The GOP should now be called the Republican Brotherhood

Has anyone noticed how the Republican Party--in Texas & elsewhere--has come to resemble the Muslim Brotherhood more & more?

Of course neither a Muslim Brother nor a Republican Brother would recognize this. But what the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt did the moment it gained power & what the GOP is doing in Texas & other states it controls are similar on the process level: that is, gain power by demagoguery & promises of moral & economic reform; then, when in power, ignore economic reform while focusing on (1) rigging the game to consolidate their power & (2) enacting the rigid rules of Shariah Law, one by one.

The Christianist version of Shariah Law starts with abortion, which Christianists regard as murder--even when the mother's life is at stake, even in cases of rape, even in cases of incest when the mother is, say, a 12 year old girl.

Of course if abortion is murder, then any woman who gets an abortion is guilty of capital murder--a death penalty offense in Texas. Along with any woman who gets in vitro fertilization in a desperate effort to have a child, since it always involves discarding many fertilized embryos.

So every time a Christianist talks about abortion as murder, ask them what they're doing about making it capital murder to have an abortion? After all, if it's murder the doctor performing the abortion is just the hired gun. The murderer is the pregnant woman...or girl.

The only justification a Christianist Republican could have for not making it a death penalty offense to get an abortion is if they regard wimmen as incapable of informed consent--like the Muslim Brotherhood does.

Democrats need to flush the Republican Brotherhood out in the open. Make them campaign to make getting an abortion a capital offense--which it most certainly is IF it's "murder." Or to admit that they're lying demagogues when they use that kind of language--unless they believe women should be equated with children in the eyes of the law...

The GOP's "Hastert Rule" tells you everything you need to know about today's GOP

For years now the Republican Party leadership in the House has worked under a simple rule: if the House is majority Republican, no bill will be allowed to come to a vote unless the Speaker of the House is sure that a majority of Republican Congressmen will vote for it.

Speaker Boehner just reaffirmed this (there have been exceptions in the past), as a no-exceptions principle.

This matters. It means that what a majority of American voters want doesn't matter. And that what a majority of House Representatives want, working as representatives of their districts, doesn't matter either. All that matters is whether the bill being considered is considered good for the Republican Party.

This is baldly and unapologetically putting Party before Country. I'm sure that both parties want to help their parties. But usually, when there may be a conflict between Party and Country, at least the Democrats try to rationalize it. The GOP doesn't even bother. The Hastert Rule (named after the GOP Speaker of the House who formulated the rule) means the GOP's Prime Directive with ALL legislations is "What helps the GOP?" Period.

Fitting for the party whose rank and file members mostly believe that "compromise" is a dirty word.

The rich really do believe that "nice guys finish last."

Today's PBS News Hour had a segment on research published last year about the Greed Is Good crowd:

"The rich really are different from the rest of us, scientists have found — they are more apt to commit unethical acts because they are more motivated by greed.

"People driving expensive cars were more likely than other motorists to cut off drivers and pedestrians at a four-way-stop intersection in the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley researchers observed. Those findings led to a series of experiments that revealed that people of higher socioeconomic status were also more likely to cheat to win a prize, take candy from children and say they would pocket extra change handed to them in error rather than give it back.

"Because rich people have more financial resources, they're less dependent on social bonds for survival, the Berkeley researchers reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As a result, their self-interest reigns and they have fewer qualms about breaking the rules.

"'If you occupy a more insular world, you're less likely to be sensitive to the needs of others,' said study lead author Paul Piff, who is studying for a doctorate in psychology."

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/27/science/la-sci-0228-greed-20120228

The researchers found in experiments that people who are led to feel richer start acting this way, as do winners of lotteries. So it's not entirely innate.

But this does mean that the Republicans' worship of the rich is misplaced; Republicans who are not themselves wealthy tend to be very nice people. I know a lot of such folk, and my experience of them confirms this. But they fail to understand that the affluent captains of industry and politics may talk like them but they don't think like them.

