tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25102251523782922052024-03-07T21:18:54.982-08:00The Dinsdale ChroniclesDinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-59229766471018199362014-02-14T08:59:00.001-08:002014-02-14T08:59:17.490-08:00Ministry of Religious DiscriminationTime for another reply to <a href="http://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/2014/02/14/clergy/silent-war-religion/" target="_blank">a recent bit of nonsense</a> by <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Terry_Hurlbut" target="_blank">Terry Hurlbut</a> on his Conservative News and Views blog.<div>
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Actually, just about everything he writes on that site is nonsense, and there are better uses for time than trying to keep up, point-by-point, with the firehose of not-even-right posted there each week. This one touches on issues I've been discussing with family lately, so I thought it was worth commenting on here.</div>
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The post in question touches on the imaginary "Silent war on religion" mentioned in a speech by Bobby Jindal, and in particular, whether institutions have a right to sidestep legal requirements, or to deny employment or service to customers, based on the religious beliefs of the owners. I touched on this in <a href="http://thedinsdalechronicles.blogspot.com/2014/02/little-sisters-big-issues.html" target="_blank">a recent post about the Little Sisters of the Poor</a>, but there are some additional considerations in what Jindal said.</div>
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To recap my points from the Little Sisters case, a nation that values individual privacy, liberty and freedom of religion should not allow any business or group to deny others equal treatment under the law over a religious principle, when the setting is not a place of worship. </div>
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If you want to run a hospital or nursing home, even if that's part of your religious mission, you're engaged in a service that can be offered outside of the religious context. If I want to receive Catholic Communion, then I have to go to a Catholic church and follow their principles to participate in something only that religion can provide. If I need a nursing home for a family member, I can obtain that service without having to conform to a religious doctrine first. Since there's nothing inherently religious in the nature of operating a hospital or nursing home, there's no justification for using a sponsoring group's religious constraints to deny legally-required benefits to employees of different faiths when the benefit has nothing to do with job performance. The Little Sisters have no right to intrude on the privacy of their employees to cherry-pick birth control coverage as something to be denied when the law says otherwise. They don't get to deny spousal health-care coverage for couples only married at city hall, even if this is considered adultery in the Catholic faith - where's the line to be drawn then?</div>
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Jindal mentions also mentions the pending Hobby Lobby case, which is even weaker than the Little Sisters case because the owners are deeply religious, but not a religious organization. The same principle applies - if you're running a secular business, then you have to comply with civil laws regardless of your personal religious beliefs. Could a fundamentalist refuse to hire qualified women for open positions because their religious views consider a woman's place to be in the home raising children and serving the husband instead? Can spousal benefits be denied to anyone who didn't get married in an approved religious ceremony? Can I fire an employee (a "servant") for working a second job on the Sabbath when my business is closed, since that puts <u>me</u> in violation of the Fourth Commandment otherwise? Most reasonable people would say no to these examples, but that's exactly what the principles of Hurlbut and Jindal allow.</div>
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Then you have the cases of bakeries and wedding photographers who were found to be in violation of the law for refusing to accommodate customers when same-sex weddings were involved. Once again, if you run a place of public accommodation, then you have to accommodate everyone equally under the law when they are asking you to perform the same services you offer to others. If you're a devout Christian baker, then making a wedding cake for a divorced person remarrying for the second or third time, or a couple getting married outside the Church, is really making the couple an "adultery cake", per the direct policy of Jesus Christ. You don't see bakers or wedding photographers pre-screening customers for religious compliance over adultery, so picking same-sex marriage as the "red line" for refusal of service is hypocritical, arbitrary, and yes, discriminatory. It's not about religion, it's about prejudice.</div>
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A point made by Terry in his piece is that you can get around this separation of religion and business by focusing on the definition of "ministry", and he & Jindal cite a case where a religious school's dismissal of a teacher was upheld because teachers in a parochial school are considered agents of ministry. That argument only goes so far, though, no matter how much Terry would want to extend the concept. If my fast-food restaurant prints Bible verses on the cups and napkins to "spread the faith", does that make the restaurant a ministry, and by extension, the cashiers and fry cooks are now ministers because they help support the enterprise? I went to a parochial school for grades K-4, and church services & daily prayers were part of the experience because my parents chose that for me. That's a lot different than running a place of public accommodation where you are obliged to serve whoever walks in the door equally regardless of their faith.</div>
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The people signing the Declaration of Independence were making a statement, so there was no problem with them mentioning religion in the document as was the custom of the time. However, these same men were not to that far removed from times and places where the quality of life (or even your life itself) would be at risk depending on what colony you lived in and the religious practices of the people in power. When the time came to actually draft the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, they enshrined freedom of religion as an individual right, not a group or government right. That's why the one key mention of religion in the Constitution was to declare that there would be <u>no</u> religious test to hold Federal government office. An atheist could be president if the voters will it, and that's exactly what the Founders intended for a nation where individual freedoms matter.</div>
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DP</div>
DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-81578065982263367652014-02-10T11:16:00.000-08:002014-02-10T11:16:14.472-08:00Bluster and Bunnyholes, Part 2When I wrote the <a href="http://thedinsdalechronicles.blogspot.com/2013/06/bluster-and-bunnyholes-part-1.html" target="_blank">first post</a> in this theme, I said that Part 2 would focus on Terry Hurlbut and his <a href="http://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/" target="_blank">Conservative News and Views</a> blog. I'll get to that completely in the near future, but thought this would be a good time for a related sidebar.<br />
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Last week we had a much-hyped debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, with much written about it in the media and on any number of blogs & opinion sites. <br />
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Now Terry is the friend of a fellow creationist named Walt Brown, who developed something called the Hydroplate Theory to scientifically back up a strictly literal interpretation of the Genesis account. Dr. Brown has published his theories in book form, made them available <a href="http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/" target="_blank">online</a>, and weighs in now and then on Creationsist matters through interviews with Terry on CNaV.<br />
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Following last week's debate, Terry put out the predictable <a href="http://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/2014/02/06/creation/bill-nye-ken-ham-walt-brown-speaks/" target="_blank">review by Dr. Brown</a>, who criticized Ken Ham for not using enough Hydroplate "science" to convincingly win over the Nye crowd in the debate.<br />
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The interview led to the inevitable repeat of Dr. Brown's <a href="http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ426.html#wp3116043" target="_blank">written</a> and <a href="http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ429.html#wp4744439" target="_blank">phone-based</a> "Debate Challenges", and this is where we get back to Bluster and Bunnyholes.<br />
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Dr. Brown likes to portray himself as a scientific maverick with ideas that are so radical they will never be seriously considered by mainstream science and given a fair hearing. That's just a cop-out, and like so many others in Creationist circles, he's pretending that scientific truth can be debated into acceptance. He's been asked to submit his work to peer-reviewed journals and let the scientific community work as it does with all proposals, conventional or radical. He refuses to do this, and instead insists on debates, as if truth can be established by argument alone.<br />
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His debate proposals have the appearance of being sincere, conforming with good scientific discipline, and open to criticism, but when you get down to the specifics it's just a facade. The specific conditions are controlled by contract, and a third party gets to edit the record. <br />
