Grrrr...The Republicans are showing their ugly thoughts!

In the late ’70s, the term “politically correct,” “PC” for short, entered the collective conscious. For a short time, certain words or expressions just weren't PC. But today, anything goes. It seems that as Republicans have been moving further to the right, words have become stronger, harsher, less tolerant and more ignorant. Recently, Indiana state Rep. Eric Turner (R) argued that there should be no loopholes in the state's abortions laws for victims of rape or incest. Here's why!

Indiana state Rep. Eric Turner (R) argued Tuesday that there should be no loopholes in the state's abortions laws for victims of rape or incest, because then "someone who is desirous of an abortion could simply say that they've been raped or there's incest."

Turner had introduced HB 1210, which, among other things, would make most abortions illegal after the twentieth week of pregnancy. It would also prevent any insurance companies from covering abortions under the federal health care bill, something that has also been debated at the federal level.

State Rep. Gail Riecken (D) introduced an amendment that would create an exemption from Turner's bill for victims of rape or incest, or in cases where the health of the mother was at risk.

Turner, in response, argued that this would create a "giant loophole," where "someone who could -- I want to be very careful, I don't want to disparage in any way someone who's gone through the experience of a rape, or an incest -- but someone who is desirous of an abortion could simply say that they've been raped or there's incest."

He added that the amendment doesn't allow for any "confirmation" of that, "so I would ask you, as I think most Americans and most Hoosiers believe that abortion coverage of any kind should not be a part of the federal health care act."

WATCH Rep. Linda Lawson (D) object to Turner's remarks:

Redistributing Wealth from the Poor to the Wealthy

Jay Michaelson has written a very interesting article about the robber-baron agenda of the Republicans. Not for the Sake of Heaven, The Polymath: Debased Discourse in a New Gilded Age, was originally published in the The Jewish Daily Forward. Michaelson begins and ends his article with a discussion of the jewish holiday of Passover and the questions that we should be asking.

Passover is coming, and with it, the season of questions. We Jews have long prided ourselves on asking good questions — even more than on providing adequate answers. We prize debates that go on forever. And, of course, we answer questions with still more questions. Inquiry, discourse, communication: These are some of the core values of the Jewish intellectual heritage.

And yet, while it has temporarily been pushed off the front page by the news from Japan and Libya, our current domestic political moment is one so devoid of truthful discourse as to render our Passover symposia almost absurd, verbally fiddling while the planet burns, deluding us into thinking that conversations like the Passover Seder still matter in our public life.

This is not a matter of ideology. I am not so young as to suppose that a momentary rightward drift in America’s political trajectory represents the end of the world as we know it. (After the events in Wisconsin and Michigan, and the Islamophobic McCarthyism in Washington, a young friend of mine on Facebook asked me how to stay politically engaged but “avoid the despair and paranoia.” He said he was really in a “dark world at the moment, trying to get out.” I remember feeling that way in 1994.) This, too, shall pass.

Substance is not my concern here, process is. “We’re sort of in a truth-free period right now,” former president Clinton said recently. I think that this assessment is spot-on, and should worry all of us who value the very notion of reasoned intellectual discourse.

A return to pre-New Deal, Gilded Age America

Contrast, for example, Rep. Peter King’s odious accusations of collective guilt against the Muslim American community with the current efforts around the country to return to pre-New Deal, Gilded Age America. The former, I think, are unconscionable. But at least they’re honest. However misinformed King and his allies may be, they are at least acting sincerely against what they perceive to be a threat, and they are stating their case clearly. In theory, my dispute with King is l’shem shamayim — for the sake of heaven. We both want people to be free from terrorist attacks, and I think we both want Americans be free from religious persecution. We just have a strong difference of opinion as to how best to pursue those goals.

Such is not the case, however, with Republican efforts to “rein in spending” or “reform public unions” or whatever other spin-doctored phrase the Fox/Koch axis has concocted to mask its radical, reactionary, robber-baron agenda. These aren’t goals, they’re pretexts, and the refusal to speak honestly about them makes real public debate impossible.

For example, we now know, thanks to off-the-cuff (but recorded) remarks, that Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, busted the public sector union in Wisconsin not to balance the state budget, but to bust the union, which tends to contribute to the Democratic Party. “Balancing the budget” had about as much to do with Walker’s action as “weapons of mass destruction” did with the invasion of Iraq.

Republican stated goals are really pretexts

Or consider the congressional budget negotiations. As the infographic by the Center for American Progress (reproduced here) makes clear, balancing the budget is a mere pretext for axing programs that Republicans have hated for decades. I’m not even talking about NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service; the culture war is just another distraction. The entire savings from cutting early childhood programs, low-income housing programs, legal services for the poor, food stamps — all $44 billion of it — is only slightly more than the $42 billion cost of the Bush tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans. This isn’t about the budget; it’s about redistributing wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest.

The CAP infographic really is a gem. Did you know that the $8.9 billion that the Republicans want to cut from low-income housing programs is exactly equivalent to the $8.9 billion it costs to let rich people deduct the mortgage interest on vacation homes? If Congress wanted to save $8.9 billion in the area of housing, why not put the burden on the 32% of Americans fortunate enough to own vacation homes? Or how about ensuring equal access to justice by preserving Legal Aid ($420 million in proposed cuts) and stopping companies from writing off punitive damages (at a cost of $312 million)? You don’t get to write off your parking tickets, so why should huge corporations write off fines for their willful and harmful misconduct?

Source : Donna Cooper, center for American Progress

Cuts, But Where?: These figures show which programs pay what prices.

