Prosperity Rises

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

-- William Jennings Bryan, "Cross of Gold" (1896)

This week's featured post is "Liberal Islam: Is it real? Is it Islam?"

This week everybody was talking about the State of the Union

This was the first SOTU of what I've been calling the Aw-Fukkit Phase of the Obama presidency, when he might as well say what he thinks because there are no more elections to position himself for.

If you haven't seen the speech, the best place to watch is on the White House web site, where you get supporting slides like the one on the right. Also, for the first time in history the White House openly leaked the text of their own speech, so you could read along with the President if you wanted.

"Tonight we turn the page" was a polite way of saying: "I've finally cleaned up enough of Bush's mess that there's room for me to have my own vision." Obama supported that view by telling the story of his administration's mess-cleaning-up accomplishments: unemployment is finally lower than before the 2008 financial crisis; troop levels in Iraq/Afghanistan are down from 180K to 15K; high-school graduation rates are up; oil imports and the price of gas are down (a wrinkle there: gas prices are down from their pre-crisis levels; during the crisis the price got down to $1.61 because nobody was buying); and deficits are down.

State of the Union addresses always have an element of symbolism. This time, Obama framed his speech around a letter he got from a woman in Minnesota, whose family went through hard times during the Great Recession, but stuck together, worked hard, studied hard, and bounced back. Opponents like to imply that Obama only represents unemployed inner-city black single mothers or irresponsible sluts who need abortions so that they can stay promiscuous and child-free, so it was artful to frame the speech around a Midwestern white couple working two jobs and raising kids born in wedlock.

We are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, very hard times. America, Rebekah and Ben’s story is our story. They represent the millions who have worked hard, and scrimped, and sacrificed, and retooled.

He referred to his policies as "middle-class economics", implying a contrast with Republican trickle-down economics, which he did not name.

At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious; that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years. So the verdict is clear. Middle-class economics works.

The speech alluded to specific proposals but deferred the details, which started rolling out later in the week. They include proposals to promote and subsidize child care for working parents, to make two years of community college free, to give new tax breaks to middle-class families, and to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.

Probably Congress will ignore all these proposals. But they will put Republicans on the spot, at a time when some of them seemed to expect Obama to ask, "How high do you want me to jump?"

and "no-go zones"

Inside the conservative news bubble, lots of nonsense goes unchallenged, like ObamaCare's "death panels", or the "stand down order" that supposedly prevented a rescue mission to Benghazi. So I was not particularly shocked when I heard that Fox News was helping spread the bizarre dystopian fantasy that there were "no-go zones" in Europe that non-Muslims have to stay out of, including the entire city of Birmingham, England, and certain well-delineated neighborhoods of Paris.

There is, of course, nothing to support any of this. British Prime Minister David Cameron treated the claims with the disdain they deserve:

I thought it must be April Fools Day. This guy is clearly a complete idiot.

and the Mayor of Paris is threatening to sue. But that didn't prevent Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal repeating those claims at a speech in London:

It is startling to think that any country would allow, even unofficially, for a so-called 'no-go zone.' The idea that a free country would allow for specific areas of its country to operate in an autonomous way that is not free and is in direct opposition to its laws is hard to fathom.

and then blamed "the liberal media" for pointing out that he was just making stuff up.

For once, Fox News apologized for its "error". (Personally, I don't think Fox actually tries to get the news right, so wouldn't call it an "error", though I believe they do feel bad about getting caught.) The apology (and not the original claim) shocked Jon Stewart, who asked:

What did they say that was so much wronger than usual?

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The tiny kernel of truth behind the Shariah-in-the-UK claim is outlined in this BBC article. If all parties agree, civil cases can be tried before Sharia councils. Similar to binding mediation in this country, the system is voluntary and does not apply to criminal cases.

and abortion

This abortion-and-rape thing, it's a constant problem for the GOP. The pro-life base believes that a newly fertilized ovum has a soul (which isn't Biblical, and on its Protestant side is a purely political doctrine that has no theological history at all), so a fetus conceived by rape has as much right to life as anybody else. But in front of the general public, passing a law that makes rape a viable male reproductive strategy is political suicide. So anti-abortion laws need some kind of rape exception.