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That's not how science works, and Dr. Brown knows it. He and Terry simply want to pretend that a process they control is the same thing as true independent review, and proudly declare that Dr. Brown's work must be solid because no one's dared to take him up on his challenge.<br />
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The answer to that point is simple. Anyone with the intelligence to discuss and properly evaluate scientific theories is smart enough to see when a game is being rigged, and wise enough not to take the bait. <br />
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The bluster is all on Dr. Brown's part - if he's willing to respond to written criticism in a strictly scientific debate format, how is that any different from the peer-review process, which allows him to thoroughly respond to any questions and challenges? The Bunnyhole is where he runs when he knows he won't fare well in a forum where he can't control the conversation or the record, directly or indirectly.<br />
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If I'm wrong, Dr. Brown, then please show me the submission of your work to a peer-reviewed journal in mainstream science and I'll apologize here right away.DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-74388055357115563642014-02-10T10:36:00.003-08:002014-02-10T17:02:45.518-08:00Little Sisters, Big IssuesThis post is in response to <a href="http://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/2014/01/08/news/little-sisters/" target="_blank">an essay</a> on the <a href="http://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/" target="_blank">Conservative News and Views</a> blog regarding the pending Supreme Court case with the Little Sisters of the Poor.<br />
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The short version is that RoseAnn Salanitri, like the Little Sisters of the Poor, believes that religious freedom in the USA includes the right of groups to claim that their religious principles justify overriding civil law, even when the group in question is not directly engaged in operating a place of worship. <br />
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The Little Sisters run a nursing home operation, and do not want the health care plans offered to their employees to include birth control coverage as required under the Affordable Care Act. What makes their case interesting is that they're declining the option to apply for a direct-coverage waiver for this requirement, because they consider that anything short of prohibiting birth control coverage for their employees, directly or indirectly, is the same as condoning birth control. <br />
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The thought that the government is somehow forcing the Little Sisters to endorse contraception by not allowing them to block it as a covered benefit, paid by others, is what they regard as an imposition on their religious freedom.<br />
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Let's recap that, because it's important. The Little Sisters believe that if you work for them in their nursing home, then they have the right as your employer to decide what is and isn't covered under your health insurance plan; it doesn't matter that the plan is run by a third party, it doesn't matter if there's no cost to them for the benefit to be covered, and it doesn't matter if the benefit is required by law. If they object to the benefit on religious grounds, that is reason enough and anything else is religious persecution.<br />
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Ms. Salinitri picks up on this and takes it to the extreme. If the Little Sisters don't prevail on this issue of "religious freedom", then we're heading down the slippery slope of Mt. Godwin to being hauled away to a concentration camp by anti-religious forces.<br />
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O-kayyy.<br />
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I wrote to Ms. Salinitri several weeks ago on this but never received a reply, so I'll put my thoughts out here for anyone else to reply to, including her.<br />
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Like RoseAnn, I see this as a clear issue of religious freedom, but from the exact opposite side in terms of whose religious freedom needs protection. The Bill of Rights was focused on defining and protecting those rights at the personal level, not the group level, and when we're talking about a secular activity like operating a place of public accommodation the rights of the individual come first.<br />
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If we were talking about running a church or whether the Little Sisters could prohibit what members of their order can and cannot do, that's their right because the context is how they worship. Running a nursing home is different - no matter how valuable the service is, it's still a secular service that can be provided by anyone regardless of faith. Even if the religious mission of a groups drives "why" they run a business like a nursing home or hospital, the businesses themselves are not places of worship and being a member of that faith is not a condition of employment. <br />
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If you want to be a cook, janitor or bookkeeper at their nursing home they cannot refuse employment based your faith, along with your race or gender. They aren't seeking to do that, but they are seeking to impose a faith-based denial of medical-plan benefits their business' employees are entitled to under U.S. law.<br />
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That approach is wrong for four reasons.<br />
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<li>First, it is an unwarranted intrusion between an employer and the privacy & personal medical decisions of the employees, which have no bearing on the execution of the jobs they are being hired for.</li>
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<li>Second, entities like the Little Sisters are not operating churches or similar places of worship, but are religious groups providing services that are essentially secular in nature. </li>
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<li>Third, the rules for when and how the tenets of a given faith should apply to medical coverage provisions are completely arbitrary, and can put the quality of medical care at risk. Can a nursing home run by Jehovah's Witnesses forbid coverage for blood transfusions? Can an employer specify whether you can give a hospital Do-Not-Resuscitate instructions? What about conditions like ectopic pregnancies, where religious influences restrict treatment options in some countries?</li>
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<li>Finally, there is a lack of consistency in the decision of the Little Sisters to object to the contraception provision of the ACA on religious grounds, while not making a similar issue of other behaviors even more clearly banned by their Catholic faith. Frankly, this is just cherry-picking a single issue while ignoring others that have been and still are condoned.</li>
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Let's look at these issues in more depth.<br />
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Regarding privacy, to what degree should an employer be allowed to pry into your personal life, and the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship, as a condition of employment? No one is forcing the Sisters themselves to use a given benefit, but they are passing judgment on the morals and lifestyles of their employees by assuming that the only medical use of contraception is for family planning. I have one friend who uses the pill to control uterine cysts, and another who uses an IUD to stabilize the frequency & severity of her menstrual cycle. Both of these women are happily married and have already had three children each, and are using these options for medical treatment rather than for family planning. Why should they be denied coverage for these medical treatments in a health care plan that other women would be covered for under the law, when the only objection the Little Sisters have is an assumption about lifestyle? Should an employee have to surrender her privacy to an employer to appeal denied coverage? <br />
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As for the second point, the Little Sisters are not running a church, and unlike their Order itself, they are not requiring one to be a devout, practicing Catholic as a condition for employment in their place of business. If you don't have to be a devout Catholic to be a cook, janitor or bookkeeper at their facility, how is it not an infringement on the staff's freedom of religion to have the employer deny them a legal, covered healthcare benefit based on a religion they don't practice, when the coverage has no bearing on job performance and comes at no added cost to the employer? This isn't about Hobby Lobby deciding that they won't be open on Sundays or that they won't sell Hanukkah decorations - those are legitimate business decisions related to the business itself. The policy comes from Catholic nuns employing others who may not even be Catholic. Denial of a legal benefit based on religion, when religion is not a condition of employment, is against the principles of the First Amendment. <br />
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As an extreme example you can even turn the premise around. Imagine a chain of well-run, high-quality nursing homes owned by a devout Islamic organization. They hire staff of all faiths, but as a condition of employment they require all hires to sign a contract agreeing to have any workplace disputes resolved under Sharia Law, rather than the secular court system. This fictional entity could claim that their faith requires this, and that forcing them to follow civil law before Sharia Law is a violation of their group's religious freedom. Pretty ridiculous, and I can only imagine how this would go over in the Bible Belt. I don't how the Little Sisters case is any different in principle, though.<br />
