“Is It Constitutional, The Civil Rights Act?”: Learning To Live With The Civil Rights Act, 50 Years Later
Freshman U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) has mainly drawn attention as a Tea Party ultra who somehow managed to draw a Tea Party ultra ultra 2014 primary opponent with rather exotic extracurricular activities.
But he may be fairly typical of his ideological cohort in having some, well, problems coming to grips with major legislation enacted a half-century ago, per this report from Scott Keyes of Think Progress:
Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL), a freshman congressman aligned with the Tea Party, held a town hall Monday evening in Gainesville where he fielded a wide range of questions from constituents. One such voter was Melvin Flournoy, a 57-year-old African American from Gainesville, who asked Yoho whether he believes the Civil Rights Act is constitutional.
The easy answer in this case — “yes” — has the benefit of also being correct. But Yoho found the question surprisingly difficult.
“Is it constitutional, the Civil Rights Act?” Yoho repeated before giving his reply: “I wish I could answer that 100 percent.” The Florida Republican then went on to strongly imply it may be unconstitutional: “I know a lot of things that were passed are not constitutional, but I know it’s the law of the land.”
Well, that’s mighty nice of him to acknowledge the Supremacy Clause, not a universal tendency among self-styled Constitutional Conservatives.
But the difficulty a lot of CCers have with the Civil Rights Act–which almost certainly exceeds public expression, given the rather controversial nature of fighting the particular lost cause that helped sink their predecessor Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign–comes from three distinct but interrelated sources. The wonkiest issue is hostility to the Commerce Clause jurisprudence on which the Public Accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act relied for regulating private discriminatory business practices. It’s very common in conservative legal circles to deplore the extension of federal power via the Commerce Clause during a chain of Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1930s; Chief Justice Roberts famously refused to accept a Common Cause rationale for the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
A second argument that would have been more familiar to Goldwater and to the southern segregationists who flocked to his 1964 campaign is a states’ rights objection to federal regulation of race relations. While today’s neo-secessionists would try to stay a million miles from racial issues in arguing that “state sovereignty” retains meaning even after the Civil War, it still has a ghostly power in conservative circles.
And then there is the idea, embraced off-and-on by the Paul family, that the Civil Rights Act simply violates fundamental principles of private property rights that cannot be trammeled for any cause, however justifiable.
It’s unclear which of these conservative concerns about the Civil Rights Act Ted Yoho shares, notwithstanding his willingness to bend the knee to the “law of the land.” But it’s interesting that he and other constitutional conservatives can’t quite suppress their discomfort with a legal regime that ensures people aren’t denied access to restaurants and hotels and other business because of the color of their skins.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 15, 2014
“If We All Lose Together, We Practically Win Together”: Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin Makes It Illegal To Establish A Minimum Wage
In a move that fits seamlessly into the GOP’s War on the War on Poverty, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin (R) has signed a bill into law that prohibits cities in the state from establishing mandatory minimum wages or vacation and sick-day requirements. The new law’s proponents claim that such a ban is necessary for economic homogeneity across the state, as allowing different municipalities to have different minimum wages could draw work disproportionately away from or towards certain cities. In essence, it seems that the logic goes something like this — if we all lose together, we practically win together.
According to Rep. Randy Grau (R-Edmond), the bill’s main supporter in the House, the ban provides ”safeguards that protect small businesses and consumers,” while raising the minimum wage “could derail local economies in a matter of months.” According to Grau, without a “level playing field” across the state, it seems that economic prosperity would all but perish. Currently, Oklahoma’s minimum wage stands at $7.25, equal to the federal level.
The bill was officially passed by Oklahoma’s House of Representatives on Tuesday.
Oklahoma’s new law comes only two months after Governor Fallin, the chair of the National Governors Association, led a national conference of governors that clashed over President Obama’s proposal to increase the national minimum wage to $10.10. In February, Obama signed an executive order that required federal contractors to pay their employees $10.10 an hour. But Gov. Fallin, along with many of her Republican colleagues, found the minimum-wage hike to be poor planning.
Claiming that the market would “take care of itself,” Governor Fallin insisted that a higher minimum wage was not only unnecessary, but actively harmful to the American economy.
