Category Archives: Politics

From the New York Times, Republican Woes Lead to Feuding by Conservatives By David D. Kirkpatrick:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 — Tax-cutters are calling evangelicals bullies. Christian conservatives say Republicans in Congress have let them down. Hawks say President Bush is bungling the war in Iraq. And many conservatives blame Representative Mark Foley’s sexual messages to teenage pages.

I guess it is possible they could all be right, right?

If someone gave me an old piano and it did not work and I had to hire someone to haul it off, I would call that paying someone to haul something off, not selling a piano at a loss. But nobody ever gave me stock options. How much would you expect to pay someone to haul off some old stock options that somebody gave you? Reported on Yahoo news, AP: Allen didn’t disclose stock options by Sharon Theimer and Bob Lewis, AP writers:

Allen’s office said he sold his Xybernaut stock at a loss and has not cashed in his Commonwealth options because they cost more than the stock is now worth. The senator also said he saw no conflict going to work for companies shortly after assisting them as governor.

Then there is the one that did work:

In interviews, Allen and his staff sought to play down his corporate dealings, saying they were a good learning experience but did not lead to extraordinary riches — except for a quarter-million-dollar windfall from Com-Net Ericsson stock.

I hear that Allen said this was really not a lot of money, but I would like to point out that it is just over 23 times the annual income of a person working at minimum wage and about 14 times the annual income for a family of 4 living close to the top edge of the poverty level in Virginia. Lets see, that is 56 people for a year– housing, food, clothing, transportation, school supplies, health insurance, medical care, Christmas presents…
I guess the perspective changes depending upon where you are on the L Curve.

For people who can’t find or don’t have time to look up the current Virginia law on same-sex marriages, here is the current law now in effect, quoted from the Code of Virginia:

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+20-45.2
§ 20-45.2. Marriage between persons of same sex.
A marriage between persons of the same sex is prohibited. Any marriage entered into by persons of the same sex in another state or jurisdiction shall be void in all respects in Virginia and any contractual rights created by such marriage shall be void and unenforceable.
(1975, c. 644; 1997, cc. 354, 365.)
http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+20-45.3
§ 20-45.3. Civil unions between persons of same sex.
A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage is prohibited. Any such civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement entered into by persons of the same sex in another state or jurisdiction shall be void in all respects in Virginia and any contractual rights created thereby shall be void and unenforceable.
(2004, c. 983.)

Here is the new proposed amendment to the Constitution:

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgibin/legp504.exe?061+ful+HJ41
HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION NO. 41
Offered January 11, 2006
Prefiled January 6, 2006
Proposing an amendment to Article I of the Constitution of Virginia by adding a section numbered 15-A, relating to marriage.
Patrons– Marshall, R.G., Byron, Cosgrove and Nixon
Referred to Committee on Privileges and Elections
WHEREAS, a proposed amendment to the Constitution of Virginia, hereinafter set forth, was agreed to by a majority of the members elected to each of the two houses of the General Assembly at the regular session of 2005 and referred to this, the next regular session held after the 2005 general election of members of the House of Delegates, as required by the Constitution of Virginia; now, therefore, be it
RESOLVED by the House of Delegates, the Senate concurring, That the following amendment to the Constitution of Virginia be, and the same hereby is, proposed in conformity with the provisions of Section 1 of Article XII of the Constitution of Virginia, namely:
Amend Article I of the Constitution of Virginia by adding a section numbered 15-A as follows:
ARTICLE I
BILL OF RIGHTS
Section 15-A. Marriage.
That only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.
This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage. Nor shall this Commonwealth or its political subdivisions create or recognize another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage.

