“Bad Idea Legislation”: When Fools Try To legislate, Women, Science, And Dwarves Are Among The Targets
March turned to April a couple days ago, and with it came a raft of April Fools’ jokes. (It also elicited a new round of sighs from Republicans who had hoped to find out that their presidential field was really an elaborate reality TV punking.)
In the spirit of the season, I’m devoting this column to April’s Fools and fools. Guess which of these are bills actually introduced in state legislatures around the country, and which are gags of my own creation (answers at bottom).
Ladies first. It should come as no surprise that many of the weirdest, most outrageous bills that have popped up around the country in recent months focus on women. Take a recent Wisconsin Senate bill that would have required the state’s Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to “emphasize” single parenthood “as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.” The bill, which happily died this month, had two sponsors. One, state Sen. Glenn Grothman, thinks liberals want children to be born out of wedlock “because they are more likely to be dependent on the government.” The bill’s other sponsor, a state representative named Don Pridemore, has said that spouses in abusive relationships should try to stay in them rather than divorce.
He might be comfortable with a prize of a bill introduced this year in the New Hampshire state House that would have required police to obtain a warrant before making an arrest in a domestic violence case unless they had seen the abuse taking place firsthand. Happily, that bill also met its deserved fate when the legislature killed it as “inexpedient to legislate.”
No discussion of legislative assaults upon women would be complete without touching on contraception. A law shot down just this week in the Arizona state Senate would have allowed any employer (not just religiously affiliated ones) to refuse to provide contraception coverage on moral grounds … unless a woman produced a note from her doctor certifying that she needed it for medical reasons (rather than the presumed moral turpitude).
“Feticide.” I’ll skip over conservatives’ insistence that women must undergo (sometimes invasive) ultrasounds before getting the perfectly legal medical procedure known as abortion. (The same people who object to warnings on cigarette packs because everyone knows the hazards of smoking simultaneously believe that a woman who wants an abortion must not realize how pregnancy works.) That’s not the only abortion-related fight going on. A proposed Iowa law would classify abortion as “feticide,” bringing life in prison without parole for the doctor.
For sheer weirdness, though, nothing beats Oklahoma. State Sen. Ralph Shortey wants to ban “food or any product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses.” Even he admitted, “I don’t know if it is happening in Oklahoma.” No word on whether he’s going to follow on with a bill banning Soylent Green. Oklahoma also brought what has been called the “every sperm is sacred” bill, for the old Monty Python sketch, which, in the spirit of granting personhood at the moment of conception, would deem any waste of sperm (as in, for example, masturbation) “an action against an unborn child.” This month a local Delaware council approved a similar resolution.
Don’t say gay. Tennessee has become a culture wars battleground. One bill in the Volunteer State’s legislature would ban teachers from talking about homosexuality in elementary and middle school sex ed classes (hence its nickname: the “don’t say gay” bill). Homosexuality “happens in nature, but so does bestiality,” said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Stacey Campfield. “That does not make it right or something we should be teaching in school.” Campfield and his allies agreed to let the bill stall when they realized that Tennessee currently has no sex ed in elementary and middle school.
The Tennessee state Senate this month passed a bill encouraging teachers to give both sides of “controversial” topics such as evolution and global warming. Maybe they hope to set up a modern-day Scopes monkey trial.
The never-ending crazy. The Tennessee House also voted overwhelmingly this month to condemn a two-decade-old nonbinding United Nations sustainable development plan as a “destructive and insidious” communist plot. Not to be outdone, Wyoming’s legislature debated (and killed) legislation that called for the state to start making plans for a catastrophe that incapacitated the federal government—including the possibility of setting up an “alternative currency” to the U.S. dollar. Another provision, which would have looked into setting up a draft and acquiring an aircraft carrier, was added with the intent of sinking the bill. It succeeded.
Not all state lawmakers look abroad with fear. Three New Hampshire representatives proposed a bill (since killed) requiring that all Granite State legislation include a quotation from the Magna Carta “which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived.”
Of course, this would have run afoul of the movement against sharia, or Islamic law. Legislators in 22 states have introduced bills banning courts from applying foreign or sharia laws, a mystifying solution in search of a nonexistent problem.
And did I mention the Florida lawmaker who wants to repeal the state’s ban on dwarf-tossing?
You can’t make this stuff up—literally. If you guessed that all of these examples are real, you get full credit. If you guessed the “every sperm is sacred” bills were too absurd to be true, you get half credit: Their sponsors proffered them with legislative tongues planted firmly in cheeks.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, April 7, 2012
“No Strangers To Racism”: National Review Cans Racist Writer John Derbyshire
On Friday, National Review writer and conservative crazy person John Derbyshire wrote an unambiguously racist piece for a conservative web site that was, well, unambiguously racist. Not a close call, that one.