“I’m not for increasing the minimum wage because I’m concerned it would destroy jobs, especially for small-business owners,” she said at the time. Her concerns were quickly echoed by GOP leaders, who latched onto a Congressional Budget Office report that said raising the minimum wage by nearly $3 could reduce jobs in 2016 by about 500,000. Of course, the CBO also found that approximately 45 million Americans would fall below the poverty line in 2016 if the minimum wage were to remain at its current level. That finding was handily ignored.
Many critics say that Fallin’s new measure unfairly targets Oklahoma City, where proponents of Obama’s $10.10 wage are collecting signatures to support the increase. The author of the initiative petition, lawyer David Slain, told the Associated Press that he was disappointed that state lawmakers “would vote in such a way to take the right of the people to decide minimum wage.”
In a press release on Monday, Governor Fallin insisted that increasing the minimum wage is not the path out of poverty that Democrats suggest it is, stating:
“Most minimum-wage workers are young, single people working part-time or entry-level jobs. Many are high school or college students living with their parents in middle-class families. Mandating an increase in the minimum wage would require businesses to fire many of those part-time workers. It would create a hardship for small business owners, stifle job creation and increase costs for consumers, and it would do all of these things without even addressing the goal of reducing poverty.”
Governor Fallin, once again, seemed to ignore the CBO’s report that such an increase could boost collective earnings by $31 billion for 33 million low-wage workers and bring an estimated 900,000 people out of poverty. But who’s counting?
By: Lulu Chang, The National Memo, April 15, 2014
“The Oldest Hatred, Forever Young”: When Hatred Is Loosed, We’re All In The Crossfire
Most of the hate crimes in the United States don’t take the fatal form that the shootings in Kansas over the weekend did, and most aren’t perpetrated by villains as bloated with rage and blinded by conspiracy theories as the person accused in this case, Frazier Glenn Miller. He’s an extreme, not an emblem.
This is someone who went on Howard Stern’s radio show four years ago (why, Howard, did you even hand him that megaphone?) and called Adolf Hitler “the greatest man who ever walked the earth.” When Stern asked Miller whether he had more intense antipathy for Jews or for blacks (why that question?), Miller chose the Jews, definitely the Jews, “a thousand times more,” he said.
“Compared to our Jewish problem, all other problems are mere distractions,” he declaimed, and he apparently wasn’t just spouting off. He was gearing up.
On Sunday, according to the police, he drove to a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kan., and opened fire, then moved on to a nearby Jewish retirement home and did the same. Three people were killed.
They were Christian, as it happens. When hatred is loosed, we’re all in the crossfire.
On Monday, as law enforcement officials formally branded what happened in Kansas a hate crime, I looked at the spectrum of such offenses nationally: assault, intimidation, vandalism.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation keeps statistics, the most recent of which are for 2012. In the United States that year there were 6,573 hate-crime incidents reported to the bureau (a fraction, no doubt, of all that occurred). While most were motivated by race, about 20 percent were motivated by the victims’ perceived religion — roughly the same percentage as those motivated by the victims’ presumed sexual orientation. I didn’t expect a number that high.
Nor did I expect this: Of the religion-prompted hate crimes, 65 percent were aimed at Jews, a share relatively unchanged from five years earlier (69 percent) and another five before that (65 percent). In contrast, 11 percent of religious-bias crimes in 2012 were against Muslims.
Our country has come so far from the anti-Semitism of decades ago that we tend to overlook the anti-Semitism that endures. We’ve moved on to fresher discussions, newer fears.
Following 9/11, there was enormous concern that all Muslims would be stereotyped and scapegoated, and this heightened sensitivity lingers. It partly explains what just happened at Brandeis University. The school had invited Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a celebrated advocate for Muslim women, to receive an honorary degree. But when some professors and students complained, citing statements of hers that seemed broadly derisive of Islam, the invitation was withdrawn. Clearly, university officials didn’t want their campus seen as a cradle or theater of Islamophobia.
But other college campuses in recent years have been theaters of anti-Israel discussions that occasionally veer toward, or bleed into, condemnations of Jews. And while we don’t have the anti-Semitism in our politics that some European countries do, there’s still bigotry under the surface. There are still caricatures that won’t die.
