“Clever Little Deceptions”: Behind The G.O.P.’s Misleading Shutdown Statements
Senator Mitch McConnell said yesterday that he would not shut down the government, over immigration or anything else, after he takes over as Majority Leader in January. On the same day, Speaker John Boehner refused to rule out a shutdown. Both were being deceptive, but Mr. McConnell, as usual, was a little more clever about it.
The House produced last year’s government shutdown when it insisted on attaching the repeal of various parts of the Affordable Care Act to spending bills necessary to keep the government open. That was a huge embarrassment for Mr. Boehner, making his caucus appear feral and ungovernable, and he has no desire to repeat it.
But his newly expanded Republican majority actually is a bit wilder than the outgoing one, and it is inflamed by President Obama’s plans to take executive action on immigration by sparing up to 5 million people from deportation. Some on the far right want to pass no spending bills if the president takes action; others, as National Review reported, want to shut down only specific departments, like Homeland Security (which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
Mr. Boehner is playing his customary game of appearing provocative in public, to keep his most extreme members at bay, while trying to cut some kind of deal in private. But if he or his members think a shutdown of the Homeland Security department is going to work, they’re kidding themselves. During the last shutdown, most of the department stayed open, in part because many of its functions are considered essential and are funded by fees rather than Congressional appropriations. To have any real leverage, House Republicans would have to threaten to shut down more than that.
Mr. McConnell wants his chamber to appear reasonable and governable in contrast to the House, and likes to portray himself as the leader who averts shutdowns. But he’s the one who has already threatened to use spending bills to stop any environmental regulations that might restrict the burning of coal, which is the same as a shutdown threat.
His plans are evident in the exact wording of his statement yesterday: “We’ll not be shutting the government down or threatening to default on the national debt.” But if he can pin the shutdown on the president, then he can claim he wasn’t the one who closed the government’s doors. During the last shutdown, the spending bills never reached the president’s desk for a veto, because the House’s demands were rejected by the Senate, and everything was blamed on “Congressional gridlock.” With Republican control of both chambers, things will be different, and a shutdown remains very much on the table.
By: David Firestone, Taking Note,The Editorial Page Editors Blog; The New York Times, November 14, 2014
“A Fight To The Death”: The Final Indian War In America About To Begin
South Dakota’s Republican leadership of John Thune and Kristi Noem always march lockstep with the other Republican robots. Neither of them care that South Dakota’s largest minority, the people of the Great Sioux Nation, diametrically oppose the Pipeline and they also fail to understand the determination of the Indian people to stop it.
The House vote was 252-161 favoring the bill. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) who is trying to take the senate seat from Democrat Mary Landrieu, They are headed for a senate runoff on December 6 and Landrieu has expressed a strong support of the bill in hopes of holding her senate seat.
Two hundred twenty-one Republicans supported the bill which made the Republican support unanimous while 31 Democrats joined the Republicans. One hundred sixty-one Democrats rejected the bill.
Progressive newsman and commentator for MSNBC, Ed Schultz, traveled to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota this year to meet with the Indian opponents of the Pipeline. Firsthand he witnessed the absolute determination of the Indian nations to stop construction of the Pipeline.
He witnessed their determination and reported on it. Except for Schultz the national media shows no interest and apparently has no knowledge of how the Indian people feel about the Pipeline nor do they comprehend that they will go to their deaths stopping it. What is wrong with the national media when it comes to Indians?
As an example of the national media’s apathy, the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota have turned their backs on the $1.5 billion dollars offered to them for settling the Black Hills Claim and although they are among the poorest of all Americans, the national media does not consider this news.
Why do they protest the XL Pipeline? Because the lands the Pipeline will cross are Sacred Treaty Lands and to violate these lands by digging ditches for the pipelines is blasphemes to the beliefs of the Native Americans. Violating the human and religious rights of a people in order to create jobs and low cost fuel is the worst form of capitalism. Will the Pipeline bring down the cost of fuel and create thousands of jobs?
President Barack Obama has blocked the construction of the Pipeline for six years and he said, “I have constantly pushed back against the idea the somehow the Keystone Pipeline is either this massive jobs bill for the United States or is somehow lowering gas prices. Understand what this project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. That doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices.”
In the meantime Senator Landrieu conceded that it is unlikely that the Senate and the House will have the two-thirds majority needed to override an Obama veto.
Wizipan Little Elk of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and a coalition of tribal leaders from across the Northern Plains and the United States have pulled no punches on how they intend to fight the Pipeline to the death if that is the only way to stop it.
South Dakota’s elected leadership has totally ignored the protests of the largest minority residing in their state. They have also totally underestimated and misunderstood the inherent determination of the Indian people. This is a huge mistake that will have national implications and it is taking place right under their Republican noses.
