“Murderers And Madmen”: The Heartland Institute Has A Message For You
As far-right groups go, the Heartland Institute hasn’t quite reached household-name status yet, but it’s working on it. The group’s strange new billboards, at a minimum, will probably help push the group’s notoriety.
The Heartland Institute is “a tax-exempt organization which promotes conspiracy theories about climate scientists, distorts climate science, and attacks regulation of air and water pollution.” Despite support from corporate allies, the group has become so extreme that high-profile supporters, including GM and AT&T, no longer want anything to do with the outfit.
Instead of moderating its views and aiming for the mainstream, the Heartland Institute is buying billboards along highways in Chicago. Joe Romm reported today:
The Heartland Institute has launched one of the most offensive billboard campaigns in U.S. history. The Chicago-based anti-science think tank is comparing all those who accept climate science — and the journalists who report on it accurately — to Charles Manson, the Unabomber, and Osama Bin Laden.
The Guardian described this as “possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.”
Of course, the Heartland Institute doesn’t quite see it that way. In its defense of the group’s propaganda, the Heartland Institute says it’s eager to convince people that “believing in global warming” is not “sophisticated,” and to do so, it’s noting that “murderers and madmen” agree with those who accept climate science.
Perhaps the group can use some of its remaining funds to buy a textbook on Logical Fallacies 101?
Andrew Sullivan added, “In some ways, this is an almost perfect illustration of what has happened to the ‘right.’ A refusal to acknowledge scientific reality; and a brutalist style of public propaganda that focuses entirely on guilt by the most extreme association.”
By” Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 4, 2012
“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
The “Id Of Newt”: A Seminar On Brain Science
On Dec. 14, with Newt Gingrich still leading in most polls of Iowa but a softness in his numbers beginning to show, the former House Speaker made the unorthodox choice to take time off campaigning to deliver a seminar on brain science in the liberal university town of Iowa City.
“Today,” Gingrich declared to an auditorium of students, “we are on the cusp of an explosion of new science that will create new opportunities in health, agriculture, energy and materials technology.” But, he argued, we must first reform the bureaucracy hindering unfettered science. Perhaps — but it was hard to argue with Politico’s conclusion that giving the seminar in the midst of a hard-fought primary was politically “puzzling.” At worst it was suicidal.
The best guide to understanding the reasons Gingrich took time off the campaign trail to teach a brain-science seminar — and also, in the words of Mitt Romney, to understanding his “zany” side — is Gingrich’s first book, “Window of Opportunity.”
Published in 1984 when he was the three-term member of Congress from Georgia (and, the cover notes, “chairman of the Congressional Space Caucus”), the book is an extended meditation on how the bureaucratic welfare state is holding back America from a bright future of space tourism and a poverty-ending computer revolution. It was coauthored by Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, and sci-fi/fantasy author David Drake and blurbed by President Reagan, who called it “a source of new hope for building an Opportunity Society that sparks the best in each of us and permits us to chart a better future for our children.” (Drake, for his part, is the author of nearly 100 novels, with titles like “The Dragon Lord” and “Skyripper.”)
The striking thing about “Window of Opportunity” (yes, I read the whole thing) are the continuities in Gingrich’s thought and style between 1984 and the present. The constant hyperbole is there (“dramatically,” “literally,” “enormously”). Gingrich’s tendency to speak in world-historical terms, coupled with authoritative-sounding and astoundingly detailed discussions of technology, is there.
“Our generation of Americans must decide whether to lead mankind into freedom, productivity, and peace or whether we will preside over the slow decay of mankind into a world of terrorism and tyranny,” he writes at one point. At another, he dives into the minutiae of Reagan’s so-called Star Wars missile defense plan:
Particle beams and laser solutions (directed energy weapons) offer some real advantages over conventional — gun and missile — weapons because directed energy weapons hit their targets at the speed of light, making aiming much easier and permitting a single weapon to hit multiple targets in series.
In “Window of Opportunity,” Gingrich waxes enthusiastic about children as young as eighth graders jumping into the new information economy and making money using computers, echoing his talk this year about getting kids to do janitorial work.
This book is where Gingrich’s abiding interest in futurism first bloomed into public view. He invokes classics of the genre such as Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave,” Peter Drucker’s “The Age of Discontinuities,” and John Naisbett’s “Megatrends.” Some of Gingrich’s predictions sound reasonably prescient with the benefit of hindsight. “Many of our grandchildren will do much of their work from their homes by connecting keyboards to their telephones to write letters, books, and purchase orders,” he writes.