One of them flared last month on the Christian televangelist Pat Robertson’s TV show. His guest was a rabbi who, shockingly, was himself trafficking in the notion that Jews excel at making money. The rabbi said that a Jew wouldn’t squander a weekend tinkering with his car when he could hire a mechanic and concentrate on something else.
“It’s polishing diamonds, not fixing cars,” Robertson interjected.
Polishing diamonds?
In a 2013 survey of 1,200 American adults for the Anti-Defamation League, 14 percent agreed with the statement that “Jews have too much power” in our country, while 15 percent said Jews are “more willing to use shady practices” and 30 percent said that American Jews are “more loyal to Israel” than to the United States.
That’s disturbing, as is the way in which the Holocaust is minimized by its repeated invocation as an analogy. In separate comments this year, both the venture capitalist Tom Perkins and Kenneth Langone, one of the founders of Home Depot, said that the superrich in America were being vilified the way Jews in Nazi Germany had been.
It’s not just Kansas and the heartland where anti-Semitism, sometimes called the oldest hatred, stays young.
A story in The Times last year focused on an upstate New York community in which three Jewish families filed suit against the school district, citing harassment of Jewish students by their peers. The abuse included Nazi salutes and swastikas drawn on desks, on lockers, on a playground slide.
When a parent complained in 2011, the district’s superintendent responded, in an email: “Your expectations for changing inbred prejudice may be a bit unrealistic.”
Well, the only way to breed that prejudice out of the generations to come is never to shrug our shoulders like that — and never to avert our eyes.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April14, 2014
“ABC News’ Rightward Lurch”: Scraping The Bottom Of The Right-Wing Pundit Barrel
ABC News recently hired Laura Ingraham to be a regular contributor to their prestigious Sunday morning political talk show, “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” Why on earth would anyone hire Ingraham, a second-rate right-wing bomb-thrower whose shtick is well past its sell-by date? You could ask ABC News, but they’d presumably answer with boilerplate press release-ese about how they seek out a “diversity of viewpoints” and welcome her “provocative” take on world events. Read Digby for a good rundown of exactly how provocative Ingraham’s hot takes have been — Ingraham’s greatest hits includes writing a book in which a central, reoccurring joke was that Michelle Obama constantly ate or craved ribs — but Ingraham’s not the only sorry character ABC has picked up recently.
Last October, “This Week” hired Bill Kristol, the bumbling neoconservative scion, who is famous for his disastrous predictions and his even more disastrous lobbying for war.
In addition to being morally culpable for the meaningless violent deaths of hundreds of thousands, Kristol is also a terrible pundit. He is not just terrible at predictions, he is also dull. He was too lazy a writer and thinker for the New York Times — a paper that still pays Thomas Friedman handsomely — leading them to decline to renew his contract after one year as a columnist. (He moved, naturally, to the Washington Post.) Only a Sunday show producer (or Washington Post opinion page editor) could imagine that Bill Kristol’s take on the issues of the day would be useful or enlightening or even entertaining to anyone.
More recently, ABC picked up Ray Kelly (as a “consultant,” not a mere contributor). Kelly is the former police commissioner of New York City, best known for his racist policing tactics and his blatantly dishonest defenses of same. In November 2013, New York City voters overwhelmingly voted to elect as mayor a man who made the removal of Kelly, and the complete rejection of Kelly’s entire philosophy of policing, a cornerstone of his campaign. Kelly, whose police department routinely lied to journalists (and beat and arrested a few too), is considered a law enforcement genius, because violent crime in New York, having already plummeted from a historic high years prior to the election of Michael Bloomberg, remained relatively low during Kelly’s tenure as commissioner, probably due to environmental and historical trends. He is also considered a great and important man because he knows how to schmooze with the smart set.
Kelly worked for a Democratic mayor and a centrist independent one. He considered running for office as a Republican, but he is probably more of an authoritarian “centrist” than a movement conservative. Still that’s three hires in six months that ought to disgust any decent person. (Even conservatives, who ought to be embarrassed to be “represented” by Ingraham and Kristol). Whatever does it mean?