What is even worse is South Dakota’s media has also buried its collective heads in the sand even though Native Sun News has been reporting on the Keystone XL Pipeline since 2006. Award-winning Health and Environment Editor for Native Sun News, Talli Nauman, has been at the journalistic forefront of this environmental disaster about to happen from day one and she has been rewarded by the South Dakota Newspaper Association with many awards for her yearly series of articles on this most important topic. Until this issue became a political football, the rest of South Dakota’s media had been silent.
The Keystone XL Pipeline that is being pushed by TransCanada may well be the beginning of the final war between the United States government and the Indian Nations. A word of caution to TransCanada and the U.S. Government: please do not disregard the determination of the Indian people when they say they will fight this Pipeline to their deaths if need be. They mean it!
When asked if he truly thought that a handful of Indians could stop the construction of the Pipeline, Little Elk simply said, “Try us!”
By: Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is The Editor and Publisher of Native Sun News; (Note: This column will appear before the Senate votes on the Keystone XL Pipeline. The House has already approved the construction of the Pipeline): Published in The Huffington Post Blog, November 16, 2014
“A Channel For The Conservative Id”: Fox News, Where Conservative Senior Citizens Get To Look At Half-Naked ‘Girls’
There’s something almost endearing about the fact that in an age when there are literally millions of images and videos of humans without their clothes on available instantaneously to anyone with an internet connection, the occasion of a famous person allowing her butt to be photographed can produce such an extraordinary amount of discussion. I’m not going to analyze the semiotic meanings and deep cultural resonance of Kim Kardashian’s behind (beyond saying that for someone with no discernible skills or talents, she sure is good at getting attention), but I do want to say something about the issue Conor Friedersdorf raises with regard to Fox News, which has been giving this critical issue extensive coverage:
Fox is, of course, not so different from other gigantic broadcast media corporations in shamelessly exploiting the fact that sex sells. Its behavior is noteworthy only insofar as it underscores the fact that the ideological mission it purports to have and the cultural critiques it purports to believe in are at odds with its actual programming. More than other broadcasters, it pretends to flatter cultural conservatives, and to disdain the decadence of liberals in their coastal enclaves. But that’s just a pose helping it sell ads against its own libertine cultural offerings.
In case you don’t watch Fox, you should know that they work extremely hard to find excuses to put images of scantily clad women on the air. Some of it contains no finger-wagging—how about a report on Hooters’ third-quarter profits, with lots of shots of waitresses?—but plenty of it is presented with a thin veneer of moral condemnation that allows viewers to feel like Fox remains on their side in the grand battle against sexual depravity. My favorite example has to be the time Sean Hannity presented hard-hitting journalism on what goes on at Spring Break, spread out over an entire week’s worth of stories with endless shots of girls in bikinis. Somehow, the Peabody committee overlooked Hannity’s scoop that kids are drinking and having sex in Ft. Lauderdale.
You can think of this as a betrayal of its audience’s cultural conservatism, but I think it’s actually a form of service. In a way, Fox News knows its viewers better than they know themselves. Don’t forget that the typical Fox viewer is a conservative senior citizen. The median age of the network’s viewers is 68.8, and some shows skew even older; Bill O’Reilly’s median viewer is 72. More so than perhaps any other channel on television, Fox endeavors to shape and reflect not just its viewers’ beliefs about particular topics but their entire worldview. It presents a picture of the world in which everything is going to hell, and the prime enemies are change and modernity. The president hates America, immigrants are destroying our culture, the kids are out of control, and it’s not like it was back in the day. Fox is a channel for the conservative id, where you can have your darkest thoughts and worst fears nurtured and validated.
And of course, there’s nothing the id likes better than looking at half-naked girls. On Fox, you can be like the stern father who discovers his teenage son’s stash of Penthouse, looking through each issue carefully to understand the depths to which the boy has sunk, lingering over each photo spread as you shake your head at how depraved the world has become. And should a voice in your head alert you that you’re finding this stuff dangerously titillating, you can remind yourself that the reason you’re there is to express your dismay. After all, it’s on Fox, the only network you can really trust.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 14, 2014
“In The Interest Of The Public”: Barack Obama’s Plan To Save The Internet Is Perfect
This week, President Barack Obama came out in favor of net neutrality, the idea that all content on the internet should flow freely and equally without any intervention from service providers.
Specifically, Obama wants to categorize the internet under something called Title II, which would classify the internet as a utility, just like telephone lines.
This scares the pants off internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, etc. All of these companies have come out in favor of “the open internet,” but their definition of “open” is much different from what net neutrality purists want.
The fear is that unless ISPs are categorized under Title II, there could be a chilling effect on innovation when someone wants to create the next major internet company like Netflix, YouTube, or, say, Business Insider. ISPs could slow down content from the new companies in favor of their own content.
