“Women And Children Last”: Was The Republican Party Always This Greedy?
I have a keen interest in military strategy and tactics. Probably because I’m a political strategist and tactician. Wednesday night, I watched a documentary on the Military History Channel about the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II. The unselfish actions of U.S. sailors there prevented a military disaster and demonstrated what was great about the Greatest Generation.
General Douglas MacArthur had just landed his invasion force in the Philippines in October of 1944. A large Japanese naval fleet, including the biggest battleship in the world, the Yamato, was bearing down on Leyte Gulf to destroy our invasion forces on the beach. The only American naval force available to stop the attack was a small task force of destroyers and escort carriers called Taffy 3 (Task Force 3).
The large Japanese force dwarfed and outgunned Taffy 3 but the Americans blunted the attack by sending three destroyers up against big Japanese battleships. The small destroyer force was able to slow down the larger Japanese fleet long enough for the main American fleet to ride to the rescue and save the day. In the process, the Japanese sunk all three of the destroyers and hundreds of brave, young American sailors went down with their ships. But the selfless dedication of the men in Taffy 3 saved MacArthur’s invasion force from total destruction.
There’s a world of difference between the selfless sacrifice of Taffy 3 and the Republican Party. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center shows that only four of 10 Republicans believe that government has a responsibility to help people who can’t help themselves. In contrast, six out of every 10 independents and three out of every four Democrats believe that government should step up to help down-on-their-luck Americans. Republicans weren’t always this selfish. In 1987, six in 10 Republicans wanted government to work for the common good.
The GOP slogan for campaign 2012 should be “Every man for himself” or “Women and children last.” Republicans of course, make exceptions for their sugar daddies. If you’re a banker or a billionaire you can count on a lot of help from Republicans in power. If you’re an unwed mother in need of prenatal medical care or a poor hungry kid in need of a school lunch, you can forget about any help from the GOP Mean Machine.
The Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan budget clearly illustrates the party’s fiscal philosophy. The GOP budget cuts aid for prenatal care, school lunches, and child healthcare. The Republican proposal is careful, however, to protect tax breaks for the 1 percent. The best example of the cruelty in the GOP budget is that it cuts federal aid to help seniors pay for home heating oil while it maintains $4 billion dollars a year in federal tax freebies for the oil companies. If you have filled your tank recently you know big oil doesn’t really need the money.
My political philosophy comes from Hubert Humphrey, who said, “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those in the shadow of life, the needy and the handicapped.”
If my belief in these words makes me a bleeding heart liberal, let me bleed.
By: Brad Bannon, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, June 7, 2012
“The End Of 5-4”: The Consequences Of The 2012 Election For The Supreme Court
Of all the things we talk about during a presidential campaign, the Supreme Court probably has the lowest discussion-to-importance ratio. Appointing justices to the Court is one of the most consequential privileges of the presidency, one that has become more important in the last couple of decades since the Court has become more politicized. But there isn’t a great deal to say about it during the campaign, beyond, “If we lose the election, we’ll lose the Court.” The candidates aren’t going to say much of anything about whom they’d appoint other than a bunch of disingenuous bromides (“I’ll appoint justices who will interpret the law, not make law!”), and we don’t actually know who’s going to retire in the next few years, so in the campaign context there isn’t much to be said .
But if there’s anything that ought to make you afraid of a Mitt Romney presidency, it’s this. First of all, if Romney wins he will be under enormous pressure to make sure that anyone he appoints will be not just conservative, but extremely conservative. Remember what happened when George W. Bush tried to appoint Harriet Miers: the right wing had a category 5 freak-out, not because they thought Miers was going to be a liberal, but because they couldn’t be absolutely, positively sure that she wouldn’t be a down-the-line Republican ideologue forever more. Unlike Romney, Bush had no particular need to prove to them that he was a real conservative, but the pressure was great enough that he eventually withdrew her nomination and nominated Samuel Alito, who was exactly what they wanted.
