less effective methods. We need to rethink how we're doing this. Here are some dumb things we teach kids about sex and what we should be teaching them instead. 1. Abstinence-Only Is the Best Way to Prevent Pregnancy and Disease Abstinence is great for preventing pregnancy and disease—if people actually practice it. But despite threats of damnation, hideous diseases, emotional havoc, etc., 95 percent of people have premarital sex. We need to accept that even though some of us reallyreallyreally hope that kids will suddenly stop it with the premarital fucking, it's not going to happen. Kids who are taught abstinence-only are statistically more likely to be involved in a teen pregnancy. The irresponsibility here is not on the kids, but on us. (See also: Professor Live Tweets Her Son's Abstinence Class.) Teaching abstinence as a safe option is great. But it shouldn't be abstinence vs. full-on babymaking intercourse. By focusing only on forbidden heterosexual P-in-V sex, we are inadvertently pointing teens toward the one sexual act most likely to cause disease and/or pregnancy. Mutual masturbation and dry humping are much safer options that provide connection and relief from sexual tension. 2. ”The Sperm Meets the Egg” and Other Unexplained, Vague Allusions to ... Something How many kids have struggled to parse phrases like "the sperm meets the egg"? We need to stop being coy and explain the real mechanics of sex. Warnings like “you can catch X from oral sex” are confusing and useless if a kid doesn't know what “oral sex” is. Let them know what various acts entail, including benefits and risks, plus info about masturbation. Teach them how male and females bodies work and how they respond. Having sex is an important life skill, and it would be nice if they learned how to do it well. 3. Sex Is All About the Biology of Reproductive Internal Organs It's great to have a working knowledge of what's going on inside, but what kids really care about are the outside parts. Letting them see photos of the range and variety of real genitalia—an oddly radical concept—is a great way to start. “It's really a process of desensitizing them to what real genitals look like so they’ll be less freaked out by their own and, one day, their partner’s,” said human sexuality educator Al Vernacchio in New York Times Magazine. 4. Sex Ed Is a One-Time, One Semester Class (If That) Canadian kids get sex ed every year until 12th grade, learning proper names for body parts in first-grade (based on suggestion of child abuse educators) to sexting, gender identity, masturbation and healthy relationships in later grades. In the Netherlands, kids start sex ed in kindergarten. In quite related news, the Netherlands has one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates among developed nations. 5. Sex = Penis in Vagina “A definition that needs to change based on the orientation of the people involved is a problem,” says Vernacchio in a TEDx talk. “Let's redefine having sex as consensual activity designed to bring sexual pleasure and satisfaction to the people involved.” “Even though sex ed is invariably aimed at straight kids, it totally fails them. We need to 'queer' sex ed so that it is valuable to absolutely everyone (even those that don't want to have sex)," says Justin Hancock at cheeky sex ed site Bish. Besides, even for some heteros, penis in vagina sex can be meh. 6. Girls Are Responsible for Fending Off Boys Who Can't Control Themselves It's important for everyone to know how to say no and recognize a no, but there's far more to sexual communication. “We also need to learn how to offer consent, how to negotiate safer sex practices, as well as how to begin healthy conversations about sex more generally. We could save our kids a lot of future grief and anxiety if we started teaching them more about sexual communication than just how to avoid having sex,” says Justin Lehmiller, social psychologist and author of the blog Sex and Psychology. (Here's an excellent video on consent using tea as a metaphor, i.e. "Unconscious people don't want tea.”) Plus, implying that boys like sex and girls don't disempowers everyone. For the record, plenty of girls dig sex and plenty of boys don't. 7. Sex Is About What Happens IRL Tech has exploded what “sex” is and sex ed needs to keep up. Kids need open, honest information about sexting, online safety and posting pictures of their bums. Give them a framework for thinking about porn, too; while it can be sexy, much of it is also male-centered or degrading to women. Point out the ways porn is unrealistic (99.9% of pizza deliveries do not lead to sex; a lot of women actually don't like mechanical pounding, etc.). 8. There's a “Normal” Way to Have Sex “Even in more comprehensive sex ed, I think the idea [of 'normal' sex being married, heterosexual sex] still gets communicated implicitly. We see a lot of users who are anxious that they're somehow doing sex 'wrong' or that they're weird for wanting or doing what they do,” says Sam Wall of Scarleteen. “Sex and sexuality are learning process, one that continues throughout life as you meet new partners, or your partner's desires change, or you figure out new things about your own desires. And, as long as everyone is consenting, there is no wrong way to have sex. Human sexual desire is a vast, weird, and wonderful tapestry, and exploring it can be fun.” Sex is a “vast, weird, and wonderful tapestry.” We need to be brave, responsible grownups and give kids the information that they want and need. Jill Hamilton writes In Bed With Married Women (www.inbedwithmarriedwomen.com). Follow her on Twitter @Jill_Hamilton.
“It was like that scene in Mean Girls,” my 13-year-old reported after seventh-grade sex ed. “'Don't have sex, 'cause you will get pregnant and die.'” In the class, which lasted for just a few weeks at the end of the semester, she learned a lot (perhaps too much) about biological inner bits like Fallopian tubes and the harrowing effects of STIs, but nothing about arousal, consent, orgasm, masturbation, sex, technology or anything about the mechanics of sex beyond vague notions of the “sperm meeting the egg.” (“Pleased to make your acquaintance.”) It was a shockingly half-assed education, and she's one of the lucky ones. Her school's in California, one of only 22 that requires sex ed and of 19 (!) requiring it be “medically, factually or technically accurate.” Sex is a hugely important, sometimes harrowing, all-around amazing part of being a human. To leave young people to just fend for themselves with scraps of iffy knowledge gleaned from friends, porn and furtive looks at dirty books is a travesty. The U.S. has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any developed country and U.S. teens are not only less likely to use contraceptives than their European counterparts, when they do, they use less effective methods. We need to rethink how we're doing this. Here are some dumb things we teach kids about sex and what we should be teaching them instead. 1. Abstinence-Only Is the Best Way to Prevent Pregnancy and Disease Abstinence is great for preventing pregnancy and disease—if people actually practice it. But despite threats of damnation, hideous diseases, emotional havoc, etc., 95 percent of people have premarital sex. We need to accept that even though some of us reallyreallyreally hope that kids will suddenly stop it with the premarital fucking, it's not going to happen. Kids who are taught abstinence-only are statistically more likely to be involved in a teen pregnancy. The irresponsibility here is not on the kids, but on us. (See also: Professor Live Tweets Her Son's Abstinence Class.) Teaching abstinence as a safe option is great. But it shouldn't be abstinence vs. full-on babymaking intercourse. By focusing only on forbidden heterosexual P-in-V sex, we are inadvertently pointing teens toward the one sexual act most likely to cause disease and/or pregnancy. Mutual masturbation and dry humping are much safer options that provide connection and relief from sexual tension. 2. ”The Sperm Meets the Egg” and Other Unexplained, Vague Allusions to ... Something How many kids have struggled to parse phrases like "the sperm meets the egg"? We need to stop being coy and explain the real mechanics of sex. Warnings like “you can catch X from oral sex” are confusing and useless if a kid doesn't know what “oral sex” is. Let them know what various acts entail, including benefits and risks, plus info about masturbation. Teach them how male and females bodies work and how they respond. Having sex is an important life skill, and it would be nice if they learned how to do it well. 3. Sex Is All About the Biology of Reproductive Internal Organs It's great to have a working knowledge of what's going on inside, but what kids really care about are the outside parts. Letting them see photos of the range and variety of real genitalia—an oddly radical concept—is a great way to start. “It's really a process of desensitizing them to what real genitals look like so they’ll be less freaked out by their own and, one day, their partner’s,” said human sexuality educator Al Vernacchio in New York Times Magazine. 4. Sex Ed Is a One-Time, One Semester Class (If That) Canadian kids get sex ed every year until 12th grade, learning proper names for body parts in first-grade (based on suggestion of child abuse educators) to sexting, gender identity, masturbation and healthy relationships in later grades. In the Netherlands, kids start sex ed in kindergarten. In quite related news, the Netherlands has one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates among developed nations. 5. Sex = Penis in Vagina “A definition that needs to change based on the orientation of the people involved is a problem,” says Vernacchio in a TEDx talk. “Let's redefine having sex as consensual activity designed to bring sexual pleasure and satisfaction to the people involved.” “Even though sex ed is invariably aimed at straight kids, it totally fails them. We need to 'queer' sex ed so that it is valuable to absolutely everyone (even those that don't want to have sex)," says Justin Hancock at cheeky sex ed site Bish. Besides, even for some heteros, penis in vagina sex can be meh. 6. Girls Are Responsible for Fending Off Boys Who Can't Control Themselves It's important for everyone to know how to say no and recognize a no, but there's far more to sexual communication. “We also need to learn how to offer consent, how to negotiate safer sex practices, as well as how to begin healthy conversations about sex more generally. We could save our kids a lot of future grief and anxiety if we started teaching them more about sexual communication than just how to avoid having sex,” says Justin Lehmiller, social psychologist and author of the blog Sex and Psychology. (Here's an excellent video on consent using tea as a metaphor, i.e. "Unconscious people don't want tea.”) Plus, implying that boys like sex and girls don't disempowers everyone. For the record, plenty of girls dig sex and plenty of boys don't. 7. Sex Is About What Happens IRL Tech has exploded what “sex” is and sex ed needs to keep up. Kids need open, honest information about sexting, online safety and posting pictures of their bums. Give them a framework for thinking about porn, too; while it can be sexy, much of it is also male-centered or degrading to women. Point out the ways porn is unrealistic (99.9% of pizza deliveries do not lead to sex; a lot of women actually don't like mechanical pounding, etc.). 8. There's a “Normal” Way to Have Sex “Even in more comprehensive sex ed, I think the idea [of 'normal' sex being married, heterosexual sex] still gets communicated implicitly. We see a lot of users who are anxious that they're somehow doing sex 'wrong' or that they're weird for wanting or doing what they do,” says Sam Wall of Scarleteen. “Sex and sexuality are learning process, one that continues throughout life as you meet new partners, or your partner's desires change, or you figure out new things about your own desires. And, as long as everyone is consenting, there is no wrong way to have sex. Human sexual desire is a vast, weird, and wonderful tapestry, and exploring it can be fun.” Sex is a “vast, weird, and wonderful tapestry.” We need to be brave, responsible grownups and give kids the information that they want and need. Jill Hamilton writes In Bed With Married Women (www.inbedwithmarriedwomen.com). Follow her on Twitter @Jill_Hamilton. 