Republicans favor the rich over the poor

It’s nothing new for Republicans to favor the rich over the poor; that preference is as old as the Grand Old Party itself. And there’s nothing new about the rich buying off politicians in order to get richer. It’s the world’s second-oldest profession, and it has much in common with the first. Today’s GOP agenda aims to overturn the Great Society, and the New Deal, and to return America to the laissez-faire policies of Herbert Hoover — only this time, with multinational corporations, globalization and an information-technology-enabled financial bubble machine.

And actually, there’s nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of sincere conservatives who sincerely believe in total laissez-faire economics. If the rich get richer, they think that the poor will likely be better off, too — and certainly better off than if the government tries to game the system. From Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman, this view is time-honored and is clearly an ideology animating the Republicans’ agenda.

Brainwashed by media spin

But you won’t hear any of this real conservatism on Fox News. Instead, we’re told that the estate tax (I’m sorry, the “death tax”) hurts families and family farms, even though it actually affects only “families” who inherit more than $3 million. Instead of principled defenses of conservative positions, our public discourse is filled with cynical lies, and phrases like “relief for the American family” pasted over policies that hurt 95% of American families.

Our popular political culture is like the child she’eno yodeah lishol, who doesn’t know that there’s a question to ask. It’s an infantilized adolescent, brainwashed by media spin. We’re not having the discussion we ought to have, because one side refuses to engage, instead offering one half-truth after another in order to shred the social-safety net.

We’re not even clear on how we got here in the first place. To some, the Tea Party movement represents a populist upwelling against a Democratic administration that grew government too big. But this, too, is a mirage. Actually, the Tea Party is a pseudo-populist movement bankrolled by big business — not just the Koch brothers, but a legion of phony “think tanks” and “grassroots organizations” that somehow have the money to make big media buys. Yes, there’s genuine anger out there. But it’s been whipped into a specifically Republican frenzy, thanks to very deliberate, calculated work by some very rich people and corporations.

And why the anger? Obviously, it relates to the deep pain created by the financial crisis of 2008. And here’s where it gets really fun. The financial crisis was brought on by deregulation, which allowed huge (“too big to fail”) financial institutions to merge with one another and make unregulated, high-risk bets. But the triumph of the Tea Party meant a victory for the deregulators, who now want even less regulation than there was before. Because of the sleight-of-hand perpetrated on sincere, hurting Tea Party voters — perhaps the greatest con in our nation’s history — the kid who crashed the old car was given the keys to the new one.

Too much wealth in so few hands.

The crisis was also brought on by the increase in the wealth gap, which concentrated so much wealth in so few hands. Today, a mere 400 people hold more cash, stock and property than 255 million Americans. In 2009, America’s wealthiest households had a net worth that was 225 times greater than that of the median family’s, the most lopsided ratio in American history. The injustice of that distribution of wealth is so massive that our eyes glaze over.

Yet even setting aside justice concerns, this is exactly the sort of imbalance that brings on big crashes. Why? Because those few very rich folks tend to invest in those same “too big to fail” banks that, without regulation, are incentivized to overspeculate. When wealth is this concentrated, risk is exacerbated, and when big bets are lost (as they inevitably sometimes are), the costs are far more severe. We fall farther, harder and faster.

Yet once again, the anger brought on by the financial crisis has handed over power to the people who created the crisis to begin with. Bernard Madoff went to jail for running a Ponzi scheme. The Republicans went to Congress.

The financial crisis is also the reason we have the budget deficit that suddenly, after decades of deficit spending, so alarms the Republican Party. The first stimulus plan, the second stimulus plan (what the Obama administration got in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts last December) and the massive drop in tax revenue are the main reasons the government is in such a financial hole. Deregulation and wealth concentration caused this deficit. The response? More deregulation and wealth concentration! All the while repeating disingenuously that this is about reducing the deficit or helping America’s small businesses, or whatever. It isn’t. From public television to collective bargaining, from the tax code to the lack of real financial regulation, Republican policies are about radical social engineering.

We need an honest debate

Here’s what I think Passover, and the Jewish value of discourse it represents, is meant to teach us. If you’re going to cut programs for the poor because you think it’s not government’s business to help the poor, or cut NPR because you think it’s too liberal, have the courage to argue your case directly. If you think unions are bad for America, then say so. Don’t hide behind the financial crisis, or the budget deficit, or phony rhetoric about American families.

As we sit down to our Seders, disagreement is part of the point. On important questions of justice, freedom and morality, reasonable people disagree, and that’s fine. But the very foundation of our religious life is that honest, principled debate is possible, that it is a sacred act to argue. And yet for all the bluster and histrionics on the airwaves today, there is little true debate, no real conversation. On the contrary, the level of dissembling has grown so high that the news looks less like Passover and more like Purim: a grotesque carnival in which no one can tell truth from falsehood.

The Republican agenda is solely based on the goal of making the rich richer. Therefore, trickle down economy is just a myth.

Corporate Tax Rate

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So What Does It All Mean?

GOP Lies and the Untold Truth

Robert Reich says that if the GOP keeps telling the same lies over and over, eventually they will become the truth. In Reich's article, The Republican's Big Lies About Jobs (And Why Obama Must Repudiate Them), he says that without the Democrats or President Obama coming out to tell the truth, the lies will become fact.

And if all others accepted the lie which the party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became the truth.

– George Orwell, 1984 (published in 1949)

But truth doesn’t seem to matter. Republicans figure if their big lies are repeated often enough, people will start to believe them.