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The third point overlaps with the doctor-patient privacy issue. Quality medical care in a free country like ours should allow a physician to apply any legal option or treatment that's in the best interest of the patient, in accordance with the wishes of the patient. There are Catholic hospitals that require ectopic pregnancies to be treated by removing the fallopian tube rather than terminating the embryo and leaving the tube intact for future pregnancies. The former is considered acceptable and the latter considered abortion because of semantics; the pregnancy is lost in either case, and yet the "acceptable" option cuts the opportunities for future conception in half. If I'm employed in a secular job by Christian Scientists, should they be able to prohibit my medical plan from covering blood transfusions because condoning that would be a violation of their faith? Is the use of a do-not-resuscitate order a violation of pro-life values? <br />
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If we have to decide to let these personal choices be driven by person affected by them or the company employing that person, isn't the best default position the one that favors individual liberty?<br />
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The final point above ties to one of my strongest objections to the lawsuit. I can certainly understand the values driving the motion by the Little Sisters, since I was raised as a conservative Roman Catholic myself. However, why does the concern about compliance with faith and the refusal to condone sin stop with contraception coverage? <br />
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The most obvious example is in providing spousal coverage for their staff under the ACA. In the Catholic context, the only valid "spouse" is the partner from the first marriage performed in a Catholic ceremony. Anything else, including remarriage after civil divorce or someone only married at City Hall, would be considered adultery in the Catholic faith. If the Little Sisters extend spousal coverage in these cases that isn't just turning a blind eye to adultery, but extending material benefits of Catholic marriage to adulterers.<br />
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The whole premise of wanting to drop the contraceptive coverage requirement is based on the idea that the Little Sisters should not endorse immoral behavior by making it affordable for their secular employees. If any of the staff want to obtain contraception they are free to do so, but at their own cost without a subsidy. That's a very focused, hand-picked example of trying to punish outside-employment behavior, and it's discriminatory because it denies women a benefit over bias regardless of the reasons one might use these treatments. If the policy was consistently applied, then all claims for all treatments would have to be reviewed for circumstance to make sure that paying for them in part or full wasn't condoning behavior considered immoral, like:<br />
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<li>Covering the prescription to treat a STD, which is rewarding adultery if the patient is single or married-and-cheating.</li>
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<li>Covering lap-band surgery, which rewards gluttony.</li>
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<li>Covering the prenatal care and birth of a child to a couple married in city hall, or to a single unwed mother, which is rewarding that "adulterous" behavior.</li>
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<li>Covering the chemotherapy for a seriously-ill woman that in turn causes a miscarriage.</li>
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We wouldn't condone letting any employer scrutinize our private medical history and then pass subjective moral judgment on what is considered acceptable to cover, but allowing the Little Sisters to prevail in this case is a step in that direction. This doesn't lead to the vision of the Founding Founders - it actually leads 150 years further backwards in civil rights to Puritan Massachusetts. The problems of that era drove the thinking of men like Roger Williams and William Penn to define freedom of conscience as a critical right of the individual, not of the state, and not of an employer either.<br />
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If individual liberty, privacy and freedom matter, then we should not be saying "We are all Little Sisters", we should be saying "We are all William Penn", and put those words into action.<br />
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DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-11681716382232924202013-09-24T08:19:00.001-07:002013-09-24T08:19:15.434-07:00Misrepresentatives of the PeopleI was doing my daily reading-over-coffee ritual when this article in The Daily Beast caught my eye:<br />
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<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/24/how-legislators-view-their-constituents.html" target="_blank">How Legislators View Their Constituents</a></div>
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I've gotten fairly cynical about the motivations of politicians, even the few who I admire, so I had a feeling this was going to be one of those pieces that would push me further down that path.<br />
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Yep.<br />
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The author, Michael Tomasky, takes a look at a recent study examining how well legislators understand the degree to which the people they represent support certain policies. <br />
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Spoiler Alert - they don't understand where their constituents stand well at all, and Conservative legislators do it the worst.<br />
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Tomasky recaps this nicely (emphasis mine):<br />
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<i>"Last year, they asked more than 2,000 state legislative candidates from around the country what they thought the political leanings of their constituents were. Specifically, they asked the candidates to estimate what percentage of the voters in the districts where they were seeking office supported: same-sex marriage; a government-run universal health-care program; the abolition of all federal welfare programs. Then they matched those to existing polling.</i></div>
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<i>Answer? From the authors:</i></div>
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<i><span style="color: #333333;">When we compare what legislators believe their constituents want to their constituents’ actual views, we discover that politicians hold remarkably inaccurate perceptions. </span><b><span style="color: #cc0000;">Pick an American state legislator at random, and chances are that he or she will have massive misperceptions about district views on big-ticket issues, typically missing the mark by 15 percentage points.</span></b></i></div>
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<b><span style="color: #cc0000;"><i>What is more, the mistakes legislators make tend to fall in one direction, giving U.S. politics a rightward tilt compared to what most voters say they want."</i></span></b></div>
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<i>Not surprising, in a way. But startling. The typical conservative candidate in their survey overestimated the district's conservatism by 20 points. The typical liberal candidate overestimated the conservatism by around 5 percentage points."</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Thanks to gerrymandering, there are many districts across the country where the people sent to elected office skew more heavily to the left or the right than a random sample of a state or county. The point of this survey, though, is that even if you're a conservative legislator from a conservative-leaning district, you are likely overestimating how many of the people who elected you actually support certain conservative positions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is important, because much of the posturing over the current Federal budget showdown comes from people like Ted Cruz, who claim to be doing the work that the people who elected him are demanding. Some of them are, I'm sure, but this research shows that the perception they claim drives their actions misses reality by a wide mark.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I'm going to follow up to see if the detailed survey data is available for easy access, and if so I'll post links to it here. It would be pretty enlightening to be able to look up your legislators and see how well they understand the people they represent (or misrepresent).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's a link to <a href="http://www.democracyjournal.org/arguments/2013/09/politicians-think-american-voters-are-more-conservative-than-they-really-are.php" target="_blank">the research summary with some sample charts</a>.</span></div>