Ted Cruz’s grotesque demagoguery: Planned Parenthood prosecutions, polio and American “values”
Two weeks ago, Sen. Ted Cruz convened a subcommittee hearing on alleged abuses of power by the Internal Revenue Service. Conservatives and Republicans have been up in arms over claims that the IRS singled out nonprofit Tea Party groups for additional scrutiny when considering their applications for tax exempt status. At the hearing, Cruz tore into the IRS and the Obama administration, drew comparisons to Richard Nixon’s felonious behavior, and declared with solemn gravity that “no politician has the right to use the machinery of the executive branch to target political enemies.” Just a couple of days ago, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz released an ad promising that he, as president, would use the machinery of the executive branch to target a political enemy. “Ted Cruz will prosecute and defund Planned Parenthood,” the ad declares, for the unforgivable crime of donating tissues from aborted fetuses to be used for medical research. That practice isn’t actually illegal, but a series of undercover sting videos released by an antiabortion rights activist group have created the impression that Planned Parenthood is profiting from the sale of fetal tissue. Overheated allegations aside, there is no indication that Planned Parenthood is actually doing that, but Ted Cruz is going to prosecute them anyway and end the practice of “harvest[ing] organs from unborn children.” The ad and the promises it makes are noteworthy for several reasons. As Steve Benen points out, Cruz is sort of giving up the game when it comes to these Planned Parenthood videos. He presents the use of fetal tissues for medical research as crime that must be stopped, but his solution – prosecuting and defunding Planned Parenthood – won’t change the fact that the practice is explicitly permitted by law. He’s just railing against Planned Parenthood and trying to ride the wave of conservative outrage the sting videos generated. There also seems to be a huge problem with the imagery Cruz’s ad people chose for this advertisement. Its opening shots appear to be black-and-white videos of young polio patients in wheelchairs and leg braces. “For a century, Americans have helped heal and care for millions in need,” the narrator says. Polio ceased being a scourge in this country after American scientists used human fetal tissues to develop the first polio vaccine in the 1950s. The researchers involved won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1954. The eradication of polio is one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, and one of the worst possible examples to include in an ad attacking fetal tissue donation for medical research. And that’s to say nothing of the myriad other vaccines – rubella, hepatitis A, rabies, chicken pox – that have been developed or produced using fetal cells. Cruz’s campaign against fetal tissue research also would seem to conflict with one of his under-the-radar policy goals: pushing medical researchers to devise cures for deadly and debilitating diseases. In mid-July, Cruz held a Senate hearing with a panel of medical experts to discuss ways to better use government resources when it comes to researching cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and a bevy of other incurable diseases. “We pay billions or trillions on the back end, dealing with the consequences of horrific diseases rather than investing and creating the incentives on the front end to cure these diseases once and for all,” Cruz said at that hearing. Removing fetal tissue research from scientists’ toolbox would deal a huge setback to the development of cures for those diseases. Stem cell-based treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease show great promise, and fetal tissue research is being used to develop treatments for Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injuries. No one is denying that there is a grim price attached to these advancements, and the moral complexities at play are difficult to negotiate – this Vox essay by a former biotech employee who worked with fetal tissues to develop breast cancer treatments is an excellent examination of the moral tug of war at the heart of this type of research. Cruz isn’t having that discussion, though. He’s demagoguing the issue, posturing as a tough guy, and presenting the donation of fetal tissue as inarguably contrary to America’s “values.” In doing so he's ignoring the incredible advancements in medical science that fetal tissue research has made possible and may make possible in the future.
Donald Trump’s biggest crime is his honesty: How he exposes the sickening rot at the core of the GOP
Many of us cast last week’s Republican debate in Cleveland as entertainment—I have heard the thought repeated many times—but this seems to me a cheap dodge. To laugh at the assembly of 10 right-wing presidential aspirants for two hours of questioning is to flinch from a truth too heavy to bear even as we must. The Fox News spectacle counts as entertainment only as tragedy does. Given the position these people seek, the decisions the next president will make, how seriously our media and many voters take them, and the money lining up to advance one or another of them into office, we have just been advised of how very perilous the American predicament is at this moment. Bad as the candidates’ domestic agendas are, the danger is greater, far greater, on the foreign policy side, and this is our topic. Somebody smart recently defined tragedy as the difference between what is and what could have been. This is the thought: We have a brief time left to correct our course before the American experiment begins to self-destruct beyond retrieval, and we have not yet proven strong or brave or honest enough to make the move. To me, this is what makes last Thursday’s spectacle tragic rather than comic. I have thought since the Tea Party’s appearance on the political scene half a dozen years ago that the American right was destined to destroy itself before our eyes. Last week’s G.O.P. display—it was politics as spectacle, not a debate—convinces me of this. The Republican Party as it has been in history is already gone, more or less, and is being replaced—more swiftly than one would have thought possible—with what amounts to a fanatical fringe. Good enough that the Republicans tip into unreason, you might think. But who could have guessed that irrationality was a winning political platform? Who would have imagined even a few years ago that the Rockefeller wing of the party was so spineless and desperate to win Washington that it would capitulate to extremists thoroughly incompetent to address the 21st century’s self-evident realities? The question to come is whether the American electorate will commission those who have usurped the G.O.P. to destroy a lot more than the party. Put any one of these people in office and Americans will forfeit their chance to participate constructively in a self-evidently emergent world order, to escape a past that now haunts us, to act abroad out of something other than fear. We have to start with Donald Trump to understand what we are getting from the right flank of our right-wing nation. It may seem unlikely, but Trump and the reaction to him among his G.O.P. opponents took me right back to my years as a correspondent in Tokyo: Every so often a cabinet minister in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party would make some egregiously unsound remark about the righteousness of Japan’s Pacific war, objectionable Westerners or the inferiority of the Chinese. The next day he would be sanctimoniously removed from office and forced to provide a ritualized apology that meant nothing. What was the offending minister’s sin? It lay not in his thinking or convictions, one came quickly to recognize, but in articulating publicly the views of all orthodox Liberal Democrats. This is Trump among his fellow Republicans. Post-Cleveland, I think of him as the id of the G.O.P. The other 16 candidates detest him more than any Democrat does, I would wager, because there is no air whatsoever between the Donald’s views—assuming they remain stable long enough to make them out—and those of anyone else vying for office in the reconstituted G.O.P. All that marks out Trump from other Republican aspirants is his presentation, the too-blunt-to-bear crudity of his prejudices against too many things and people to count, his hollowed-out presumptions of American primacy, his impossible promise to lunge backward to “make America great again.” In a word, Trump comes up with the wrong affect. And there is no understanding the spectacle American politics has become, or why this nation conducts itself so recklessly abroad, unless we grasp the importance of affect in the American consciousness and American public life. Trump is correct in his estimation of what a right-wing American pol has to be to get anywhere: dismissive of the Other, intolerant of all alternative perspectives, suspicious of thought, given to action (preferably violent) while indifferent to its consequences. Trump’s ultimate sin—a paradox here—is to possess an affect so plainly the sum total of what he has to offer that it exposes the rest of the Republican crowd: They are all empty but for slightly varied poses. All they have for us is affect.