Unless, that is, those big lies are repudiated – and big truths are told in their place.

What worries me almost as much as the Republican’s repeated big lies about jobs is the silence of President Obama and Democratic leaders in the face of them. Obama has the bully pulpit. Republicans don’t. But if he doesn’t use it the Republican’s big lies gain credibility.

Here are some other whoppers being repeated daily:

“Cutting the federal deficit will create jobs.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was in town yesterday (specifically, at Stanford’s Hoover Institute where he could surround himself with sympathetic Republicans) to tell this whopper: “Cutting the federal deficit will create jobs.”

It’s not true. Cutting the deficit will create fewer jobs. Less government spending reduces overall demand. This is particularly worrisome when, as now, consumers and businesses are still holding back. Fewer government workers have paychecks to buy stuff from other Americans, some of whom in turn will lose their jobs without enough customers.

“Cutting taxes on the rich creates jobs.”

Nope. Trickle-down economics has been tried for thirty years and hasn’t worked. After George W. Bush cut taxes on the rich, far fewer jobs were created than after Bill Clinton raised them in the 1990s.

To his credit, President Obama argued against Republican demands for extending the Bush tax cut for those making more than a quarter million. But as soon as Republicans pushed back he caved. And the President hasn’t even mentioned that the $61 billion Republicans are demanding in budget cuts this fiscal year is what richer Americans would have paid in taxes had he not caved.

“Cutting corporate income taxes creates jobs.”

Baloney. American corporations don’t need tax cuts. They’re sitting on over $1.5 trillion of cash right now. They won’t invest it in additional capacity or jobs because they don’t see enough customers out there with enough money in their pockets to buy what the additional capacity would produce.

The President needs to point this out – not just in Washington but across the nation where Republican governors are slashing corporate taxes and simultaneously cutting school budgets. President Obama says he wants to invest in American skills, but many states are doing the opposite. Florida Governor Rick Scott, for example, says his proposed corporate tax cuts “will give Florida a competitive edge in attracting jobs.” They’ll also require education spending be reduced by $3 billion. Florida already ranks near the bottom in per-pupil spending and has one of nation’s lowest graduation rates. If Scott’s tax cuts create jobs, most will pay peanuts.

“Cuts in wages and benefits create jobs.”

Congressional Republicans and their state counterparts repeat this lie incessantly. It also lies behind corporate America’s incessant demand for wage and benefit concessions – and corporate and state battles against unions. But it’s dead wrong. Meager wages and benefits are reducing the spending power of tens of millions of American workers, which is prolonging the jobs recession.

President Obama and Democratic leaders should be standing up for the wages and benefits of ordinary Americans, standing up for unions, and decrying the lie that wage and benefit concessions are necessary to create jobs. The President should be traveling to the Midwest – taking aim at Republican governors in the heartland who are hell bent on destroying the purchasing power of American workers. But he’s doing nothing of the sort.

“Regulations kill jobs.”

Congressional Republicans are using this whopper to justify their attempts to defund regulatory agencies. Regulations whose costs to business exceed their benefits to the public are unwarranted, of course, but reasonable regulation is necessary to avoid everything from nuclear meltdowns to oil spills to mine disasters to food contamination – all of which we’ve sadly witnessed. Here again, we’re hearing little from the President or Democratic leaders.

Look, the President can’t be everywhere, doing everything. There’s tumult in the Middle East, we’re suddenly at war in Libya, Japan is struggling with the aftermath of disaster, and surely Latin America is an important trading partner.

But nothing is more central to average Americans than jobs and wages. Unless the President forcefully rebuts Republican’s big lies, they’ll soon become conventional wisdom.

Tell the President and your Congressional leaders that this country was not built on lies. Revising history, creating chaos and undermining truth is the path to ignorance.

The Fight Against Women

The GOP's fight to control a woman's uterus is in full speed ahead mode. Amanda Marcotte asks, "What's really driving the GOP's abortion war?"

The anti-choice movement goes for the kill

When Republicans profited from the miserable economy to sweep up huge wins in last fall's election, most political watchers figured they knew what was coming: budget cuts, privatization of more government functions, and tax cuts for the wealthy. The push to dismantle public sector unions has been a bit of a surprise, but not a jarring one.

But what seems to have thrown everyone -- save for a handful of embittered and neglected pro-choice activists -- for a loop is the way Republican lawmakers at both the national and state levels have focused so intently on the uteruses of America. Republicans appear to believe that the women of America have wildly mismanaged these uteruses in the four decades since the Supreme Court gave them control over them -- and now that Republicans have even a little bit of power, they’re going to bring this reign of female tyranny over uteruses to an end.

After all, the Republican House speaker, John Boehner, has identified limiting women's access to abortion and contraception as a "top priority" -- this with the economy is in tatters and the world in turmoil. Boehner's and the GOP's abortion fixation raises an obvious question: Why now, when there are so many other pressing issues at stake?

There isn’t just one explanation. The assault on reproductive rights is intensifying now because of a convergence of several otherwise unrelated events that have created the perfect moment for the anti-choice movement to go for the kill.

Victories against women's rights

Republicans have managed to score a couple of major victories against women's rights in the past few years. Both of the main obstacles to dismantling reproductive rights -- the Supreme Court and the Democrats -- have buckled under anti-choice pressure, emboldening the movement to demand even more, including rollbacks on contraception access.