Other predictions, not so much:
- “If we are going to retain our high standard of living and compete in the world marketplace, Americans must give priority to the development of high-value industries such as space tourism and advanced health care.”
- “The space station will provide opportunities for a variety of new commercial and scientific projects: the first stable base for long-term production of … ultralight, very large structures that can be built with extremely thin materials in a zero-gravity environment but would be crushed by Earth’s gravity.”
- “This much flashier space vehicle would theoretically be capable of research and development missions, hypersonic flight, and even rescue missions to the Moon — but it must be piggy-backed into orbit on the shuttle, and it will be piloted by a single man in an open cockpit, protected only by an anti-micrometeorite suit supplied by the lowest bidder.”
- “The third-generation shuttle of the year 2020 should offer yet another magnitude drop [in the price of flying cargo to space] about $10 a kilogram. At that point, a typical couple might take a honeymoon trip into space for around $15,000.”
In fairness, there’s still a few years left for America to achieve the $15,000 moon honeymoon. If Gingrich is elected in 2012 and reelected in 2016, maybe he can make it happen.
By: Justin Elliott, Salon, December 27, 2011
A Progressive Defense Of The White House On Plan B
I get the reasons for liberal outrage at the Obama administration’s Plan B decision. But I can’t quite join in the indignation. I know that I am a man—a fact I’ve been aware of for some time—and so readers male and female can factor that in here as they wish. But it seems to me that to call this merely a case of politics cynically trumping science is way too dismissive of some concerns that parents with all kinds of political views might have about their teenage daughters buying this pill without their knowledge.
Much of the opposition to allowing underage girls to buy the pill over the counter amounts to straw-man arguments. There’s the line that taking the pill amounts to abortion. Watch this lurid ad by a right-to-life group and think about what sort of cacophony must be raging inside the mind that could even come up with such an egregious thing. Outside the realm of anti-abortion fanaticism, I don’t think most of us would equate the prevention of a pregnancy with the removal of an existing fetus. It’s called “emergency contraception” because it’s contraception, not abortion.
There’s also an argument about harmful effects on young girls of the pill’s heightened progesterone levels. I am far from being an expert on such matters, but unanimous view of the scientific community appears to be that the pill is safe for all females of child-bearing age, and that’s good enough for me.
Those are ideological issues, and ones that can be dismissed easily. But it seems to me that there is a fair issue here, and it has to do with parents having a right to know about and be involved in what their kids are up to. You simply don’t have to be a right-winger to have concerns about your 14- or 15-year-old daughter having easy access to such a pill.
That is not a political question per se. A parent’s view on that matter will be partially informed by politics, but only partially (and in some cases not at all, since lots of people have no political views to speak of). Parents’ opinions on this will be informed most of all by the parent-child relationship; by the parents’ views about sexuality and morality; by the parents’ feelings about their authority vis-a-vis their child’s autonomy. These areas might have a lot to do with a parent’s political views, but they might not. We all know people who are politically conservative but sexually libertine, or politically liberal and as chaste as Mother Teresa.
In other words, this is less about appeasing the right than acknowledging reality in all its complications out there in the country, where many people probably have mixed feelings. I’d be fascinated to see some polling on this, and I expect we will soon.
In an ideal world, parents would rationally support the idea of their daughters having every means available to them to correct an error (or, obviously, to override a violation) that happened a day or two prior. But parents don’t always think rationally about these things. That makes these issues sensitive by definition, and it’s hardly illegitimate for a government to take such matters into consideration. I’d have had more respect for Kathleen Sibelius in this situation if, instead of that blather about 11-year-old girls not being able to follow instructions and take the pill properly, she’d just said: “Look, I respect the science, but this raises ethical and moral questions about what is the proper age for access to emergency contraception, in addition to the scientific ones. And that’s a public debate we ought to have more of before we pull this trigger.”
Such pills are generally available in other advanced countries, but there are some limits. In England, you have to be at least 16 to buy them. In Finland, 15. In Quebec, you have to consult a pharmacist. In Italy, it requires a doctor’s prescription.
So advanced societies haven’t yet made an across-the-board decision that all girls from 11 up should be able to buy this pill, and the United States always lags behind in these things, for all the reasons we know.
I wouldn’t doubt that the administration feared the development of a narrative here. Newt Gingrich in particular is very adept at that sort of thing: This election, he’d have announced with his usual fanfare, is a contest between traditional values and 13-year-old girls having no-consequences sex. It’s hard to know the extent to which that would have taken off.
But I doubt this was just politics. It was only in August that this same “anti-woman” administration issued new standards requiring insurance companies to cover all government-approved contraceptives for women, without co-payments or other fees. That will take effect, under the new health-care law, in January 2013 and should go a long way toward lowering the cost barriers to birth-control services for insured women. If the administration so lives in fear of political fallout from the cultural right, then why did it do that?