* * *
Since the days of Jefferson, Americans have cast themselves as “a people of feeling,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Andrew Burstein. Ours was a “culture of sensibility.” Americans, in other words, tended to rely on feeling, as opposed to thought, to understand a given question or fix a given problem. This New World trope was part of what made Americans American. Yes, America was the flower of the Enlightenment and authority derived from law. But reason was not the source of true conviction in American culture. Emotional experience was, as the Great Awakening of the 1730s made starkly plain. One felt, one was converted, then one believed. The sentimental aspect of the American character assigned great importance to affect. Bearing, demeanor, attitude, posture—these things took on a certain patriotic dimension. A good American had to be observably American. To be “affectionate,” indeed, was part of what it meant to be American in the early years. But the peaceable, generous, good-willed Americans of the 18th century gave way in the 1820s to the Jacksonian kind of American: Aggressive, uncompromising, masculine in the traditional manner, suspicious of intellect and sympathy, given to swift action and simple justice. You can see where this leads easily enough. Think of all the Hollywood films and television programs you have wasted your time watching. Think of John Wayne, Joe Friday, Hoss Cartwright and everything Clint Eastwood has ever done. Think of "Duck Dynasty." To a very weird extent, our culture consists of a never-ending lesson in the proper American affect. Now as in the 18th century, it is affect that distinguishes us and proves us patriotic. Same thing in our national political life. Al Gore was a lousy candidate because his demeanor was wooden—“hard to like the guy.” Bill Clinton can say “I feel your pain” and thus we find faith in his policies. Bush II reports of Putin, “I saw into his soul,” and it is honored as serious comment. Sarah Palin attacks Obama for speaking well, which means he is not “a real patriot.” And here we are in 2015. Scott Walker says of the most significant diplomatic accord to be negotiated in decades, “We don’t need more information… we need decisive leadership and we need it now…. The United States needs a foreign policy that puts steel in the face of our enemies.” It says nothing and everything, doesn’t it? Nobody in Cleveland last week said anything of substance, either. Jeb Bush gave one of his foreign policy speeches Tuesday, and again, while he said nothing, the presentation told the whole story. The right wing in American politics is still quoting the 18th century: What matters most is the affect of the man or woman who holds our highest office. As may be plain, I assign the 2016 presidential contest a large psychological dimension. The policy positions will count, of course, and I will get to them, but what is most fundamentally at issue is the character of the American consciousness. To strip the point to the simplest terms, we are in an argument between affect and thought, or between feeling and reason. We need to have it, but right-thinking people must recognize that we do not have much time to get it done. To substitute affect for thought, as all G.O.P. candidates propose, is dangerous for two reasons. First and very practically, it almost inevitably produces bad results. Bush II’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-September 11 period are obvious but not isolated cases. The need was to look tough, to act without thinking, to declare “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck. Second, affect is a dangerous appeal to the subconscious in us. It addresses unsayable fears, resentments and insecurities, and fortifies idealized selves, self-images derived from impossible Hollywood plots and characters. In this respect it is the doorway to irrational politics and behavior, especially in our conduct abroad. To complete the thought, while affect may be mistaken for charisma, the two are very different. The latter is a many-sided attribute in a man or woman. Charisma draws its power from thought, insight, imagination, wisdom; it leads people to new understandings, ways of seeing they never knew were possible. Affect is by comparison one-dimensional. It reduces politics to spectacle, so it is ersatz, WalMart charisma at best. Reagan, who dragged America back into the politics of affect after the defeat in Vietnam, was the master—and hence the idol of all 10 men on the stage in Cleveland. Bobby Kennedy (the later Bobby) or Mandela were by contrast charismatic figures. Two exceptional pieces on the Republicans have come out since Cleveland. Both shed good light on what the Republicans propose to offer voters as they try to win back the White House. Last Friday Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, published an opinion item headlined, “They Can’t Be Serious.” “While it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals,” Krugman writes. “Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party…. Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious—not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.” There is something in this not to be missed. In effect, the Republicans’ gamble is that the denial of the realities with which we live will prove attractive to enough voters to put a G.O.P. candidate in the White House. Two big things are at stake here. One, the Republicans may turn out to be right. Two, denial is essential to the right wing’s position. They are committed to refusing any acknowledgement of the requirements the 21st century imposes upon us. Denial is totemic, then—a kind of ritual of refusal. It reflects, and I would say unmistakably, a deep, subconscious fear abroad among us. Many voters want to see and hear denials. They depend on the irrationality of each one. This is what I mean by a self-destructing party—and the danger all of us will face if we get a Republican victory next year. We will be made prisoners of our past in all its real and imagined aspects. It is not possible, of course, to live well in such a space. A few days ago the Atlantic published Peter Beinart’s “The Surge Fallacy,” an essay on the return to Bush II foreign policy postures. We have had next to nothing other than bluster from Republican aspirants so far, but again, these people say nothing but tell us everything. Beinart describes a kind of subterranean drift in the right-wing orthodoxy—yet another attempt to lunge backward into permanent avoidance. “Over the past decade, the foreign-policy debate in Washington has turned upside down,” Beinart begins. “As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic foreign policy commonly dubbed ‘neoconservative’ seemed on the verge of collapse…. That was then. Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the G.O.P. presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal…” Beinart identifies a new rewrite of the Iraq narrative—wherein Bush won the war with his 2007 “surge,” and the Obama administration punted it by withdrawing American forces—as the signal moment in this latest iteration of American militarism. The “surge fallacy,” as Beinart calls it, was Jeb Bush’s theme, made ad hominem with an attack on Hillary Clinton, when he spoke Tuesday at—where else?—the Reagan Library in Southern California. What are we to say when the Republican candidate who trades on an image of moderation—this is his affect, of course—turns out to be as ungiven to reason as the worst in the lineup? The follow-on problem here is that, however well or badly the Republican candidate does in the election, he or she can force any Democrat, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, to cast America’s foreign policy alternatives in proximately unreal terms. The American right’s new hawkishness, thus, is not a sickness from which the rest of us can claim immunity. There is none for Americans. In a remarkable appearance at the Reuters newsroom in New York Tuesday, Secretary of State Kerry put the point as forcefully as he has ever said anything: “Our allies are going to look at us and laugh,” he warned, if this country’s rightists kill the accord with Iran. Then this: “It’s not going to happen overnight. But I’m telling you, there’s a huge antipathy [to U.S. leadership] out there. There’s a big bloc out there, folks, that isn’t just sitting around waiting for the United States to tell them what to do.” Last week’s message from Cleveland is simple and stark, it seems to me. The politics of affect must be understood for what it is and then decisively countered if we are to advance into that place known as the 21st century. This means we have to stop pretending to take posing politicians, those who dress up fear as courage, as credible voices in the conversation Americans need to have. Let the media write about them as if they are serious. They are serious only as measures of how much needs to get swept away. These judgments may seem Cassandra-like, but so be it. It seems to me Cleveland also told us that the political season to come could prove a last, best hope for who knows how long to alter the course to destruction we remain on.Many of us cast last week’s Republican debate in Cleveland as entertainment—I have heard the thought repeated many times—but this seems to me a cheap dodge. To laugh at the assembly of 10 right-wing presidential aspirants for two hours of questioning is to flinch from a truth too heavy to bear even as we must. The Fox News spectacle counts as entertainment only as tragedy does. Given the position these people seek, the decisions the next president will make, how seriously our media and many voters take them, and the money lining up to advance one or another of them into office, we have just been advised of how very perilous the American predicament is at this moment. Bad as the candidates’ domestic agendas are, the danger is greater, far greater, on the foreign policy side, and this is our topic. Somebody smart recently defined tragedy as the difference between what is and what could have been. This is the thought: We have a brief time left to correct our course before the American experiment begins to self-destruct beyond retrieval, and we have not yet proven strong or brave or honest enough to make the move. To me, this