I am not a lawyer, but I can read. I will vote “No” to the proposed amendment.
First of all, the proposed amendment does not guarantee a right to anyone, and is therefore not properly placed in the Bill of Rights section of the Virginia Constitution. If you read that section of the Constitution, you will see that it does not belong there. Article 1, the Bill of Rights, deals with equality and citizens’ rights: insures free elections; prohibits excessive bail and fines and cruel and unusual punishment; guarantees due process of law, rights of people to assemble, freedom of religion, and the actual rights of people that democratic government is supposed to guarantee. It states what government cannot do to citizens. It does not in any case or in any way impose any sectarian or dogmatic agenda except that of democracy — representative government and rights of citizens. This proposed amendment is something different. It is a legal definition of marriage and a restriction upon the rights of citizens. It is a point of law, and, since it has been properly passed by the elected officials of the state, it is already included in the laws of Virginia in the two articles that are quoted above. There is not a place in the Constitution for matters of this sort. Terms and definitions of contractual and customary relationships between people are properly a part of the Code of Virginia, the law of the Commonwealth, and (quoted above) the Code already contains the provisions of the proposed Constitutional amendment.
In view of the fact that the law already exists in Virginia, I think it is necessary for Virginians to consider why their elected officials are spending so much time and money trying to enact a law that is already on the books.
I am voting “No” also because the proposed amendment extends the definition of prohibited relationships beyond the current law, which prohibits only same-sex marriage and civil union. The proposed amendment says that the state may not “recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage.” Now help me out here, folks. There are domestic partnerships that are not one man and one woman married to each other for life that in fact need legal recognition: an unmarried mother with children, an unmarried father with children, an elderly parent with an unmarried (or married) child, two elderly people of the same sex who pool their resources to maintain a better lifestyle and look after one another, two elderly people of opposite sex who pool their resources and look after one another (and may on occasion, shall we say, approximate the design of marriage in other ways like going out to Hardees for breakfast). The proposed amendment calls into question whether statutes that apply to families and households regarding health care, domestic violence, and other domestic considerations would be held to apply to these domestic arrangements. The proposed law in fact prohibits the state from recognizing or giving any legal status to these households.
I would also like to point out that most of the households that are not within the proposed narrow definition of a family (one man and one woman, married to each other) are headed by women. The proposed law is therefore more likely to do harm to the social and economic well-being of women as a group — many of them caring for minor children or elderly parents — than to have any impact upon the gay and lesbian community, who are already disadvantaged by the law in its current form (quoted above).
I stand as well with the majority of Virginians who do not support discrimination against gays and lesbians. I fully believe that the sacrament of marriage is the province of religion, and government should leave it alone. Good government, serving the interest of all citizens, should approve civil unions. I have been unable to understand from the outset how it benefits a society to proscribe and attempt to prohibit stable arrangements between citizens who happen to be gay or lesbian. A church creates its own dogma from its own resources — scripture, talks with God, etc. — and under the Bill of Rights has a right to do so. Under the same Bill of Rights, no church can be “established,” which means that the dogma of a particular church cannot be made the law of the land. The sponsors of the proposed amendment do not name the Southern Baptists in their proposed legislation, but they do propose to make into law a definition of family that is distinctly Southern Baptist and distinctly not derived from any other source.
I always vote, and on this issue my vote is “No.”

I have been listening to the fear campaign that accompanies the approach of elections, and it appears that our government actually believes that terrorism is the biggest threat to human civilization.
I decided that I was willing to bet that there were bigger threats to human beings than terrorism. Just off the top of my head, I came up with the notion that probably the number one worldwide killer of human beings was poverty and its associated mix of poor living conditions and lack of access to medical care. In this frame of mind, I went to my Google guru and put in the phrase “death toll of poverty,” and up came a whole raft of more or less associated information.
One of the links went to a geocities home page for Donald McBride. I kept skating around his reference links, particularly the ones on death rates , and I discovered that in 2002 worldwide terrorism was not in the top 20. Road traffic accidents was number 10, and number 14 was self-inflicted.
Here at home in the USA, the top ranked cause of death is disease, with 749 deaths per 100,000 in 2001, and we are allowed to note that death from disease is possibly poverty-related. Number 4 is natural disaster with 0.2 per 100,000, and as we saw in New Orleans, natural disaster is not an effect of poverty, but death from natural disaster is related to poverty. War is blamed for 5.7 deaths per 100,000 from 1941 to 2004. Terrorism hits the chart at 0.06 deaths per 100,000 from 1982 to 2004.
So I am going to go out on a limb here and state that terrorism is not our biggest problem. Too bad we couldn’t get a government that was obsessed with getting everyone medical insurance or planning evacuation procedures for people who can’t hop in their SUV.
Much thanks to Donald McBride for the site!