And that will be a shadow of the pressure exerted on a President Romney. So when he gets his chance to make an appointment, there is just no way he will do anything other than select someone pre-approved by the Republican base. And what kind of chance will he get? Well let’s take a look at the ages of the current Court. I’ve arranged them from oldest to youngest:
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 79
Antonin Scalia: 76
Anthony Kennedy: 75
Stephen Breyer: 73
Clarence Thomas: 63
Samuel Alito: 62
John Roberts: 57
Sonia Sotomayor: 57
Elena Kagan: 52
Of course, it isn’t necessarily the case that the oldest justices will be the first to retire. A relatively young justice might become ill, or just get bored, and decide to go. And ideological considerations would probably affect that decision; if you were Ginsburg and Mitt Romney was president, you’d know that retiring would dramatically change the makeup of the Court, in a way you wouldn’t like. But all else being equal, one would expect the older ones to be more likely to step down first. And health considerations might leave a justice with no choice.
So if Mitt Romney were president and one of the four liberal justices stepped down, it would be the end of 5-4 decisions. It would also be the end of all the “What will Anthony Kennedy do?” discussions, since Kennedy won’t matter much anymore. There would be five highly partisan, ideologically ambitious justices who would have the majority on every question that came before them. If Kennedy retired during a Romney presidency, we’d be left with many 5-4 decisions, but they’d all be decided in the conservatives’ favor, and the effect would be the same.
The Court hasn’t had an ideological 180 since George H.W. Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall in 1991 (though you might count Alito replacing Sandra Day O’Connor ). But there’s a fair chance that we’ll see one such shift in the next four years. If it happens when Romney is president, it could be the most consequential one in decades.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 6, 2012
“Ultra Hawk”: John Bolton, Too Far Right Even For George W.Bush
If Mitt Romney plans to make even a slight move toward the middle in the general election, campaigning with John Bolton is not a great way to do it. Bolton, a key foreign-policy advisor to Romney, created a stir recently by appearing to rejoice in an op-ed in The Washington Times that talks between Iran and the U.S. and the “P5 plus one”–the U.N. Security Council members and Germany – had “produced no substantive agreement.” Bolton said any talks with Iran were merely “a well-oiled trap” and declared that President Obama had become “increasingly a bystander” in Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon (despite the disclosure that Obama has authorized aggressive cyber-attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities).
“Bolton has made it clear that he’s rooting for American diplomacy to fail and has repeatedly called for a rush to war with Iran,” said Michelle Flournoy, the Obama administration’s former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in a statement issued by the Obama campaign on Tuesday.
What is less understood about Bolton — and what is truly one of the great oddities in the career of any diplomat in U.S. history — is that for more than a decade the former undersecretary of State and U.N. ambassador has stood fast consistently against most diplomatic efforts, to the point of regularly belittling his former colleagues at the State Department. Both as a Yale-trained lawyer and a public official, Bolton has long campaigned against U.S. fealty to international agreements and multilateral treaties, and he was so extreme in these views that he proved to be too far right even for the George W. Bush administration, according to several former senior Bush officials. A favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney, Bolton ran afoul of senior officials including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and failed in successive bids to be named her deputy and to replace Douglas Feith as No. 3 at the Pentagon. He was given the U.N. job as a consolation prize, at the urging of Cheney’s office, in part to keep him out of Washington, according to the former senior officials.
Even the British, America’s closest ally in the war on terror, found they could not work with Bolton diplomatically. On several occasions, Britain was irked by what U.S. and British sources said were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. In 2003, U.S.-British talks to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program succeeded only after British officials “at the highest level” persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team, my then-Newsweek colleague John Barry and I reported at the time. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Qaddafi’s demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House finally agreed to keep Bolton “out of the loop,” as one source put it. A deal was struck only after Qaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for “policy change”–surrendering his WMD.
Often misidentified as a neoconservative because of his ultra-hawkish views, Bolton told me in an interview in the early 2000s that he is actually a libertarian conservative, albeit not of the Ron Paul variety. Based on that interview and on his writings, in such essays as “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” (Chicago Journal of International Law, 2000), Bolton has made plain that his career-long goal has been to unwind America’s deep ties to the international community, including the U.N. and multilateral treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which he believes is based on an unsound legal concept. Bolton believes that international law in effect doesn’t exist and has no sway over U.S. sovereign prerogatives, especially whether to go to war.
At one point, Bolton even appeared to undermine the president’s own wishes in pursuing his personal agenda of undermining multilateral affiliations. In a landmark speech at the National Defense University in February 2004, Bush had called for a toughened Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But Bolton, who as undersecretary for arms control was supposed to be in charge of that project, “was absent without leave” when it came to implementing the agenda that the president laid out, failing to prepare for a five-year review conference of the NPT in 2005, a former Bush official who worked with Bolton told me at the time. “Everyone knew the conference was coming and that it would be contentious. But Bolton stopped all diplomacy on this six months ago,” another former official told me then. “The White House and the National Security Council started worrying, wondering what was going on. So a few months ago the NSC had to step in and get things going themselves. ” Bolton also held up a plutonium disposal project that required agreement with the Russians; it was completed after he left office.