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In 2007, the Supreme Court, with a 5-4 vote, upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Act, which not only set a precedent of the court validating a ban on an abortion procedure necessary to preserve some women's lives, but also introduced a new justification to limit women's rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy argued in the majority opinion that the D&X procedure could be banned in order to save women from the possibility of regret down the road. After this ruling, anti-choice bills sprung up like weeds, many of them rooted in this same assumption that women are too silly to be trusted to make their own decisions. Waiting periods, ultrasound requirements and forced "counseling" all make accessing abortion that much harder -- even as each step is dressed up as protection for women against their own flightiness and inability to make good decisions.

But the bigger victory was getting a Democratic president to sign an executive order barring insurance companies from offering abortion coverage to customers who are using federal subsidies to pay for insurance. Barack Obama signed the order under duress; there was no way to pass his healthcare reform bill without doing so. But the lesson for Republicans was clear: When it comes to reproductive rights, they don’t actually need to be in charge to get their way. If reproductive rights can be exploited to nearly derail healthcare reform while the Democrats control Congress and the presidency, think of how much leverage the issue gives them now that they've gained control of the U.S. House and a bunch of new statehouses.

Bringing the uteruses of America under right-wing control

It’s hard to overstate how much Republican energy is invested in bringing the uteruses of America under right-wing control. The House went into an anti-choice frenzy upon being sworn in in January, passing two bills that would eliminate private insurance funding for abortion, one that would dramatically cut funding for international family planning, and the Pence Amendment, which would ban Planned Parenthood from receiving any federal funding. And in case the Pence Amendment doesn’t work, the House also zeroed out all funding for Title X, which subsidizes reproductive healthcare for low-income patients, in the continuing resolution that funds the federal budget.

For the right, rolling back reproductive rights is considered a worthy goal in its own right, but since the issue could also provoke a budget showdown that could result in a government shutdown, it's also a useful tool in their effort to force Democrats to blink. As with their push to bust unions at the state level, Republicans stand to gain electorally by wreaking havoc on the pro-choice movement and undermining its ability to get out the vote for Democrats.

On the state level, an unprecedented number of anti-choice bills are being introduced in response to the perceived anti-choice bent of the Supreme Court. Florida alone has introduced 18 separate anti-choice bills. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has declared mandatory ultrasounds for abortion patients an emergency priority, and fast-tracked it through the Legislature. Three separate states have introduced bills that could legalize domestic terrorism against abortion providers, though a bill in South Dakota was withdrawn under pressure. Instead, that state's Legislature moved on to pass the most draconian abortion law in the country, one that would require a woman to wait 72 hours for an abortion and listen to a lecture from an anti-choice activist before having an abortion. These examples represent just a tiny fraction of the anti-choice bills percolating through state legislatures.

Keeping the religious right motivated

Maybe this is all surprising. After all, haven't we heard for the last two years that the Tea Party is more libertarian and less socially conservative? If you bought that line, congratulations -- you’re ensconced in Beltway wisdom. The truth is that a new name for the same old conservative base hasn’t changed the nature of that base. Just as before, the "small government" conservatives and the religious right have a great deal of overlap. With gay rights waning as a powerful wedge issue, keeping the religious right motivated and ready to vote is harder than ever. Reproductive rights creates new incentives for church-organized activists to keep praying, marching, donating and, most important, voting for the GOP.

The lesson for the Democrats and President Obama is that the GOP's focus is to dismantle a woman's right to choose.

If You Can't Blame Obama, Then Blame The Women

Is CNN contributor Erick Erickson a Rush Limbaugh wannabe? This is what he said on his radio show earlier this week (h/t Media Matters for America):

By the way, it's the women's fault. … It's, apparently, the women in the Obama administration who have decided we needed to go to war in Libya. … This is typical. This is so typ-- i'm mean, I'm going to bring my inner sexist out I'm afraid tonight, some of you are going to be very upset with me. But this is like women drivers. We're going to war in Libya, we have no plan, we have no map, even if we have a map of war, um, it wasn't going to get read, they were going to pull over and ask the French apparently for help, or at least make the guy pull over and ask the French for help. This is crazy....

This is just silly. I mean, back-seat driving by the women, and they're gonna get Barack Obama lost. What is it with Barack Obama caving to the women? I mean, now we know who rules his personal life. I guess Michelle is firmly in charge as well, if Barack Obama is going to cave that easy to three women in his administration over what to do with Libya....

It took the women to get him involved, and the women apparently went in without a clear plan. No shopping list.

(Added emphasis)

Listen to his comments during the March 21st broadcast of his radio show.

CNN's Erickson isn't the only man criticizing the women in Obama's administration. The Nation's Katha Pollitt critiqued the sexist rhetoric used by her fellow Nation blogger Robert Dreyfuss.

In a post originally titled "Obama's Women," Dreyfuss argued that Obama administration advisers Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton (to quote Pollitt) "are a 'troika,' a 'trio' who 'rode roughshod over the realists in the administration' (all men) and 'pushed Obama to war.'"

A number of the comments on Pollitt's piece made this basic argument: "Dreyfuss' post isn't evidence of widespread misogyny; he's just one misguided blogger who chose his words poorly." As much as all of us in the progressive sphere would love for that to be true -- for sexist language and attitudes to be outliers, rather than epidemic -- that just isn't the case. Pollitt was writing specifically about the prevalence of misogyny in left-leaning media outlets, but, of course, the problem is everywhere. And the women of the Obama Administration, in particular, have been frequent targets of that misogyny of late.

Feminist blogger Echidne finds this attitude to be prevalent.