Conversely, poorer people--often disdained by Republicans--tend to have each others' backs (unless they win the lottery...).

Snowden: Traitor? Heroic whistleblower? Or?

My local public radio station did a segment on the NSA self-styled whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Nearly all of the dozens of commenters treated this issue as a no-brainer. Big Snoopy Government BAD, heroic Little Guy Whistleblower GOOD. With the corollary of Another Whistleblower Was Right And They Done Him Wrong--Therefore anyone who claims he's also a whistleblower is Right.

Not so fast. One reason why there's an Ex Presidents' Club --including all the former Prez's of both parties--is that nobody else really knows what the gig entails. Every President made fine-sounding statements before getting the job that he had to revisit later.

The Constitution predates the global Islamofascist movement, the Internet, the computer, the radio, the telephone, the telegraph. It even predates the steam locomotive, for that matter. Most Americans would be hard-pressed to imagine what the world was like for the people who wrote and ratified the Constitution. What was prescient about the Founders was that most of them knew they didn't know what the future would hold. So they wrote the Constitution in generalities for the most part, because they wanted to establish principles and protections without trying to micromanage...well, us.

They say wisdom is knowing what you don't know. Score one for the Founders, zero for the outraged multitudes who confidently assume they actually know what the scoop is here. And as the Prez pointed out, perfect privacy is only attainable at the expense of total exposure to terrorist attacks, while perfect protection from terrorist attacks is only attainable at the expense of zero privacy. If there were another 9/11 on President Obama's watch, would any of these self-righteous denouncers say "Well, that was acceptable collateral damage as long as the government doesn't know who I'm phoning."

The right answer, however uncomfortable, is a compromise between safety and personal privacy--stirring Patrick Henry quotes notwithstanding. No government always gets this right, but we have to guard against calling for more privacy whenever someone takes it upon himself to spill secret beans--and then against calling for more safety when we get bombed.

Let us prey--the prayer of the Libertarians

The secular religion of Libertarianism (it's a religion because it's based on beliefs that can't be empirically proven) provides a handy cover for corporatists and racists to operate under.

Corporatists because crippling government's ability to regulate polluters and corporate con artists (look up Enron) is a prime goal for these people, but standing up for the big guy doesn't play well in court of public opinion, so blathering about "freedom" in the "strip you naked of any defenses against powerful people running roughshod over you" sense is the way to go.

Racists because to unreconstructed Southern whites the federal government is still considered to be an enemy occupying power without which the South could restore the paradise of the Antebellum South. So here again crippling the federal government is the real desire as being instrumental to putting blacks and other non-Anglos back "in their place."

The rest is wordsmithing.

And Libertarian propaganda itself provides a fine example of how unprotected people who aren't highly intelligent and educated need protection from demagoguery.

One thing Libertarianism features is nothing on behalf of the half of the country with an IQ of 100 or less. Corporatists want these people undefended so they'll buy junk food and nostrums and predatory loans and fall for the appeals of demagogues. Libertarians provide an ostensibly noble-sounding excuse for leaving people not born with college-level smarts unprotected for the smart people who are also ruthless to prey on them.  

Who wears the cloak of Libertarianism, and why?

Yesterday the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote a column critiquing Libertarianism. Here's my two cents' worth:

Einstein said explanations should be as simple as possible--but no simpler.

That's the essence of the problem with Libertarianism: it's simpler than messy reality, like all shining ideological visions, and thus breaks down in the real world. Like small business accounting software that has no provision for bounced checks.

Government needs to be big enough to let a nation function effectively on the world stage, and to protect the little guy from the relentless drive of the rich and powerful to become ever richer and ever more powerful by making the rest of us ever poorer and weaker.

In 1790, with a nation of 4 million--90% farmers--with no foreign trade to speak of, and the medicine of the day unable to cure diseases, and old age care comprising your children, and communications traveled at the speed of a walking horse, the kind of government we needed was infinitely closer to the Libertarian ideal. Now it's impossible.