is what makes last Thursday’s spectacle tragic rather than comic. I have thought since the Tea Party’s appearance on the political scene half a dozen years ago that the American right was destined to destroy itself before our eyes. Last week’s G.O.P. display—it was politics as spectacle, not a debate—convinces me of this. The Republican Party as it has been in history is already gone, more or less, and is being replaced—more swiftly than one would have thought possible—with what amounts to a fanatical fringe. Good enough that the Republicans tip into unreason, you might think. But who could have guessed that irrationality was a winning political platform? Who would have imagined even a few years ago that the Rockefeller wing of the party was so spineless and desperate to win Washington that it would capitulate to extremists thoroughly incompetent to address the 21st century’s self-evident realities? The question to come is whether the American electorate will commission those who have usurped the G.O.P. to destroy a lot more than the party. Put any one of these people in office and Americans will forfeit their chance to participate constructively in a self-evidently emergent world order, to escape a past that now haunts us, to act abroad out of something other than fear. We have to start with Donald Trump to understand what we are getting from the right flank of our right-wing nation. It may seem unlikely, but Trump and the reaction to him among his G.O.P. opponents took me right back to my years as a correspondent in Tokyo: Every so often a cabinet minister in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party would make some egregiously unsound remark about the righteousness of Japan’s Pacific war, objectionable Westerners or the inferiority of the Chinese. The next day he would be sanctimoniously removed from office and forced to provide a ritualized apology that meant nothing. What was the offending minister’s sin? It lay not in his thinking or convictions, one came quickly to recognize, but in articulating publicly the views of all orthodox Liberal Democrats. This is Trump among his fellow Republicans. Post-Cleveland, I think of him as the id of the G.O.P. The other 16 candidates detest him more than any Democrat does, I would wager, because there is no air whatsoever between the Donald’s views—assuming they remain stable long enough to make them out—and those of anyone else vying for office in the reconstituted G.O.P. All that marks out Trump from other Republican aspirants is his presentation, the too-blunt-to-bear crudity of his prejudices against too many things and people to count, his hollowed-out presumptions of American primacy, his impossible promise to lunge backward to “make America great again.” In a word, Trump comes up with the wrong affect. And there is no understanding the spectacle American politics has become, or why this nation conducts itself so recklessly abroad, unless we grasp the importance of affect in the American consciousness and American public life. Trump is correct in his estimation of what a right-wing American pol has to be to get anywhere: dismissive of the Other, intolerant of all alternative perspectives, suspicious of thought, given to action (preferably violent) while indifferent to its consequences. Trump’s ultimate sin—a paradox here—is to possess an affect so plainly the sum total of what he has to offer that it exposes the rest of the Republican crowd: They are all empty but for slightly varied poses. All they have for us is affect.* * *
Since the days of Jefferson, Americans have cast themselves as “a people of feeling,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Andrew Burstein. Ours was a “culture of sensibility.” Americans, in other words, tended to rely on feeling, as opposed to thought, to understand a given question or fix a given problem. This New World trope was part of what made Americans American. Yes, America was the flower of the Enlightenment and authority derived from law. But reason was not the source of true conviction in American culture. Emotional experience was, as the Great Awakening of the 1730s made starkly plain. One felt, one was converted, then one believed. The sentimental aspect of the American character assigned great importance to affect. Bearing, demeanor, attitude, posture—these things took on a certain patriotic dimension. A good American had to be observably American. To be “affectionate,” indeed, was part of what it meant to be American in the early years. But the peaceable, generous, good-willed Americans of the 18th century gave way in the 1820s to the Jacksonian kind of American: Aggressive, uncompromising, masculine in the traditional manner, suspicious of intellect and sympathy, given to swift action and simple justice. You can see where this leads easily enough. Think of all the Hollywood films and television programs you have wasted your time watching. Think of John Wayne, Joe Friday, Hoss Cartwright and everything Clint Eastwood has ever done. Think of "Duck Dynasty." To a very weird extent, our culture consists of a never-ending lesson in the proper American affect. Now as in the 18th century, it is affect that distinguishes us and proves us patriotic. Same thing in our national political life. Al Gore was a lousy candidate because his demeanor was wooden—“hard to like the guy.” Bill Clinton can say “I feel your pain” and thus we find faith in his policies. Bush II reports of Putin, “I saw into his soul,” and it is honored as serious comment. Sarah Palin attacks Obama for speaking well, which means he is not “a real patriot.” And here we are in 2015. Scott Walker says of the most significant diplomatic accord to be negotiated in decades, “We don’t need more information… we need decisive leadership and we need it now…. The United States needs a foreign policy that puts steel in the face of our enemies.” It says nothing and everything, doesn’t it? Nobody in Cleveland last week said anything of substance, either. Jeb Bush gave one of his foreign policy speeches Tuesday, and again, while he said nothing, the presentation told the whole story. The right wing in American politics is still quoting the 18th century: What matters most is the affect of the man or woman who holds our highest office. As may be plain, I assign the 2016 presidential contest a large psychological dimension. The policy positions will count, of course, and I will get to them, but what is most fundamentally at issue is the character of the American consciousness. To strip the point to the simplest terms, we are in an argument between affect and thought, or between feeling and reason. We need to have it, but right-thinking people must recognize that we do not have much time to get it done. To substitute affect for thought, as all G.O.P. candidates propose, is dangerous for two reasons. First and very practically, it almost inevitably produces bad results. Bush II’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-September 11 period are obvious but not isolated cases. The need was to look tough, to act without thinking, to declare “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck. Second, affect is a dangerous appeal to the subconscious in us. It addresses unsayable fears, resentments and insecurities, and fortifies idealized selves, self-images derived from impossible Hollywood plots and characters. In this respect it is the doorway to irrational politics and behavior, especially in our conduct abroad. To complete the thought, while affect may be mistaken for charisma, the two are very different. The latter is a many-sided attribute in a man or woman. Charisma draws its power from thought, insight, imagination, wisdom; it leads people to new understandings, ways of seeing they never knew were possible. Affect is by comparison one-dimensional. It reduces politics to spectacle, so it is ersatz, WalMart charisma at best. Reagan, who dragged America back into the politics of affect after the defeat in Vietnam, was the master—and hence the idol of all 10 men on the stage in Cleveland. Bobby Kennedy (the later Bobby) or Mandela were by contrast charismatic figures. Two exceptional pieces on the Republicans have come out since Cleveland. Both shed good light on what the Republicans propose to offer voters as they try to win back the White House. Last Friday Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, published an opinion item headlined, “They Can’t Be Serious.” “While it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals,” Krugman writes. “Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party…. Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious—not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.” There is something in this not to be missed. In effect, the Republicans’ gamble is that the denial of the realities with which we live will prove attractive to enough voters to put a G.O.P. candidate in the White House. Two big things are at stake here. One, the Republicans may turn out to be right. Two, denial is essential to the right wing’s position. They are committed to refusing any acknowledgement of the requirements the 21st century imposes upon us. Denial is totemic, then—a kind of ritual of refusal. It reflects, and I would say unmistakably, a deep, subconscious fear abroad among us. Many voters want to see and hear denials. They depend on the irrationality of each one. This is what I mean by a self-destructing party—and the danger all of us will face if we get a Republican victory next year. We will be made prisoners of our past in all its real and imagined aspects. It is not possible, of course, to live well in such a space. A few days ago the Atlantic published Peter Beinart’s “The Surge Fallacy,” an essay on the return to Bush II foreign policy postures. We have had next to nothing other than bluster from Republican aspirants so far, but again, these people say nothing but tell us everything. Beinart describes a kind of subterranean drift in the right-wing orthodoxy—yet another attempt to lunge backward into permanent avoidance. “Over the past decade, the foreign-policy debate in Washington has turned upside down,” Beinart begins. “As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic foreign policy commonly dubbed ‘neoconservative’ seemed on the verge of collapse…. That was then. Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the G.O.P. presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal…” Beinart identifies a new rewrite of the Iraq narrative—wherein Bush won the war with his 2007 “surge,” and the Obama administration punted it by withdrawing American forces—as the signal moment in this latest iteration of American militarism. The “surge fallacy,” as Beinart calls it, was Jeb Bush’s theme, made ad hominem with an attack on Hillary Clinton, when he spoke Tuesday at—where else?—the Reagan Library in Southern California. What are we to say when the Republican candidate who trades on an image of moderation—this is his affect, of course—turns out to be as ungiven to reason as the worst in the lineup? The follow-on problem here is that, however well or badly the Republican candidate does in the election, he or she can force any Democrat, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, to cast America’s foreign policy alternatives in proximately unreal terms. The American right’s new hawkishness, thus, is not a sickness from which the rest of us can claim immunity. There is none for Americans. In a remarkable appearance at the Reuters newsroom in New York Tuesday, Secretary of State Kerry put the point as forcefully as he has ever said anything: “Our allies are going to look at us and laugh,” he warned, if this country’s rightists kill the accord with Iran. Then this: “It’s not going to happen overnight. But I’m telling you, there’s a huge antipathy [to U.S. leadership] out there. There’s a big bloc out there, folks, that isn’t just sitting around waiting for the United States to tell them what to do.” Last week’s message from Cleveland is simple and stark, it seems to me. The politics of affect must be understood for what it is and then decisively countered if we are to advance into that place known as the 21st century. This means we have to stop pretending to take posing politicians, those who dress up fear as courage, as credible voices in the conversation Americans need to have. Let the media write about them as if they are serious. They are serious only as measures of how much needs to get swept away. These judgments may seem Cassandra-like, but so be it. It seems to me Cleveland also told us that the political season to come could prove a last, best hope for who knows how long to alter the course to destruction we remain on.Many of us cast last week’s Republican debate in Cleveland as entertainment—I have heard the thought repeated many times—but this seems to me a cheap dodge. To laugh at the assembly of 10 right-wing presidential aspirants for two hours of questioning is to flinch from a truth too heavy to bear even as we must. The Fox News spectacle counts as entertainment only as tragedy does. Given the position these people seek, the decisions the next president will make, how seriously our media and many voters take them, and the money lining up to advance one or another of them into office, we have just been advised of how very perilous the American predicament is at this moment. Bad as the candidates’ domestic agendas are, the danger is greater, far greater, on the foreign policy side, and this is our topic. Somebody smart recently defined tragedy as the difference between what is and what could have been. This is the thought: We have a brief time left to correct our course before the American experiment begins to self-destruct beyond retrieval, and we have not yet proven strong or brave or honest enough to make the move. To me, this is what makes last Thursday’s spectacle tragic rather than comic. I have thought since the Tea Party’s appearance on the political scene half a dozen years ago that the American right was destined to destroy itself before our eyes. Last week’s G.O.P. display—it was politics as spectacle, not a debate—convinces me of this. The Republican Party as it has been in history is already gone, more or less, and is being replaced—more swiftly than one would have thought possible—with what amounts to a fanatical fringe. Good enough that the Republicans tip into unreason, you might think. But who could have guessed that irrationality was a winning political platform? Who would have imagined even a few years ago that the Rockefeller wing of the party was so spineless and desperate to win Washington that it would capitulate to extremists thoroughly incompetent to address the 21st century’s self-evident realities? The question to come is whether the American electorate will commission those who have usurped the G.O.P. to destroy a lot more than the party. Put any one of these people in office and Americans will forfeit their chance to participate constructively in a self-evidently emergent world order, to escape a past that now haunts us, to act abroad out of something other than fear. We have to start with Donald Trump to understand what we are getting from the right flank of our right-wing nation. It may seem unlikely, but Trump and the reaction to him among his G.O.P. opponents took me right back to my years as a correspondent in Tokyo: Every so often a cabinet minister in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party would make some egregiously unsound remark about the righteousness of Japan’s Pacific war, objectionable Westerners or the inferiority of the Chinese. The next day he would be sanctimoniously removed from office and forced to provide a ritualized apology that meant nothing. What was the offending minister’s sin? It lay not in his thinking or convictions, one came quickly to recognize, but in articulating publicly the views of all orthodox Liberal Democrats. This is Trump among his fellow Republicans. Post-Cleveland, I think of him as the id of the G.O.P. The other 16 candidates detest him more than any Democrat does, I would wager, because there is no air whatsoever between the Donald’s views—assuming they remain stable long enough to make them out—and those of anyone else vying for office in the reconstituted G.O.P. All that marks out Trump from other Republican aspirants is his presentation, the too-blunt-to-bear crudity of his prejudices against too many things and people to count, his hollowed-out presumptions of American primacy, his impossible promise to lunge backward to “make America great again.” In a word, Trump comes up with the wrong affect. And there is no understanding the spectacle American politics has become, or why this nation conducts itself so recklessly abroad, unless we grasp the importance of affect in the American consciousness and American public life. Trump is correct in his estimation of what a right-wing American pol has to be to get anywhere: dismissive of the Other, intolerant of all alternative perspectives, suspicious of thought, given to action (preferably violent) while indifferent to its consequences. Trump’s ultimate sin—a paradox here—is to possess an affect so plainly the sum total of what he has to offer that it exposes the rest of the Republican crowd: They are all empty but for slightly varied poses. All they have for us is affect.* * *
Since the days of Jefferson, Americans have cast themselves as “a people of feeling,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Andrew Burstein. Ours was a “culture of sensibility.” Americans, in other words, tended to rely on feeling, as opposed to thought, to understand a given question or fix a given problem. This New World trope was part of what made Americans American. Yes, America was the flower of the Enlightenment and authority derived from law. But reason was not the source of true conviction in American culture. Emotional experience was, as the Great Awakening of the 1730s made starkly plain. One felt, one was converted, then one believed. The sentimental aspect of the American character assigned great importance to affect. Bearing, demeanor, attitude, posture—these things took on a certain patriotic dimension. A good American had to be observably American. To be “affectionate,” indeed, was part of what it meant to be American in the early years. But the peaceable, generous, good-willed Americans of the 18th century gave way in the 1820s to the Jacksonian kind of American: Aggressive, uncompromising, masculine in the traditional manner, suspicious of intellect and sympathy, given to swift action and simple justice. You can see where this leads easily enough. Think of all the Hollywood films and television programs you have wasted your time watching. Think of John Wayne, Joe Friday, Hoss Cartwright and everything Clint Eastwood has ever done. Think of "Duck Dynasty." To a very weird extent, our culture consists of a never-ending lesson in the proper American affect. Now as in the 18th century, it is affect that distinguishes us and proves us patriotic. Same thing in our national political life. Al Gore was a lousy candidate because his demeanor was wooden—“hard to like the guy.” Bill Clinton can say “I feel your pain” and thus we find faith in his policies. Bush II reports of Putin, “I saw into his soul,” and it is honored as serious comment. Sarah Palin attacks Obama for speaking well, which means he is not “a real patriot.” And here we are in 2015. Scott Walker says of the most significant diplomatic accord to be negotiated in decades, “We don’t need more information… we need decisive leadership and we need it now…. The United States needs a foreign policy that puts steel in the face of our enemies.” It says nothing and everything, doesn’t it? Nobody in Cleveland last week said anything of substance, either. Jeb Bush gave one of his foreign policy speeches Tuesday, and again, while he said nothing, the presentation told the whole story. The right wing in American politics is still quoting the 18th century: What matters most is the affect of the man or woman who holds our highest office. As may be plain, I assign the 2016 presidential contest a large psychological dimension. The policy positions will count, of course, and I will get to them, but what is most fundamentally at issue is the character of the American consciousness. To strip the point to the simplest terms, we are in an argument between affect and thought, or between feeling and reason. We need to have it, but right-thinking people must recognize that we do not have much time to get it done. To substitute affect for thought, as all G.O.P. candidates