[W]e now live in a post-feminist world? When honor killings exist? When the United States has never had a female president? When the Erick Ericksons of this world can proudly compare the US Secretary of State to bad women drivers? When work-life balance is just yet another women's issue? When I can watch a week of Japanese television about the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear-disaster combination and not see one female expert or politician interviewed, when all those rooms of power are full of only men? When the US Republican Party has declared an all-out war on women, and few notice this?....

Gender equality is not something that is taken seriously, in general. That's why Erickson can present his contempt of women as a joke and that's why we don't all riot when we are told that women should cut back on higher education so as to leave more space for men which they then could marry. We are uncomfortable with taking the topic seriously because we are still living the neolithic era of gender relationships.

Being politically correct is a figment of the past. Talking heads, political pundits, Faux News and now CNN are taking the Howard Stern reins of the political scene.

Response to Incorrect Video

YouTube frame grab Jimmy Wong

NPR has the story about Jimmy Wong Wants To Give Alexandra Wallace 'A Big Hug.'

If you haven't heard about the anti-Asian video rant that exploded on to the Web, only to be followed by one of the best video responses you'll ever imagine, then our headline probably doesn't mean anything to you.

Trust us, the story is well worth checking out, as Dave Pell did over at the All Tech Considered blog earlier this week.

Here's the short version:

UCLA student Alexandra Wallace posted a three-minute video about Asian students at her school. It was racist. It went viral. Then 24-year-old Jimmy Wong posted a 4-minute video song in which he used humor — barbed at some points, but not mean — to set Alexandra straight. His The Asians in the Library Song went viral.

Meanwhile, Alexandra started to get death threats. She dropped out of school last Friday.

Today, All Things Considered host Melissa Block talked with Jimmy. Has he heard from Alexandra?

"I really wish that I would just get a call one day from an L.A. area code ... and it would be her," he said. "I would love to meet her for coffee and give her a big hug."

"We all make mistakes," Jimmy continued. And "if all you hear ... are death threats [then] you're not going to change."

As he did with his video, Jimmy just showed us all something about how to act with grace and humor.

His conversation with Melissa is due on today's edition of ATC and the as-broadcast version will be posted hereclick here. later. To find an NPR station that broadcasts or streams the show,

And if you haven't seen Jimmy's video yet, WATCH:

Here is the original video by Alexandra Wallace. WATCH:

Gingrich Flip-Flop

Lewis Black on Donald Trump

Comedian Lewis Black was so overcome with joy when he heard Donald Trump had come out as a 'birther.' Black knows that this means only one thing, a run for the Presidency. Black said, "This is what I've been waiting for my whole life. A President who's not afraid to tell the truth about being a lying asshole."

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GOP Science Deniers - Déjà vu

An anti-science mania has taken over the GOP! Law Professor Robert Benson argues that "being vocally anti-science has become the defining mark of a current style of politics, an intentional ignorance that recalls the Scopes Monkey Trial."

The Second Coming of Science

You’ve got to go back to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 for a precedent to the anti-science mania that is currently sweeping the GOP. Then, the issue was teaching Darwin’s work on evolution in the schools. Today, the issue is global warming. Then, as now, large numbers of politicians tapped into the stratum of popular culture that simply rejects science as the basis for public or personal decisions. The chief prosecutor of high school teacher John Scopes, William Jennings Bryan, gloated that literal interpretation of the Bible trumped scientific knowledge. This resonated with large masses of ordinary folks, the ones H. L. Mencken and the liberal press were calling “yokels” and “morons.”

Turns out the yokels and morons won, at least for a generation. Scopes was found guilty of violating the Tennessee law that prohibited teaching evolution, and his conviction (though later overturned on a technicality) galvanized the anti-evolution movement for years. Politicians came pouring in. Scores of resolutions were introduced in state legislatures and school boards all over the country, setting back the teaching of evolution for decades until logic and reason and the scientific method gradually reasserted themselves in the culture.

The 1925 Anti-Science Climate of Today

Today, Republicans are falling over themselves in a rush to ridicule the science that shows our use of fossil fuels is producing greenhouse gases that are warming the planet to disastrous levels. These findings were confirmed even by the Bush administration before it left office, as well as by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and every other significant scientific academy around the world, not to mention the unpaid global work of hundreds of volunteer scientists for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Republicans Ceny Climate Change

But anti-scientists are undaunted by facts. More than half of the incoming Republican caucus denies the validity of climate change science. Some 74 percent of Republicans in the U.S. Senate now take that stance, as do 53 percent of GOP in the House. Here’s a sampler of what some of their leading illuminati have to say about it:

“I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything that human beings do. …” — Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin

“Nobody really knows the cause. The earth cools, the earth warms … It could be caused by carbon dioxide or methane. Maybe we should kill the cows to stop the methane, or stop breathing to stop the CO2 … Thousands of people die every year of cold, so if we had global warming it would save lives … We ought to look out for people. The earth can take care of itself.” — Rep. Duncan Hunter, California

“There was a report a couple of weeks ago that in fact you look at this last year, it was the warmest year in the last decade, I think was the numbers that came out. I don’t — I accept that. I do not say that it is man-made.”Rep. Fred Upton, Michigan —

“The greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people.” — Sen. James Inhofe, Oklahoma

Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois says we need not worry about the planet being destroyed because, citing chapter 8, verse 22 of the Book of Genesis, God promised Noah it wouldn’t happen again after the great flood.

Sen. John McCain co-authored a good global warming bill when running for president in 2008. But he did a 180-degree turnabout when running for re-election to Arizona’s Senate seat two years later, suddenly saying, “There’s great questions about it that need to be resolved.”

