Lily Salter's Blog, page 961

November 5, 2015

We’re missing the real Marco Rubio scandal: The problem isn’t his financial trouble, it’s that he’s a corruptible sneak

Now that Marco Rubio has vaulted himself into a front-running distant third place in the poll for the 2016 Republican nomination, he’s starting to come under harsher scrutiny from the press and his opponents in the GOP field. For the moment, the focal point of that criticism is Rubio’s personal finances, as the New York Times reported this morning:

A decade after he began using a Republican Party credit card for personal purchases like paving stones at his home, Senator Marco Rubio on Wednesday pledged to disclose new spending records from that account as he sought to inoculate himself against what could be his biggest liability as a presidential candidate: how he manages his finances.

The paper goes on to note that Rubio’s fellow aspirants for the Republican nomination “are rushing to resurrect the matter in an attempt to portray him as a careless money manager.” Donald Trump is “suggesting that the senator struggled to live within his means,” the Times writes, adding that the “risk” for Rubio is that this credit card issue “may become a symbol of a larger pattern of financial challenges in his recent past.” Come on. The problem revealed by Rubio’s shady history with state party credit cards isn’t that Rubio is bad at “managing his finances” – it’s that he’s a weasel who cashed in on his position of (limited) authority. The image of Rubio as a poor money manager with massive debt isn’t as damaging as his opponents and the press might think. Pretty much everyone in the country has trouble handling debt, and far too many people are carrying way too high a balance on their credit cards. Framing it in these terms just allows Rubio to make the point that he’s not wealthy and he copes with the same financial difficulties as everyone else. The damning part of all this is that he abused resources made available to him as Speaker. I’m not especially bothered that Rubio can’t balance his checkbook, but I do care that he’s a corruptible sneak. (However, if reporters and Rubio’s opponents are looking for a way to make his personal financial troubles relevant, try bringing them up the next time Rubio justifies a balanced budget amendment by saying the government must balance its books just like American families do.) But that’s still not Rubio’s “biggest liability as a presidential candidate.” I tend to think it’s a little more significant that much of Rubio’s policy platform is based on lies and discredited economic theories. Just today he released his plan for exploding the military budget well beyond its current levels as part of his neoconservative foreign policy vision to pick fights and spread freedom at gunpoint. He’s going to provoke international conflicts and preside over a vast expansion of defense spending while also blowing a hole in the budget by slashing tax rates, eliminating taxes on investments, and creating new tax credits for the middle class. The last Republican president implemented a more modest version of this policy agenda, and the results – intractable military quagmires, exploding inequality, huge deficits – left him so widely reviled that he put himself in political exile, where he remains to this day. And, of course, Rubio is still moving to the right on immigration in an attempt to mollify conservatives who disowned him for his past heresies on “amnesty.” He’s running to be the nominee of a party in desperate need of support from minority voters, and to secure that nomination he’s inching closer and closer to the immigration position of the party’s nativist wing. Seems like a pretty serious problem! So if you want to focus on Rubio’s credit card shenanigans and his past life as a small-time charlatan, go right ahead. Just don’t do him the favor of believing that’s his biggest weakness as a would-be president. [image error]

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Published on November 05, 2015 11:01

Neil deGrasse Tyson destroys argument for intelligent design: “I cannot look at the universe and say that yes, there’s a God, and this God cares about my life — at all”

On the “Nightly Show” Wednesday evening, Neil deGrasse Tyson went toe-to-toe with celebrity pastor Carl Lentz and comedian Tom Papa on a panel debating science and religion, saying that he rejected the notion of kindness and benevolence that goes hand in hand with peoples’ belief in God. “Any time someone describes their understanding of God, typically it involves some statement of benevolence or some kind of kindness,” Tyson explained. “I look out to the universe and yes, it is filled with mysteries, but it’s also filled with all manner of things that would just as soon have you dead. Like asteroid strikes, and hurricanes, and tornadoes, and tsunamis, and volcanoes, and disease, and pestilence,” he continued. “There are things that exist in the natural world that do not have your health or longevity as a priority. And so I cannot look at the universe and say that yes, there’s a God, and this God cares about my life — at all. The evidence does not support this.” "But in all fairness, you just described the Old Testament," Wilmore joked. Watch the full debate below:

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Published on November 05, 2015 10:56

November 4, 2015

Meet the Republican Mitch McConnell called a “pathological liar”: How Gov.-elect Matt Bevin decimated Kentucky Democrats