propose, is dangerous for two reasons. First and very practically, it almost inevitably produces bad results. Bush II’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-September 11 period are obvious but not isolated cases. The need was to look tough, to act without thinking, to declare “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck. Second, affect is a dangerous appeal to the subconscious in us. It addresses unsayable fears, resentments and insecurities, and fortifies idealized selves, self-images derived from impossible Hollywood plots and characters. In this respect it is the doorway to irrational politics and behavior, especially in our conduct abroad. To complete the thought, while affect may be mistaken for charisma, the two are very different. The latter is a many-sided attribute in a man or woman. Charisma draws its power from thought, insight, imagination, wisdom; it leads people to new understandings, ways of seeing they never knew were possible. Affect is by comparison one-dimensional. It reduces politics to spectacle, so it is ersatz, WalMart charisma at best. Reagan, who dragged America back into the politics of affect after the defeat in Vietnam, was the master—and hence the idol of all 10 men on the stage in Cleveland. Bobby Kennedy (the later Bobby) or Mandela were by contrast charismatic figures. Two exceptional pieces on the Republicans have come out since Cleveland. Both shed good light on what the Republicans propose to offer voters as they try to win back the White House. Last Friday Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, published an opinion item headlined, “They Can’t Be Serious.” “While it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals,” Krugman writes. “Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party…. Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious—not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.” There is something in this not to be missed. In effect, the Republicans’ gamble is that the denial of the realities with which we live will prove attractive to enough voters to put a G.O.P. candidate in the White House. Two big things are at stake here. One, the Republicans may turn out to be right. Two, denial is essential to the right wing’s position. They are committed to refusing any acknowledgement of the requirements the 21st century imposes upon us. Denial is totemic, then—a kind of ritual of refusal. It reflects, and I would say unmistakably, a deep, subconscious fear abroad among us. Many voters want to see and hear denials. They depend on the irrationality of each one. This is what I mean by a self-destructing party—and the danger all of us will face if we get a Republican victory next year. We will be made prisoners of our past in all its real and imagined aspects. It is not possible, of course, to live well in such a space. A few days ago the Atlantic published Peter Beinart’s “The Surge Fallacy,” an essay on the return to Bush II foreign policy postures. We have had next to nothing other than bluster from Republican aspirants so far, but again, these people say nothing but tell us everything. Beinart describes a kind of subterranean drift in the right-wing orthodoxy—yet another attempt to lunge backward into permanent avoidance. “Over the past decade, the foreign-policy debate in Washington has turned upside down,” Beinart begins. “As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic foreign policy commonly dubbed ‘neoconservative’ seemed on the verge of collapse…. That was then. Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the G.O.P. presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal…” Beinart identifies a new rewrite of the Iraq narrative—wherein Bush won the war with his 2007 “surge,” and the Obama administration punted it by withdrawing American forces—as the signal moment in this latest iteration of American militarism. The “surge fallacy,” as Beinart calls it, was Jeb Bush’s theme, made ad hominem with an attack on Hillary Clinton, when he spoke Tuesday at—where else?—the Reagan Library in Southern California. What are we to say when the Republican candidate who trades on an image of moderation—this is his affect, of course—turns out to be as ungiven to reason as the worst in the lineup? The follow-on problem here is that, however well or badly the Republican candidate does in the election, he or she can force any Democrat, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, to cast America’s foreign policy alternatives in proximately unreal terms. The American right’s new hawkishness, thus, is not a sickness from which the rest of us can claim immunity. There is none for Americans. In a remarkable appearance at the Reuters newsroom in New York Tuesday, Secretary of State Kerry put the point as forcefully as he has ever said anything: “Our allies are going to look at us and laugh,” he warned, if this country’s rightists kill the accord with Iran. Then this: “It’s not going to happen overnight. But I’m telling you, there’s a huge antipathy [to U.S. leadership] out there. There’s a big bloc out there, folks, that isn’t just sitting around waiting for the United States to tell them what to do.” Last week’s message from Cleveland is simple and stark, it seems to me. The politics of affect must be understood for what it is and then decisively countered if we are to advance into that place known as the 21st century. This means we have to stop pretending to take posing politicians, those who dress up fear as courage, as credible voices in the conversation Americans need to have. Let the media write about them as if they are serious. They are serious only as measures of how much needs to get swept away. These judgments may seem Cassandra-like, but so be it. It seems to me Cleveland also told us that the political season to come could prove a last, best hope for who knows how long to alter the course to destruction we remain on.
Trump the indestructible: Not even his bizarre Planned Parenthood defense will do him in
So Donald Trump is going around saying nice things about Planned Parenthood. It's hard to think of anything theoretically more damaging right now for a Republican presidential primary contender than to say anything remotely positive about Planned Parenthood. It's one of those moves that we'd call an instant death knell for any other GOP presidential aspirant. But because it's Donald Trump, he'll probably shoot up in the polls, for no apparent reason, since that's just how things work for him. What is Trump saying about Planned Parenthood? Well, he certainly doesn't like abortion -- hates abortion! He doesn't care for the abortion-y stuff that Planned Parenthood does: very bad. Some other stuff they do, though: good. Seriously, though, this is not far off from what Trump said:
“The problem that I have with Planned Parenthood is the abortion situation. It is like an abortion factory, frankly,” Trump said. “And you can’t have it. And you just shouldn’t be funding it. That should not be funded by the government, and I feel strongly about that.” When pressed on non-abortion services Planned Parenthood allegedly provides, Trump said, “What I would do when the time came, I’d look at the individual things they do, and maybe some of the individual things they do are good. I know a lot of the things are bad. But certainly the abortion aspect of it should not be funded by government, absolutely.” Trump continued, “I would look at the good aspects of [Planned Parenthood], and I would also look, because I’m sure they do some things properly and good and that are good for women, and I would look at that, and I would look at other aspects also. But we have to take care of women.”Trump is saying that we have to weigh the pros and cons of Planned Parenthood in determining whether it should receive Title X funding from the federal government. The "abortion aspect" of it should not be funded, while perhaps its other family planning and women's health care services should. In other words, Trump defended the status quo with regards to the federal government's Planned Parenthood funding. Federal law prohibits funding of abortion services; the Title X money that Planned Parenthood receives goes to its non-abortion operations. Conservatives don't buy this explanation, though, and consider all of Planned Parenthood's money fungible: Any dollar going to Planned Parenthood is a dollar that supports abortion. Among the many conservative media figures who lashed out at Trump after these comments on Tuesday morning was Breitbart News' John Nolte. "Any money given to Planned Parenthood funds abortion," Nolte wrote, "Period." Hmm... Breitbart News. Does that ring a bell? Ah yes, this is the conservative news outlet that flatters the hell out of Donald Trump. We wondered a couple of weeks ago what could possibly motivate that outlet to run interference for Trump so flagrantly. Our best guess was access, but it turns out it may be cold hard cash. Like, Trump giving money to Breitbart News. That... would be the simplest theory. But Nolte's attempt to push back at those pay-for-play rumors by posting a condemnation of Trump's Planned Parenthood comments were canceled out from in-house, when trusty Trump sycophant Matt Boyle rose to Trump's defense in a very beautiful, very classy piece. "In response to several folks seemingly misunderstanding what the 2016 GOP frontrunner said on CNN on Tuesday morning about Planned Parenthood funding," Boyle wrote, "Donald Trump has issued a statement to Breitbart News exclusively that makes it crystal clear where he stands: While the organization conducts abortions, they should receive no taxpayer dollars." The EXCLUSIVE statement:
