More on the California Budget

So various sources tell us that California's prison population has either quintupled or septupled (depending how it gets counted, apparently) over the past 20 years. The population has increased by half - i.e., not even doubled. That is the major internal source of economic pressure on the budget (the external source is lack of revenue). True, the $11 billion on prisons is about 10% of the budget, and only half the $24b budget gap. But it's been driving up the budget for years. In 2007, the budget had about $10b for prisons and $12 billion for higher education. Higher education had a $15 billion budget, but had to raise $3 billion from bonds. Prisons got all their money in cash. Apparently, the prison budget in the 2005 budget year was only $7 billion. That's a big increase in just a few years.

While health expenditures at $30b are the second largest single expenditure, they were, for example, raised by just 1% between 2006 and 2007. Prisons went up 6%. (I look at 2006-2007 because those were the last "good years" budgeting-wise).

However, the largest expenditure is on K-12 education, at about $40b. Proposition 98 protects that, unfortunately. Prop 98 requires that 40% of the general fund be spent on schools. This is the other problem. In good years, that means a lot more money. In bad years, that percentage has to go up dramatically or there are serious cuts. Pegging it at 40% of the general fund is an awful idea that makes it impossible to restrain the growth of spending.

But the other issue is tax cuts. That's right. According to the LA Times, about $100 billion in tax cuts have been enacted over the past 15 years. Tax breaks require a simple majority vote; tax increases a 2/3 vote. So various loopholes and tax reductions for special interests have drained the treasury.

And proposition 13 has abeen an unmitigated disaster. According to another report, it has drained revenue from our governments. The year prop 13 was passed, California received about 27% of its total revenue (state and local) from property taxes. That percentage is now 12%. As whole, all states had about 21% of its state/local revenue from property taxes in 1977, the year prop 13 was passed. That percentage nationwide has gone down to 16%. So the nationwide reliance on property taxes has dropped by 5 percentage points of the total, but CA has gone down by 15 percentage points, three times as much. The result has been an increase in the use of the personal income tax, a fickle source of funds. In 1977, all states, including CA, got about 10% of their state and local revenue from income taxes; in CA, that went up to 16%, while the rest of the country crept up to 12%. Note the imbalance: CA lost 15% of its revenue stream in property taxes and made back only 6% of its needs from personal income tax.

So that's it in a nutshell. (1) external to budget: Declining tax revenue from various sources, including tax breaks, so the revenue stream has skewed to unstable income taxes. (2) internal to budget: prop 98 and prisons.

The clear culprit in all of this is (1) the 2/3 budget rule and (2) the ballot propositions 13 and 98 that have monkeyed with the constitution.

This is why we need a constitutional convention to reform the constitution:
1. Establish majority-vote budgets like almost every other state
2. Bar constitutional amendments by initiative except with a 2/3 vote or higher
3. Allow the legislature to repeal any initiative/proposition statute by simple majority vote (now not possible)
4. Outlaw paid signature gathering for propositions. All-volunteer signature gathering was the norm before the 1970s, and the result was very few propositions ever made it to the ballot. The reason we have so many propositions now is that you can just pay money to hire signature gatherers who get it done. This means that instead of representing grass roots efforts, ballot propositions are playthings of rich special interests. I would not outlaw ballot propositions altogether because it is our political tradition in California to be allowed to circumvent the legislature, or to threaten to do so, from time to time. I would prefer to contain this rather than try to outlaw it. Lots of other states have such direct democracy in limited form that is not a serious problem.
5. Reform Prop 13 to make it fair. Nobody should have to pay 10x or 20x more in taxes than their neighbor for the same property, particularly in tract-home neighborhoods where the properties are practically interchangeable. Seriously, people paying $1000/year for properties next to those paying $10K or $15K/year is not uncommon in some areas. You shouldn't be able to pass that tax basis on to your children and grandchildren. Commercial property owners who can charge market rent for their property should be taxed on full market value. It is not fair for business A to be charged 1/10 the taxes of competing business B just because the new business moved in to the next door property 20 years later. The goal of prop 13 was to protect homeowners, particularly those on fixed incomes, from being socked with double-digit % increases in their property taxes as a result of increases in property value that they did not cause and would not benefit from unless they sold the property. The obvious solution is to restrict increases to, say, 5% on an annual basis, allowing for greater reassessment every 7 or 8 years, except for those over 65 years old. Sure, this will cause some unfairness, but it will probably keep neighbors within 50% of each other, which is so much better than now.
6. Abolish prop 98 altogether. There is no excuse for pegging any program's budget to the amount of revenue raised by the state rather than to the programmatic needs!
7. Abolish the "plural executive" and make the Attorney General, Treasurer, Sec of State, Sec of Education, Insurance Comm'ner appointed rather than separately elected. It is ridiculous to have the governor of one party and the heads of his departments of another party. Guess how that affects transparency and openness in government.