Bolton is sometimes described as the author of the Bush administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative–a multilateral agreement to interdict suspected WMD shipments on the high seas. But the former senior Bush official who criticized Bolton’s performance on the NPT conference said that in fact Bolton’s successor, Robert Joseph, deserved most of the credit for the PSI. This official adds that it was Joseph, who was in charge of counterproliferation at the NSC, who had to pitch in when Bolton fumbled preparations for the NPT conference as well.
After he left the Bush administration, Bolton also became a vocal critic of its turn toward diplomacy, openly criticizing then-Secretary Rice’s efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with North Korea, which ultimately failed. “This is classic State Department zeal for the deal,” Bolton said on Fox News. He also declared, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, that the Bush administration, having purged or sidelined most of its hardliners, was “in a state of total intellectual collapse.”
And now John Bolton is back.
By: Michael Hirsh, National Journal, June 6, 2012
“Rand Paul’s Twisted Mind”: Protecting Individual Rights Is Not Stalinist
This week Republicans in the Senate once again blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would take further steps to guarantee access to the legal system for women who charge they’ve been paid less than men for doing the same job. (That’s illegal, in case anyone was thinking of trying it.) Justifying his vote against the act, Rand Paul compared it to Soviet communism. This is sort of a dog bites man story; on a given day, Rand Paul probably compares several dozen things to Soviet communism. But here, for what it’s worth, is why he thinks legislation to make it easier for women to sue when they’ve been paid less than men for doing the same job is just like Soviet communism:
“Three hundred million people get to vote everyday on what you should be paid or what the price of goods are,” Paul told reporters on Capitol Hill. “In the Soviet Union, the Politburo decided the price of bread, and they either had no bread or too much bread. So setting prices or wages by the government is always a bad idea.”
Mr. Paul does not appear to understand either the law which he has just voted against, or the class of economic transaction about which he is speaking. If a woman sues because she has been paid less than a man for doing the same work, and a judge rules in her favour, that is not an instance of “setting prices or wages by the government”. The wage in question was set by the employer. What the judge has ruled is that the employer cannot offer different wages to different employees based on their sex. Why might such a hypothetical judge make such a ruling? Because, as noted above, offering different wages to different employees based on their sex is against the law, and has been so since 1963.
I. What Are the Federal Laws Prohibiting Job Discrimination?
1. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;
2. the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), which protects men and women who perform substantially equal work in the same establishment from sex-based wage discrimination;
But should it be illegal to offer different pay for the same work based on an employee’s sex? Maybe not. Mr Paul’s argument here implies he thinks it should be okay. So, let’s try a thought experiment. How would you react to seeing a job advertisement that read: “Associate lawyer in patent firm, 3 years’ experience required, salary $100k for man, $77k for woman”? Is that okay? If not, why not? How about this: “Associate lawyer in patent firm, 3 years’ experience required, salary $100k for Christian, $70k for Jew”? How about “Salary $100k for white, $65k for negro”?
The Paycheck Fairness Act, like the Lily Ledbetter Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, is not an instance of government price setting. It is an instance of government prohibition of certain forms of exploitative price discrimination. It is illegal for an employer to pay a woman less than a man for the same work just as it is illegal for a shop owner to charge a Jew more than a Christian for the same loaf of bread. There have been places in the world where at various times shop owners were allowed to charge Jews more based on their religion, to pay untouchables less based on their caste, and so forth.
Those places were not freer than America. Indeed, one place where employers were free to discriminate against women and Jews, and did so avidly, was the Soviet Union. One of the key differences between the Soviet Union and America is that in America, we have an independent judiciary to which individuals can turn for enforcement of their legal rights when someone is screwing them over because they are of the wrong race, colour, religion, sex or national origin.
In America, you have rights, and what makes those rights non-meaningless is that you can use the legal system to defend them. Mr Paul’s ideological system has performed the ingenious trick of twisting his head around 180 degrees, such that he views the fact that Americans have legally enforceable rights not to be discriminated against as a form of communism.
By: M. S., The Economist, June 6, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 