But that raises the question: What kind of rape? And what kind of evidence should a woman claiming the exception need to present? If just saying you were raped is good enough, then we're back to abortion on demand, because, you know, bitches be lyin' about stuff like that. Ask Bill Cosby.

So this week the new Republican Congress was all set to pass a nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks (on the pseudo-scientific theory that 20 weeks is the threshold for a fetus feeling pain). But the supporting coalition ruptured on the exact wording of the rape exception: To claim it, a woman would have to have previously reported the rape to the police. Congresswoman Renee Ellmers objected to that requirement enough to remove herself as a sponsor. Reportedly, other Republican congresswomen also objected, and the House leadership was not willing to pass the bill without sufficient female cover.

The pro-life crowd then went apeshit, abusing Ellmers (previously a far-right-winger in good standing, one of Sarah Palin's "Momma grizzlies") in such misogynistic terms that even a liberal like Joan Walsh felt obligated to defend her.

Senator Lindsey Graham then told the Family Research Council that "I'm going to need your help to find a way out of this definitional problem of rape." But the whole point of "defining" rape is so that anti-abortion bureaucrats can tell a woman that she's wrong about having been raped. I don't see any nice way to do that.

but I wish more people were talking about addiction

Johann Hari has a fascinating article up at Huffington Post, "The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think." Most theories of addiction blame either the addictive nature of the drugs themselves, biological propensities in the addicts, or moral weakness.

Some early experiments put a rat in a cage with two choices of water, a pure source and one laced with an addictive drug like cocaine. Most of the tested rats became addicts, and some killed themselves with overdoses. Eventually, though, researcher Bruce Alexander wondered whether the problem wasn't the drug so much as being alone in a cage. So he created Rat Park, as utopian a rat community as he could imagine, except for the fact that it also has one pure and one drug-tainted water source.

The happy rats of Rat Park consumed about 1/4th as much of the drug as the bored and lonely rats, and none of them OD'd. What's more, moving addicted rats from isolation to Rat Park often enabled them to kick the habit.

Hari compares this experiment to the real-life experience of American G.I.s, many of whom were heroin addicts in Vietnam, but didn't bring their addiction home. Professor Alexander argues: "It's not you, it's your cage."

and you also might be interested in ...

If you're wondering why the price of gas is suddenly so low, Daniel Yergin's analysis is as convincing as any.

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The only people who should be talking about 2016 this early are the comedians who make fun of people talking about 2016 this early. Andy Borowitz posted to Facebook:

Mental Health Professionals Report Alarming Increase in People Who Believe They Could Be President

And Jon Stewart commented on Mitt Romney's hints that he might run again.

Quit being a nomination hog, Mitt. There's a lot of people who deserve the chance to lose a presidential race.

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Gun rights for black people continue to be mostly theoretical. Tuesday, a 62-year-old black man with a concealed-carry permit was tackled as he entered a WalMart by a white man yelling "He's got a gun!" Afterward, a police spokesman cautioned vigilantes to "make sure there's a good reason" before tackling gun owners. Just seeing an armed black man turns out not to be a good enough reason.

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A few weeks ago I used torture as an example of how conservatives will intentionally break a word they don't like through intentional misuse. Well, now they're working on breaking theocracy. How else to interpret this exchange between Mike Huckabee and televangelist James Robison?

HUCKABEE: Now I'm not saying that a person should run [for president] and say, "Let's have a theocracy", because I don't think we should.

ROBISON: It's ridiculous.

HUCKABEE: No, that's not what even our [garbled] want.

ROBISON: We have a theocracy right now. It's a secular theocracy.

HUCKABEE: That's it. It's a humanistic, secular, atheistic [theocracy], even antagonistic toward Christian faith.

Yep, secular theocracy is the new liberal fascism. If the common usage of theocracy can be stretched to include "humanistic, secular, atheistic" versions, then for all practical purposes the word will stop meaning anything at all. And that would suit Robison and Huckabee just fine.

and let's close with something amusing

It's another year's worth of Bad Lip Reading the NFL.