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"And that's the way it is..."

I used to watch Walter Cronkite every night on the CBS evening news. To this day, whenever I need to watch live news coverage of political events, I still watch CBS. But I rarely watch the TV news programs anymore. There seems so little point to it. Most of the time I end up muting or changing the channel to alleviate the nausea.

There is no journalist working in America today who has earned anywhere near the widespread respect Walter Cronkite had. News is thriving but journalism is dying. Information is plentiful but authorities are scarce. Data is everywhere but the truth is gets buried by it.

America is a fractured polity with its fragments growing ever more isolated. The Left and Right now have their own news networks, their own commentators, their own blogospheres. Pundits are no longer respected for their objectivity, but are rewarded for their unwavering commitment to a particular ideology--the more theatrical their presentation the better.

It was not a simpler age back then, nor was it a better age... But I think perhaps we had a better guide. I am sad tonight. I will miss our "Uncle" Walter.

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Justice Ginsburg

So Justice Ginsburg is being pilloried for saying this in response to a question about abortion:

" JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion."

All the conservoblogs are lit up about this. They are saying that Ginsburg wants to use abortion for eugenics.

But here is the rest of her answer, "Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong."

In other words, Ginsburg is saying, more or less, that she was skeptical of Roe because she thought some of its backers were pushing for eugenics, but she realized it was a misimpression on her part later when a second court decision barred medicaid funding for abortions.

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The Peculiar Minorities

In college I discovered to my surprise that the gay community and the disabled community there felt a special affinity toward one another. I have seen this elsewhere as well. I did not know why those particular minorities felt they shared a special bond until I realized those two groups are, in the same sort of way, rather peculiar minorities.

They are different from other minorities because, whatever genetic component there is to being gay or disabled, the nature of the inheritance is more akin to a "recessive" trait, and often one which only manifests later in life. One obvious consequence is that the gay and disabled communities cut across all other minorities: They include men and women of all races and cultures. A less obvious but perhaps more important consequence is that gays and the disabled almost always find themselves minorities even within their own families, and yet thanks to their families the majority of them have enjoyed the socio-economic benefits of being born into the majority.

So on the one hand, then, members of those minorities share a peculiar form of loneliness, and perhaps then a peculiar need to form special communities of their own. Yet on the other hand they do not suffer from the accumulated burden of generations of oppression because there is no continuity between generations. (Another consequence of this lack of shared heritage is that the generational divides within these communities are more pronounced than within others.)

Thus when some African-American leaders dispute the similarity between their civil rights movement and the civil rights movement for gays and lesbians, one must admit they have a point. The accumulated burden of centuries of slavery and oppression, that "peculiar institution" so central to the African-American experience and the legal battles that followed, finds no parallel in the gay civil rights movement. Attempts to draw that parallel are at best misguided, if not downright offensive.

Perhaps then we should look to the struggle to secure the rights of the disabled as an important model from which to draw parallels with the fight for gay rights. In that case the central emotive argument would not be, "We are proud of our differences," but rather, "We are your friends, your parents, and your children." Instead of emphasizing the differences, we must emphasize the sameness.