What Happened?

The Tea Party and its allies had made it unacceptable to the GOP base to be anywhere except pandering to the anti-science crowd.

None of this would have surprised historian Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer in 1964 for his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Starting with the colonies, Hofstadter shows how the vast underlying stratum of anti-elite, anti-reason, anti-science Americans has frequently erupted into political and cultural action. These are folks who never heard of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and do not experience a lot of reason, logic or the empirical method in their daily lives. They live by “common sense,” personal relationships and superstition. They have always been with us, and there are a lot of them.

Their outburst into today’s anti-science global warming mania would just be the latest chapter in Hofstadter’s book.

The Rise of Idiot America Today

You might think that the revolution of Internet-blogging-networking technology would work to spread sound scientific knowledge more broadly, but you would be wrong. The new technology spreads a cacophony of voices in which the pre-Enlightenment folks are not only equal but more numerous and dominant than the voices of reason.

Journalist Charles Pierce not long ago wrote an essay on “Idiot America,” followed by a book of that name, in which he argued that “the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.”

Think Tanks and Lobbyists

Moreover, the new technology is not working alone. You have the likes of oil interests such as Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil funding a phalanx of anti-science spokesmen, think tanks and lobbyists. They put their money into sowing doubt about the scientific consensus, as many of these same people did on tobacco, ozone and acid rain, playing on the fact that the way science works is to set up repeated challenges of the evidence by peers but ignoring that scientific consensuses do indeed exist — otherwise, we would not have made the progress we did on tobacco, ozone and acid rain.

Sheltered by the technological cacophony and the big money available, politicians feel unashamed to stand in front of the National Academy of Sciences and virtually every climate scientist in the world and utter irrational things like “God promised Noah …,” or “solar flares,” or “nobody really knows,” “not man-made” or “hoax.”

Creating Controversy

“[The deniers’] goal is to create the perception that fundamental aspects of climate science are controversial,” write several scientists connected to the National Academy. “They are not.”

“All their claims, all the studies cited and all the evidence they have presented has been thoroughly reviewed by climate scientists. There is no scientific basis for contesting the academy’s finding.”

We are in Tennessee again, 1925, in the grip of the anti-scientists and their politicians. We will lose a generation in dealing with greenhouse gases. Yet the science says we have only a few years.

Clarence Darrow, defense lawyer and William Bryan, prosecutor, during the Scopes Monkey Trial, circa 1925.

Going "Medieval on America!"

David Sirota brings to our attention the "6 Sadistic State Laws Conservatives Are Trying to Ram Through."

We’re talking about true legislative sadists looking to go medieval on America.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that states are the “laboratories of democracy.” Oft repeated over time, the aphorism has helped impart legitimacy to the rough and tumble of state lawmaking. We’ve heard “laboratory” and we’ve imagined staid scientists in white coats rigorously testing forward-thinking theories of societal advancement.

It’s certainly a reassuring picture—but there is a darker side of the metaphor. States are indeed laboratories. The problem is that today, those laboratories are increasingly run by mad scientists.

We’re not talking about the usual Dr. Frankensteins trying to bring alive new corporate giveaways through harebrained cuts to social services (though there are those, too). We’re talking about true legislative sadists looking to go medieval on America. Behold just six of the most telling examples:

1. The Anti-Life Pro-Life Act: After anti-abortion Republicans in Congress tried to narrow the legal definition of rape, Nebraska Republican state Sen. Mark Christensen took the assault on women’s rights one step further with a bill to legitimize the murder of abortion providers by classifying such homicides as “justified.”

2. The Let Them Eat Corporate Tax Cuts Act: As poverty rates and hunger have risen, so, too, have corporate profits. The Georgia Legislature’s response? Intensify the inequity with a bill to create a regressive sales tax on food that would then finance a brand new corporate tax cut.

3. The Demoralize the Workforce Act: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker didn’t just threaten to deploy the National Guard against state workers unless they accept big pay and pension cuts. Apparently, that was too Kent State and not enough Ludlow Massacre for him. So he pressed to statutorily bar those workers from ever again collectively bargaining.

4. The Child Labor Act: Missouri state Sen. Jane Cunningham’s proposal to eliminate child labor laws would allow corporations to employ any kid under 14 and would terminate restrictions on the number of hours that kid can be forced to work. The legislation is proof that when tea party ideologues refer to “the ’50s,” some of them aren’t referring to the 1950s—they are referring to the 1850s.

5. The Obesity and Deficit Encouragement Act: Colorado exemplifies America’s childhood obesity epidemic and its budget crisis. The state’s childhood obesity rate grew at the second-fastest rate in the country, and its $1.2 billion budget gap is threatening the state’s already underfinanced schools. Yet, despite the U.S. Department of Agriculture showing that higher soda taxes would drive down obesity, and despite such a levy raising much-needed public revenues, Colorado’s newly Republican House is pushing legislation to create a special budget-busting sales tax exemption exclusively for soda.

6. The Endorsing Your Own Demise Act: Between trying to legalize hunting with hand-thrown spears and pressing to eliminate education requirements for those seeking the office of state superintendent of schools, Montana’s Republican lawmakers are also considering legislation to officially endorse catastrophic global climate change. That’s right, in the face of a Harvard study showing that climate change could destroy Montana’s water supplies, agriculture industries and forests, state Rep. Joe Read’s bill would declare that “global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.”