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DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-62295710601368736632013-08-28T08:11:00.000-07:002013-08-28T08:11:04.342-07:00Schlafly and Suppression<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just read <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/north-carolina-embraces-honest-elections/" target="_blank">this piece on voter ID laws</a> by Phyllis Schlafly. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;">Amazing that the same people who want to enable the purchase of guns with little or no obstacle "because it's a right" have no problem imposing barriers to vote "because it's common sense". These other nations that are cited for their voter-ID laws all have gun-control laws that would never fly in the USA, so this is a pretty sad instance of cherry-picking the restrictions you want while ignoring the ones you don't.</span><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;">It's also hypocritical and ridiculous that Schlafly thinks early voting is bad because votes might be cast before all the debates are over. Early voting benefits people who are locked in to their choice and want to exercise that choice as conveniently as possible. Would someone like her really have changed her mind and voted for Obama after seeing a particular debate or campaign ad? Since when did these these "small government" people decide that the government should now have a say in how much time you need to make a well-informed vote? </span><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;">The same goes for the "modest fees" and "minimal effort" to get official government photo ID's because others that were fine in the past are now disallowed. Suddenly the people who hate big government and regulations love the idea of government regulations getting between you and your constitutional right to vote. Need to get a government ID? Take a look at how limited the hours of access are for the offices you need to go to in order to get one - in many cases there are no after-hours or weekend access, so while you're free to get an ID, it would mean missing work or school to do so. Even if the fee is five dollars, or just one dollar, how is this not a poll tax in principle when voting was free before?</span><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;">And finally, notice how Schlafly nor anyone else behind these suppression laws can cite hard evidence showing that the rate of actual proven fraud justifies these laws. In Pennsylvania last year when their voter-ID laws were challenged in court, the challengers statistically proved that tens of thousands of previously-eligible voters would be blocked from voting in 2012 by these changes, while the state could not provide even one actual case of proven fraud as a counter-example.</span><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;">Anyone who says they believe in upholding Constitutional rights, but then supports the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of actual American voters to prevent hypothetical fraud that has never been shown to happen in a meaningful way, let alone put an election into doubt, is the worst type of hypocrite. They are the cowards who realize that most Americans do not actually share their vision, and instead of attracting votes with better ideas, their choice is to deny votes to their opposition. </span><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;">They may win small tactical battles in states where they control the local government, but time, demographics and exposure of their tactics will inevitably make this right because as Colin Powell and others have observed, these tactics will provoke a backlash. This was attempted in Florida last year, and instead of suppressing the opposition it drew out long lines of patriotic Americans willing to put up with hours of waiting and overcome the obstacles thrown in their path by the GOP. They remembered who did this to them, and in all the other states trying these tactics, the party responsible for them will be remembered too.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;" /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); color: #3f4549; line-height: 12.666666984558105px;">Schlafly and her ilk may think that a better America is one where conservatives are armed with guns free of restrictions while new restrictions disarm the votes of those who'd disagree with them. At the risk of being confused for Tea Partiers, I'd suggest that every person who had to overcome new obstacles to vote this year wear something with the Gadsden Flag or the words "Don't tread on me" on it, and use that vote to remove the people attacking their rights from office.</span>Ugh</span>DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-34507565870114500632013-08-09T07:53:00.001-07:002013-08-09T07:53:03.820-07:00When Conservative analysis discredits Conservative policy...<p dir=ltr>There's a pretty good read in Salon showing what happens when objective, Ayn Rand style analysis to manage the self-interest of the free market insurance industry debunks the Conservative policies towards climate change and gun proliferation.</p>
<p dir=ltr>http://www.salon.com/2013/08/09/conservative_ideology_no_longer_privately_insured/</p>
DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-69312676409169909382013-06-18T17:34:00.002-07:002013-06-18T17:34:44.013-07:00Bluster and Bunnyholes, Part 1Okay, been on another break to deal with life and all the things that go along with it. I'm a husband and father in a pretty atypical family situation, and that will always be where my priorities lie.<br />
<br />
I'll try to do a better job of keeping up with posting, starting with this one.<br />
<br />
I've noticed that there's a certain class of conservative that, like my cockapoo, barks and makes a lot of noise, but scurries away if there's an actual chance of a direct encounter. In the case of the dog, he'll run and hide behind the feet of a protector, empty his bladder, or both. In the case of some people I've observed, that's a pretty close comparison, too.<br />
<br />
A textbook example of this is Ken DeMyer, who goes by more than a few pseudonyms online, but does most of his standout blustering on Conservapedia where he goes by the name "Conservative". You can find a good recap of his antics <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Conservative" target="_blank">in this Rationalwiki article</a>, but the behavior I'm focusing on here is the "bark-and-bail" pattern. <br />
<br />
DeMyer is fond of putting out challenges to people that he can spin into victories in his own mind, and claiming that his adversaries are "hiding in their intellectual bunny holes" when he creates an impression that no one's willing to take him up.<br />
<br />
The reality is that people <u>are</u> taking him up on his challenges, and instead of backing up his bluster he jumps through hoops to weasel out and try to make any evidence of the exchanges disappear. There are too many examples of this to get into, but he's fallen into a predictable pattern:<br />
<br />
1) Issue challenges from a safe, online forum where he controls whether responses appear or not.<br />
2) When people reply, block the responses from ever appearing, and use wiki/blog tools to erase the record if people find other ways to call him out.<br />
3) Claim victory because "no one is willing to take on the XYZ challenge".<br />
4) Lather, rinse & repeat with any number of topics.<br />
<br />
The one other pattern that DeMyer relies on is that he now only issues challenges for people to take on conservatives <u>other</u> than himself. He used to propose debating people directly, but played the old game of throwing out absurd conditions that no sensible person would accept. This kept him safe from actually backing up his bluster, and he'd declare that his opposition were cringing in their bunny holes. Then a handful of people decided to call him out on this and actually meet his conditions, and faced with having to "walk the walk", DeMyer ran like hell instead.<br />
<br />
So the tactic that replaced this is simple, but pretty cowardly. He now challenges people to debate items of controversy with other people instead of himself, and only in rigged forums where he and his friends are in control of editing the outcome. That's sad enough, but he's taken this to a point where the people he's trying to drag in as his proxies are fed up with it, and want nothing to do with him.<br />
<br />
DeMyer is a middle-aged man, and way too old to be picking fights with strangers and then asking his friends to do the fighting for him. On the other hand, he's also such a ridiculous cartoon character that it's hard to take him seriously, and nobody really does. The shame is that people like Andrew Schlafly are perfectly content to treat people like DeMyer as useful idiots, letting him fling poo like a monkey all over his "Trustworthy Encyclopedia" as long as he attracts page views. <br />
<br />
But if Ken DeMyer is a cartoonish poo-flinger allowed to perform his antics to grab eyeballs, his "bark and bail" tactics would be shunned by anyone claiming to be a highly educated, respectable conservative Christian advocate, right?<br />
<br />
But more on Terry Hurlbut and his <a href="http://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/" target="_blank">Conservative News And Views</a> blog in the next part... <br />
<br />
<br />DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-27975826090080334782013-02-27T19:11:00.003-08:002013-02-27T19:11:42.323-08:00Sequester as a strategy - GOP, you're doing it wrong<br />
In case anyone isn't clear about what's going on with the current sequester posturing, let me summarize it for you.<br />
<br />
This is an attempt to use the same strategy applied by President Obama to deal with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, but in this case it's done with cynicism and a pathetic disregard for who gets hurt in the process. Unlike the tax cut expiration, the responsibility for what's about to happen is in the hands of the Congress that set this up a year ago, with most of the same players still in charge.<br />
<br />
The Bush tax cuts were passed over a decade ago with a specific time limit, so if they expired and rates reverted back to their Clinton-era levels (from a more prosperous time, ironically), it wouldn't even have been an Obama tax increase because this law wasn't passed on his watch. The original law was set up by a GOP Congress and enacted by a GOP president, and no amount of spin could change that fact.<br />
<br />