Likewise, integration into the "mainstream" has been the overriding goal of the disabled, and perhaps that should become a rallying cry for gays and lesbians as well--who must overcome that peculiar sense of isolation that can drive them to band together even more so than other minorities do. The more common, more radical stance has been to eschew the trappings of the mainstream and form separate enclaves, with a brash (and invented) subculture. And I have said before that I believe gay marriage is actually a rather conservative form of social and legal re-integration of gay life back into the family and the larger community.

Of course, many gays and lesbians will fear to equate their struggle with that of the disabled, lest homosexuality be seen as akin to a disability. I admit to a similar concern. But in truth, I believe that unfortunate fear speaks more of the remaining social prejudice against the disabled than anything else.

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Apollo 11 Launched 40 Years Ago Today

On July 16th, 1969, The United States of America launched a manned space craft - under the command of native Ohioan, Neil Armstrong - with a mission to fly to the Moon. Upon arrival at the Moon, Armstrong and some guy who isn't from Ohio, got out and actually walked on another world.

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A spiritual call to collective action

These words were spoken just recently about the various economic and environmental crises this world faces.

"The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It's caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That [is] heresy...
We are our siblings' keepers and knowers, and we cannot be known without them -- we have no meaning, no true existence in isolation. We shall indeed die as we forget or ignore that reality."

This is as radical an assault on protestant individualism as I have seen in a long time. It is actually a bit shocking in its theological break with most American fundamentalists who assume that salvation is entirely about an individual relationship with God. Moreover, this is a call to everyone to engage in the world. It is a firm statement that changing one's individual behavior is not a sufficient response to the present economic or environmental crises.

This was Bishop (Primate) Katherine Schori's opening address to the 2009 Episcopal General Convention currently taking place in Anaheim. If anyone was wondering whether there is diversity in Christian theology, take a deep breath and read it again.

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Race In The Coming No-Majority America

Hi Everyone,

There is a lot of talk these days about the demographic changes going on in the United States these days. The future of America is one in which there is no racial or ethnic majority. There hasn't been an ethnic majority in the United States since its beginnings (despite our reputation as "transplanted Englishmen," Germans, Irish, Africans, Scots and French people etc have always made up large portions of our population - not to mention Native Americans). But racially, this country has long been one in which Europeans comprised well over 80% of the population. That is what is about to change. The day is coming soon when Americans of European heritage will make up less than 50% of the population. The big growth is coming from Asian and Latino immigrants and their descendants. The dominant theme of conversations about this future revolves around the changes "White" people will have to make.

But an exchange yesterday between Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Judge Sotomayor about her infamous "wise Latina" remark (in which she said that a wise Latina would make better judicial decisions than a white male) points out that groups that are now minorities in an America dominated by whites will have to make changes in their attitudes as well. Senator Graham pointed out that if he had come close to suggesting he would make a better Senator than a minority candidate because he was a caucasian male, he'd be - rightly - shredded. I think Senator Graham has a point here. There are statements that if white people say them are clearly and universally regarded as racist that if a Latina/o or African American say them are more often regarded as more or less innocent statements of cultural self-confidence.

The traditionally "political correct" way to respond to Graham's distinction is to say, "Well, white people are in power by virtue of their majority status so of course they can't say things that minorities can." But very soon, that won't be as true as it is now or was 30 years ago. The time is fast coming when people of color will have to more carefully consider the rhetoric they use to express their pride of culture. It's one thing to say "Latinas have wisdom to contribute!" It's quite another to say "Latinas are better than white people."

To be honest, I don't think Sotomayor understood or agreed with Graham's point. I think she deflected the topic with agility and diplomacy. But I think she is very much a product of her generation. I think her attitudes towards conversations about race is very much rooted in traditional political correctness with all its inherent double standards.

I don't think this exchange really disqualifies Sotomayor. Nor do I think her statement from years ago is all that important in of itself. But I think the point Graham was trying to make is an interesting topic for a conversation about race. Think of it as a kind of continuation of the dialogue Obama called for his race speech.