After delivering a cannon blast to Democratic rivals for the Kentucky governorship, Matt Bevin and Jenean Hampton have captured the keys to the Governor’s Mansion, becoming the second duo to do so in 44 years. Among U.S. off-year races Kentucky’s was the most closely watched on Nov. 3, and the Republican victory signals a local shift toward an almost wholly-Red state. A 30 percent turnout rate left Democrats in the state House of Representatives (the last Democrat-controlled chamber in the Solid South) reeling with confusion, and last night’s only two Democratic statewide winners in a frenzy to rebuild the party brand. While they’re blowing up the phone lines of donors and local party chairs, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the smooth-talking Tea Party conservative -- frequently compared to Donald Trump, called a “pathological liar” by Kentucky’s own Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and winner of the Republican primary by 83 votes -- the man who swung the state Red, Matt Bevin: Goodbye healthcare, hello Right to Work Bevin campaigned on promises that his first act as governor would be to repeal the state's wildly successful health insurance exchange, Kynect, created with $253 million in federal funds, and its Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which has since covered more than 420,000 previously uninsured Kentuckians -- contributing to a drop in the state's uninsured rate from 20 percent to 9 percent over the past two years, according to Gallup. A core tenet of his rowdy, radical appeal to voters Bevin derided "the welfare state" throughout his campaign in speeches, where he pushed himself as “the only candidate who has promised to dismantle Obamacare.” This played well even among the benefactors of the state’s Kynect program, where the name Obama has become as politically toxic as coal ash. His positions stand in stark contrast to his own history, however. Bevin accepted $100,000 in state money from New Hampshire via a matching grant when his family bell factory burned down. When asked why he didn't have the insurance which would have covered the factory's reconstruction, Bevin told reporters that the price of the insurance was too high. Bevin has claimed the price of Medicaid expansion is too high for the state as well. The program is currently running purely on federal dollars, but is slated to incrementally pick up costs starting in 2017 and ending with a cap of 10 percent on state costs in 2021. State estimates show that by that time, the expansion should be able to both pay for itself and create new jobs, findings that Bevin spent much of his campaign dodging. Bevin has shifted positions on the issue, though, alternating between his strict promise to dismantle Kynect and a desire to use 1,115 waivers. The waivers are federal requests to use Medicaid block grants in creating a customizable state healthcare exchange, but which still don’t exempt the state from having to carry 10 percent of the costs by 2021. A potential healthcare re-structure could also loom large for those Kentuckians who receive services from Planned Parenthood, which Bevin has promised to defund. In an earlier press release, the Bevin campaign said “As Governor, I will direct my Secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services not to distribute federal taxpayer dollars from that department to Planned Parenthood clinics.” A likely front-running for the Secretary position is former Republican state Sen. Julie Denton, of Louisville, a former chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare with a short history of courting the Bevin campaign and a long history of advancing anti-choice legislation. But any cabinet’s compliance with Bevin’s order could endanger other federal Medicaid provision, as the Obama administration hinted recently. Kentucky’s coal-powered energy policy would likely see less of a shake-up under Bevin, who told public radio audiences in September that he isn't interested in cutting pollution via the federal Clean Power Plan, arguing that climate change isn't man-made but that there is "absolutely unequivocal evidence" that it is caused by natural forces. In the throes of his victory speech, Bevin was quick to praise the state's lieutenant governor-elect, his running mate Jenean Hampton. Hampton is a Tea Party activist and now the state's first Black constitutional officer. Aside from dismantling Kynect, passing Right to Work legislation -- which would prevent union workplaces from requiring union dues of all employees--has been a central priority of the duo’s platform. “The reason that Right to Work is at the top of our list is that we are surrounded by states. Tennessee's just 30 minutes from Bowling Green and they have no state tax. They have a better business climate, so who knows what business we're losing,” Hampton said in an April interview. “I think going county by county is the wrong approach.” Hampton brushed off questions about the rise in worker injuries in states with Right to Work laws, questioning the quality of the data. When asked about the hard numbers showing wage decline in Right to Work states, she only said “I've heard that too and I don’t know that I agree with that either. When there are a lot of businesses and they're all competing for workers the wages rise.” From early on, Bevin put Hampton’s race at the forefront of his campaign speeches, reminding local Republican voters that it could play a crucial role by attracting conservative-leaning black voters and undercutting Conway's much-neglected base. In Oldham County, for example, a suburban Louisville-adjoined Republican stronghold, Bevin told voters, “The fact that she is a black woman in Kentucky as a Republican puts her in fairly select company. It’s going to matter in the general election. If there’s a ticket being sold out of the Republican side that doesn’t have a woman on it, fairly or otherwise, you’re going to hear that narrative.” But Hampton says that the discussion of race in this context makes her uncomfortable. She prefers to see herself as “just Jenean.” Hampton takes a Tea Party approach to the economic and judicial disparities between races in Kentucky and across the country, eschewing the context of imbalanced incarceration rates and job opportunities for a classically libertarian approach. “I don’t accept that society is inherently racist,” she said. “Are there racists out there? Sure there are, but the question is: what do you do with it? I always carried myself as ‘I'm just Jenean’ and there things to see and do, and there are people to meet, and I treat people as people. I don't see color.” But she does. In the same interview, Hampton openly acknowledges a historical inequality between races and the role it played in her own life. “I knew I was blessed to be born in the U.S.A., in this country, in this time, because in an earlier era I couldn’t vote. I couldn’t own property. I couldn’t even be in control of the fruits of my own labor,” she said. The acknowledgment seems to stop there, though. Hampton sees the Black Lives Matter movement as disingenuous and chides protesters from Baltimore and Ferguson for stirring anti-police sentiment. “The concern rings hollow to me when they say ‘black lives matter’ because what they're telling me is that a black life matters only if a white person takes it. And I know that’s not what they mean but I’m looking at the level of excitement, the level of concern, over blacks being killed and I just think it could be misplaced. There’s hundreds who were killed, thousands who were killed, but it’s black on black crime,” she said. “You know I’ve heard more excuses from people rioting in Baltimore, that they're just disenfranchised. Well, I don’t understand,” said Hampton, adding that her upbringing in a poverty-stricken area of Detroit didn’t prevent her from achieving personal success. “Do you know anybody who was born a slave? I know there are people out there, and that's a thing. But here's the thing, I was born in 1958. My parents were not slaves. Nobody around me was a slave. I knew about it because in the 1960's they decided to teach black American history,” she said. “When I hear people say our economy is based on slaves, maybe it was. But we're not there. We are where we are.” Hampton volunteered that she isn’t concerned with police brutality. “The times that I go back to Detroit, I have less to fear from the cops than I do from other black people in Detroit,” she said. “If I walk down the street, I’m not worried about the cops. I know cops are my friend. I know that maybe they might profile me.” If the position of Lt. Gov. is an ambassador's role, Hampton’s sentiments may work against her in some of Kentucky’s racially divided regions. Goodbye, blue skies: Kentucky’s Dems face the boot So what happened to the Democrats on the state level? Which of the local party leaders let this coup happen? The search for answers begins and ends with the old guard among the state’s Democrats. The answer itself could be seen on the resigned face of Patrick Hughes, the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party who appeared on stage at the Democrats’ campaign headquarters last night in awkward form, mc’ing the parade of concession speeches. Hughes was a temporary pick for the KDP chair, according to Democratic insiders. A former deputy chief attorney general to Conway, Hughes was brought on with the understanding that his tenure as chair would only be through the duration of the campaign, and would serve as Conway’s Chief of Staff after the big win. Hughes was appointed in Feb. of this year, replacing Dan Logsdon, of the state's heavy-hitting Logsdon Oil and Gas company. Tax and property records show that the Logsdon and Conway families have been swapping oil and gas leases in eastern Kentucky for years. Logsdon held the chair since 2010. After overseeing a rise of Republican seats in legislature and the brutal defeat of Alison Lundergan Grimes in her 2014 U.S. Senate race against Mitch McConnell, Hughes’ appointment was a sure signal to the state that Grimes’ defeat sent waves across the party, and Conway would be the next nominated. Naturally, Conway announced in May. Conway’s loss has Hughes on the chopping block. This means the de facto party chair is now Grimes, but her father Jerry Lundergan is rumored to be calling the shots. He's a former state representative, two-time former KDP chair, and personal friend to the Clintons. Democrats aren’t likely to fall in line behind him, however. His longtime political consultant, Jonathan Hurst, was picked to manage the Grimes campaign against powerhouse McConnell, a choice many in the party are still sore about. Some Democrats still attribute the election loss to Lundergan’s alleged interference and campaign control. Why on earth is all this state-level inside baseball important? What does it mean for the future of Democrats in Kentucky and other southern Red states? Because these people are old guard Democrats with legacy names -- Lundergan, Conway, Andy Beshear (the sitting governor’s son and only other Democrat to win statewide office on Nov. 3) -- and are playing by an outdated rulebook. Democratic strategy, in Kentucky and elsewhere in the south, has largely failed to evolve in concert with the radicalism of the more-conservative right. Democrats have failed to cultivate the kind of fresh-faced candidates that Kentucky Republicans have -- young zealots who court the base with unapologetic fervor. Instead of developing diverse campaign strategies and funding new Democrats, the old guard repacks the same eggs in the same fraying basket. To be a successful Kentucky Democrat, the conventional wisdom until now has been to court pro-union social conservatives in rural regions by declaring a love of guns, coal and teachers. Then, a Democrat must rouse the last vestiges of western Kentucky unionism. They must make limited overtures to urban areas, hoping the base shows up on Election Day. And the strategy worked for a long time. But the campaign strategy ignores consistent rural-to-urban population shifts in Kentucky altogether, attempts to court aging rural voters who have been going Red since the late aughts. Democrats have had plenty of warning. They knew the state was going Red in 2010, when the famously Blue 6th Congressional District kept their Democrat, Ben Chandler, in the U.S. House by less than 1 percent of the vote, only to be defeated in 2012 by 4 percent. He lost to the same opponent, Andy Barr, who still holds the seat and won his last election by a full 20 percent. Coal unions are going extinct and the only population growth in some of these counties comes with the construction of new prisons. By playing a Republican-lite tune to the more deeply partisan Republican regions, Democrats are hitting all the wrong chords for an urban progressive base which feels more ignored than ever. Star players like Grimes, Conway and Beshear the Lesser have tiptoed around rural anti-Obama sentiment and failed to rally around the state's healthcare successes--a Democratic victory that could have been an enormous harvest of party PR in the state's "Golden Triangle" of metropolitan growth. But the old guard knows the jig is up. Lundergan’s Clinton connection can only hold so much value for the party's go-to strategist when election losses become this brutal. Candidates willing to kiss the ring would be well-advised to proceed with caution: his connection couldn't secure Democrats a U.S. Senate seat in 2014, nor the Governor's Mansion in 2015. To play by the old rules in 2016 could mean losing the House, the last Blue chamber in the Solid South, and declaring political bankruptcy in the state overall. If election night was any hint, one could look at Bevin’s televised victory dance, where the writhing Republican throng shouted in unison, “Flip the House! Flip the House!" Bevin, from the podium, was leading their chant. [image error] After