In response, National Review has fired him. You can read editor Rich Lowry’s statement here, or I’ll save you a link and just provide the probably-more-accurate version:
“My friends, we at National Review are no strangers to racism. I mean, holy crap, have you seen some of the stuff we’ve published?Let’s not forget that this entire magazine was founded so that segregationists would have somewhere to go to feel intellectually superior about their racism, and I think we’ve tried to maintain that philosophy ever since.The one and only essential rule we require of our authors, however, is that they maintain a small bit of plausible deniability. You don’t come right out and say white supremacist things, you simply suggest them, then act outraged when someone picks up on the obvious implications. All of conservatism relies on this distancing between our “suggested” policies and their obviously ridiculous or racist real world results. By breaking that implicit rule, however, Mr. Derbyshire has damaged our future abilities to claim we don’t actually mean it when we suggest obviously racist things.
We are therefore letting Mr. Derbyshire go, so that we can maintain the genteel, did-we-really-mean-that-or-not veneer of our crazy racist founders. We wish him well, and hope to see him say he is sorry, be quickly forgiven and then nobly redeemed in the eyes of the movement, hopefully by next Tuesday or Wednesday, and are at least satisfied that for the rest of his life he will be able to wear this episode as a badge of how very downtrodden racist assholes are in this nation, probably because ethnic people and liberals are meanies and/or fascists. Thank you.”
Did I get it right? Meh, who cares.
By: Hunter for Daily Kos, April 7, 2012
“Fear Is Good”: Romney’s Pivot To The Center Postponed Indefinitely
In a new tactic that TPM appropriately called the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” strategy, Mitt Romney has decided to accuse President Obama of being too vague in his plans for a second term. Once you get past the absurdity, there’s something meaningful going on. But first, to Mitt’s charges: “Nancy Pelosi famously said that we would have to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it. President Obama has turned that advice into a campaign strategy: He wants us to re-elect him so we can find out what he will actually do. With all the challenges the nation faces, this is not the time for President Obama’s hide and seek campaign.” Riiiiight.
This probably seems to you like a weird accusation to make. After all, Obama’s plans for a second term seem pretty clear: more of the same! You may think that’d be great, or you may think that’d be a hellish nightmare, but either way it’s not like it’s some big mystery. It isn’t as though he’s going to come out and really shock us with some new policy turn that is totally different from the kind of things he’s been doing for the past three years. But that’s what you think only if you don’t reside deep in the heart of the Republican base, which is where the key to this appeal lies.
You see, as far as base Republicans are concerned, there are two kinds of Obama policies. The first kind is the freedom-destroying, Constitution-desecrating, pulling-us-toward-socialist-dystopia awfulness. Like health care reform, or repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The second kind is the long con, the things he has done to lull the American people into a false sense of security before the second term comes and he unveils the horror of his true agenda. Like the way he has done nothing to restrict gun purchases, which only proves just how diabolical his plan to take away every American’s guns really is.
When Romney says that Obama is hiding his true intentions from us, he knows that your average voter isn’t going to be persuaded. And that’s what’s so notable about this. At a moment when he’s got the nomination pretty well locked up, Romney is still trying to assure conservatives that he’s one of them, that he hates who they hate and fears what they fear. That “pivot to the center” could be a while in coming.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, April 5, 2012
Republicans “Marvelously Looking Forward To Tampa”: Godfathers, Caterpillars And Golf
Republican to-do checklist:
1) Pooh-pooh all the talk about a war on women.
“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,” said the Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, during a week when a USA Today/Gallup poll found Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney among women in key swing states by 18 points.
This comment was extremely unsettling. What was it that made Priebus think about caterpillars? At least if you mess with women, women can fight back. We’re already losing all the bees, and the bats are in trouble. We do not want these people picking on caterpillars at all.
2) Seek out news about the mood of the womenfolk.
“My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me, and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy,” Mitt told a meeting of editors in Washington this week.
It sounded as if Ann Romney was, say, a native of Turkmenistan who had occasion to return to her native people and bring her husband back word of their hopes and concerns.
3) Make Rick Santorum get out of the race.
This is becoming a Republican obsession, and I am sure it will be a hot topic of conversation at Easter and Passover dinners, when American families will get together and express their amazement at the news that Rick Santorum is still running for something.
4) Keep Mitt on script.
The other day Romney reacted spontaneously to a comment by David Plouffe, an Obama adviser, that Mitt was the “godfather” of the individual mandate in health care reform.
“If I’m the godfather of this thing, then it gives me the right to kill it,” Romney said.
Think about that for a minute. What do you think he was going for there? A Mafia metaphor? Romney also tossed in a mention of Rumpelstiltskin, so maybe either a Mafia metaphor or some sort of weird fairy-tale image? (“I am your evil fairy godfather, and I am putting you into a coma from which you will never awake. Especially since your health insurance expired.”)
5) Watch the Masters golf tournament.