And even then it was impossible. Libertarians conveniently forget America's decade or so under the Articles of Confederation. That WAS a Libertarian government, and even with the limited needs for government that we had then it failed utterly. Jefferson was dead wrong. Madison and Hamilton were right. That's why we got our Constitution--the document that the Teahadis claim to worship when in fact they want to kill it and resurrect the Articles of Confederation.

The only reason the Libertarian dream still staggers around like a zombie on steroids is that it's being propped up by corporatists and Confederacy revanchists. Corporatists want a government too weak to regulate them and easy to capture (courtesy of the Citizens United decision). Aging undereducated Southern whites who still call the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression" want their antebellum South back, where blacks knew "their place" and the federal gummint was unable to protect them.
These special interests talk Libertarianism to cloak what they really are...and want.

The GOP needs radical surgery to restore its honor--and its Presidential aspirations

America needs a major conservative party along the lines of what the GOP was like before it sold its soul to get all those racist Southern Dixiecrats--the kind of people who now call themselves Tea Partiers and claim that their concerns are strictly fiscal.

We need a conservative party because at least a third of Americans are conservative by nature, just as around a third are liberal by nature, and another third are moderate pragmatics by nature. For a many years the two major parties were either liberal-leaning or conservative-leaning, with their beliefs moderated by the compromises needed to attract enough moderates to win elections.

But today the Republican Party has abandoned that tack. It has become an extremist organization that wins through extremist demagoguery and a string of ever-dirtier vote-rigging tricks--radical gerrymandering, voter suppression (especially black voters), abuse of the Senate rules, lavishly funded propaganda campaigns aimed at not just defeating Democrats but at fostering fundamental hatred and distrust of the federal government.

The consequence is that today's Republican Party is no longer conservative--it's reactionary, dominated by aging Southern white revanchists still fighting the Civil War, still hating the federal government for the same reasons they hated it in 1861.

The only way we'll get a real conservative party again is through the reduction of this GOP to a regional party. Its Southern white base is so radicalized they can't be reasoned into the 21st century, and their gerrymandered grip on their House seats is so strong they can't be defeated in their rural redoubts--at least not until America's demographic shifts shrink these redoubts to the point that they can't command a House majority. Such a party won't be able to elect presidents--or shape the Supreme Court as a consequence. Or get a Senate majority.

Only when it becomes clear that a Tea Party-dominated GOP can't elect a president will moderate conservatives have a shot at getting their party back.

Oh no! There's a slippery slope!

The NRA's war on the ATF, the CDC, and all the American citizens who depend on the government to save them from anarchy, all rests on one basic argument: that reasonable laws invariably lead to more extreme, unreasonable ones.

This is the "slippery slope" "argument."

But "slippery slope" is a metaphor, not an argument. Metaphors can illustrate points. They can't make them. There are incidents without number when a restriction led to even more restriction. There are also incidents without number where a restriction led to a loosening. These things have to be looked at on a case by case basis.

For example, Prohibition didn't lead to having the death sentence for possessing alcohol. Instead it was repealed. Marijuana possession laws were enacted in the last century, and they will almost certainly be repealed in the not too distant future. The voting age was moved from 21 to 18. It hasn't moved from 18 to 10.

There is no such thing as a "slippery slope" except for actual slopes--like on hills--that get slippery when they get wet.

Why we fight (for gun control)

Why we fight:

•Charlotte Bacon, 6
•Daniel Barden, 7
•Rachel Davino, 29
•Olivia Engel, 6
•Josephine Gay, 7
•Ana Marquez-Greene, 6
•Dylan Hockley, 6
•Dawn Hocksprungm, 47
•Madeleine Hsu, 6
•Catherine Hubbard, 6
•Chase Kowalski, 7
•Jesse Lewis, 6
•James Mattioli, 6
•Grace McDonnell, 7
•Anne Marie Murphy, 52
•Emilie Parker, 6
•Jack Pinto, 6
•Noah Pozner, 6
•Caroline Previdi, 6
•Jessica Rekos, 6
•Avielle Richman, 6
•Lauren Rousseau, 30
•Mary Sherlach, 56
•Victoria Sotom, 27
•Benjamin Wheeler, 6
•Allison Wyatt, 6

All murdered on December 14, 2012, by a man employing his NRA-certificated training combined with an AR-15 assault rifle firing .223 high velocity rounds with "mankiller" wobble-head bullets, loaded into multiple 30-round extended magazines.