A couple of days ago I met two Virginians who hadn’t even heard that George Allen — in a stump speech, no less — used a common racial slur in speaking about and to a dark-skinned young photographer in his audience. Information on the topic abounds, but they only watch FOX. I was already a Jim Webb supporter, and I was already a George Allen opponent before Jim Webb was a candidate, so I can’t say the incident cost Allen my vote. It was never his to lose.
Still, I am always amazed at the persistence of ignorance and always grateful to those who will not only seek out information but will share it.
Jeffrey Feldman at the the Frameshop has done the Google research on the word Allen used:

‘Macaca’ or ‘macaque’ is a nasty racial epithet alright. It is often used by American white supremacists to describe black people. In Belgium, it is a racial slur for ‘dirty arab.’

The article is worth reading in its entirety, along with the comments that have been posted. It concludes:

The term ‘macaque’–also pronounced ‘mukakkah’–is a commonly used racial slur on par with the word ‘nigger’ in the united states.
In Europe, the word ‘macaque’ is largely a racial slur used to insult people of North African descent. It is roughly synonomous with ‘dirty arab.’
Most of the results that came back in these searches took me to well known white supremacy websites–and to posts from the past two or three years. So this is a phrase that is still in use.

We heard George Allen say that he used the word innocently, claiming that he did not know what it meant. I don’t believe this is possible.
Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger agrees:

If Allen had a sterling record on civil rights, perhaps he’d be given the benefit of the doubt. But he doesn’t — we’re talking about the same George Allen who revered the Confederate flag during his political career, opposed a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King, referred to the NAACP as an “extremist group,” issued a Confederate History Month proclamation, calling the Civil War “a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights,” and kept a noose alongside a Confederate flag in his law office.

And now, quoting from Bob Lewis, Associated Press, on the CBS website, after we have all seen the video that “shows him [Allen] pointing to Sidarth and singling him out for derision” and we have seen that he “smiled as he needled Sidarth, seemingly enjoying the moment, ” George Allen has sought out this young man and apologized personally. The GOP thinks this is enough:

GOP strategists agreed that Allen has damaged himself, but the incident need not doom him politically.
“Senator Allen needs to make it clear that he made a mistake, that this was obviously something he should not have done,” said Mike Mahaffey, a former Iowa Republican Party chairman.
Iowa’s nominating caucuses rely on one-to-one politics, giving Allen a chance to personally appeal to voters and convince them the incident was an aberration.
“If he can come across as sincere in that regard, it will not hamper him in Iowa,” said Mahaffey, a GOP activist with a law practice in Montezuma, Iowa.

As mistakes go, this is the kind kids in fifth grade make, and we ask them to apologize and we forgive them. We even hope the kid they pointed to will forgive. But George Allen isn’t in the fifth grade. His disregard for people who are not of his own class and color is apparent. To forgive this kind of “mistake” in the context of a Senate race is an error in judgement.
And as for the GOP activist Mahaffey, note well that he is not asking George Allen to give a sincere apology. He is only asking him to “come across as sincere.” He knows as well as I do that an “appearance” is the best Allen will be able to give.

Fred Kaplan at Slate is commenting on Condi Rice’s tendency to classify herself as a “student of history” who sees the world in such a grand scheme of time that nothing can be done/evaluated/judged in the present. He has this quote:

I’m a student of history, so perhaps I have a little more patience with enormous change in the international system. It’s a big shifting of tectonic plates, and I don’t expect it to happen in a few days or even in a year.