So with the expiration date approaching, the GOP was boxed in - they couldn't keep taxes from going up, and lacking the votes to override a veto, they could only propose a fix that Obama would sign off on. So they sucked it up and gave Obama a victory by letting rates rise for some at the higher end, and keeping the lower rates for the rest. Payback was promised, but the joke is that they did this to themselves.<br />
<br />
So back to the sequester. This was never meant to be a budget option, but rather a penalty so harsh and non-viable that it would motivate Congress to work out a plan to cut the deficit responsibly instead. Congress failed, and now the self-imposed punishment is about to hit the country.<br />
<br />
It's worth noting at this point that all the BS about this being "Obama's sequester" is just that - pure BS. The bill came from the GOP-led Congress, and not a single Democrat in the House voted for it - not one. Obama signed it because it was tied to raising our debt ceiling, and the fiscal hostage-taking the GOP was doing last year had already hurt our credit. Bottom line is that these were the terms the GOP wanted to impose to allow the US to pay the bills Congress had already run up, so this was their idea. <br />
<br />
Then a few weeks ago I finally understood the actual GOP strategy behind the sequester, and why they wanted it.<br />
<br />
In their thinking, this is an analog of the tax cuts expiring. Force deep, painful, unacceptable cuts across the board, and use the threat to try to get leverage. If the threats don't work, the cuts kick in, and then Congress can pick and choose which funding to restore from the new, lower baseline. That's how the tax battle was lost - they couldn't keep them from going up for everyone, so they could only restore the cuts the President wanted, with him in control. In the sequester scenario, Congress gets to propose which spending to restore, and Obama has to accept what they propose since since funding increases are in their control.<br />
<br />
So if you're a Tea Party supporter, this is great - it pushes the cuts so deep that something will have to be done to restore essential priorities, but they get to control what is considered "essential". Obama has no choice but to accept this, because not accepting anything would be worse. The rest of the GOP goes along with this so they can campaign as fiscal conservatives in the 2014 election cycle, rather than face primary challenges.<br />
<br />
Except this is a huge miscalculation, based on hubris and an ignorance of recent history.<br />
<br />
As I said before, Obama had no hand passing the original law that led to tax cuts expiring. He wouldn't be the bad guy if they went up, but he could be the good guy for keeping them down even if it was only for some.<br />
<br />
The GOP-led House forced the sequester to happen through posturing over a debt-ceiling increase - something the GOP-led Congress didn't do from 2001-06 when they approved multiple debt-ceiling increases for a GOP president. Boehner, McConnell and Cantor were part of that - same players, different policies. The sequester passed without Democratic votes in the House - they can't claim bipartisan support for it, and Obama signed it to prevent default, not to support the cuts. The GOP leaders who passed the sequester are the same ones today - they can't pass off accountability onto their predecessors - they own this, and they own the economic fallout to come.<br />
<br />
Some in the GOP have realized how they're not going to be able to pass the blame on this as the cuts kick in, and they're proposing a bill to give the President powers to re-allocate spending that the office has never had before. That's crossing into the domain of Congress, and it's only being proposed because they want Obama to bear the responsibility that the Constitution says is theirs - to deal with the pain and scorn of the people & interests who get hurt when a smaller pie has to be re-divided. These are the same GOP members of Congress complaining about "tyrants" using executive orders over access to guns, but here they are a few weeks later trying to hand off their Constitutional responsibilities to avoid blame for the damage they created. People are catching on to this, and the even the Tea Party is calling it out as a cynical dereliction of duty.<br />
<br />
So unlike the tax situation in late December you have GOP leaders in Congress who set up this imminent crisis themselves, and they're trying to make the short-term scrambling Obama's responsibility. Obama doesn't have to accept that responsibility and take on Congress' job, though. Instead, he's working on messaging, and getting out a narrative about what's going to lost as of March 1st, and who they should blame when it happens.<br />
<br />
That's the critical miscalculation by the GOP and the Tea Party. They learned nothing from Newt Gingrich losing the messaging war over the government shutdown in the 1990's, and they haven't even learned from Romney losing the high ground on messaging this past summer.<br />
<br />
If tax cuts expire, they take a bigger bite from incomes, but automatic furloughs don't happen and government services don't stop. Unlike the showdown in the 1990's, the sequester cuts military spending by a set amount as law, and it immediately begins to have an impact on national defense capability, naval deployments, overseas rotations, and more. It also affects Federal aid to the states, and in this aspect the GOP leaders in Congress have probably made their gravest tactical blunder. The states which take from from the Federal government in assistance than they give back are mostly red states, and they will feel the pain hard. Many of these states have GOP governors, some of whom have already agreed that signing onto Obamacare is more in their interest than not. They have to live with the damage to their state budgets when the cuts kick in, and in states with a heavy dependency on the military for jobs and business, doubly so. These people will scream the loudest, because it's their own party doing this to them.<br />
<br />
Let me recap this in two sentences. The GOP leaders in Congress and the Tea Party minority prodding them may have set the sequester into motion thinking that it would create a new, low baseline to rebuild the national budget using their priorities, with Obama powerless to stop them. They've miscalculated badly, though, because the cuts will hurt grass-roots GOP interests and GOP-led state governments more than most, and all Obama has to do is win the messaging war over whose fault this is while the GOP consumes itself in a self-inflicted civil war.<br />
<br />
<br />
DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-31738256427263288172013-02-21T20:58:00.004-08:002013-02-21T20:58:38.763-08:00Stop pretending that assault weapons are anything but toys...I'm working on a longer post about the gun control debate, and wanted to get this out of my system up front.<br />
<br />
I was curious to see how many incidents I could find where someone used an assault weapon to defend their home or person against an actual attack. My search wasn't exactly scientific, but I could only find three items.<br />
<br />
This country has a lot of people who own a lot of assault rifles, but only three documented incidents where they were used for real life self-defense? I'm sure I missed a few, but the total number's probably going to stay small for two key reasons:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>These are large, bulky weapons - not something you'd carry around outside every day or leave in a nightstand drawer in case intruders break into your home. Handguns are used more because they're just more practical.</li>
<li>Assault weapons are more dangerous to innocent bystanders. You might be tempted to fire a shotgun in your house in self-defense, but unload a stream of bullets from a Bushmaster? Plaster walls won't be much protection for your family members on the other side. The same goes for use in public - in war it's okay to spray bullets at the enemy indiscriminately, but in a crowded public setting it's a disaster.</li>
</ul>
<div>
These can be used for hunting, of course, but let's be honest - using an assault weapon to take out an animal is about as "sporting" as fishing using a stick of dynamite dropped in the water.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The reality as I see it is pretty simple - assault weapons are desired because they are big, bad, powerful and a rush to shoot. I have never fired one myself, but I'll take the work of others on that. So is it really the need for a legitimate self-defense option that makes this such a fighting-point for gun advocates, or is it the idea that a major adrenaline rush might be taken away that angers them?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What I don't get is why we can't find a way to give people legal access to shoot these guns in a controlled setting, while prohibiting their possession or use outside of that setting? It seems pretty simple - shooting ranges or gun clubs can apply for a permit to keep one or more assault rifles on premises for target shooting only, and these registered weapons can never leave the premises intact. Customers or members can go to the range and shoot them to their hearts' content at targets, and the guns are locked up when not in use. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So people with an assault-weapon itch that has to be scratched can have their outlet. The public can have a ban on them everywhere else to get them off the streets. Over time, the remaining number in circulation starts to go down, and steep penalties for illegal possession drive that further.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This bypasses the whole "What if I need military firepower to resist the tyrannical government if it ever comes down to that?" line of argument, and that's on purpose. That whole premise is a bunch of BS - the military is made up of citizens like us, and to assume that an all-volunteer army of men and women dedicating to serving on behalf of family, friends and country could be convinced to betray them all - yeah, real likely.</div>
DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-19372618988546900192012-11-05T19:29:00.000-08:002012-11-06T08:49:35.005-08:00If you can't beat 'em, cheat 'em...<div><p>There's winning, and there's winning at any cost, including integrity and a respect for the rights of your fellow citizens.</p>
<p>You might be surprised that there is no actual "right to vote" in the U.S. Constitution.  The ability of a person to cast a vote in this country is regarded as a core value equal to freedom or religion, freedom of speech, etc., but it's not that simple in practice.  Only a handful of items in the Constitutional relate to your actual right to vote.</p>
<p>Several Amendments to the Constitution prohibit the denial of voting based on race, gender, or the use of poll taxes.  However, the 10th Amendment states that any power not given to the Federal government in the Constitution belongs to the states.</p>
<p>This last point is the key - as long as a state is not directly violating the Constitution, they have a lot of latitude in how they manage your ability to vote. <br>
Voting locations & hours, paper versus touchscreen, receipt or no receipt, who handles the machines and the voting records - all up to the states. This also includes setting the terms for absentee voting, early voting and provisional voting. </p>
<p>The other key issue, which has become a battleground in courts, is the ability to states to define guidelines for what ID one must present in order to vote.</p>
<p>There are several states where the outcome is a toss-up, and in the ones with Republicans in control at the state level, all sorts of games are being played to steer the outcome Republican.</p>
<p>There isn't just one state or one issue to talk about, so see for yourself. Go to news.google.com and search on "voter access issues" (I'll make this a link later).</p>
<p>These are cynical games being played with your rights by people who can't offer candidates who can win cleanly and convincingly on merit.</p>
<p>Remember who's behind this, and vote accordingly when the time comes to keep them or replace them.</p>
</div>DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-12705631598437365742012-11-04T21:16:00.002-08:002012-11-11T07:43:23.936-08:00Truth as another storm-related casualtyAs the recovery from Sandy began to wear on the nerves of the most affected in NJ, a story started making the rounds on the Fox News / Brietbart circuit saying that power-repair crews from Alabama were being turned away for not being union members or agreeing to affiliate with the unions up here.<br />
<br />
Just in time for the upcoming election, this fired up a wave of resentment online for unions and everything union-related. Of course, a story like this would be salt in the wounds for the thousands sitting in the cold and dark, wondering if these crews would have made the difference between the lights being off and on for them. Journalists would make sure to fact-check a story like this to make sure that people weren't outraged without reason, and to prevent an unjustified backlash against the crews already at work restoring power.<br />
<br />
But then I said this story was being pushed by Fox News, didn't I?<br />
<br />
As you can guess by now, the reality is that no crews were turned away by anyone in NJ, and that the power utilities and unions here welcome any and all assistance in a crisis without preconditions. <br />
<br />
The incident at the heart of this was a crew from Alabama being given paperwork that led them to believe they had to join or declare affinity with the electrical workers union in NJ before being allowed to help on site. The crew from Decatur traveled as far as Virginia before stopping to get clarification on the documents, and whether they would be allowed to work if they did not agree to union membership/affiliation. During that time other crews had responded at their intended destination in NJ, so they attempted to look for work in other areas. After being stalled in Virginia most of the day Thursday, they decided to return home. All that time, other crews from Alabama and utilities from across the country were showing up in the storm-damaged areas and helping to restore power.<br />
<br />
Late Friday at a press conference, a representative of the Decatur crew's company said the documents triggering the confusion had actually come from Electric Cities of Alabama, a coalition of the state's municipally owned utilities.<br />
<br />
To recap:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>This was a story about one crew having logistical problems, not a blanket policy affecting all helpers. </li>
<li>They never made it to NJ, and were never turned away by anyone. </li>
<li>The papers leading to the confusion came from other electric utilities in Alabama, not unions in NJ. </li>
</ul>
<br />
<div>
A representative of the utility held a press conference to confirm all of these points, and the video is <a href="http://www.waff.com/story/19981857/confusion-causes-utility-crew-to-return-from-recovery-effort">here</a> for all to see. <br />
<br />
Even Fox put out a quiet correction stating that other Alabama crews are at work in in New Jersey, but the original story was still being being spread.<br />
<br />
The reality is that there have been crews from all over, union AND non-union, working hard around the clock to get everyone back. This is difficult, often dangerous work being done by professionals - they deserve our thanks, and not to be held up as scapegoats for rumor-based political attacks.<br />
<br />
MediaMatters has <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/11/02/utility-companies-deny-right-wing-media-claims/191101">a good recap</a> a good recap of the story behind the story, but if you don't consider them credible, take a look at <a href="http://www.waff.com/story/19981857/confusion-causes-utility-crew-to-return-from-recovery-effort">the WAFF story</a>, straight from Alabama.</div>
DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-57427375270326891282012-11-04T11:30:00.000-08:002012-11-04T11:30:28.370-08:00The bar is set really low...I had posted <a href="http://thedinsdalechronicles.blogspot.com/2012/10/why-is-anyone-actually-for-mitt-romney.html" target="_blank">an entry</a> the other week asking why people would vote for Mitt Romney - not why they didn't want to re-elect President Obama, but why they considered Romney to be the better option.<br />
<br />
Only one person responded, and his case made for Romney was basically that Romney appeared presidential in the last debate. No actual policy specifics or comparisons. Just a gut impression.<br />
<br />
Then I came across <a href="http://blog.newleftmedia.com/post/34776839834/ohio-romney-rally" target="_blank">this video</a> yesterday, in which an interviewer asks supporters at a recent Romney rally in Ohio what they like about him. No leading questions, no "gotcha" tricks. Just an open mike and some pretty scary ignorance on display.<br />
<br />
"Romney has a plan to fix the economy". Except that the person has no idea what "the plan" is, so how does he even believe that there is a plan, or why he's in favor of it?<br />
<br />
"He's a Muslim. And an atheist." That's an either-or proposition, lady.<br />
<br />
Take a few minutes, watch the video, and be sobered that these people in a critical swing state are motivated voters, even though they are proving that they have no actual idea what they are voting for besides a name and the fact that the name's not "Obama".<br />
<br />
It's also worth noting that these are the ideal target voters for politicians unable to run on substance, and that these politicians are overwhelmingly conservative. It also explains why GOP politicians in conservative states like Texas <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html" target="_blank">are trying to eliminate critical thinking skills from their public school curriculum</a>. <br />
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But hey, if you feel that the people in the video are cherry-picked examples of ignorance, and that there are meaningful, fact-based reasons to support Romney as the best choice this Tuesday, please comment below and explain why.DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-73647633236202224792012-10-29T07:57:00.002-07:002012-10-29T07:58:15.415-07:00Same disaster, different values...<br />
Two items from the news this morning to think about next Tuesday. In New Jersey, Chris Christie was praising President Obama for his fast, proactive support with Federal assistance for the states being affected.<br />
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Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has gone curiously silent about the fact that just over a year ago in the GOP debates, he pledged to dismantle FEMA, leave disaster relief to the states with block grants, and that disaster response itself should be privatized. His words, not anyone else's.<br />
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So when next Tuesday rolls around, remember which candidate delivered the up-front support that earned praise from his opponents, and which one believes that it's better to have for-profit companies enrich themselves through your misfortune.<br />
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Stay safe everyone.<br />
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http://www.politicususa.com/frankenstorm-arrives-romney-ryan-silent-plan-cut-fema-disaster-relief.htmlDinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-82831848034890174732012-10-25T22:34:00.002-07:002012-10-26T08:01:16.102-07:00A Trifecta of Wrong...<div>So abortion as a campaign issue is back in the news, with the debate comments of Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock lighting up the boards of the Democratic attack and Republican damage control machines.<br />