While Planned Parenthood is engaging in the despicable practice of abortion — in addition to then selling aborted baby body parts to the highest bidder — the organization should receive no taxpayer dollars. The liberal left wing always claims that Planned Parenthood isn’t about abortion and that it’s about other general areas of women’s health. I am totally in favor of women’s health and if they can put their money where their mouth is, and stop the abortion services at Planned Parenthood entirely, we can talk about government funding for many of the other aspects of the organization that do a lot of good."What’s perhaps the most interesting development here is, now that Trump has set the record straight—and made clear that he supports no tax money going to the organization while it’s in the abortion business—he seems to have exposed the entire political class yet again," Boyle's hilarious article continues. "All his haters crawled out of the woodwork to attack him to argue he suggested he’d be okay with funding Planned Parenthood at all while the organization is still in the abortion business, and he just exposed them all yet again." Later on Tuesday night, though, Trump appeared on "Hannity" -- his preferred Fox News vehicle -- and yet again seemed not "crystal clear" about where he stands on Planned Parenthood funding. He said "maybe" he would support eliminating all funding for Planned Parenthood until it ceased performing abortions, while reiterating all of the nice things he'd previously said about the organization. Here we quote a third Breitbart News article (love you guys!):
Trump was then asked if they should get any taxpayer money, he answered, “let’s say there’s two Planned Parenthoods, in a way. You have it as an abortion clinic. Now, that’s actually a fairly small part of what they do, but it’s a brutal part, and I’m totally against it, and I wouldn’t do that. They also, however, service woman, and one of the things that I thought was so terrible, when Jeb Bush…when he talked about women’s health issues, he was so bad. I mean, it’s like, what is he doing? We have to help women. A lot of women are helped. So, we have to look at the positives, also, for Planned Parenthood. You know, even a guy like you, you may be convinced that it does some positive things. I would look at it very strongly. We have to help women. As far as the abortion stuff, absolutely un –.” He was then asked, “But if they are doing abortions, then they can allocate their other resources to other things. … why should the taxpayers pay for an organization that — ?” Trump answered, “Maybe unless they stop with the abortions, we don’t do the funding for the stuff that we want. There are many ways you can do that, Sean, because I’m totally against the abortion aspect of Planned Parenthood, but I’ve had many women, I’ve had many Republican, conservative women come up and say Planned Parenthood serves a good function, other than that one aspect.”What's interesting here is not just the joy of watching the internal psychodrama of Breitbart News play out in article-length subtweets against each other. It shows how Trump manages to survive or even take advantage of each gaffe, whether it's saying that John McCain sucks at war for getting captured, or that Megyn Kelly was probably on her period during the debate, or now saying that Planned Parenthood is great. A bigger wave of conservative pundits come after him each time, but then he successfully converts those pundits into enemies of the cause and accomplices in the PC Police's takeover of our discourse. The more villains he creates publicly, the stronger he ends up. For now.So Donald Trump is going around saying nice things about Planned Parenthood. It's hard to think of anything theoretically more damaging right now for a Republican presidential primary contender than to say anything remotely positive about Planned Parenthood. It's one of those moves that we'd call an instant death knell for any other GOP presidential aspirant. But because it's Donald Trump, he'll probably shoot up in the polls, for no apparent reason, since that's just how things work for him. What is Trump saying about Planned Parenthood? Well, he certainly doesn't like abortion -- hates abortion! He doesn't care for the abortion-y stuff that Planned Parenthood does: very bad. Some other stuff they do, though: good. Seriously, though, this is not far off from what Trump said:
“The problem that I have with Planned Parenthood is the abortion situation. It is like an abortion factory, frankly,” Trump said. “And you can’t have it. And you just shouldn’t be funding it. That should not be funded by the government, and I feel strongly about that.” When pressed on non-abortion services Planned Parenthood allegedly provides, Trump said, “What I would do when the time came, I’d look at the individual things they do, and maybe some of the individual things they do are good. I know a lot of the things are bad. But certainly the abortion aspect of it should not be funded by government, absolutely.” Trump continued, “I would look at the good aspects of [Planned Parenthood], and I would also look, because I’m sure they do some things properly and good and that are good for women, and I would look at that, and I would look at other aspects also. But we have to take care of women.”Trump is saying that we have to weigh the pros and cons of Planned Parenthood in determining whether it should receive Title X funding from the federal government. The "abortion aspect" of it should not be funded, while perhaps its other family planning and women's health care services should. In other words, Trump defended the status quo with regards to the federal government's Planned Parenthood funding. Federal law prohibits funding of abortion services; the Title X money that Planned Parenthood receives goes to its non-abortion operations. Conservatives don't buy this explanation, though, and consider all of Planned Parenthood's money fungible: Any dollar going to Planned Parenthood is a dollar that supports abortion. Among the many conservative media figures who lashed out at Trump after these comments on Tuesday morning was Breitbart News' John Nolte. "Any money given to Planned Parenthood funds abortion," Nolte wrote, "Period." Hmm... Breitbart News. Does that ring a bell? Ah yes, this is the conservative news outlet that flatters the hell out of Donald Trump. We wondered a couple of weeks ago what could possibly motivate that outlet to run interference for Trump so flagrantly. Our best guess was access, but it turns out it may be cold hard cash. Like, Trump giving money to Breitbart News. That... would be the simplest theory. But Nolte's attempt to push back at those pay-for-play rumors by posting a condemnation of Trump's Planned Parenthood comments were canceled out from in-house, when trusty Trump sycophant Matt Boyle rose to Trump's defense in a very beautiful, very classy piece. "In response to several folks seemingly misunderstanding what the 2016 GOP frontrunner said on CNN on Tuesday morning about Planned Parenthood funding," Boyle wrote, "Donald Trump has issued a statement to Breitbart News exclusively that makes it crystal clear where he stands: While the organization conducts abortions, they should receive no taxpayer dollars." The EXCLUSIVE statement:
While Planned Parenthood is engaging in the despicable practice of abortion — in addition to then selling aborted baby body parts to the highest bidder — the organization should receive no taxpayer dollars. The liberal left wing always claims that Planned Parenthood isn’t about abortion and that it’s about other general areas of women’s health. I am totally in favor of women’s health and if they can put their money where their mouth is, and stop the abortion services at Planned Parenthood entirely, we can talk about government funding for many of the other aspects of the organization that do a lot of good."What’s perhaps the most interesting development here is, now that Trump has set the record straight—and made clear that he supports no tax money going to the organization while it’s in the abortion business—he seems to have exposed the entire political class yet again," Boyle's hilarious article continues. "All his haters crawled out of the woodwork to attack him to argue he suggested he’d be okay with funding Planned Parenthood at all while the organization is still in the abortion business, and he just exposed them all yet again." Later on Tuesday night, though, Trump appeared on "Hannity" -- his preferred Fox News vehicle -- and yet again seemed not "crystal clear" about where he stands on Planned Parenthood funding. He said "maybe" he would support eliminating all funding for Planned Parenthood until it ceased performing abortions, while reiterating all of the nice things he'd previously said about the organization. Here we quote a third Breitbart News article (love you guys!):
Trump was then asked if they should get any taxpayer money, he answered, “let’s say there’s two Planned Parenthoods, in a way. You have it as an abortion clinic. Now, that’s actually a fairly small part of what they do, but it’s a brutal part, and I’m totally against it, and I wouldn’t do that. They also, however, service woman, and one of the things that I thought was so terrible, when Jeb Bush…when he talked about women’s health issues, he was so bad. I mean, it’s like, what is he doing? We have to help women. A lot of women are helped. So, we have to look at the positives, also, for Planned Parenthood. You know, even a guy like you, you may be convinced that it does some positive things. I would look at it very strongly. We have to help women. As far as the abortion stuff, absolutely un –.” He was then asked, “But if they are doing abortions, then they can allocate their other resources to other things. … why should the taxpayers pay for an organization that — ?” Trump answered, “Maybe unless they stop with the abortions, we don’t do the funding for the stuff that we want. There are many ways you can do that, Sean, because I’m totally against the abortion aspect of Planned Parenthood, but I’ve had many women, I’ve had many Republican, conservative women come up and say Planned Parenthood serves a good function, other than that one aspect.”What's interesting here is not just the joy of watching the internal psychodrama of Breitbart News play out in article-length subtweets against each other. It shows how Trump manages to survive or even take advantage of each gaffe, whether it's saying that John McCain sucks at war for getting captured, or that Megyn Kelly was probably on her period during the debate, or now saying that Planned Parenthood is great. A bigger wave of conservative pundits come after him each time, but then he successfully converts those pundits into enemies of the cause and accomplices in the PC Police's takeover of our discourse. The more villains he creates publicly, the stronger he ends up. For now.