So people can bomb each other for oh, say, even a year, and then it will take us 20 or 30 years to say whether we think it was a good idea. That is, since we are students of history, we need to have this patience with bombs.
I’ve been hanging around students of history long enough to know know that they do not necessarily refer judgement of all present decisions and actions to some distant future. They usually have enough examples from the past to be pretty opinionated, and they don’t mind telling you about it. Condi Rice is past her sophomore year — she is a national leader who should at least think something. The history she knows has apparently given her no criteria to help her decide whether an action is good or bad. An actual student of history in her position might use examples from the past to inform the present. She is refusing to process in present time the information that is before her, and I will hazard a guess that history will say she was just along for the ride.

By way of Thudfactor in a piece titled “Our own party”, The Wild Hunt’s “Pagan Square Pegs, Religious Liberal Round Holes” came to my attention. At least one modern pagan is upset at not being given proper recognition by numbers gatherers and being “lumped together” with other small but identifiable religious demographic groups:

So Pagans are “ethnic churchgoers”? “Religious feminists”?
“Spiritual but not religious” voters? Do Pagan pacifists belong with the “pious peaceniks”, while a pro-gun Asatruar who voted Kerry out of disgust with Bush is an “ethnic” vote? The confusion stems from the political (and religious) punditry’s almost total ignorance of any religion that doesn’t sport a cross on the door. Since Pagans and Hindus and Buddhists didn’t decide the vote in 2004, we don’t matter to the opinion makers.

Religion is a big issue in the United States at the present time, and that is why we are paying attention to religious demographics. The fact that the GWB campaigns from the beginning manipulated the religious right and all who identify themselves as Christians is no secret. He said he spoke with God daily. He brought God back into government, and we can all see how much better that has made government. We feel the love in bombs over Baghdad, and here at home in the absence of young men and women sent to war, increased rates of child poverty, rising costs of medical insurance, larger numbers of people without access to proper medical care, cronies in responsible posts who cannot carry on the basic functions of government, and schools that can’t teach music or art because they are struggling without enough funding to meet ill-conceived federal mandates.
When government and religion are bedfellows, the result is never good. Religion cannot solve its own disputes, much less the problems of society. For the faithful, religion deals with truths that are not in the human arena and cannot be called into question or placed on the negotiating table. Because of this, religion cannot use the most basic tactic of problem-solving in the social context, compromise. Government, however, at least in the modern understanding of democracy, continually negotiates and balances one interest against another in order to achieve what democratic government — and any other responsible government — holds as a goal, the “common good.”
The current administration has used religion to manipulate people in ways that have not been used by a western government since the 18th century:

• Many Americans believe — and Bush rhetoric implies — that the Iraq war is a holy war of Christians against Muslims.
• Remaining popular support for Republicans rests upon two issues, gay marriage and abortion rights. These are not the big problems in the United States. They do not relate to the common good except that they are areas in which the civil rights to privacy and participation of people are being abridged because they do not hold the same religious persuasion as the Christian government. These questions are important in a religious sense, where people are searching for answers to the questions of how an individual ought to live. And whatever side of whichever issue you come down upon as an individual, that is an emotional and sensitive issue for you. But for the common good, it is not that complicated. Women are citizens who are female. Gays are citizens who are homosexual. There is no rational, civil, social, or economic reason to restrict the civil rights of individual citizens just because they are female or homosexual.
• The rational scientific approach to problems and questions has been discouraged. “Faith-based initiatives” have been substituted for social research and reasonable address to difficult problems like poverty. The “faith-based initiative” permits government to give large chunks of public money to churches to purchase favor. Social problems in education have been blamed on the absence of prayer in schools, and academic problems have been addressed by applying methods that an hour’s research would reveal had already failed. And despite its potential, stem cell research has been stalled for religious reasons. The advances and understandings of biological science and earth science have been called false based upon the necessary religious truth of the Genesis story.
• The focus upon “evil” from religious and government leaders has returned to the medieval period. There is a resurgence of actual services to “exorcise” the “devil” from possessed people. Belief in the devil as the ruler of a kingdom of demons that can possess people when they aren’t properly protected by the church is the most irrational of Christian constructs. Its history is clearly traceable in written record. Its basis in the Bible is shaky and inconsistent. And if the threat of a devil that would overpower us if we didn’t hold fast to the cross and keep the garlic by the door and salt the window sill would make us better people, humanity would have been perfect with no need for improvement by the dawn of the 19th century.