So maybe there was something more going on here. Maybe we should have a longer debate about the appropriate age at which this pill should become available. And maybe the right answer, an answer that much, but not all, of the advanced world has agreed on, is that there shouldn’t be a limit. The science says it’s safe, and it will undoubtedly prevent unwanted pregnancies—and, in an irony that the anti-abortionists never grasp, it will prevent abortions, too. But it’s now the job of advocates to make the culture catch up to the science.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 9, 2011
“We The People” And America’s Future: Is Rick Perry As American As He Thinks He Is?
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece asking whether Governor Rick Perry could call himself a Christian given his opposition to government actions to help the hungry, aged, and ill. Not surprisingly, many challenged my view of Christianity. In letter after letter they pointed out that Christ spoke to individuals, not government. My observation that He was speaking to a conquered people, not free individuals who could use their power to make a more just state, was not convincing. My reference to the prophets Micah, Amos, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, each of whom called on governmental leaders to help the poor, was dismissed as being from the “Old Testament.”
I will surely return to the issue of Christianity again, but I devote this piece to Rick Perry’s character and the character he would nurture in American citizens. Teddy Roosevelt said, “Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.” So what is the character that Perry embodies? What is his view of the American citizen and the citizen’s responsibility to our country and to one’s fellows?
First, Perry himself.
His persona evokes the rugged individualist. His warning to Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, not to come to Texas so that he can avoid being subjected to “real ugly” frontier justice evidences a character antithetical to one of the crowning achievements of the United States — a nation under law, not men. In a phrase, he dismisses the Bill of Rights — due process, trial by jury, the right to confront one’s accuser.
The real question is not what character he would make of the United States but whether he believes in America at all. He has threatened to secede. Central to his campaign is his pledge to shrink the federal government — making it impossible for our noble nation to lead the world, to serve as the “city on the Hill.”
Perry may want to pretend that he is taking America back to a better past, but his actions are part of the movement away from nation-states, where countries are largely irrelevant. The notion that we are at the end of the need for nation-states is gaining more adherents globally. The fortunate few, commonly referred to as the Davos groupies, hang out with the other well off and well-heeled all over the world. Summering in Europe, wintering in Colorado, the global elite have more in common with and feel more loyal to their carefully connected crowd than with their fellow citizens. When one’s loyalty lies with one’s own class, where does that leave one’s country?
In declaring his wish to shrink the size of government, Perry believes that government should have as little role in people’s lives as possible. No investment in education, science research, building the railroads, highways, or sewage systems of the future. Why care about America’s future, why set inspirational goals that bring people together, if you don’t believe in “We the people”?
Nationalism, patriotism, commitment to one another are for Perry an anachronism, a thing of the past. He has not said that those with the greatest wealth, talent, and circumstances have any special responsibility to our country or their fellow citizens. He has not said we are all Americans together. Rather, he seems to be able to watch human suffering with equanimity — as though America should be a place of survival of the fittest. No Social Security, no Medicare, no unemployment insurance, no laws to protect clean air, clean water. When hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and flood destroy home and communities — no FEMA, no help. “We” are on our own.
In his book Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America From Washington, Perry writes that the 16th Amendment, which gave birth to the federal income tax, was “the great milestone on the road to serfdom,” because it represented “the birth of wealth redistribution in the United States.”
Individualism, self-reliance, self-respect — these are great virtues, useful in many fields of endeavor. But they are not enough to sustain a nation. Virtues don’t spring into being in a moment. They need to be exercised and practiced. Nations at war need courage, quick thinking, and selflessness. Nations at peace require that sense of duty to others. No man goes into a burning building for mere money. Nor does a fierce individualism nurture the patience that a teacher requires, the love given by a hospice nurse caring for a dying man.
Citizens’ moral compasses do not stem only from their faith. Government also defines the moral standard of a nation. If we are told that blacks are worth but three-fifths of whites, many will see this as the acceptable treatment of their fellow man. Likewise, when the government declares it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, we see that discrimination is also wrong.
When a candidate like Governor Perry boasts that he will shrink government by cutting those programs that grasp the nation’s imagination of what we can do together, he is saying that America does not need the one institution in which we make our most solemn decisions together. We need not nurture a nation of laws, nor educate the young, nor protect the elderly. Teddy Roosevelt took on the trusts, protected the environment, made America more just. The character of the nation improved with his leadership. Can it improve with Perry’s?
By: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, The Atlantic, August 29, 2011
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