If you don’t live in one of these states, it’s easy to tell yourself that these bills don’t affect you. But history suggests that what happens in one “laboratory” is quite often replicated in others—and ultimately, in the nation’s capital. That’s why we should all hope saner minds cut short these experiments before they get even more out of control.

Rachel Maddow puts this Republican strategy in context. WATCH:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

“If you aren't completely appalled then you haven't been paying attention!”

The Importance of Remembering the Triangle Fire

Via the Nation, Remembering the Triangle Fire.

It was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York until September 11, 2001. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better and safer working conditions for sweatshop workers in that industry.

Union Movement

The Triangle Fire occurred at a moment of radical challenge to the national structures of power. For more than a decade the union movement had been growing in size and strength, stretching from conservative craft unions in the American Federation of Labor to the radical Industrial Workers of the World, with emerging garment worker unions combining elements of both. During the two years before the fire, a wave of protests had swept through the garment factories of New York and other cities, beginning with the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” a general strike of young female makers of women’s blouses, including those employed by the Triangle Waist Company. The struggle of the “girl strikers” proved epic. For thirteen weeks the clothing companies used thugs and police to try to break the walkout, while the strikers won support from organized labor, socialists and women’s groups, including prominent figures like multimillionaire suffragist and socialite Alva Belmont. The strike ended in a partial victory, union settlements with some 300 companies (though not Triangle) and a general improvement of pay and conditions. The next year, a cloakmakers strike brought the “Protocols of Peace,” an innovative agreement with the employers that solidified the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and established a Joint Board of Sanitary Control to address the dangerous, unhealthy conditions that permeated the industry.

The garment strikes erupted from a world bubbling with the excitement of new ideas and movements—socialism, anarchism, women’s rights and industrial unionism...

Eliminate Abuses

Progressives and unionists sought to develop mechanisms to eliminate the worst abuses of capitalist society and give working people some say about their lives, on and off the job. Propped up by an expanding economy and a widespread belief in the idea of progress, a great optimism about the possibilities for change managed to survive the daily horrors of unrestrained capitalism.

The unionization and reform that followed Triangle provides a feel-good element to an otherwise bleak story and accounts for some of its telling and retelling. Yet the triumphs—as remarkable as they were—proved limited in scope and durability. Government protections and benefits excluded many of the most exploited workers, like agricultural and domestic labor. And for garment workers, their moment of economic stability lasted only a generation or so; during the post–World War II decades, clothing manufacturers began leaving unionized production centers like New York City for rural and Southern locations, where organized labor was weaker and costs lower, and then for foreign shores. As the industry reorganized, sub-minimum and sub-subsistence wages, child labor and dangerous working conditions re-emerged, both in low-end shops in New York and Los Angeles that employed (as did the Triangle Waist Company) almost exclusively immigrant labor and in the vast archipelago of factories abroad—in Haiti, Central America, China and Bangladesh—where young women toil to feed apparel to American retailers.

Deregulation

The re-emergence of sweated labor in the garment industry previewed a broader degradation of work that has occurred since the 1970s, in the face of deregulation and economic restructuring. Many industries, like meatpacking, went from providing stable, well-paid, unionized jobs to operating dangerous facilities with low pay, poor benefits and high turnover. Manufacturing increasingly left the country (one reason for the drop in occupational fatalities). No one should have been surprised when in 1991 twenty-five workers died in a fire at a poultry plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, where doors were locked to prevent theft, just as at Triangle, or when two years later a fire at the Kadar toy factory near Bangkok killed more workers than at Triangle, the result of a similar combination of flammable materials strewn about, crowded conditions, inadequate exits and a lack of fire safety preparation.

Today, as a cult of deregulation, a rabid ethos of unrestricted capitalism and the ability of firms to play workers in one country against those in another have seemingly sent us careening back in time toward a pre–New Deal regime of labor relations, there is less domestic opposition to sweated labor than 100 years ago (though low-paid workers overseas have been increasingly militant, evident in the fusillade of strikes in China). Periodic waves of moral outrage sweep across college campuses in antisweatshop campaigns, but as an organized force, labor has weakened to the point that the percentage of privately employed workers who belong to a union is now lower than in 1911.

Worker Rights

Given the enormous differences, politically, socially and culturally, between our time and the time of Triangle, it would be glib to draw specific lessons for today from the reformers who pulled some good from the ashes of the fire. But perhaps we can learn from their broad approach. The seemingly technical, incremental reforms that came in the aftermath of Triangle—requirements for sprinklers and fire drills and unlocked exit doors that open outward—were no more the result of modest thinking than the sweeping New Deal reforms like Social Security that came two decades later. Rather, they came out of a shared belief by socialists, unionists and even progressive presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson that the society they lived in was fundamentally disordered, with institutions, rules and customs inappropriate for the needs of the people. The world needed reinventing. But if the spirit of revolution infused the air, so did the practical draw of social engineering and respect, grounded in daily experience, for the importance of even small changes in the conditions of work.

Today, the labor movement and progressives fight one dispiriting battle after another to defend wages, benefits, social programs and government protections from further dismemberment. Even the thrilling mobilization of labor and its allies in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana has remained, so far, defensive—necessary, but not enough even to win incremental advances. We live in a society that simply does not function for an ever-growing part of the population. It is too late to rally around restoring the status quo ante, an impossible and not particularly attractive ideal. Rather, like the social forces fused together by the flames at Triangle, we need to imagine a new way of being, a new set of customs and laws designed for our world of commoditization, financialization and globalization, which has brought so much wealth and so much misery—some new combination of regulation and self-organization. Only by recapturing the spirit of the reformers of a century ago, that the world belongs to us, to make right as we see fit, can we achieve even modest improvements in our daily reality.