delivering a cannon blast to Democratic rivals for the Kentucky governorship, Matt Bevin and Jenean Hampton have captured the keys to the Governor’s Mansion, becoming the second duo to do so in 44 years. Among U.S. off-year races Kentucky’s was the most closely watched on Nov. 3, and the Republican victory signals a local shift toward an almost wholly-Red state. A 30 percent turnout rate left Democrats in the state House of Representatives (the last Democrat-controlled chamber in the Solid South) reeling with confusion, and last night’s only two Democratic statewide winners in a frenzy to rebuild the party brand. While they’re blowing up the phone lines of donors and local party chairs, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the smooth-talking Tea Party conservative -- frequently compared to Donald Trump, called a “pathological liar” by Kentucky’s own Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and winner of the Republican primary by 83 votes -- the man who swung the state Red, Matt Bevin: Goodbye healthcare, hello Right to Work Bevin campaigned on promises that his first act as governor would be to repeal the state's wildly successful health insurance exchange, Kynect, created with $253 million in federal funds, and its Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which has since covered more than 420,000 previously uninsured Kentuckians -- contributing to a drop in the state's uninsured rate from 20 percent to 9 percent over the past two years, according to Gallup. A core tenet of his rowdy, radical appeal to voters Bevin derided "the welfare state" throughout his campaign in speeches, where he pushed himself as “the only candidate who has promised to dismantle Obamacare.” This played well even among the benefactors of the state’s Kynect program, where the name Obama has become as politically toxic as coal ash. His positions stand in stark contrast to his own history, however. Bevin accepted $100,000 in state money from New Hampshire via a matching grant when his family bell factory burned down. When asked why he didn't have the insurance which would have covered the factory's reconstruction, Bevin told reporters that the price of the insurance was too high. Bevin has claimed the price of Medicaid expansion is too high for the state as well. The program is currently running purely on federal dollars, but is slated to incrementally pick up costs starting in 2017 and ending with a cap of 10 percent on state costs in 2021. State estimates show that by that time, the expansion should be able to both pay for itself and create new jobs, findings that Bevin spent much of his campaign dodging. Bevin has shifted positions on the issue, though, alternating between his strict promise to dismantle Kynect and a desire to use 1,115 waivers. The waivers are federal requests to use Medicaid block grants in creating a customizable state healthcare exchange, but which still don’t exempt the state from having to carry 10 percent of the costs by 2021. A potential healthcare re-structure could also loom large for those Kentuckians who receive services from Planned Parenthood, which Bevin has promised to defund. In an earlier press release, the Bevin campaign said “As Governor, I will direct my Secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services not to distribute federal taxpayer dollars from that department to Planned Parenthood clinics.” A likely front-running for the Secretary position is former Republican state Sen. Julie Denton, of Louisville, a former chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare with a short history of courting the Bevin campaign and a long history of advancing anti-choice legislation. But any cabinet’s compliance with Bevin’s order could endanger other federal Medicaid provision, as the Obama administration hinted recently. Kentucky’s coal-powered energy policy would likely see less of a shake-up under Bevin, who told public radio audiences in September that he isn't interested in cutting pollution via the federal Clean Power Plan, arguing that climate change isn't man-made but that there is "absolutely unequivocal evidence" that it is caused by natural forces. In the throes of his victory speech, Bevin was quick to praise the state's lieutenant governor-elect, his running mate Jenean Hampton. Hampton is a Tea Party activist and now the state's first Black constitutional officer. Aside from dismantling Kynect, passing Right to Work legislation -- which would prevent union workplaces from requiring union dues of all employees--has been a central priority of the duo’s platform. “The reason that Right to Work is at the top of our list is that we are surrounded by states. Tennessee's just 30 minutes from Bowling Green and they have no state tax. They have a better business climate, so who knows what business we're losing,” Hampton said in an April interview. “I think going county by county is the wrong approach.” Hampton brushed off questions about the rise in worker injuries in states with Right to Work laws, questioning the quality of the data. When asked about the hard numbers showing wage decline in Right to Work states, she only said “I've heard that too and I don’t know that I agree with that either. When there are a lot of businesses and they're all competing for workers the wages rise.” From early on, Bevin put Hampton’s race at the forefront of his campaign speeches, reminding local Republican voters that it could play a crucial role by attracting conservative-leaning black voters and undercutting Conway's much-neglected base. In Oldham County, for example, a suburban Louisville-adjoined Republican stronghold, Bevin told voters, “The fact that she is a black woman in Kentucky as a Republican puts her in fairly select company. It’s going to matter in the general election. If there’s a ticket being sold out of the Republican side that doesn’t have a woman on it, fairly or otherwise, you’re going to hear that narrative.” But Hampton says that the discussion of race in this context makes her uncomfortable. She prefers to see herself as “just Jenean.” Hampton takes a Tea Party approach to the economic and judicial disparities between races in Kentucky and across the country, eschewing the context of imbalanced incarceration rates and job opportunities for a classically libertarian approach. “I don’t accept that society is inherently racist,” she said. “Are there racists out there? Sure there are, but the question is: what do you do with it? I always carried myself as ‘I'm just Jenean’ and there things to see and do, and there are people to meet, and I treat people as people. I don't see color.” But she does. In the same interview, Hampton openly acknowledges a historical inequality between races and the role it played in her own life. “I knew I was blessed to be born in the U.S.A., in this country, in this time, because in an earlier era I couldn’t vote. I couldn’t own property. I couldn’t even be in control of the fruits of my own labor,” she said. The acknowledgment seems to stop there, though. Hampton sees the Black Lives Matter movement as disingenuous and chides protesters from Baltimore and Ferguson for stirring anti-police sentiment. “The concern rings hollow to me when they say ‘black lives matter’ because what they're telling me is that a black life matters only if a white person takes it. And I know that’s not what they mean but I’m looking at the level of excitement, the level of concern, over blacks being killed and I just think it could be misplaced. There’s hundreds who were killed, thousands who were killed, but it’s black on black crime,” she said. “You know I’ve heard more excuses from people rioting in Baltimore, that they're just disenfranchised. Well, I don’t understand,” said Hampton, adding that her upbringing in a poverty-stricken area of Detroit didn’t prevent her from achieving personal success. “Do you know anybody who was born a slave? I know there are people out there, and that's a thing. But here's the thing, I was born in 1958. My parents were not slaves. Nobody around me was a slave. I knew about it because in the 1960's they decided to teach black American history,” she said. “When I hear people say our economy is based on slaves, maybe it was. But we're not there. We are where we are.” Hampton volunteered that she isn’t concerned with police brutality. “The times that I go back to Detroit, I have less to fear from the cops than I do from other black people in Detroit,” she said. “If I walk down the street, I’m not worried about the cops. I know cops are my friend. I know that maybe they might profile me.” If the position of Lt. Gov. is an ambassador's role, Hampton’s sentiments may work against her in some of Kentucky’s racially divided regions. Goodbye, blue skies: Kentucky’s Dems face the boot So what happened to the Democrats on the state level? Which of the local party leaders let this coup happen? The search for answers begins and ends with the old guard among the state’s Democrats. The answer itself could be seen on the resigned face of Patrick Hughes, the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party who appeared on stage at the Democrats’ campaign headquarters last night in awkward form, mc’ing the parade of concession speeches. Hughes was a temporary pick for the KDP chair, according to Democratic insiders. A former deputy chief attorney general to Conway, Hughes was brought on with the understanding that his tenure as chair would only be through the duration of the campaign, and would serve as Conway’s Chief of Staff after the big win. Hughes was appointed in Feb. of this year, replacing Dan Logsdon, of the state's heavy-hitting Logsdon Oil and Gas company. Tax and property records show that the Logsdon and Conway families have been swapping oil and gas leases in eastern Kentucky for years. Logsdon held the chair since 2010. After overseeing a rise of Republican seats in legislature and the brutal defeat of Alison Lundergan Grimes in her 2014 U.S. Senate race against Mitch McConnell, Hughes’ appointment was a sure signal to the state that Grimes’ defeat sent waves across the party, and Conway would be the next nominated. Naturally, Conway announced in May. Conway’s loss has Hughes on the chopping block. This means the de facto party chair is now Grimes, but her father Jerry Lundergan is rumored to be calling the shots. He's a former state representative, two-time former KDP chair, and personal friend to the Clintons. Democrats aren’t likely to fall in line behind him, however. His longtime political consultant, Jonathan Hurst, was picked to manage the Grimes campaign against powerhouse McConnell, a choice many in the party are still sore about. Some Democrats still attribute the election loss to Lundergan’s alleged interference and campaign control. Why on earth is all this state-level inside baseball important? What does it mean for the future of Democrats in Kentucky and other southern Red states? Because these people are old guard Democrats with legacy names -- Lundergan, Conway, Andy Beshear (the sitting governor’s son and only other Democrat to win statewide office on Nov. 3) -- and are playing by an outdated rulebook. Democratic strategy, in Kentucky and elsewhere in the south, has largely failed to evolve in concert with the radicalism of the more-conservative right. Democrats have failed to cultivate the kind of fresh-faced candidates that Kentucky Republicans have -- young zealots who court the base with unapologetic fervor. Instead of developing diverse campaign strategies and funding new Democrats, the old guard repacks the same eggs in the same fraying basket. To be a successful Kentucky Democrat, the conventional wisdom until now has been to court pro-union social conservatives in rural regions by declaring a love of guns, coal and teachers. Then, a Democrat must rouse the last vestiges of western Kentucky unionism. They must make limited overtures to urban areas, hoping the base shows up on Election Day. And the strategy worked for a long time. But the campaign strategy ignores consistent rural-to-urban population shifts in Kentucky altogether, attempts to court aging rural voters who have been going Red since the late aughts. Democrats have had plenty of warning. They knew the state was going Red in 2010, when the famously Blue 6th Congressional District kept their Democrat, Ben Chandler, in the U.S. House by less than 1 percent of the vote, only to be defeated in 2012 by 4 percent. He lost to the same opponent, Andy Barr, who still holds the seat and won his last election by a full 20 percent. Coal unions are going extinct and the only population growth in some of these counties comes with the construction of new prisons. By playing a Republican-lite tune to the more deeply partisan Republican regions, Democrats are hitting all the wrong chords for an urban progressive base which feels more ignored than ever. Star players like Grimes, Conway and Beshear the Lesser have tiptoed around rural anti-Obama sentiment and failed to rally around the state's healthcare successes--a Democratic victory that could have been an enormous harvest of party PR in the state's "Golden Triangle" of metropolitan growth. But the old guard knows the jig is up. Lundergan’s Clinton connection can only hold so much value for the party's go-to strategist when election losses become this brutal. Candidates willing to kiss the ring would be well-advised to proceed with caution: his connection couldn't secure Democrats a U.S. Senate seat in 2014, nor the Governor's Mansion in 2015. To play by the old rules in 2016 could mean losing the House, the last Blue chamber in the Solid South, and declaring political bankruptcy in the state overall. If election night was any hint, one could look at Bevin’s televised victory dance, where the writhing Republican throng shouted in unison, “Flip the House! Flip the House!" Bevin, from the podium, was leading their chant. [image error] After