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Who Really Hurt the CIA?

This argument from the right (which is being rather easily accepted and passed on as fact by the main stream media) that all these controversies and investigations are "hurting the CIA" really bugs me. No one is asking, "What if the CIA had followed the law in the first place?" No one is asking, "Did Cheney ask himself how his extra legal meddling would effect the CIA in the long run?"

Current CIA director, Leon Panetta, brought this latest story to light. Why? Because he's protecting the integrity of his own chain of command against the practice of White House interference that was established in the Bush-Cheney years! He's doing this to protect the CIA not undermine it! Cheney already undermined it!

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Happy Bastille Day!

Sing a song!

Storm a castle! (but be sure to have fun doing it)

Taunt some Englishmen.

Drink some wine!

Go to a parade!

Join the Foreign Legion!

Vive La France!

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Episcopal Church Moves to Fully Embrace all Baptized Persons

The Episcopal Church has a general convention that meets every three years. For the past five conventions, they have tried to pass compromise resolutions to handle the complaints of conservatives that they were being too inclusive of gays while advancing "equal rites" within the church. The unexpected climax of a building confrontation with conservative forces came in 2003 with the ordination of Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire. A handful of congregations and four dioceses (0f 80) bolted from the church. Same thing happened over the ordination of women in the 1970s. Then the other partners in the Anglican Communion overseas in the "developing south" demurred strongly. (Others, like the churches in Scotland and Canada, were supportive of the American church). In 2006, the Episcopal General Convention voted a controversial moratorium on the ordination of gay bishops and on the adoption of formal rites for the blessing of same-sex unions. But it also elected a woman as Presiding Bishop for the first time. It was hoped that the response from the rest of the Anglican communion would be conciliatory. It wasn't. The response was to tell us to get bent. Several of these fellow bishops refused even to take communion with our Presiding Bishop.

So, basically, the American church has finally had it. In keeping with a national spirit of renewal and change, the Episcopal church is voting today to lift the moratorium on ordaining gays to any office and to authorize rites for same sex blessings. It is expected that the Episcopal church will have formally adopted all of these measures by the end of the week. The church is considering a further measure to give priests and bishops wide latitude to respond as they please to any local jurisdiction that authorizes same sex marriages.

The amazing thing is to see and read about the convention. What you are seeing is not trepidation or legislation, but an outpouring of joy and the holy spirit. Compromise has its season. So does action. I hope that the coming generation may find churches to be places of hope and community. This isn't just about gay people. It's about saying to everyone that God loves you just as you are, and that there is nothing you can do, no matter how awful, and no power on earth or beyond it that can separate you from the love of God. For many on this blog that doesn't matter at all, I know. For other people, though, this can matter a lot, particularly those who have been taught from an early age that an angry God despised them, and whose psyches have been warped by this.

[Update: The first resolution about ordaining gay persons was passed by more than 2/3 of the delegates present in the two houses.]

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Senator Jeff Sessions and a Sad Day for the Republican Party

Senator Jeff Sessions has repeatedly said that the recent Ricci decision, finding white firemen were discriminated against in New Haven, CT, was the most important civil rights case in a very long time. So, Senator Sessions finally discovered civil rights now that white people might need the laws. Jeff Sessions kept pressing about it, playing to his racist supporters back in Alabama.

Let's get the facts straight about Senator Sessions. He used to be a federal judge, and Reagan tried to elevate him to the appellate court. He was rejected by the Senate, including the negative vote of Alabama Senator Heffrin. Why? Sessions had let his racist stripes be known. He "jokingly" said that Ku Klux Klan was not so bad until he found out that some of them smoked marijuana. Sessions also referred to the NAACP as "un-American" and "Communist-inspired" because it"forced civil rights down the throats of people."

So now he has discovered civil rights? No intelligent person can believe he cares about civil rights. Sotomayor knows who Sessions really is. She must be on some serious meds right now not to lash back. Smart, very smart, to keep it cool.