Via The Washington Post

A century ago this week, in Lower Manhattan, a young social worker named Frances Perkins was having tea at the Greenwich Village townhouse of her friend, the socialite Margaret Morgan Norrie. They were interrupted by clanging fire truck bells. Then they heard the anguished screams: “Don’t jump!”

They raced out of the townhouse and ran toward the commotion: a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, just off Washington Square. Flames and black smoke shot from the top floors, and as they watched in shock, young girls and women, some alone, some clutching hands, inched up to the windows’ ledges — and jumped to their deaths.

Perkins would describe the scene in lectures later: “They couldn’t hold on any longer. There was no place to go. The fire was between them and any means of exit. It’s that awful choice people talk of — what kind of choice to make?” She added: “I shall never forget the frozen horror that came across as we stood with our hands on our throats watching that horrible sight, knowing that there was no help.”

The sewing factory employed more than 500 people, who worked long hours for low wages, in wretched and unsanitary conditions. They turned out “shirtwaists” — blouses with puffed sleeves and tight bodices popularized by the “Gibson Girl.” The factory owners had locked the fire-escape doors. The seamstresses were trapped when fire raced through the sweatshop just before closing on March 25, 1911.

In less than 20 minutes, 146 people, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, were dead. The last six victims were officially identified just a few weeks ago. Triangle outraged the public and offered a grisly example of how powerless workers were without collective bargaining, because unionized garment workers received better pay and had safer conditions. And it galvanized Frances Perkins.

Twenty-two years later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her secretary of labor, the first woman to serve as a Cabinet secretary. During her 12-year tenure, she directed the formulation and implementation of the Social Security Act, one of the most important pieces of social legislation in our history. Among other extraordinary accomplishments, she helped create unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and the legislation that guarantees the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. She also established the department’s Labor Standards Bureau, a precursor to what is now the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Perkins clearly had the Triangle victims in mind as she weaved the nation’s social safety net.

Also an article in the Star-Ledger recounts the importance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, which killed 146 young women workers and led to major reform in American labor.

David Von Drehle is the author of the 2003 book “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America,” which recounts the history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and its aftermath. He spoke with Linda Ocasio of The Star-Ledger editorial board about the historic significance of the Triangle fire and its continuing hold on the American conscience.

Q. Why does the tragedy remain compelling?

A. It speaks to people, because so many strands of our history come together in the story: American labor history, immigrant history, women’s history, New York City history, Jewish history. It was a crucial milestone in the political awakening of Eleanor Roosevelt. She later joined the board of the Women’s Trade Union League.

And also for Frances Perkins, who was an eyewitness to the fire and was on the Factory Commission that led to reforms. She became the first female cabinet member during FDR’s presidency, secretary of labor, and took the reform agenda into the New Deal. Perkins was an eyewitness to the fire.

It was a catalytic moment in the Democratic Party, which became a reform rather than a conservative party. It’s also a meaningful story to young people. They really relate to the Triangle workers; so many who died were teenagers themselves. It’s a piece of history they can relate to.

Q. Is Triangle still relevant to today’s unions?

A. I think the story continues to be important to the union movement generally, and especially the needle trades and textile workers of Unite, the successor to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. Triangle speaks to the difficulties of the modern labor movement.

The issues of 1911, when 100 or more American workers were dying on the job every day — it was clear why workers would want to be part of a union. There were virtually no regulations on safety or hours to be worked, no minimum wage, health benefits or compensation for injury on the job. Workers were powerless, fired without cause.

The labor movement today is sort of in a struggle to make its value clear to workers and employers. But polling indicates there is still a strong philosophical belief that people ought to have the right to organize and bargain as a group. That sort of ground-level condition is still there, though not as strong as it used to be. A lot of people see teenagers locked in dangerous factories as different from schoolteachers arguing over merit pay and layoffs. People don’t equate them.

Q. How can unions still invoke Triangle to raise awareness of labor conditions?

A. One of the best things the current garment union does is call attention to work done for American consumers that doesn’t meet our standards for worker safety or compensation. Our ability to influence laws of Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia is limited, but it’s important to keep the issue in the public eye. It’s important in the United States.

The American worker in 1911 was at 50 times greater risk of losing his life on the job than workers are today. There’s been an improvement. Still, there are U.S. sweatshops. The story is how Triangle came to have such an influence, through organizing, voting, raising awareness, working within the system. That story is still relevant to solve the problems we have today.

Q. Have you been surprised by the attention to the Triangle fire anniversary?

A. The amount of energy that’s gone into commemorating the fire has only increased year by year, and this year, in New York and all over the country, it’s mind-boggling to me, given that this is a story almost completely forgotten in the 50 years after the fire. It was largely forgotten until “The Triangle Fire” by Leon Stein was published in 1961 at the 50th anniversary of the fire.

I couldn’t have done my book without his. My book was the first attempt to compile a list of survivors. Then Michael Hirsch took my list and ran with it. He put together the definitive list of fatalities. Another milestone in this was the Kheel Center at Cornell University, which became a repository for old garment union records and Stein’s papers.

Q. And the building where the fire took place still stands.

A. The building is still there (at Washington Place and Greene Street in the West Village). I lived for a time in the neighborhood and walked by the building all the time. It does add another compelling layer to the whole story, the fact that it’s right there in the center of everything, a block from Washington Square. It gives it a living quality a lot of history doesn’t have.