This isn't the typical way people are murdered in America. However, it is typical for massacres, most of which occur in America, & almost none in other advanced countries (the Norwegian massacre of many dozens of young liberals by a right wing extremist being a notable exception). And the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter used the firearm of choice for people who massacre: a semiautomatic assault weapon using .223 high velocity rounds in extended magazines.

Not one of the grieving parents of Newtown has called for banning or confiscating guns. They have called for banning extended magazines, making background checks universal, & coming up with a comprehensive program to stop straw purchasers/gun traffickers. And to reform how we handle crazy people.

Nothing the Sandy Hook Elementary parents want would interfere with lawful gun owners buying & keeping guns for hunting, target practice, and home defense. They WOULD put a crimp in the fantasy commando shtick that's so profitable for the gun makers.

BTW one way to simplify background checks would be a universal biometric database like India is implementing.

The Second Amendment--originally, a sop to slaveowners

An originalist interpretation of the 2nd Amendment would see it not as conferring an individual right but as a structural limitation on the power of the federal government to restrict the Southern states from forming militias to put down slave rebellions.

"...the Second Amendment was written to assure the South that the militia--the very same militia described in the main body of the Constitution--could be armed even if Congress elected not to arm them or otherwise attempted to "disarm" them.

"From our perspective today, this may seem like a small matter since Congress retained exclusive authority to determine the composition of the militia, and, thus, who could enjoy the right to bear arms.

"However, in the context of the concern and circumstances of the time, it was significant. The Amendment deals with keeping and bearing arms in the militia, subject to federal and state regulation. Therefore, to the extent original intent matters, the hidden history of the Second Amendment strongly supports the collective rights position."

--From the University of California at Davis Law Review article "The hidden history of the Second Amendment" by Carl T. Bogus, Professor of Law at Roger Williams University and author of "Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism." reviewed with admiration by right wing newspaper The Washington Times.

http://www.saf.org/lawreviews/bogus2.htm

The NRA's prime target: NRA members

The biggest victims of NRA propaganda are its own members, which the NRA spends a fortune on propagandizing with the notion that guns = freedom... = power...= virility.

The average NRA member is an aging white man who has seen his world become more & more insecure. Job insecurity. Cultural insecurity. America no longer looks & acts like him outside his rural redoubts. And a black man is President--a thumb in the eye of every redneck.

The NRA's fever dream-solution is more guns. Has to be more guns, because fewer & fewer Americans own any guns. Young men play 1st person shooter videogames instead. Educated men & women know better. And firearms last a long, long time; it's not like owners' current guns are wearing out.

Hence assault weapons. Sexy! Hold one & you're a Commando on a Vital Mission. Never mind that they're inferior for hunting & home defense. They're the world's best fantasy weapon to hold off the hordes or drug-crazed blacks about to invade your compound in Idaho any minute now. That or the UN's black helicopters come to take away your guns.

Reality is less fun.

"A 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery that found that 'every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.'

"Pistol owners' fantasy of blowing away home-invading bad guys or street toughs holding up liquor stores is a myth debunked by the data showing that a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gun-science-proves-arming-untrained-citizens-bad-idea&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20130513

Scientific American magazine, published since 1845. won the 2011 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. A third of its 4m readers have postgrad degrees. 

The liberal media!

From the viewpoint of a right wing extremist, a moderate is a left wing extremist, and vice versa.

Thus in Berkeley California, Democrats are seen as no different than Republicans.