ISPs swear they don’t want to slow down rival content. And they are probably telling the truth. But under one proposal the FCC is considering, ISPs would, rather than slow down traffic, be able to make their web content get to you faster, giving them an advantage. So while ISPs and the FCC say all content on the internet will be equal, the reality is that some content will be more equal than the rest.
Critics say Obama’s proposal will stifle innovation because it will keep service costs low and slow down companies’ ability to invest more in infrastructure.
But the problem with that argument is that investment in building out broadband networks is already slowing, as Matthew Yglesias of Vox pointed out this spring. Telecom companies invested $17.65 billion in broadband between 2005 and 2008. But that investment fell to $12.24 billion between 2009 and 2013. Meanwhile, the cost of internet access continues to increase. Americans also get slower speeds for what they pay compared with other countries, according to the Open Technology Institute.
It’s also worth noting that FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is a former telecom lobbyist, representing all the big ISPs. That makes it tough to trust that his proposals are in the interest of the public, not the ISPs.
That’s why Obama is right. ISPs have done nothing to prove that internet access won’t get more expensive over time. They have also done nothing to guarantee they won’t start favoring their services over those of rivals. As the proposals stand, there is still wiggle room for ISPs favor some content over others.
Obama’s Title II proposal is the only approach that guarantees the internet will be a level playing field for everyone. He put it best in his statement Monday:
For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access in and out of your home or business. That is why a phone call from a customer of one phone company can reliably reach a customer of a different one, and why you will not be penalized solely for calling someone who is using another provider. It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information — whether a phone call, or a packet of data.
In other words, the internet has become as vital to commerce and communications as phone lines were decades ago. Giving companies that have demonstrated only that they want to profit off that communication without investing in improving it and making it more affordable is a dangerous path.
By: Steve Kovach, Business Insider, November 12, 2014
“So Much Unpaid, Unrewarded Labor”: Why Women Should Get The Rest Of The Year Off
As of October 11, the average American woman who works full time, year-round started working for free.
That’s because she makes just 78 percent of what a man makes. If a man’s pay lasts the whole year long, hers doesn’t even make it to Halloween.
Women of color have been putting in even more time. Black women have been working for free since August 21. Hispanic women have been doing so since July 16.
Even if we take into account things like the fact that women tend to go into different industries and occupations, stay in the labor force for less time (often thanks to raising children), and are less likely to be in a union, women should still walk away from work beginning Black Friday and not come back until New Years Day.
The fact that women’s work comes so heavily discounted has inspired unions in Denmark for the last five years to call on Danish women to take the rest of the year off after they reach that point—and they have just a 17 cent pay gap, one of the world’s smallest. “It’s a way to remove the gender pay gap in a split second,” Lise Johansen, who heads the campaign for the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions, told Bloomberg News. “Go to a tropical island for the rest of the year!”
Women aren’t just working for free when they leave their houses, of course. They’re working for free every day of the year when they go home and raise children, cook meals, and clean house. They devote far more time to this than men: they spend a half hour more on child care, housework, cooking, and household management each day compared to men. That’s double the time men spend on child care.
That time may not be rewarded, but it still has a value. Take the effort women put in caring for elderly parents, which they are far more likely to do compared to men. If all the informal elderly caregiving by family and friends were instead replaced by someone paid to do it, the total would be $522 billion a year. That’s a half trillion dollar gift (mostly) women give to society.
So maybe they should get even more time off than just what the gender wage gap allows, since they’re putting in so much unpaid, unrewarded labor. Given that they do seven hours more housework each week, or fifteen extra days a year, and eight hours more child care a week, or seventeen days a year, let’s call it even if they get another month tacked on to their early vacations. Being generous, that means women could have thrown in the towel when we reached the end of October.
What would happen if American women stopped working inside and outside the home for two months out of the year? It’s all obviously relegated to the world of thought experiments. Even in Denmark, where three-quarters of the workforce belongs to a union, women won’t actually heed the mostly joking call to stay away from work, and here in the United States union power is far lower.
But desperate times call for desperate measures, and when it comes to the wage gap, these are increasingly desperate times. The gap was closing quickly and steadily between the 1960s and 1990s and continued to shrink in the 2000s, but over the last decade, it’s only budged by 1.7 percentage points. At this rate, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimates it won’t close until 2058. While President Obama has issued executive orders related to equal pay and Democrats in Congress have proposed bills like the Paycheck Fairness Act, none of these measures will close the gap on their own. In the meantime, the pay gap contributes to more women living in poverty, relying on government benefits, and facing economic instability in their retirement years.
Maybe what’s needed is for this issue to jump from a talking point to a day of action. Perhaps if the country witnessed what it would be like for half the population to refuse to type a word, ring up a purchase, pick up a wrench, or to wipe a booger or a counter, women’s value would be brought into sharp focus. Then we might see some aggressive action to correct for the discrimination that still suppresses women’s wages. Until then, women should at least slack off as much as they can for the remainder of the year.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, November 13, 2014
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