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Much has been written and broadcast since then, and it amazes me how so many people you would otherwise consider sensible find ways to do mental gymnastics and justify supporting Mourdock his allies over this.<br />
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Time to cut to the chase. There is a lot of wrong in what's going on - three distinct levels of wrong - a trifecta of wrong, in fact.<br />
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It's wrong for politicians to base policies that impact the entire public on their personal interpretation of a religion. Faith informs values, and values inform policies, but the public is a diverse body representing many faiths and perspectives. There's a disturbing number of politicians and political aspirants who see the privilege of holding office as a platform to serve their faith first, and the constituents second. When you hear candidates talk about "returning to our roots as a Christian nation", or policy needing to be "grounded in Biblical values", watch out. These are people who see their own personal future in the afterlife being at stake if they don't use their position to advance the faith. If it's a choice between their eternal fate or the interests & priorities of anyone else, it's not even a contest. Even worse, too many of these people are horribly misinformed about biology, and in their religious zeal they have no motivation to learn about facts that may conflict with their faith-based certainty.<br />
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It's wrong for people to frame the idea of being "pro life" in terms of a fertilized egg having full Constitutional rights. A girl or woman has rights, too, but in the views of Richard Mourdock or Paul Ryan, they lose some fundamental rights when they become pregnant. Basically, they lose the right to control their own bodies, becoming little more than an incubator until the developing fetus can survive on its own. You can't authentically be "pro life" when your position makes the health and well-being of some people less important than others. In the case of rape victims, no one but the victim can truly understand what her experience is like. Taking away her right to choose what happens with her body isn't treating a zygote like a person, it's taking a victim and then making her even more of one by declaring her less than a person. The pro-life crowd doesn't concern itself with making sure the woman has adequate mental and physical health care - that's all on her. If the pregnancy doesn't result in a healthy birth, then the woman is under a cloud of suspicion for potentially doing something deliberate to cause that. You're just an incubator existing for the sake of someone else for 9 months, and once that child is born, truly alive by even a pro-choice view, then the final irony is that the pro-life crowd doesn't concern itself with what happens to that life.<br />
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The third great wrong is the ease with which politicians barter away the rights of women for political expediency. "His comments were wrong, but he sincerely apologized so we can still support him". <br />
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Please. <br />
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Akin, Mourdock and the others like them were caught expressing what they truly believe, forgetting to apply the filter of political correctness first. I believe Mourdock is sincere when he says that rape is a horrible crime and that it is the life expressed as a pregnancy that is a gift from God. None of that changes the fact that his policy would be to deny rape victims the choice of control over their bodies once they are pregnant - the rapist has more control over his body for the next nine months than the victim has over hers. <br />
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Then you have Mitt Romney distancing himself from the comments, but refusing to withdraw his endorsement of Mourdock or even ask that the Mourdock ads featuring that endorsement be pulled. That's because at this point they don't want to forfeit a potential GOP senate seat, and would rather have him and his reprehensible views than work with a pro-life Democrat instead. This is selling out women to be less than full citizens for political advantage, and they're hoping to just survive until election day without things getting worse.<br />
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Three different levels of wrong, and a fourth, really, when you consider that the first three aren't enough to make more women stop voting for the GOP this year.DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-54595396531453028402012-10-22T21:05:00.000-07:002012-10-23T07:38:12.505-07:00Why is anyone actually FOR Mitt Romney?<div>Politics time. Hang in there, only a few more weeks to go.<br />
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The title is something I've been asking Romney supporters for the past few months, and in all honesty I've yet to get a good answer. Not even "wow, you've convinced me!" good, but answers that aren't simply regurgitated Obama-bashing.<br />
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So here's the question, one more time - instead of explaining why you don't want Obama, explain why someone should want to vote <u>for</u> Romney.<br />
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I'd want an election that's a race between two choices that are so good I'd have a hard time deciding. Who wouldn't? We don't have that this year, no matter how much you may dislike Obama.<br />
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In Mitt Romney, you have a man who was raised in a privileged, elite bubble, in a world where the risks and rules that impact 99% of us never applied to him. He was raised to be ambitious, and that's not a bad quality for anyone to possess, but he never picked up the humility and ability to couple that ambition with a genuine concern for the welfare of others that his father, George Romney, possessed and was admired for.<br />
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The younger Romney got into college because of his father's connections and when he graduated he landed at Bain through connections as well. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing earned by merit, either. <br />
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Then at Bain, Romney was asked to take charge of a new subdivision, Bain Capital, which was only accepted after guarantees that his position and compensation would not be at risk regardless of the outcome. That's a safety net your average entrepreneur doesn't have, and he never had to understand what it meant to have his livelihood on the line. <br />
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Then the new unit was failing, and if he treated it the way he wanted to treat GM and Chrysler three years ago, he'd have let the company go bankrupt. That would have been a severe personal and professional setback to someone with his ambition, so he orchestrated a bailout through the FDIC. The company didn't recover at that point, and the proper free-market response would have been to liquidate the remaining $10 million in bailout funds to the creditors and move on. His job was still safe, but his reputation was not, so Romney gave out the millions in remaining cash in bonuses to his management team. There was nothing left for the creditors, so they had no choice but to extend more credit and hope to earn it back over time. This move saved Bain Capital, and over time it made Romney a virtual quarter-billionaire. However, his accounting gimmicks cost the U.S. taxpayers $10 million in bailout financing that was never recovered. His gain came at our loss, and it makes him all the more a hypocrite for attacking bailouts, stimulus spending, or the U.S. government losing money invested in startups like Solyndra.<br />
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This isn't opinion or a spin job from the media. The source is in the SEC filings from Bain itself, and Romney doesn't deny it - he just doesn't talk about it, for obvious reasons.<br />
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Romney is also highly astute at working the rules of finance and taxation to get every advantage that he can to maximize his wealth. There's nothing wrong with that either, but his carried interest deals and creative use of offshore & foreign accounts represent a man used to a world where there are different rules if you have enough wealth to leverage them. He knows exactly how far he pushed the edge with these games, which is why he would take any criticism, even from within the GOP, rather than disclose his tax returns as his father did.<br />
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It doesn't matter what the income tax rate is for the 1% when most of the 1% get their annual revenues through capital gains and carried interest, and not "income" in the traditional sense. In fact, under the Romney/Ryan plan, Romney would be paying a rate closer to 2%. He'll say that's fair since corporate taxes are already paid, but corporate taxes are paid after the same games, which is why a company like GE can earn billions and pay zero annual income tax. This is not about whether any of this is legal - it is - but it represents different rules for the wealthy versus the middle class, and that Romney seeks to maintain that uneven playing field.<br />
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So Romney moves on from Bain to "save" the Salt Lake Olympics, a high point on his resume. Except, he did it primarily by registering as a lobbyist, and working business connections and politicians to get over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding. "Mission accomplished", but when Romney says he knows fiscal policy in part because he rescued the Olympics and balanced that budget, he leaves out that he "balanced it" with a billion dollars of your money that wasn't repaid.<br />