The myth of the "liberal media bias" is part and parcel of this.

It's certainly true that most reporters are Democrats. You might wonder why this is so BTW. However, all these Democrats now work for giant multinational conglomerates that own the major newspapers and broadcast networks.

And those conglomerates, as a whole, don't care about "liberal" or "conservative." They care about profits. So they chase scandal.

The place where I've seen the most liberal bias in the media is over illegal immigration, where you see lots of sob stories about angelic illegals and none about criminal illegals.

But in general the corporate bosses aren't about to see their profits sacrificed for reporters' values that they don't even share.

Even MSNBC became liberal as a conscious corporate marketing decision--market segmentation. And there, they have been steadily replacing the more strident leftist voices with more reasoned ones (Ed Schultz and Cenk Uigur out; Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes in).

There's a liberal media, but it's not the Washington Post etc. It's Huffington, Daily Kos, Mother Jones etc. And those are certainly liberal.

Lastly, the mainstream media mostly has been reduced to quoting both sides on major issues and not fulfilling their duty as "declarers of fact." That job has been surrendered to a handful of nonpartisan factchecking groups like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com.

Those show that both sides lie all the time. Which also shows that neither of these sites are controlled by either wing. I find the right wing lies generally more egregious, but that's a matter of opinion. Look at them to see the actual facts, then judge it yourself....See More

 

If you live by the sword...

The NRA has a demographic problem no amount of it brilliantly Fascist propaganda can cure: its hard core is aging. Those huge gun sales are going to present gun owners building arsenals, while fewer and fewer households have guns in them, and fewer and fewer Americans practice hunting. The new sales are mostly for home defense against the gun nuts' fantasy of heavily armed black drug gangs assaulting their compounds, despite the statistical unlikelihood of that happening to any of them.

Turns out the real weapon defeating the NRA is....first person shooter videogames. That's what young men generally prefer to the hassle of a real weapon. They can duel with simulated humans in elaborately detailed commando scenarios--and they never have to clean their virtual firearms...or store them in a gun safe...or pay the big bucks for them.

Remember, though, I'm not arguing for them--just observing what's actually happening.

The remaining gun zealots are highly motivated, of course, though this article avoids the real secret of gun glamour: most gun owners have experienced a progressive lessening of economic security; the majority of Americans have become more and more different from them in both appearance and iifestyle; modern society's issues and functions are too complex for them to understand...and all these changes are emasculating.

But the gun gives them instant masculinity, and assault weapons give them even more, since assault weapons shift the self-pleasuring fantasy from Mighty Hunter to Invincible Commando on an Important Mission--exactly how the Adam Lanzas of the world see themselves BTW.

These people will never change.

But they will die out, slowly but surely. Hard to mount a fierce campaign against a congressman who dares to disagree with the NRA in the slightest when the protestors have to use walkers...

Lastly, the NRA's take no prisoners tactics are making more and more Americans heartily despite them. If/when we do get the upper hand...they will get no mercy (legislatively speaking, natch).

Does "Republican" = racist?

Not all Republicans are racists, and not all racists are Republican--but the Republican Party got a huge infusion of such people when the Dixiecrats went Republican en masse after Congress under Lyndon Johnson got civil rights legislation passed that had some teeth in it.

A CBS poll taken before the 2008 election showed this:

"72% of those who live in the West say most people they know would vote for a black person for president. 66% in the Northeast and 64% in the Midwest agree. But the figure is lowest in the South, where just 54% say most people they know would vote for an African-American for president. 33% there say most people they know would not."

I'd guess that more people are racist than will admit it to a pollster, so these figure should be regarded as a low estimate.

And to such people--roughly a quarter of the nation, but a much higher percentage of Republicans--President Obama's election was their Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe"--how they refer to Israel becoming a nation).

It is this group--perhaps very roughly half of Republicans--that regards a black man in the White House as a thumb in their eye.

It is this group that desperately needs the President to fail because he's black, no matter how much their efforts to make him fail harm the country.