More amazingly, Sessions is complaining that Sotomayor did not act to overturn precedent when she had a chance. In the next breath, he complains that she is a judicial activist? Ha!

Then he complains that she didn't apply the Adarand case and strict scrutiny in the Ricci case (claiming she "broke a promise" to him). Of course, those cases are not on point. Adarand required a high standard before federal agencies adopt what used to be called minority set-asides, programs to favor minority contracting. Adarand does not concern the Ricci case at all. New Haven was not adopting a policy favoring minorities; it was responding to a case of disparate impact. Simply put, New Haven saw that no African-Americans and only one hispanic passed its test and realized that a case could be made that there was some problem with the test.
For Sessions, if a city adopts an exam that "coincidentally" only white men pass, this strikes him as natural and right. The old racist assumes whites are smarter. Or he wants to find legal ways to discriminate agaisnt negroes. If the city in question had been Birmingham rather than New Haven, maybe the Ricci case would be easier for the media to see properly.

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Cheney May Have Been Covering Up Illegal Assassination Ring

Hi Everyone,

In an earlier thread we talked about revelations that Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to lie to Congress despite being obligated by the laws that established the CIA in the first place to subject itself to Congressional oversight. In that thread Dr S suggested that this wouldn't amount to much because it didn't seem to involve either wiretapping or torture. Well, the Wall Street Journal has a story that suggests it was about something even worse than both...assassination. Even planning such a program has been illegal since 1975. Cheney knew that if he told even the most secretive and sympathetic members of Congress about his plans, they would shut it down. So he ordered the CIA people he was working with to lie about it to Congress. It was a classic coverup. That it never got off the ground will likely prove to be the result of suitably patriotic foot-dragging by right thinking CIA people.

So to sum up:

1) The Vice President (an office with no executive authority at all) inserted himself into the chain of command for the conduct of intelligence and covert operations.

2) The VP used that self appointed authority to order the planning of operations that were illegal - namely assassinations.

3) The VP then ordered CIA officials to lie about his illegal plans in order to prevent them being shut down by the responsible oversight authorities in Congress (this despite the fact that he has no real authority to order anything).

This stinks. I know LTG says that there is some sort of statute of limitations that says that if you don't catch him before he leaves office, a VP is not liable for this kind of stuff but I don't believe him.

I expect that this will hang over his head until after the health care vote then Democrats in Congress will act.

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DADT Moratorium?

Rumor has it that Sen. Kirsten Gillebrand (D-NY) may offer an amendment to this year's defense appropriations bill to place an eighteen-month moratorium on enforcing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Gillebrand supports gay marriage and has said her ultimate goal is still to repeal the policy entirely, replacing it with a new policy that would allow gays and lesbians to serve their country openly. There is as yet no indication as to whether this amendment would be adopted.

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What if we had a supreme court confirmation hearing and no one came?

Tomorrow, hearings will begin for Sonia Sotomayor to be SC justice. Scarcely a word about this is in the press. With Roberts and Alito, it was front page news for weeks. Why? Plainly because the confirmation is a foregone conclusion.

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Republicans Violated Laws and Constitution For Little Gain

So not only have recent reports shown that Cheney ordered the CIA to violate the law by knowingly giving false and misleading reports to Congress but the round of reports reveals that all that warrantless wire tapping that Republicans swear is the only thing standing between us and a nuclear terrorist attack was not nearly as useful as the Republicans claimed to the agents conducting it.

I think it should be fairly obvious that a democracy should not deviate from its standard constitutional protections unless doing so would yield an ENORMOUS benefit or avoid and ENORMOUS loss AND it is the ONLY option to achieve that. The Bush people failed both tests with this wire tapping. It was neither particularly useful nor was it the only way to achieve the ends for which it was designed. Republicans rushed to the extra-legal wiretapping on the ASSUMPTION that a more authoritarian approach is safer than a democratic approach. The ASSUMPTION was that democracy is a luxury that must be the first thing sacrificed in a crisis. One of the many things they don't realize is that democracy is the end not the means.