delivering a cannon blast to Democratic rivals for the Kentucky governorship, Matt Bevin and Jenean Hampton have captured the keys to the Governor’s Mansion, becoming the second duo to do so in 44 years. Among U.S. off-year races Kentucky’s was the most closely watched on Nov. 3, and the Republican victory signals a local shift toward an almost wholly-Red state. A 30 percent turnout rate left Democrats in the state House of Representatives (the last Democrat-controlled chamber in the Solid South) reeling with confusion, and last night’s only two Democratic statewide winners in a frenzy to rebuild the party brand. While they’re blowing up the phone lines of donors and local party chairs, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the smooth-talking Tea Party conservative -- frequently compared to Donald Trump, called a “pathological liar” by Kentucky’s own Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and winner of the Republican primary by 83 votes -- the man who swung the state Red, Matt Bevin: Goodbye healthcare, hello Right to Work Bevin campaigned on promises that his first act as governor would be to repeal the state's wildly successful health insurance exchange, Kynect, created with $253 million in federal funds, and its Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which has since covered more than 420,000 previously uninsured Kentuckians -- contributing to a drop in the state's uninsured rate from 20 percent to 9 percent over the past two years, according to Gallup. A core tenet of his rowdy, radical appeal to voters Bevin derided "the welfare state" throughout his campaign in speeches, where he pushed himself as “the only candidate who has promised to dismantle Obamacare.” This played well even among the benefactors of the state’s Kynect program, where the name Obama has become as politically toxic as coal ash. His positions stand in stark contrast to his own history, however. Bevin accepted $100,000 in state money from New Hampshire via a matching grant when his family bell factory burned down. When asked why he didn't have the insurance which would have covered the factory's reconstruction, Bevin told reporters that the price of the insurance was too high. Bevin has claimed the price of Medicaid expansion is too high for the state as well. The program is currently running purely on federal dollars, but is slated to incrementally pick up costs starting in 2017 and ending with a cap of 10 percent on state costs in 2021. State estimates show that by that time, the expansion should be able to both pay for itself and create new jobs, findings that Bevin spent much of his campaign dodging. Bevin has shifted positions on the issue, though, alternating between his strict promise to dismantle Kynect and a desire to use 1,115 waivers. The waivers are federal requests to use Medicaid block grants in creating a customizable state healthcare exchange, but which still don’t exempt the state from having to carry 10 percent of the costs by 2021. A potential healthcare re-structure could also loom large for those Kentuckians who receive services from Planned Parenthood, which Bevin has promised to defund. In an earlier press release, the Bevin campaign said “As Governor, I will direct my Secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services not to distribute federal taxpayer dollars from that department to Planned Parenthood clinics.” A likely front-running for the Secretary position is former Republican state Sen. Julie Denton, of Louisville, a former chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare with a short history of courting the Bevin campaign and a long history of advancing anti-choice legislation. But any cabinet’s compliance with Bevin’s order could endanger other federal Medicaid provision, as the Obama administration hinted recently. Kentucky’s coal-powered energy policy would likely see less of a shake-up under Bevin, who told public radio audiences in September that he isn't interested in cutting pollution via the federal Clean Power Plan, arguing that climate change isn't man-made but that there is "absolutely unequivocal evidence" that it is caused by natural forces. In the throes of his victory speech, Bevin was quick to praise the state's lieutenant governor-elect, his running mate Jenean Hampton. Hampton is a Tea Party activist and now the state's first Black constitutional officer. Aside from dismantling Kynect, passing Right to Work legislation -- which would prevent union workplaces from requiring union dues of all employees--has been a central priority of the duo’s platform. “The reason that Right to Work is at the top of our list is that we are surrounded by states. Tennessee's just 30 minutes from Bowling Green and they have no state tax. They have a better business climate, so who knows what business we're losing,” Hampton said in an April interview. “I think going county by county is the wrong approach.” Hampton brushed off questions about the rise in worker injuries in states with Right to Work laws, questioning the quality of the data. When asked about the hard numbers showing wage decline in Right to Work states, she only said “I've heard that too and I don’t know that I agree with that either. When there are a lot of businesses and they're all competing for workers the wages rise.” From early on, Bevin put Hampton’s race at the forefront of his campaign speeches, reminding local Republican voters that it could play a crucial role by attracting conservative-leaning black voters and undercutting Conway's much-neglected base. In Oldham County, for example, a suburban Louisville-adjoined Republican stronghold, Bevin told voters, “The fact that she is a black woman in Kentucky as a Republican puts her in fairly select company. It’s going to matter in the general election. If there’s a ticket being sold out of the Republican side that doesn’t have a woman on it, fairly or otherwise, you’re going to hear that narrative.” But Hampton says that the discussion of race in this context makes her uncomfortable. She prefers to see herself as “just Jenean.” Hampton takes a Tea Party approach to the economic and judicial disparities between races in Kentucky and across the country, eschewing the context of imbalanced incarceration rates and job opportunities for a classically libertarian approach. “I don’t accept that society is inherently racist,” she said. “Are there racists out there? Sure there are, but the question is: what do you do with it? I always carried myself as ‘I'm just Jenean’ and there things to see and do, and there are people to meet, and I treat people as people. I don't see color.” But she does. In the same interview, Hampton openly acknowledges a historical inequality between races and the role it played in her own life. “I knew I was blessed to be born in the U.S.A., in this country, in this time, because in an earlier era I couldn’t vote. I couldn’t own property. I couldn’t even be in control of the fruits of my own labor,” she said. The acknowledgment seems to stop there, though. Hampton sees the Black Lives Matter movement as disingenuous and chides protesters from Baltimore and Ferguson for stirring anti-police sentiment. “The concern rings hollow to me when they say ‘black lives matter’ because what they're telling me is that a black life matters only if a white person takes it. And I know that’s not what they mean but I’m looking at the level of excitement, the level of concern, over blacks being killed and I just think it could be misplaced. There’s hundreds who were killed, thousands who were killed, but it’s black on black crime,” she said. “You know I’ve heard more excuses from people rioting in Baltimore, that they're just disenfranchised. Well, I don’t understand,” said Hampton, adding that her upbringing in a poverty-stricken area of Detroit didn’t prevent her from achieving personal success. “Do you know anybody who was born a slave? I know there are people out there, and that's a thing. But here's the thing, I was born in 1958. My parents were not slaves. Nobody around me was a slave. I knew about it because in the 1960's they decided to teach black American history,” she said. “When I hear people say our economy is based on slaves, maybe it was. But we're not there. We are where we are.” Hampton volunteered that she isn’t concerned with police brutality. “The times that I go back to Detroit, I have less to fear from the cops than I do from other black people in Detroit,” she said. “If I walk down the street, I’m not worried about the cops. I know cops are my friend. I know that maybe they might profile me.” If the position of Lt. Gov. is an ambassador's role, Hampton’s sentiments may work against her in some of Kentucky’s racially divided regions. Goodbye, blue skies: Kentucky’s Dems face the boot So what happened to the Democrats on the state level? Which of the local party leaders let this coup happen? The search for answers begins and ends with the old guard among the state’s Democrats. The answer itself could be seen on the resigned face of Patrick Hughes, the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party who appeared on stage at the Democrats’ campaign headquarters last night in awkward form, mc’ing the parade of concession speeches. Hughes was a temporary pick for the KDP chair, according to Democratic insiders. A former deputy chief attorney general to Conway, Hughes was brought on with the understanding that his tenure as chair would only be through the duration of the campaign, and would serve as Conway’s Chief of Staff after the big win. Hughes was appointed in Feb. of this year, replacing Dan Logsdon, of the state's heavy-hitting Logsdon Oil and Gas company. Tax and property records show that the Logsdon and Conway families have been swapping oil and gas leases in eastern Kentucky for years. Logsdon held the chair since 2010. After overseeing a rise of Republican seats in legislature and the brutal defeat of Alison Lundergan Grimes in her 2014 U.S. Senate race against Mitch McConnell, Hughes’ appointment was a sure signal to the state that Grimes’ defeat sent waves across the party, and Conway would be the next nominated. Naturally, Conway announced in May. Conway’s loss has Hughes on the chopping block. This means the de facto party chair is now Grimes, but her father Jerry Lundergan is rumored to be calling the shots. He's a former state representative, two-time former KDP chair, and personal friend to the Clintons. Democrats aren’t likely to fall in line behind him, however. His longtime political consultant, Jonathan Hurst, was picked to manage the Grimes campaign against powerhouse McConnell, a choice many in the party are still sore about. Some Democrats still attribute the election loss to Lundergan’s alleged interference and campaign control. Why on earth is all this state-level inside baseball important? What does it mean for the future of Democrats in Kentucky and other southern Red states? Because these people are old guard Democrats with legacy names -- Lundergan, Conway, Andy Beshear (the sitting governor’s son and only other Democrat to win statewide office on Nov. 3) -- and are playing by an outdated rulebook. Democratic strategy, in Kentucky and elsewhere in the south, has largely failed to evolve in concert with the radicalism of the more-conservative right. Democrats have failed to cultivate the kind of fresh-faced candidates that Kentucky Republicans have -- young zealots who court the base with unapologetic fervor. Instead of developing diverse campaign strategies and funding new Democrats, the old guard repacks the same eggs in the same fraying basket. To be a successful Kentucky Democrat, the conventional wisdom until now has been to court pro-union social conservatives in rural regions by declaring a love of guns, coal and teachers. Then, a Democrat must rouse the last vestiges of western Kentucky unionism. They must make limited overtures to urban areas, hoping the base shows up on Election Day. And the strategy worked for a long time. But the campaign strategy ignores consistent rural-to-urban population shifts in Kentucky altogether, attempts to court aging rural voters who have been going Red since the late aughts. Democrats have had plenty of warning. They knew the state was going Red in 2010, when the famously Blue 6th Congressional District kept their Democrat, Ben Chandler, in the U.S. House by less than 1 percent of the vote, only to be defeated in 2012 by 4 percent. He lost to the same opponent, Andy Barr, who still holds the seat and won his last election by a full 20 percent. Coal unions are going extinct and the only population growth in some of these counties comes with the construction of new prisons. By playing a Republican-lite tune to the more deeply partisan Republican regions, Democrats are hitting all the wrong chords for an urban progressive base which feels more ignored than ever. Star players like Grimes, Conway and Beshear the Lesser have tiptoed around rural anti-Obama sentiment and failed to rally around the state's healthcare successes--a Democratic victory that could have been an enormous harvest of party PR in the state's "Golden Triangle" of metropolitan growth. But the old guard knows the jig is up. Lundergan’s Clinton connection can only hold so much value for the party's go-to strategist when election losses become this brutal. Candidates willing to kiss the ring would be well-advised to proceed with caution: his connection couldn't secure Democrats a U.S. Senate seat in 2014, nor the Governor's Mansion in 2015. To play by the old rules in 2016 could mean losing the House, the last Blue chamber in the Solid South, and declaring political bankruptcy in the state overall. If election night was any hint, one could look at Bevin’s televised victory dance, where the writhing Republican throng shouted in unison, “Flip the House! Flip the House!" Bevin, from the podium, was leading their chant. [image error]