But not with approval! “Don’t you think it’s time Augusta National joined the 21st century — or the 20th — and allowed women members?” tweeted John McCain. (O.K., possibly not personally. Possibly tweeted by a minion on behalf of John McCain.)
“If I could run Augusta, which isn’t likely to happen, of course, I’d have women,” said Romney.
There are two ways to look at this. One is that this is another sign of an increased gender consciousness in the Republican ranks, albeit a teensy-weensy, poll-driven one. Another is that it is heartening that the whole men-only-golf-club thing now seems so pathetic, even the Republican high command wants to steer away from it.
Although, in that case, somebody had better tell John Boehner to ditch his.
6) Prepare for the next big primaries.
“On April 24 — is that — what day is April 24? Is that a Tuesday?” Mitt asked the crowd at a rally this week. “It’s a Tuesday! I need you to — it’s not that coming Tuesday. It’s the one after that, or is it the one after that? It’s the one after that!”
As Mario Cuomo said, we campaign in poetry, govern in prose.
7) Prepare for the convention.
Which will be held in Tampa, Fla., on Aug. 27. Where, in the name of safety, the City Council is attempting to ban water guns from the area around the coliseum but is prohibited by Florida state law from banning handguns. Sure looking forward to Tampa.
8) Try to figure out what to do for the four months in between. That’s enough time to run an entire season of a TV series.
Star Trek, the Mitt Generation — A time machine takes Romney 100 years into the future, where Newt Gingrich is plotting his next political comeback.
Romney Top Chef — Ann impresses the judges with Mitt’s favorite meal of meatloaf cakes with catsup and brown sugar.
Undercover Boss Reunion Show — Mitt goes back to visit workers who were laid off after Bain Capital bought their factories and discovers that every one of them is doing great.
The Amazing Race: Michigan — Team Romney overcomes a Roadblock in which Tagg is challenged to measure the height of the trees.
Republican Swamp People — The Romneys move to the Everglades in an effort to woo the swing state of Florida. Excitement ensues when Mitt tries to drive to a rally with an alligator strapped to the roof of the car.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 6, 2012
The GOP’s “Rear Guard”: Republican Race-Baiting Will Come Back to Haunt Them
On the wonderful night of November 4, 2008, thousands of people, white, black, and Latino, gathered in Grant Park in Chicago to celebrate the election of our first black president. For many Americans, Barack Obama’s election was the beginning of a new era when there would be cooperation not conflict between races. Finally the racial conflict which had plagued America for centuries would come to an end. Fat chance!
The truth is that racial relations now seem to be even worse than they were before election day in 2008. The ugly truth is that Barack Obama’s election brought the bigots and haters out in full force.
The dream ended for me when I watched a Tea Party rally in Washington where several of the protestors carried posters that pictured the president of the United States as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose. Then there was the infamous incident when white Tea Party protesters at the Capitol hurled racial epithets at black members of Congress.
The Republican candidates for president have made overt and covert racial appeals. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a smart man who should know better, once said President Obama’s views on foreign policy were shaped during his childhood in Africa. During this year’s presidential campaign, Gingrich and former Sen. Rick Santorum both urged black Americans to end their dependence on federal entitlement programs. Pointedly, neither candidate offered the same advice to the millions of white Americans who receive federal benefits. Former Gov. Mitt Romney criticized his primary opponents for just about every reason under the sun, but he never called his opponents out for their racism.
The Republican race baiting filtered down through the ranks. An official of the Orange County Republican Party in California sent out an E-mail that showed the president of the United States as the child of chimpanzees. A Republican mayor in California sent an E-mail that depicted the White House lawn as a watermelon patch.
The final straw was the tragic death of Trayvon Martin.
It’s hard for me to see how Martin could have been a threat to George Zimmerman. Zimmerman had a gun and Martin was armed with a bag of Skittles. Not really a fair fight. My kids used to eat Skittles and fortunately no one shot them. But my kids are white and Trayvon Martin was black. The Republican indifference to Martin’s murder is shocking. The Pew Center released a national poll on Tuesday that indicated that a majority of Republicans believed the media had paid too much attention to the Martin tragedy. They would not think that way if the victim had been a white kid.
The question facing America is whether racial hatred is getting worse or whether it is a rear guard action by people trying to hold back the racial changes in America. I think it’s the last gasp of a dying breed of racial dinosaurs. In their book Millennial Makeover Morley Winograd and Mike Hais demonstrate that the millennial generation of young Americans, who will set the course for American politics for the next generation, is remarkably free of racial basis. And there’s a good reason for this according to the authors. Four out of every 10 Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 are black, Latino, Asian, or Arab. Many young white Americans have black and Latino friends, a situation that has created a generation almost free of racial hate.
If Republicans do win this year, it would be a classic example of winning ugly. But if they win ugly in 2012, they will pay a political price in a few years when millennials replace baby boomers as the dominant force in American politics. Don’t say I didn’t warn them.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, April 5, 2012
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