LTG made a comment on another thread that the Republican Party is the single greatest threat to American democracy today. I agree. Certainly these reports about Cheney interfering with the CIA and the so-so performance of the extra-legal wire taps prove it.

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Cheney Ordered CIA to Lie to Congress

This story in the NY Times may prove to be a real problem for the Bush-Cheney crowd. It sounds like they have hard evidence that Vice President Dick Cheney ordered CIA officials to lie to Congress about the existence and implementation of CIA programs.

Apparently, there was a program, the details of which are still secret except the relevant committees in Congress, that Cheney ordered CIA briefers to conceal and lie about. As a result the committees in Congress that were responsible for overseeing CIA activities were unaware of what the CIA was doing in this program. I've heard rumors/stories on the radio, that this may be a reference to an illegal assassination program whereby CIA teams would travel to foreign countries and assassinate people on their target list. Assassination has been illegal for the CIA since the early 1970s when Congress reacted to CIA abuses in the 50s and 60s.

According to the story, Obama's CIA Director, Leon Panetta, ordered the program shut down as soon as he heard about. Elections have consequences!

Remember a few months ago when Pelosi claimed that the CIA had been lying to Congress - especially the Democrats for years? At the time, Republicans threw a hissy fit about how she was undermining the morale of the CIA and how dare this San Francisco "librul" impugn the honor of these heroes. Well, it turns out she was right all along and - no surprise - it was Cheney who was undermining morale and impugning the honor of the CIA.

I have no idea where this will lead formally. Clearly, has this come out during the Bush administration's time in office, it would be grounds for impeaching the whole lot of them. I suspect that Cheney, at the very least, could be charged with "Contempt of Congress" and possibly a number of federal laws against falsifying or tampering with government reports etc. LTG will probably have a better idea of his legal liabilities here.

Politically, this vindicates Pelosi to some extent. That probably won't help Pelosi's numbers but it probably will hurt the reputation of those Republicans who have been using her as a punching bag - at least among independents.

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Some Notes About Africa

I'm watching Obama give a speech to the parliament of Ghana right now. Why is Obama in Africa? Why does Africa matter? As even George W. Bush recognized, Africa is, along with South-Central Asia, the most likely region to see failed states emerge. It is also a region that many know little about. I remember once that Bell Curve and I wrote a trivia quiz for our favorite pub and we had a hand out of map of Africa with the countries' names left blank. We knew it would be challenging for most Americans to fill in those names (of course our friends at the pub did fine for the most part) but the fact that we could reasonably assume people would struggle is telling. Consider the famous report that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. She's not the only person who thinks this, although she may be the only one who thought that thought she was qualified to hold high public office despite that level of ignorance. So here are some factoids about Africa.

Of the 229 countries that the CIA World Fact Book has profiles for, 18 of the 20 poorest countries in the world are in sub-saharan Africa. One of the others is Afghanistan and the other is a semi-sovereign territory of New Zealand. Many of the countries in Sub-saharan Africa have economies that depend on the export of a single commodity or natural resource (oil, gold, diamonds, coffee, peanuts, etc). Many of the countries in Sub-saharan Africa have experienced violent ethnic conflict or civil wars recently. Millions of people have been killed or displaced in wars that are either going on now or only recently finished. Basic infrastructure that we take for granted (like roads, a power grid and clean water) are absent in much of the continent. The internet is slow to take root in this region. Decent access to the internet is critical not only for communication but investment too. Capital transactions these days are all computerized. Many of these countries languish under massive debt problems. There are also problems with establishing a consistent legal structure in many of these countries. As if this wasn't enough, there is also a widespread problem with malaria and HIV-AIDS.

But there are success stories too. And Ghana is one of them. Despite not being particularly rich, Ghana has established itself as a relatively stable democracy with a bright future. Botswana is doing even better.

Obama's speech focussed on how Africans need to and can solve their own problems. One of best lines in the speech (one that got a lot of applause) was "Africa doesn't strong men, it needs strong institutions." To help that, Obama promised directly western aid to help build the institutions that a stable democracy and economy need. Let's hope it works out for Africa.