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Published on November 04, 2015 14:20

We choose to be anxious, stressed, afraid: “We set ourselves the goal of trying to avoid things that are utterly out of our control”

As if we weren’t already feeling stressed out enough – today is National Stress Awareness Day – a new report by the Pew Research Center just came out, describing the levels of stress that otherwise privileged American families are under. “The data are the latest to show that while family structure seems to have permanently changed,” a New York Times story reports, “public policy, workplace structure and mores have not seemed to adjust to a norm in which both parents work.” (The piece is headlined "Stressed, Tired, Rushed: A Portrait of the Modern Family.") As the Atlantic described the study’s two-income families: “these parents are stressed and harried, struggling to bring their family lives into alignment with their work lives.” What is stress? Where does it come from? And is there something about contemporary life that’s amplifying it? We spoke to University of Texas psychology professor Art Markman, author of “Smart Thinking” and co-host of the radio show Two Guys On Your Head. Salon spoke to Markman from his office in Austin; the interview has been edited for clarity. Before we get into specifics around stress, let’s start with the basics of stress. What causes it? All of the emotions you experience are related in one way or another to the motivational systems in your brain. The feelings you have are basically your motivational system’s way of telling you if you are succeeding or failing at whatever you are trying to do. And because your motivational system is buried so deep inside your brain, those feelings – the emotions you experience – are basically the only mode of communication that that very evolutionarily old system has to communicate with the rest of the brain. With stress in particular, the motivational system has two distinct modes: The one you engage when you’re trying to approach some really positive or desirable thing in the world – having a really great meal, hanging out with a friend, listening to really great music. And then there’s a second system, the avoidance system, that engages when there’s something really noxious in the environment you’re truing to avoid. It could be a source of danger – a bus bearing down on you – or it could be a somewhat more diffuse danger, like the prospect that you might get fired. When that avoidance system is active – there’s something in the world you’re trying to avoid, but you haven’t avoided it yet – you end up experiencing emotions of stress, anxiety and fear. Part of the reason we’re talking about this today is that it’s apparently National Stress Awareness Day. It seems like a bizarre name for a holiday – aren’t people who are stressed out typically aware of it? Or do people end up walking through stressful times without noticing? People who are stressed are aware they’re stressed, but they’re not always aware of where that stress is coming from or what they can do about it. There are lots of places stress can come from. A new New York Times story describes its origins in middle-class family life. Does that report surprise you? It’s not surprising – particularly when it comes to parenting. Parents, at least in the United States, often frame most of what they’re doing with their children as the avoidance of calamity. I don’t want my child to fail, I’m worried that my child won’t get into the right school or college, I’m worried they won’t be happy. But how are they going to learn to be happy from a bunch of stressed-out parents? We spent all our time trying to avoid calamity, but don’t ask, What is a beautiful, desirable thing I could do today? Parents don’t model that kind of behavior for their kids: They create all these wonderful opportunities for their kids, and then they over-schedule them and make stress them out about being late to stuff. “Hurry up, we’re going to be late to dance lessons.” So now we’re all stressed by the time we get to this thing that’s supposed to be fun. You’ve talked about the roots of stress that go back to early human evolution. But I imagine there are more specific factors amplifying stress in contemporary life, especially economic and technological factors. Well, let’s put this into perspective. Almost anything in the world can be framed as something I’m trying to avoid, or something I’m trying to achieve. The sources of stress in our world: There are specific things we choose to worry ourselves about. But what we should bear in mind is that… we’ve mostly got plenty of food – most of us. Again, not everyone – there are definitely people who don’t have anything to eat, don’t have a place to sleep, don’t have clothes. Who have legitimate survival concerns. But I would venture that the bulk of people who will read this piece are not at that level – they’re more existential crises. Once we get to that level – people talk about Maslow’s hierarchy, once we get off the bottom of that – you have a real choice, in almost everything in your life, about how you want to frame it. There are health concerns – people get sick. There are truly fearful things in the world. But an awful lot of what we encounter in the world, we have a lot of choice about. And we choose to frame them, as a society, in terms of avoiding negative outcomes, as opposed to trying to approach desirable outcomes. And that matters – because you can’t experience joy unless you put yourself in a situation in which there is a potential positive outcome you can achieve. Because when you are anxious and stressed and fearful – when you’re trying to avoid something – the best outcome is that you successfully avoid it, and now you’re relieved. “I lived to fight another day.” And that’s no way to live. We worry about money, but we don’t have to set up our lives that way. What are some small, desirable things I can do for my family? If I don’t have enough money to go on that great vacation that we hoped for, what’s a wonderful place we could walk to, or drive to? Or a hike we’ve always meant to take in town? Or frankly, connecting with other people is a great thing. Can we volunteer at the animal shelter this weekend? Hang out with a dog – it doesn’t worry about much. What does stress cause people to do? What’s the wrong way to respond to stress? If we set ourselves the goal of trying to avoid things that are utterly out of our control, we put ourselves in a situation where we worry a lot about the future without there being anything we can really do. Remember, the motivational system is all about getting you to act. So the trick in life is to focus on things you can do rather than things where you don’t have much control. So find an action you can perform, and then engage with it. And if your life is really not in peril, find a way to think about it in a way that allows you to enjoy the activities that you’re doing. Find the desirable piece that’s going to happen today. [image error]As if we weren’t already feeling stressed out enough – today is National Stress Awareness Day – a new report by the Pew Research Center just came out, describing the levels of stress that otherwise privileged American families are under. “The data are the latest to show that while family structure seems to have permanently changed,” a New York Times story reports, “public policy, workplace structure and mores have not seemed to adjust to a norm in which both parents work.” (The piece is headlined "Stressed, Tired, Rushed: A Portrait of the Modern Family.") As the Atlantic described the study’s two-income families: “these parents are stressed and harried, struggling to bring their family lives into alignment with their work lives.” What is stress? Where does it come from? And is there something about contemporary life that’s amplifying it? We spoke to University of Texas psychology professor Art Markman, author of “Smart Thinking” and co-host of the radio show Two Guys On Your Head. Salon spoke to Markman from his office in Austin; the interview has been edited for clarity. Before we get into specifics around stress, let’s start with the basics of stress. What causes it? All of the emotions you experience are related in one way or another to the motivational systems in your brain. The feelings you have are basically your motivational system’s way of telling you if you are succeeding or failing at whatever you are trying to do. And because your motivational system is buried so deep inside your brain, those feelings – the emotions you experience – are basically the only mode of communication that that very evolutionarily old system has to communicate with the rest of the brain. With stress in particular, the motivational system has two distinct modes: The one you engage when you’re trying to approach some really positive or desirable thing in the world – having a really great meal, hanging out with a friend, listening to really great music. And then there’s a second system, the avoidance system, that engages when there’s something really noxious in the environment you’re truing to avoid. It could be a source of danger – a bus bearing down on you – or it could be a somewhat more diffuse danger, like the prospect that you might get fired. When that avoidance system is active – there’s something in the world you’re trying to avoid, but you haven’t avoided it yet – you end up experiencing emotions of stress, anxiety and fear. Part of the reason we’re talking about this today is that it’s apparently National Stress Awareness Day. It seems like a bizarre name for a holiday – aren’t people who are stressed out typically aware of it? Or do people end up walking through stressful times without noticing? People who are stressed are aware they’re stressed, but they’re not always aware of where that stress is coming from or what they can do about it. There are lots of places stress can come from. A new New York Times story describes its origins in middle-class family life. Does that report surprise you? It’s not surprising – particularly when it comes to parenting. Parents, at least in the United States, often frame most of what they’re doing with their children as the avoidance of calamity. I don’t want my child to fail, I’m worried that my child won’t get into the right school or college, I’m worried they won’t be happy. But how are they going to learn to be happy from a bunch of stressed-out parents? We spent all our time trying to avoid calamity, but don’t ask, What is a beautiful, desirable thing I could do today? Parents don’t model that kind of behavior for their kids: They create all these wonderful opportunities for their kids, and then they over-schedule them and make stress them out about being late to stuff. “Hurry up, we’re going to be late to dance lessons.” So now we’re all stressed by the time we get to this thing that’s supposed to be fun. You’ve talked about the roots of stress that go back to early human evolution. But I imagine there are more specific factors amplifying stress in contemporary life, especially economic and technological factors. Well, let’s put this into perspective. Almost anything in the world can be framed as something I’m trying to avoid, or something I’m trying to achieve. The sources of stress in our world: There are specific things we choose to worry ourselves about. But what we should bear in mind is that… we’ve mostly got plenty of food – most of us. Again, not everyone – there are definitely people who don’t have anything to eat, don’t have a place to sleep, don’t have clothes. Who have legitimate survival concerns. But I would venture that the bulk of people who will read this piece are not at that level – they’re more existential crises. Once we get to that level – people talk about Maslow’s hierarchy, once we get off the bottom of that – you have a real choice, in almost everything in your life, about how you want to frame it. There are health concerns – people get sick. There are truly fearful things in the world. But an awful lot of what we encounter in the world, we have a lot of choice about. And we choose to frame them, as a society, in terms of avoiding negative outcomes, as opposed to trying to approach desirable outcomes. And that matters – because you can’t experience joy unless you put yourself in a situation in which there is a potential positive outcome you can achieve. Because when you are anxious and stressed and fearful – when you’re trying to avoid something – the best outcome is that you successfully avoid it, and now you’re relieved. “I lived to fight another day.” And that’s no way to live. We worry about money, but we don’t have to set up our lives that way. What are some small, desirable things I can do for my family? If I don’t have enough money to go on that great vacation that we hoped for, what’s a wonderful place we could walk to, or drive to? Or a hike we’ve always meant to take in town? Or frankly, connecting with other people is a great thing. Can we volunteer at the animal shelter this weekend? Hang out with a dog – it doesn’t worry about much. What does stress cause people to do? What’s the wrong way to respond to stress? If we set ourselves the goal of trying to avoid things that are utterly out of our control, we put ourselves in a situation where we worry a lot about the future without there being anything we can really do. Remember, the motivational system is all about getting you to act. So the trick in life is to focus on things you can do rather than things where you don’t have much control. So find an action you can perform, and then engage with it. And if your life is really not in peril, find a way to think about it in a way that allows you to enjoy the activities that you’re doing. Find the desirable piece that’s going to happen today. [image error]