This also means that the other half of Republicans are not racially biased against him, though of course they still wanted Romney to win and mostly voted for Romney.

However, it's hard for this group to accuse half of their own party of Racism, no matter how rabid the Republican racists act. So mostly they wring their hands and wish the Teanderthals would shut up--because they know the damage this is doing to their party in the long run. 

The real IRS scandal

The irony with the IRA scandal, is that if they actually were operating as Democratic partisans they would have cracked down hard on all the liberal organizations getting 501(c).

The reason is money:

"Of the 21 organizations that received rulings from the IRS after January 1, 2010, and filed FEC reports in 2010 or 2012, 13 were conservative. They outspent the liberal groups in that category by a factor of nearly 34-to-1, the Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows. "

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/outside-money/501c-groups/

Sacrificing 1 tax free liberal dollar in exchange for 34 tax free right wing dollars would have been a good deal.

Should newspapers charge for online content?

Yes, if they're major national/international newspapers with high quality original content.

And if the pricing is appropriate to the online world rather than the old physical newspaper delivered to your doorstep world.

The Washington Post is planning to implement what's called a "paywall" this summer, and they've floated the idea of charging $180/year for online subscriptions, requiring them for readers who want to access more than 20 articles per month.

Here's what I wrote their ombudsman-equivalent:

There are 2 ways of looking at a paywall: improving the newspaper's revenue & improving the reader's experience.

1. Improving the newspaper's revenue

Looks like the Washington Post is thinking of pricing access compared to getting home delivery--hence the idea floated by WaPo of charging $180/year. However, most of the WaPo's potential online subscribers are not considering this as an alternative to home delivery--we're all over the country & already have local newspapers.

We are not going to pay $180/year for just the national content of the WaPo. I doubt most of us would pay more than a tenth of that. I predict the WaPo will wind up stepping over dollars to pick up nickels if it pursues such an ill-considered pricing policy. It will make far, far more money off cheap per-user pricing than by limiting its online active readership to a relative handful of affluent local subscribers.

At the very least you should consider a low price for potential subscribers who live outside the physical newspaper's distribution area, & therefore have no need or use for its local content.

Another group excluded by high pricing is retired people living on a fixed income.

2. Improving the reader's experience

News/opinion consumption has become an interactive phenomenon. Readers want to have their say, and so the comment threads of articles have become significant in a way that old-school newspapermen might not realize.

The problem is that the comment threads on topics that affect corporate profits or major political advantage have been rendered useless because they're infested by paid shills using persona management software, with one shill having up to 70 online identities. These shills would not have to pay a subscription fee because they could just manipulate their identities. You can read about it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-is-astroturfing

Find a solution that blocks astroturfers or pricing becomes irrelevant....See More

 

Criminalizing abortion works about as well as Prohibition did.

The anti-abortion movement--you know, the people who flatter themselves by calling their movement "pro-life"--really comes out of the woodwork with cases like Dr. Gosnell's.

This is a strange bunch. First, although they showcase the clinics they set up to compete with Planned Parenthood, their overwhelming focus is on criminalizing abortion.

But only where it's convenient, and with little actual effect. The number of abortions didn't change significantly after Roe V. Wade legalized abortion within limits, nor did they get safer for the most part, because an abortion is, medically, a minor procedure with low risk for the pregnant female. It doesn't require surgery or taking potentially dangerous drugs whether it's done legally or otherwise. It's only dangerous when people resort to folk remedies.

By "only where it's convenient" I mean that even with Dr. Gosnell, he was just the hired hand. The girls and women who came to him hired him to abort their fetuses. If that's murder, then the pregnant females are guilty of capital murder, and Dr. Gosnell was just their assistant.

Yet if you look down comment threads on articles about Dr. Gosness you don't see a single anti-abortion activist calling for these females to prosecuted for premeditated murder. Nor do any call for banning in vitro fertilization and prosecuting those women--desperate to become pregnant--again for capital murder, since in vitro fertilization involves fertilizing many eggs but then destroying most of them.