Perhaps ABC News is repositioning itself as more conservative. NBC’s “Meet the Press” is struggling. It’s easy to imagine a television professional thinking that NBC’s problem is that viewers think it is too liberal, and that therefore the best way to beat it is to become more conservative. Perhaps they are over-correcting for the fact that “This Week’s” Stephanopoulos is a former Clinton White House operative, although at this point that was a lifetime ago, and George has been studiously centrist ever since.
As has been well-documented, none of the big network Sunday shows are remotely liberal, “This Week” included. According to Media Matters’ research, in 2013, “This Week’s” guests and panel lineups were not appreciably more left-wing than its major competitors. (Fox’s Sunday show was significantly more conservative, but that show isn’t aimed at the same “insider” Acela corridor “centrist” audience that the other three fight for.) All the networks skew white, male and right-wing. If ABC is aiming to win over a more conservative audience, it seems to be scraping the bottom of the right-wing pundit barrel.
But maybe there was no strategic thinking behind these three hires at all. Maybe each one just made sense to whomever was responsible at the time. Maybe three completely odious people who do not in any way deserve such large and well-compensated platforms for their discredited opinions all just got hired by the same network because the news media elite, like the finance and political elite, refuse or are unable to recognize the obvious and total moral bankruptcy of members of their own clan.
Or maybe Bill Kristol just has an amazing agent.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 15, 2014
“Getting By On Fumes”: Has Rush Limbaugh Finally Reached The End Of The Road?
Like him or hate him, there is no disputing that Rush Limbaugh’s very special brand of mixing right-wing politics with his flare for entertainment has produced one of the most successful radio programs in the medium’s long history.
Whatever the burning political question of the day, millions of Americans have relished the opportunity to tune into Rush’s program, knowing that he would quickly take that hot potato, throw a few gallons of verbal kerosene into the mix and elevate the matter into a five alarm fire with a just a few well-chosen words spoken in the style only Rush Limbaugh could produce.
Until now…
At long last, it appears that Rush Limbaugh has run out of steam.
I have to acknowledge that I have sensed Rush getting by on fumes for some time now (yes, I tune into his show from time to time to enjoy his broadcasting skills if not his message). However, it was only recently that the world of Limbaugh crossed that thin red line from partially serious to total self-parody and audience deception—a line crossed from which there is often no return.
It happened on the occasion of Stephen Colbert’s appointment to fill David Letterman’s soon to be vacated chair on the CBS (CBS +0.65%) late-night set.
By using this occasion to create a political narrative designed to stir up his listeners, Limbaugh telegraphed to his loyal followers that he is now dependent upon feeding fully faux political nonsense that his audience instinctively—or explicitly—knows is a bunch of baloney.
To be sure, this is hardly the first time Limbaugh has fed his audience a diet of twisted information and bizarre, conspiratorial memes. However, it may well be the first time that he attempted to shove a diet down the throats of any semi-rational listeners still living in the real world made up of nonsense that even his most loyal listener could not possibly swallow.
That’s a problem for Rush.
A show like Limbaugh’s is wholly reliant on his listeners’ willingness to believe—or suspend belief—no matter how ‘out there’ their guru’s arguments may be. While it is one thing for me to sneer at much of what Limbaugh may present, it is quite another when he attempts to sell his loyal audience on stuff they already know, through personal experience, to be false and fraudulent hokum.
Upon hearing the news of Colbert’s new gig, Limbaugh pronounced— as only Limbaugh can pronounce—
“CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America. No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values, conservatism. Now it’s just wide out in the open. What this hire means is a redefinition of what is funny, and a redefinition of what is comedy. They’re blowing up the 11:30 format… they hired a partisan, so-called comedian, to run a comedy show.”
Not quite satisfied with his initial declaration, Limbaugh returned to the subject in a later program, commenting further on CBS’s decision to hire Colbert—
“It clearly indicates that the people making this decision have chosen to write off a portion of the country, that they don’t care if a portion of the country watches or not.”
Rush has it right on his last statement.