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Published on November 04, 2015 14:07

Louisiana police kill 6-year-old boy after high-speed pursuit

A Louisiana state investigation has been opened after law enforcement officers killed a 6-year-old boy named Jeremy Mardis on Tuesday evening. Pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said that Mardis was “caught in the line of fire” in the passenger seat of his father's fleeing vehicle. Although it's unclear if the father, Chris Few, was armed, city marshals apparently “discharged their duty weapons, at a vehicle” in pursuit of Few in Marksville. Few first fled from city marshals trying to serve him a warrant, but eventually reached a dead end. Officers claimed that after Few’s SUV backed into one of their own vehicles, the marshals got out of their patrol cars and began firing through the driver’s window. Few is in critical condition after being air-lifted to an Alexandria hospital. [image error]A Louisiana state investigation has been opened after law enforcement officers killed a 6-year-old boy named Jeremy Mardis on Tuesday evening. Pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said that Mardis was “caught in the line of fire” in the passenger seat of his father's fleeing vehicle. Although it's unclear if the father, Chris Few, was armed, city marshals apparently “discharged their duty weapons, at a vehicle” in pursuit of Few in Marksville. Few first fled from city marshals trying to serve him a warrant, but eventually reached a dead end. Officers claimed that after Few’s SUV backed into one of their own vehicles, the marshals got out of their patrol cars and began firing through the driver’s window. Few is in critical condition after being air-lifted to an Alexandria hospital. [image error]A Louisiana state investigation has been opened after law enforcement officers killed a 6-year-old boy named Jeremy Mardis on Tuesday evening. Pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said that Mardis was “caught in the line of fire” in the passenger seat of his father's fleeing vehicle. Although it's unclear if the father, Chris Few, was armed, city marshals apparently “discharged their duty weapons, at a vehicle” in pursuit of Few in Marksville. Few first fled from city marshals trying to serve him a warrant, but eventually reached a dead end. Officers claimed that after Few’s SUV backed into one of their own vehicles, the marshals got out of their patrol cars and began firing through the driver’s window. Few is in critical condition after being air-lifted to an Alexandria hospital. [image error]

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Published on November 04, 2015 13:55

Harry Reid takes to the Senate floor to rip “Morning Joe” for its fawning Koch brothers interview

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid ripped into "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski during a speech on the Senate floor today for hyping the Koch brothers' "propaganda campaign" with a softball interview this week. On Tuesday, the MSNBC morning show aired its much hyped sit-down interview with Charles and David Koch from the billionaire Republican donors' childhood home in Wichita, Kansas. Reid, a frequent critic of the Koch Brothers, clearly took issue with the fawning coverage and was dismayed that the businessmen were not pressed on how their political involvement has evolved to include bankrolling such minute, local issues as a zoo in Ohio to Colorado Springs' Republican-led effort against potholes. "This Koch media tour has failed to bury one simple truth," Reid declared. "The Koch brothers are trying to buy America":

The Kochs have also procured a media that is intimidated by their billions -- too intimidated to hold them accountable. Consider yesterday's interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show. This is classic, listen. Here are some of the questions that Joe and Mika asked the Koch brothers. Joe Scarborough asked, "It's hard to find people in New York, liberals -- we were talking about this before -- liberals or conservatives alike, who haven't been touched by your graciousness, whether its toward the arts or cancer research. Do you think you got that instinct from your mom?" Huh. Mika asked, "Sitting here in your childhood home" -- they were doing this interview in Topeka, Kansas -- "we have the Koch brothers, which was the good brother?" Another tough question. Joe then asked, "You guys both play rugby, right? Play together?"

"Wow, those were some really tough questions asked by the hosts of "Morning Joe," Reid said mockingly. "Most of the time, they weren't even questions, they were just compliments." "Those questions are so easy, they may even qualify them to moderate the next Republican presidential debate," Reid continued. "It seems that some journalists are determined not to get on the wrong side of the Koch brothers and their billions." "When the media rolls over for these modern-day robber barons as it's doing now," Reid warned, "our country's in trouble." “We should be working to rid the system of the Koch brothers’ dark money, but this cannot and will not happen if reporters and journalists refuse to ask Charles and David Koch questions, maybe even probing questions,” Reid said. “Otherwise, no one is holding these two oil barons accountable for their nefarious actions." Reid didn't reserve his criticism just for the Senate well, as he also took to Twitter to call out "Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough specifically on Twitter: https://twitter.com/senatorreid/statu... Scarborough responded to Reid's taunting by rehashing his longstanding contempt for Reid's attacks on the billionaire brothers. During his interview with the Kochs, Scarborough asked Charles how surprised he was at "the level of vitriol leveled against you and your family, even Harry Reid calling you un-American." https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/661... Scarborough then compared Reid's calling out of the Koch's political involvement as un-American to a "Joseph McCarthy routine": https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/661... In a statement to Politico, Scarborough further responded to Reid's critique and defended his interview with the Koch Brothers:

It is easy to understand why Harry Reid is enraged by the kind of thoughtful discussions we have with our Democratic and Republican guests on Morning Joe. It was Reid, after all, who brought shame to the Senate floor last year by quoting Joseph McCarthy and calling his political opponents ‘un-American' [...] If Harry Reid were not so blinded by hatred toward Charles Koch, he would have noticed that Koch harshly criticized Republicans for supporting corporate welfare, called George W. Bush a failed president for running up massive deficits and reckless wars, and said that he was unimpressed with the field of Republican presidential candidates. In fact, he saved his harshest criticisms for Republicans he once supported. [...] Reid's unbridled rage toward the Kochs led to a failed electoral strategy that cost Democrats their majority in 2014. I can understand why he remains so bitter to this day.