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Cutting out the Middle Man

President Obama is pushing a plan through Congress to change the way the Federal government handles student loans. Instead of merely providing subsidies to private financial institutions to encourage them to lend to students, as is the current practice, Obama proposes that the Federal government simply offer loans directly to students.

The CBO estimates this change would save $87 Billion over the next 10 years. Naturally, the banks are furious. They are crying "socialism" and "takeover," which appears to be the usual response whenever the government attempts to wean private institutions off the public teat--in this case one that has been remarkably nourishing. It appears the House Education Committee is now on board. We shall see.

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Fox News... Making Racism Cute

I saw this video link on Daily Kos. They are talking about how a study about senile dementia in Sweden and Finland doesn't apply here because "Swedes have pure genes" and Americans "marry other species." First, of all I can tell you, as a Scandinavian American, that cross ethnic marriage is good not bad for genetic problems. Scandinavians have some of the highest rates of birth defects in the world despite excellent health care and environmental protection....why? "Pure genes." My father's family is Danish. They are also rather inbred. His family is part of a network of families that have been marrying into each other for generations - they even married each other back in Denmark before they came over so this cousins marrying cousins thing has probably been going for a 1000 years or more. Anyway, he always said he married my mother for her "genes" (she's of appropriately multi-ethnic American heritage - sorry - multi-species). I suspect he was also talking about how she looked in jeans but that's another story.

This kind of pseudo-intellectual style combined with matter of fact statements of the most mind blowing ignorance is what is wrong with the American conservative movement. These are Palin's people. Her "real America" if you will. These are the people who go to "Tea Parties" and get angry about big city Ivy League types like Obama. It makes me sick just to think of it. How do we confront this problem?

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Republicans, Politicized Sex and Money

Republicans are attracted to sex like a moth to flame. On the one hand, many of them want the state to pressure people to have sex only under the circumstances with the kinds of partners of whom they approve. They want to politicize one of the most personal and intimate behaviors human beings engage in. They see no division between religion, identity, morality, economic policy and law in general. Granted there are obvious intersections. But they blur these things so much that they begin to insist on this law on moral grounds and that economic policy on religious grounds. They see sex with disapproved partners and under disapproved circumstances as "un-American." They see religion, particularly the Christian religion, as equivalent with American identity and they use both to justify a range of self serving economic ideologies with stark distributional implications.

In the context of this particular combination of world views, theologies, and ideologies, it should really surprise us that many of these same Republican politicians a) can't keep their pants zipped and b) make sex scandals worse by engaging in cover-ups, blackmail and bribery. If you remember the John Ensign (R-NV) scandal from back pre-Palin, pre-Jackson, and even pre-Sanford then you may not be surprised to learn that money and cover up are emerging as pieces of this scandal too. Ensign's parents paid his mistress nearly a hundred thousand dollars in hush money. We've also just heard that Tom Colburn (R-OK) knew about the affair and encouraged Ensign to end it quietly and quickly. Colburn is now claiming "doctor-patient" privilege and refusing further comment. You see, Colburn is an MD and while he is not Ensign's regular doctor, he feels that doctor-patient privilege covers this kind of thing. One wonders if he knew about the payments of hush money.

What is also coming out is that Ensign, Colburn and Sanford were all members of a secretive and cultish Christian group of powerful politicians called "The Family" - mostly Republican but with a couple Democrats. This organization has a house on C Street in Washington D.C. which they use to provide below market rate housing to several members of Congress. They push both a religious and rightwing-corporatist economic agenda in which large corporations benefit from state support at the expense of potential competition. They have a small chapel in the building and so have listed the building as a "church" for tax purposes. Religion, money, politics, sex....

What we have here is a small group of right wing politicians belonging to a secretive political organization masquerading as a church. These men, push a right wing political agenda while themselves engaging in self-destructive secret lives themselves. This is not my father's Republican party.

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