Indeed, the people who make decisions at television networks have chosen to write off a portion of the country—a decision that was made for them a very long time ago.
However, it has never had anything to do with making choices of audience based on anything even resembling politics and has always had everything to do with blowing off anyone older than 49 years of age because these older folks are poison to advertisers. In other words, the networks are clearly writing off those in ‘the heartland’ if they’ve reached 50 years old—just as they’ve written off folks in this demo in every other nook and cranny of America.
What Limbaugh chose to ignore in his rant is that this is a choice based on what television advertisers want—and what television advertisers want is a young television viewing audience or, to be more specific, viewers that fall between the ages of 18-49. Despite Limbaugh’s truly lame efforts to pretend otherwise, if you fall within this age group, you are welcomed to the party whether you be a progressive, conservative, independent, communist, John Bircher, or whatever other political affiliation you can conjure up.
You see, car companies don’t really care about your politics when they are trying to sell you a car via a TV commercial—they care about whether you are in a position to buy that new car should they succeed in getting your attention. Purina really doesn’t give a damn about your politics or your dog’s politics when they are trying to sell you their brand of dog food.
For these reasons that would appear to be obvious to everyone but Rush Limbaugh—although we all know that they are obvious to him too—all viewers younger than 50 are coveted by the television networks.
And yet, Limbaugh—a guy who has spent his life in media—wants his audience to believe that there is some political agenda on the part of a network at work here. Never mind that early morning and late night are the two largest sources of revenue for every broadcast network. Limbaugh expects us to believe that CBS is willing to throw all that money out the window to make a political statement.
If you are a Limbaugh fan, how are you not asking yourself just how dumb this man thinks you are?
Even the right-wing Frontpagemag.com was able to properly discern the truth of the situation and provide an excellent explanation of reality:
The number of people who watch a TV show stopped mattering years ago. If it did, Murder She Wrote, a show that had an older audience and high ratings, wouldn’t have been canceled. Instead there’s talk of rebooting it with younger multicultural leads in a different setting.
Network television doesn’t just fail to count older viewers; it tries to drive them away. A show with an older viewership is dead air. Advertisers have been pushed by ad agencies into an obsession with associating their product with a youthful brand.
The demo rating, 18-49, is the only rating that matters. Viewers younger than that can still pay off. Just ask the CW. Older viewers however are unwanted.
A network show would rather have 5 million viewers in the demo than 15 million older viewers. A cable show would rather have 1 million viewers in the demo than 10 million viewers outside the demo.
Colbert and Stewart have the top late night talk shows in the demo. That means 1 million ‘young’ viewers. That’s barely what Letterman was pulling in on a top network.
Networks, which already have high median ages, are doing everything possible to bring them down. CBS has a median age of 58 and is the oldest network. Colbert is supposed to lower their average.
Letterman’s show had a median age of 56. Colbert’s show has a median age of 39. That a 49-year-old comedian with an audience whose median age is 39 is considered a draw for younger audiences reveals just how thoroughly younger viewers are abandoning television.”
As someone who spent the overwhelming majority of his career as a television producer and executive, I can state with absolutely certainty that Frontpagemag.com got it precisely right—and when was the last time you heard me say that a right-wing anything got it exactly right?
So, what does it say when a guy like Rush Limbaugh stoops to trying to build a political fire out of what is about as apolitical as chicken soup?
It says Rush is running on empty. It says he’s grown lazy. It says he’s probably trying to hold on to get though the next presidential election cycle before fading off into the sunset.
Rush’s audience knew that his anti-Colbert rant was nonsense the minute it left Limbaugh’s lips. How did they know?
While Limbaugh’s listeners may be inclined to believe the words of the great Rush Limbaugh, these aging listeners are the very people who can no longer find anything on TV to watch because everything is so skewed to the young viewer. They know all too well that it has nothing to do with their politics and everything to do with their age and being outside the desired demographic.
Rush Limbaugh ‘works’ when he can fire up his audience with red-hot ideology designed to bring out the anger of his listeners. But no entertainer succeeds when they try to stupidly pull the wool over the very listeners who have been loyal—and Limbaugh’s effort to politicize the Colbert hiring was just that.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, April 15, 2014
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