Watch Harry Reid take "Morning Joe" to task on the Senate floor for failing to hold the Koch Brothers accountable for what he calls their "nefarious actions": [image error]

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Published on November 04, 2015 13:50

The secret history of bathroom panic: Inside the right-wing campaign that paved the way for Houston’s anti-LGBT vote

On Tuesday, voters in Houston chose overwhelmingly to rescind the city's equal rights legislation, which bans discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity and a host of other categories.

The campaign against the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) may have taken place in 2015, but it played on some very old, primal and nasty fears. "No men in women's bathrooms"—a breathtakingly bigoted piece of transphobic slander—was the opponents' rallying cry. Take this ad from former Houston Astros player Lance Berkman:

"No men in women’s bathrooms, no boys in girls’ showers or locker rooms. I played professional baseball for 15 years, but my family is more important. My wife and I have four daughters. Proposition 1, the bathroom ordinance, would allow troubled men to enter women’s public bathrooms, showers and locker rooms. This would violate their privacy and put them in harm’s way."

The proponents of HERO found that, despite their celebrity backing and financial muscle, they could not overcome such scaremongering. The bathroom line was the single most potent one in getting people to oppose the measure.

A simple equal-rights bill supported by famous people gets destroyed by a hysterical fear campaign: Where have we heard that one before?

My thoughts turned instantly to the 1970s—specifically to Phyllis Schlafly, whose improbably successful campaign to torpedo the Equal Rights Amendment reads like a textbook that the anti-HERO forces in Houston studied thoroughly. When Schafly began her fight to take down the ERA, the amendment—which simply stated that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex"—appeared unstoppable. Then Schlafly got involved. She shrewdly twisted the seemingly straightforward text of the amendment into a supposed nightmare scenario for American women (there was also some nice homophobia thrown in, too). As she put it in a 2007 op-ed:

"The amendment would require women to be drafted into military combat any time men were conscripted, abolish the presumption that the husband should support his wife and take away Social Security benefits for wives and widows. It would also give federal courts and the federal government enormous new powers to reinterpret every law that makes a distinction based on gender, such as those related to marriage, divorce and alimony."

ERA supporters vocally objected to this interpretation of the amendment, but they lost the argument. Schlafly was tapping into visceral fears people had about a changing society.

Besides all the doomsday situations mentioned in the passage above, one of the anti-ERA campaign's most effective lines of attack concerned—you guessed it—bathrooms.

The notion that the ERA would mandate unisex bathrooms became known as the "potty problem." People got very agitated about this. "Fear Of Unisex Bathrooms Doomed ERA," one headline from the Orlando Sentinel read years later.

As in the '70s, so it was in 2015, when bathrooms killed HERO. It is appropriate, therefore, that Schlafly has been weighing in on the bathroom question. "They're trying to turn our boys into Peeping Toms," she told the rightwing Newsmax on Monday. "I can't imagine why else they would want to go into the girls' restrooms."

It's obvious why bathrooms or locker rooms work so well as a line of attack. They are intimate, private, sexually charged spaces. Remember all the drama surrounding how Michael Sam's straight peers felt about him showering with them? Or how incendiary the notion of black people using bathrooms with white people once was? Bathrooms make the abstract real. The Other is not just out there somewhere; he's right next to you.

The fall of HERO on such horribly antiquated lines shows that, despite this being the year of Caitlyn Jenner, the Phyllis Schlaflys of the world still retain a great deal of power. If they are to be defeated, we have to tackle the bathroom bigotry once and for all.

[image error]

"No men in women’s bathrooms, no boys in girls’ showers or locker rooms. I played professional baseball for 15 years, but my family is more important. My wife and I have four daughters. Proposition 1, the bathroom ordinance, would allow troubled men to enter women’s public bathrooms, showers and locker rooms. This would violate their privacy and put them in harm’s way."

A simple equal-rights bill supported by famous people gets destroyed by a hysterical fear campaign: Where have we heard that one before?

"The amendment would require women to be drafted into military combat any time men were conscripted, abolish the presumption that the husband should support his wife and take away Social Security benefits for wives and widows. It would also give federal courts and the federal government enormous new powers to reinterpret every law that makes a distinction based on gender, such as those related to marriage, divorce and alimony."

ERA supporters vocally objected to this interpretation of the amendment, but they lost the argument. Schlafly was tapping into visceral fears people had about a changing society.

Besides all the doomsday situations mentioned in the passage above, one of the anti-ERA campaign's most effective lines of attack concerned—you guessed it—bathrooms.

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Published on November 04, 2015 13:10

Bernie Sanders’ latest racial blind spot: Hillary’s right on gun control — urban vs. rural really means black vs. white

Perhaps it is time for Bernie Sanders supporters to accept that he's weak on gun control move on. The defensiveness isn't helping anyone. The latest example comes courtesy of William Saletan of Slate, who is lobbing an accusation at Hillary Clinton -- that she's playing the "race card" on gun control -- that would more normally come out of Republican mouths trying to silence the opposition on this issue. Saletan previously wrote a piece denouncing Hillary Clinton for teasing Sanders over a moment in the Democratic debate when Sanders told her not to shout. The anger of that piece felt like an overreaction; Hillary and her supporters delivered more of a mild nose-tweaking than some outraged accusation of misogyny. Now Saletan's overreacting to an even more reasonable point -- though not a joke -- that Clinton is making about one of Sanders' talking points justifying his lax voting record on gun control: That there are some ugly racial implications to it. At issue is a comment Clinton made during a speech to the NAACP: “There are some who say that this [gun violence] is an urban problem. Sometimes what they mean by that is: It’s a black problem. But it’s not. It’s not black, it’s not urban. It’s a deep, profound challenge to who we are.” Saletan thinks this is an unfair dig at Sanders. The Republicans haven't called violence an "urban" problem during the debates -- though Saletan fails to note whether they have said such a thing in non-debate circumstances -- so it must, in his opinion, be a talking point aimed squarely at Sanders:

In the debate, Sanders began by saying, “As a senator from a rural state, what I can tell Secretary Clinton [is] that all the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want.” A couple of minutes later, Sanders told former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley: “We can raise our voices, but I come from a rural state, and the views on gun control in rural states are different than in urban states, whether we like it or not.” O’Malley insisted that the issue was “not about rural and urban.” Sanders replied: “It’s exactly about rural.” Only one other candidate used the word “urban” during the debate: former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb. A week later, on Oct. 20, Webb quit the campaign. So when Clinton, on Friday, spoke scathingly of people who call guns an “urban problem” but mean it’s a “black problem,” it’s obvious to whom she was referring.