The glaring logical flaw at the heart of Rand Paul’s economic plan
As some of you may have heard, Sen. Rand Paul provided us with some of his famous libertarian insight the other day. When asked about whether his flat tax plan, which would make all incomes over $50,000 taxable by an equal 14.5 percent, would increase income inequality, which is already at record highs, he responded:
“The thing is, income inequality is due to some people working harder and selling more things. If people voluntarily buy more of your stuff, you'll have more money....It's a fallacious notion to say, 'Oh, rich people get more money back in a tax cut,’ if you cut taxes 10 percent, 10 percent of a million is more than 10 percent of a thousand dollars. So, obviously, people who pay more in taxes will get more back.”At a time when the top 1 percent's share of income has just about tripled over the past four decades, and is now at similar heights as just before the Great Depression in 1928, it is interesting to hear a presidential candidate shrug it off as if it were a minor issue. Paul's notion that income inequality is because of “some people working harder” is wonderfully dumb, and it causes me to wonder what Sen. Paul imagines hard work to be. Is a CEO or a politician's job harder than, say, a coal miner or fisherman's -- which, by the way, are considered by many to be the “hardest” jobs in America. Paul seems to assume that everyone is “selling things” rather than selling (renting) their labor to capitalists or the state. This is a very libertarian way of thinking -- looking at every working person as a small businessperson selling whatever good they produce with the sweat of their brow. This is what I have previously called lemonade-stand capitalism. Before economies became industrialized during the 18th and 19th centuries, this model of labor was true for a certain class of working individuals, called artisans. These workers were somewhat like small businessmen, crafting various goods or providing services that required a certain degree of skill in towns and cities. As capitalism and industrialization grew, the need for artisans decreased, as goods that had previously been crafted by artisans began to be mass produced much more efficiently through the division of labor. But enough history; today, the majority of people in America do not sell anything other than their labor value -- whether they work for a multinational corporation, a small business or the state. There are about 28 million small businesses in America -- ranging from self-employed therapists to businesses with hundreds of employees. In the case of small businesses, what Paul said makes logical sense -- owners who sell more goods (or services) have more money. However, like it or not, the majority of Americans are not small business owners. There are nearly 320 million citizens in the United States, and most of them sell their labor to the business owners who employ them. For these individuals, whether they are coal miners or computer scientists, they produce a certain amount of value, and receive a fraction of this value in income. Now, when looking at actual workers who sell their labor to capitalists, it is clear that working harder or being more productive has done little to make them wealthier. Since the 1980s, these workers have been paid less and less for their labor. As productivity increased with technology, capitalists have managed to get even more out of the workers' labor. Moreover, our income-tax system was completely overhauled with the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which cut many loopholes, but also slashed the top marginal rate from 70 percent in 1981 to 28 percent in 1988. Since then, executives have become increasingly well paid, while everyone else has seen their pay stagnate. No doubt, there are many reasons for the rise in income inequality, but creating a less progressive tax system is a big one. It seems quite obvious that when the top tax rate is slashed, top earners become much wealthier -- especially because they can demand outrageously high wages without worrying about it being taxed at a higher rate. Imagine you are a CEO discussing your pay package with the board, for example. If you know that your income will be taxed at a higher rate the more you earn, there is less incentive to demand outrageous sums. If you know that you will be taxed at the same rate of 14 percent regardless of what you make, you will reach for the sky. There is no doubt that income inequality will only increase with Rand’s radical plan. When income inequality has reached record highs, it is not wise to move toward a plan that will only increase this inequality. Paul’s beliefs are based largely on the false notion that every single person sells something, and that if they work harder, they will make more. This is a childish and utopian view of the economy. The truth is that Paul does not care about income inequality, and neither do any of the other GOP candidates. This idea that some people are lazy and others are hard workers is sacred in Republican circles. As with many other issues, the “just-world bias” kicks in whenever inequalities or injustices are discussed, and explained away with this notion that people get what they deserve. By now Paul should understand how false this notion is. He is, after all, competing with Donald Trump.As some of you may have heard, Sen. Rand Paul provided us with some of his famous libertarian insight the other day. When asked about whether his flat tax plan, which would make all incomes over $50,000 taxable by an equal 14.5 percent, would increase income inequality, which is already at record highs, he responded:
“The thing is, income inequality is due to some people working harder and selling more things. If people voluntarily buy more of your stuff, you'll have more money....It's a fallacious notion to say, 'Oh, rich people get more money back in a tax cut,’ if you cut taxes 10 percent, 10 percent of a million is more than 10 percent of a thousand dollars. So, obviously, people who pay more in taxes will get more back.”At a time when the top 1 percent's share of income has just about tripled over the past four decades, and is now at similar heights as just before the Great Depression in 1928, it is interesting to hear a presidential candidate shrug it off as if it were a minor issue. Paul's notion that income inequality is because of “some people working harder” is wonderfully dumb, and it causes me to wonder what Sen. Paul imagines hard work to be. Is a CEO or a politician's job harder than, say, a coal miner or fisherman's -- which, by the way, are considered by many to be the “hardest” jobs in America. Paul seems to assume that everyone is “selling things” rather than selling (renting) their labor to capitalists or the state. This is a very libertarian way of thinking -- looking at every working person as a small businessperson selling whatever good they produce with the sweat of their brow. This is what I have previously called lemonade-stand capitalism. Before economies became industrialized during the 18th and 19th centuries, this model of labor was true for a certain class of working individuals, called artisans. These workers were somewhat like small businessmen, crafting various goods or providing services that required a certain degree of skill in towns and cities. As capitalism and industrialization grew, the need for artisans decreased, as goods that had previously been crafted by artisans began to be mass produced much more efficiently through the division of labor. But enough history; today, the majority of people in America do not sell anything other than their labor value -- whether they work for a multinational corporation, a small business or the state. There are about 28 million small businesses in America -- ranging from self-employed therapists to businesses with hundreds of employees. In the case of small businesses, what Paul said makes logical sense -- owners who sell more goods (or services) have more money. However, like it or not, the majority of Americans are not small business owners. There are nearly 320 million citizens in the United States, and most of them sell their labor to the business owners who employ them. For these individuals, whether they are coal miners or computer scientists, they produce a certain amount of value, and receive a fraction of this value in income. Now, when looking at actual workers who sell their labor to capitalists, it is clear that working harder or being more productive has done little to make them wealthier. Since the 1980s, these workers have been paid less and less for their labor. As productivity increased with technology, capitalists have managed to get even more out of the workers' labor. Moreover, our income-tax system was completely overhauled with the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which cut many loopholes, but also slashed the top marginal rate from 70 percent in 1981 to 28 percent in 1988. Since then, executives have become increasingly well paid, while everyone else has seen their pay stagnate. No doubt, there are many reasons for the rise in income inequality, but creating a less progressive tax system is a big one. It seems quite obvious that when the top tax rate is slashed, top earners become much wealthier -- especially because they can demand outrageously high wages without worrying about it being taxed at a higher rate. Imagine you are a CEO discussing your pay package with the board, for example. If you know that your income will be taxed at a higher rate the more you earn, there is less incentive to demand outrageous sums. If you know that you will be taxed at the same rate of 14 percent regardless of what you make, you will reach for the sky. There is no doubt that income inequality will only increase with Rand’s radical plan. When income inequality has reached record highs, it is not wise to move toward a plan that will only increase this inequality. Paul’s beliefs are based largely on the false notion that every single person sells something, and that if they work harder, they will make more. This is a childish and utopian view of the economy. The truth is that Paul does not care about income inequality, and neither do any of the other GOP candidates. This idea that some people are lazy and others are hard workers is sacred in Republican circles. As with many other issues, the “just-world bias” kicks in whenever inequalities or injustices are discussed, and explained away with this notion that people get what they deserve. By now Paul should understand how false this notion is. He is, after all, competing with Donald Trump.