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Then he decides that on the heels of his Olympic success it's time to get into politics while his brand is strong. He runs for Senate against Ted Kennedy in the blue state of Massachusetts, and morphs from a conservative to a pro-choice centrist, and loses. He runs for governor and wins, claiming that he can lead because he drove progress as a Republican in a state where 87% of the legislature was Democratic. Except that he issued 844 vetoes, and 707 of those were overridden by the Democrats. Not exactly the record a bipartisan uniter would be promoting.<br />
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Romney had aspirations beyond the state level, so he was "one and done" before he'd have to much of a record to defend, and just to be safe, allowed his senior staff to purchase their government computers and erase their hard drives. The data on those drives were the property of the citizens, not Romney, but he chose to be contemptuous of that ownership and leave as little a record as possible to be scrutinized.<br />
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So now the man runs for the presidency. In the 2008 campaign he was taken out fairly early in favor of McCain. He retooled and repackaged, and came back in 2011 positioning himself as a lifelong conservative in a primary driven by pandering to the Tea Party. This time around he had the good fortune to be running against one of the weakest fields in decades, and even with the Bachmann, Perry and Herman Cain to run against, he could never get more than 25% of the vote in any of the early races. He may have survived by attrition and looking like the most reasonable choice (and he was by comparison), but the point needs to be restated - 3 out of 4 Republican voters wanted someone else in almost every early primary.<br />
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But he hung in, let the weakest competition implode on their own, and obliterated the last couple with attack ads. Romney didn't win the nomination because the GOP wanted him - he won because they couldn't produce a candidate who wasn't worse.<br />
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The campaign moves ahead, and we discover that his argument is that you have to vote for him if you don't want Obama, and since you shouldn't want Obama, you should vote for him. The thinking must have been that he would never have to specifically define what a vote for Romney would be <b><i>for</i></b>, as long as you were content with voting for what it would be <b><i>against</i></b>. <br />
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But voters aren't that stupid, and after Bush 43 even the Republicans want to know what they'd be getting with a Romney presidency. So what do you get?<br />
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His tax plan doesn't pass the math test, and you can ignore the "six studies that support them" that Romney pulls out in defense. Most of those are blog posts or opinion pieces, one was paid for by his campaign, and <u>all</u> of them undermine the Romney assertion that the middle class wouldn't get hit in one way or another. You can't get something for nothing, and the numbers don't add up even in the most optimistic scenarios. When you ask him to get specific, he says he'll sit down with Congress to define the specifics together. That's just another way of saying "I don't have specifics, and I'm punting to Congress so when they don't either, it won't be on me". <br />
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When you ask Paul Ryan, he says "I don't want to bore you with the details" or "We don't have the time". We have the time and the patience for something this important, Mr. Ryan. All you have to do is put the details on your website and we'll do the reading from there. But...nothing. There is no plan that adds up, and that's why you're not going to see the details.<br />
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His pledge during the Tea Party Primaries was to "Repeal Obamacare on day one", but most Americans like certain provisions in Obamacare, like putting dependents up to age 26 on their parent's plans, keeping insurance companies from denying pre-existing conditions, and so on. So the pledge morphed into "Repeal and replace Obamacare", and when pressed for details, he'd leave in many of the perks, but none of the mechanisms to pay for them. You don't get something for nothing, and the businessman isn't presenting a business case with workable numbers.<br />
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He wants to "protect and preserve Medicare", but behind those words is the "how". He's for the Ryan plan to give out vouchers - it'll improve the control of costs, but that's because when your costs go over your voucher, it's all on you, unlike today. In a Romney/Ryan world you can get sick only up to a certain cost point, and then you can ask for charity or go to the ER.<br />
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On social issues he stays quiet, or plays word games when forced to take a stand. He "wouldn't propose any legislation restricting abortion", but he hasn't promised not to sign any bills that are proposed by others (wink). He won't reverse Obama's proto-DREAM act for immigrant children, but still believes in self-deportation - making life so miserable that you'd have to leave, even when your kids are born here and know no other life. He'd defund Planned Parenthood even though no government money pays for abortions due to the Hyde Amendment, and 97% of the health care services they provide are related to wellness, screening and family planning that have nothing to do with abortion.<br />
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Romney was against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act when it was proposed, and promising not to reverse it is not the same as supporting it when it wasn't yet the law. He wouldn't have needed "binders full of women" to be presented to him if his transition team included women in the first place, and the number of women in senior roles actually went down over his term as governor - not up, not even - down.<br />
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Foreign policy? Romney couldn't go on a friendly tour through Europe & Israel this summer without provoking one embarrassment in each of the countries he visited. In Israel his pandering was so shameless it delighted Netanyahu, but gave sensible people pause. America should stand by its close allies, but it should never be led by them, and there he was telling another nation that they could set our policy for us.<br />
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I can go on but I think I've said enough. If anyone asks I'll be glad to provide unbiased references for any of the points above. This isn't spin, it's a collection of facts.<br />
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If you don't like Obama that's fine - I wish he did a better job too, but I also think he did a good job given the circumstances and a childishly hostile Congress. On the other hand, the country is objectively in better shape now than it was four years ago. "Better" doesn't mean that things are good, but they are not as bad as they were, and they continue to improve, not worsen.<br />
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Romney has not offered specific policies that can be independently assessed and shown to make more sense than Obama's. He's making bold promises to make things much better than they are now, but refuses to tell you how he'd make them happen in any way that's realistic. Any independent analysis of the details he does share shows that he's not just going back to the approaches of George W. Bush, but in some ways is doubling down on them.<br />
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We saw how that worked out from 2001-2004, and gave him an extra four years that did nothing but make things worse. There is no reason for any sane, sensible, thinking person to take what is known about the Romney approach and not see that this is going backwards to what failed. <br />
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So I'll end this with a challenge. Show me, educate me, enlighten me, without empty rhetoric and Fox News sound bites, that there is something objectively better in a Romney/Ryan administration than we'd have by staying with the progress we've experienced for real since 2009. I'm ready and waiting.<br /></div>DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2510225152378292205.post-74593048762322121172010-04-05T19:13:00.000-07:002012-10-22T08:53:11.912-07:00Well, it's a start anyway<div><p>Happy Monday, everyone.</p>
<p>I post online in various places using the name DinsdaleP, which I liked because it had a nice feel to it, and was easy to recognize. </p>
<p>There are probably a few other DinsdaleP's floating around on blogs, wikis or message boards, so to clarify, I'm the one folks know from Conservapedia, Rationalwiki & Conservative News and Views.</p>
<p>I started posting on conservative sites as a counter-voice, not to be a crank, but to offer a thoughtful rebuttal to some of the more outrageous B.S. that gets posted on them as "insights". </p>
<p>Sooner or later this gets me booted off because the people behind them don't want a dialogue, and they definitely don't want to justify themselves in a rational way- they want echo chambers. If you aren't telling them how right they are, you aren't welcome.</p>
<p>So I decided a while back that instead of expecting them to give equal time to the other side, I just needed to start posting in my own space, free from the impact of their "delete" buttons.</p>
<p>That was 2010, and I'm just getting back to this now. One thing I'll give these guys credit for is that they apparently have a LOT of free time on their hands. Me, not so much, but I'll try again. <br>
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</div>DinsdalePhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01160722186799189032noreply@blogger.com2