I don’t want any religion to have recognition in government except recognition of the rights of citizens to practice their religion in freedom. That is all that Christians or any other group should have. The only restrictions upon religious practice should be those that protect other people from coercion and forced participation, either as members or as victims. People can be — and most people are — religious. Governments need to be democratic, civil, and rational.

If you think you have been watching the fake news on The Daily Show, read this report:
Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed by Diane Farsetta and Daniel Price, Center for Media and Democracy. In this report they offer videos of 36 “video news releases,” the term for advertising that is conveyed to the consumer as “news.” There is also a map showing where the 77 TV stations that aired the fake news are located.
Brief of the report:

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms’ use of 36 video news releases … (VNRs) —a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours … (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population. The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients’ messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety.

A story in Education Guardian Weekly on February 28 titled It’s official: class matters tells about a study that measured academic success of students based upon the socio-economic status of their parents:

This unprecedented project has revealed that a child’s social background is the crucial factor in academic performance, and that a school’s success is based not on its teachers, the way it is run, or what type of school it is, but, overwhelmingly, on the class background of its pupils.

The study looked at large numbers of students at two age/grade levels:

The study looked at 476,000 11-year olds and 482,000 15-year-olds. The data was analysed through Mosaic, a programme devised by the information company Experian, which divides the UK population by postcode into 11 main groups and 61 types, providing detailed insight into the socio-demographics, lifestyles, culture and behaviour of UK citizens. It is being used in key policy areas, such as health and crime, but this is the first time it has been used to assess the link between education performance and social class.

For Americans reading this article, it is important to understand the UK reference to social class. Middle class families are those in which parents are professional people “whose homes are in high-status neighbourhoods.” The schools are composed of two classes, middle class and working class. This is somewhat different from the American terminology. In the United States our aristocracy is corporate. Below the corporate owners and CEO’s we have professional people and managers who are upper class or upper middle class (belong to a country club). Then there are people who earn above the median hourly wage who are sometimes called upper middle but more often middle class. People who can afford medical insurance but not vacations are called middle or lower middle class. Then we have lower class, which is composed of wage earners who can’t afford medical insurance. Class is a thing Americans don’t deal with well, so we keep it fuzzy, with a little garnish of denial.
Anyway, the story:

The findings come at a pivotal time in education with the government determined to push through its education reforms in a new schools bill, expected to be published today. If it is successful, all primary and secondary schools will be encouraged to become independent trusts with control over their own admissions. But many critics have argued that the government should be introducing more rigorous controls over admissions – to ensure as many schools as possible have a balanced intake of middle- and working-class children.

The study found that, whatever their background, children do better the more “middle-class” the school they attend, and also that more than 50% of a school’s performance is accounted for by the social make-up of its pupils.

This whole article is worth the reading time, especially for those interested in how schools are rated. The study has generated a weighted method of measuring school success which takes into account the class of student received into the school, and, while the top affluent schools still do well in this ranking, the largest effect seems to be that some schools that were ranked very low on the unweighted scale were actually having a high degree of success within the context of the economic class of the students in the school. This recognition is inspiring to hard-working teachers and administrators in poor schools, and will, if carefully observed, perhaps result in an understanding of best practices for schools in deprived areas.
This study as reported in The Guardian underscores what a few of us have been saying for a long time. We are spending our money unwisely in education. We are assessing our schools to death with more tests than they have time to give and distracting them with more initiatives and requirements for teacher quality than can be readily accommodated. To raise the level of educational achievement across the board, we need to raise the standard of living for the American working family. We could, for example, take that bucket of money we are dumping on useless assessments and raise the minimum wage. We could lower the cost of health insurance. We could help people live better, and the success of children in schools would follow.