No doubt Clinton is poking a weak spot in her opponent's case, but Saletan is also missing the forest for the trees here. Sanders most likely didn't intend for his talking point about rural vs. urban gun ownership to have any racial implications. But those implications are nonetheless there. I doubt that Clinton or any of the other people troubled by his remarks believe he is speaking out of anything but ignorance. But that ignorance is still a problem. Racism is baked into the DNA of the gun control debate. The gun lobby loves to gin up support and sell weapons by scaring white people with poorly concealed racist fantasies about black people coming to get them, and how they need guns -- apparently a lot of guns -- to keep the scary hordes away. Take, for instance, a video released by NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre last week where he, using thinly veiled code words, and basically tells white people that Obama is arming up black criminals while taking their guns away to leave them helpless. "Nothing illustrates America's breakdown like the way the president's hometown celebrates its holidays. Memorial Day: 12 dead, 56 wounded. The Fourth of July: 10 dead, 53 wounded. Labor Day: 9 dead, 46 wounded. This kind of third-world carnage has become absolutely … normal," LaPierre begins, going on to insinuate that Obama is deliberately trying to cover up "multiple people were murdered by criminal gangbangers with illegal guns in Chicago." "Under the existing federal gun laws, he could take every felon with a gun, drug dealer with a gun and criminal gangbanger with a gun off the streets tomorrow and lock them up for five years or more," he continues. "But he won't do it, his Justice Department won't do it, and the media never asks why." Duh duh DUM. You, the viewer, should be picking up on his implication, that Obama is somehow conspiring with Chicago "gangbangers" to make "the good, honest Americans living out in farm towns in Nebraska or Oklahoma" live in fear. Of people in Chicago. (He also tosses in a reference to good people "working"---though he doesn't say living---"two jobs in inner-city Chicago or Baltimore," but that bit of ass-covering fools no one.) This is far from the only time that LaPierre has used barely concealed racist fears that black people are criminal to suggest that white people need to arm themselves heavily to protect themselves. And let's not forget that Ronald Reagan was for gun control when the fear was Black Panthers owning guns, but against gun control when it was perceived as preventing white people from getting guns. If you're familiar with this history and rhetoric, it's not hard to hear the racial implications of suggesting that "rural" folks are responsible, safe gun users -- while "urban" folks are not. On the contrary, it's hard not to hear that. Sanders may mean well, but his constituents who insist that they are just wholesome gun owners, unlike some people, probably do not mean well. Is Clinton using this fact to garner support? Absolutely. But the bigger picture is this. Racism fuels much of the opposition to gun control. We live in a country where black men (or boys) have been shot for holding toy guns or even just a toy sword in one case. "I thought he had a gun," is the excuse we expect after police shoot unarmed black men. But when a white man was openly walking around the streets of Colorado Springs shooting people dead over the weekend, one witness said her call to 911 was blown off initially because open carry is legal in the state. Also, there's this: Sanders is wrong. The assumption that "rural" people who own guns are responsible and that it's just those urban people who are screwing it up for the rest of us is not borne out by the evidence. Research compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center shows that there's a strong correlation between homicide rates and gun ownership, both on a state and household level. While some cities do have a criminal gang problem that leads to high murder rates in neighborhoods that have a gang problem, there is a lot of gun violence beyond that, much at the hands of those "law-abiding" citizens we hear so much about. In addition, the suicide rate is strongly correlated to the gun ownership rate, because having access to a gun makes someone in the throes of a depressive episode that much more likely to both try and succeed at suicide. Look past the racially tinged stereotypes of responsible-rural people and lawless-urban people and a much more complex picture emerges. There's no use in denying that race is an issue in how people think about gun control and the threat of gun violence. If Clinton scores a political point on this, well, good. Maybe Sanders will rethink that horrible talking point about rural people. Whether he intends to or not, he is perpetuating ugly stereotypes about who is and isn't responsible. [image error]Perhaps it is time for Bernie Sanders supporters to accept that he's weak on gun control move on. The defensiveness isn't helping anyone. The latest example comes courtesy of William Saletan of Slate, who is lobbing an accusation at Hillary Clinton -- that she's playing the "race card" on gun control -- that would more normally come out of Republican mouths trying to silence the opposition on this issue. Saletan previously wrote a piece denouncing Hillary Clinton for teasing Sanders over a moment in the Democratic debate when Sanders told her not to shout. The anger of that piece felt like an overreaction; Hillary and her supporters delivered more of a mild nose-tweaking than some outraged accusation of misogyny. Now Saletan's overreacting to an even more reasonable point -- though not a joke -- that Clinton is making about one of Sanders' talking points justifying his lax voting record on gun control: That there are some ugly racial implications to it. At issue is a comment Clinton made during a speech to the NAACP: “There are some who say that this [gun violence] is an urban problem. Sometimes what they mean by that is: It’s a black problem. But it’s not. It’s not black, it’s not urban. It’s a deep, profound challenge to who we are.” Saletan thinks this is an unfair dig at Sanders. The Republicans haven't called violence an "urban" problem during the debates -- though Saletan fails to note whether they have said such a thing in non-debate circumstances -- so it must, in his opinion, be a talking point aimed squarely at Sanders:

In the debate, Sanders began by saying, “As a senator from a rural state, what I can tell Secretary Clinton [is] that all the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want.” A couple of minutes later, Sanders told former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley: “We can raise our voices, but I come from a rural state, and the views on gun control in rural states are different than in urban states, whether we like it or not.” O’Malley insisted that the issue was “not about rural and urban.” Sanders replied: “It’s exactly about rural.” Only one other candidate used the word “urban” during the debate: former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb. A week later, on Oct. 20, Webb quit the campaign. So when Clinton, on Friday, spoke scathingly of people who call guns an “urban problem” but mean it’s a “black problem,” it’s obvious to whom she was referring.

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Published on November 04, 2015 12:31

Love to laugh at Fox News? The new sitcom “Fair and Balanced” sounds amazing

Good news for people who love to laugh at Fox News (or things loosely inspired by Fox News): According to Deadline, Kal Penn is re-teaming with “Harold and Kumar” writers Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz for “Fair and Balanced,” a new ABC comedy about "an aspiring NPR reporter who is swayed to work at a Fox News-type channel." The project will be inspired in part by Penn’s own life, as he has worked as a Vice News correspondent in addition to stints at the White House Office of Public Engagement and as a member of Obama’s National Arts Policy Committee. No word on whether any other "Harold and Kumar" alums will be joining the project, but we think Fred Willard would kill it as a Bill O'Reilly-style blowhard. Thoughts and feelings? [image error]Good news for people who love to laugh at Fox News (or things loosely inspired by Fox News): According to Deadline, Kal Penn is re-teaming with “Harold and Kumar” writers Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz for “Fair and Balanced,” a new ABC comedy about "an aspiring NPR reporter who is swayed to work at a Fox News-type channel." The project will be inspired in part by Penn’s own life, as he has worked as a Vice News correspondent in addition to stints at the White House Office of Public Engagement and as a member of Obama’s National Arts Policy Committee. No word on whether any other "Harold and Kumar" alums will be joining the project, but we think Fred Willard would kill it as a Bill O'Reilly-style blowhard. Thoughts and feelings? [image error]

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Published on November 04, 2015 12:25

Robin Williams’ last gift: His death is helping us talk about letting go of life with courage

We do not live in a death-friendly culture. A woman in her eighties and in coma is lovingly encouraged to "get back to work." The family of a child with a disease for which there is no cure is castigated for "borderline assisted murder" for allowing her to "choose heaven." And when mortality — which comes for all of us — strikes, the end of life is often wrapped in terms of defeat, a simpering, insulting announcement that the individual "lost a battle." But here's what you realize when you see up close a suffering so cruel it makes you question everything you ever thought you believed about the value of life: There are far worse things than death. Death can be a mercy. And as Robin Williams' widow says of his choice to end his life, "I don't blame him one bit." Speaking this week with "Good Morning America" and People magazine more than a year after her husband's sudden and shocking suicide, Susan Williams said that "It was not depression that killed Robin. Depression was one of, let’s call it 50 symptoms, and it was a small one…. Lewy Body Dementia killed Robin. It’s what took his life." An autopsy report last year confirmed the Lewy Body Dementia, a condition that "shares symptoms with better-known diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s." (Williams also had Parkinson's.) Williams told Amy Robach on "GMA" that near the end, her husband was "just disintegrating before my eyes," and that "If Robin was lucky, he would've had maybe three years left. And they would've been hard years. And it's a good chance he would've been locked up." She says that at the end, as emergency responders were working on him, "I just wanted to see my husband. And I got to see him ... and I got to pray with him. And I got to tell him, 'I forgive you 50 billion percent, with all my heart. You're the bravest man I've ever known.' You know, we were living a nightmare." She added, "There are many reasons — believe me, I've thought about this — of what was going on in his mind, what made him ultimately commit, you know, to do that act. And I think he was just saying, 'No.' And I don't blame him one bit. I don't blame him one bit." Williams says she hopes now to "shed some light on Lewy Body for the millions of people and their loved ones who are suffering with it," and she already has received an outpouring of support. In a rare example of how surprising a place the Internet can be, the commentary around her story has been remarkably gracious and empathetic. On People, a reader wrote, "I would like to thank Susan Williams for bringing this disease to the forefront. I KNOW that my dad had LBD and it's awful." And on Yahoo, commenters have been sharing their own experiences. "The last few years were really hard for Dad," wrote one man. "By the end he could not communicate, speak or take care of himself. Thank God for my Mom and my brother and sister-in-law, who all took the best of care of him. Another person, writing about her grandmother, admitted, "I spent years watching her health, mental state, and dignity decline. When she took her last breath, I was honestly glad, because she was FINALLY at peace after years of suffering." And as another person put it, "I had a few Parkinsons patients when I worked in a nursing home years ago. As I watched them get worse over time, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of sadistic #$%$ would insist that someone ride that diagnosis to the bitter end." The painful paradox of loving someone with a vicious disease is desperately wanting to hold on to him or her as long as possible, and desperately wanting the suffering to be over. Life alone is not a victory, a feeble heartbeat is not a triumph. And if you've experienced the toll of sickness from which there is no return on the person enduring it and those who love that person, you know that Susan Williams is right. It can be a profound act of bravery to let go — for both the one who dies, and the ones left behind. [image error]