This isn't just hypocritical--it's grossly sexist. Those women. They're just mushy-brained females who only do what big strong men tell them to do.

It's as if we've been teleported to a fundamentalist Muslim village in rural Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

What we see here is most anti-abortion activists being tightly focused on getting revenge on the men that women hire to do abortions instead of doing things that would actually reduce abortions, starting with proper sex ed & providing contraceptives to one & all....See More

 

Dr. Gosnell the baby killer vs. the Pro Lifers

What we see in "Pro-life" comments about articles about Dr. Gosnell is the luxury of moral posturing without regard to real world consequence.

It's so inconvenient to see how often idealistic policy turns into horrors as it plays out.

Consider China vs. India. China implemented its One Child policy--including forced abortion for miscreants--in 1979. India tried something of the sort but, being a democracy, was forced to give in to the opposition of people like the anti-abortion crusaders you see on this thread.

Today the consequences--and contrasts--are stark. Individual Chinese hate having to obey the policy. Selective abortion of female fetuses has produced millions of excess males. But nobody's starving.

India now has hundreds of millions more people than China. In "pro-life" India, 7,000 Indians die of starvation every day, including more than 5,000 babies below the age of one--babies who never knew a moment of living without suffering. In a land where mothers saw their children's legs off to make them better beggars. Or simply abandon them, as the heartbreaking film "Salaam Bombay" shows.

In the real world Dr.Gosnell was a piker compared to India's "Pro-Lifers."

Does the guy who imprisoned three females for a decade deserve to die?

I have nothing against revenge per se. Unless going after it interferes with public safety. Public safety is the first duty of government to its citizens--not getting revenge on people who harm citizens, after the fact.

The best cure is prevention, after all.

Legal eagles claim that our legal system is not about either revenge or public safety, but about justice. Whatever that is. But they're kidding.

Because whatever our legal system says, revenge is obviously the main focus of many elected district attorneys: it plays well with voters. Voters also like the idea of prisons as revenge factories with no rehabilitation programs, virtually no job prospects if and when they get out, extra revenge on men who committed a crime while being black.

Not to mention the fact that voters also oppose spending money on public defenders, such that most have impossible jobs that only permit them to negotiate plea bargains--not to actually try to exonerate the accused.

So you can argue that the current penal system is theoretically devoted to justice but in practice it only honors that principle with rich people who can afford competent representation. For all else it's revenge-o-rama all the way, every day.

But going for revenge interferes with going for public safety.

Take this Castro scumbag who imprisoned, tortured & raped 3 females for a decade. I believe he deserves to die slowly and brutally for what he did. But I'm against killing him, because right now, many other scumbags around the country have imprisoned thousands of innocent people similarly. I say thousands because most of these are sex slaves the public sees as prostitutes. There are real prostitutes, but I'm talking about the involuntary ones. They number in the tens of thousands. Nice middle class people just don't see them. Apart from the ones who go to the bad part of town and pay pimps to rape them (they don't think they're raping them for the most part, I'd guess, but they are).

I don't want these enslaved people to be murdered by their captors. Or maimed. Or imprisoned for longer rather than shorter periods. And so forth.

So if public safety is your goal, you need graduated sanctions that give criminals incentives to not murder their victims, ratcheting up the sanctions for every increment of bad things done to their victims.

Reserve death for murder & nothing else. Not for justice. Not to thwart revenge. For the victims' sake. It's the least we can do for them.

I realize it galls to lighten up on criminal sanctions for heinous crimes. And I agree that the sanctions should be severe if the crime is severe. But not so severe that the criminal believes he has nothing to lose by killing his victims.

Here's the problem with global warming.

Look at it from the point of view of the many voters who identify themselves as conservative, or as independents who lean conservative.

They've got enough problems without global warming sticking its big nose into their business. If man-caused global warming is true, than for sure it's inconvenient as all get out.

If it's true, then doing nothing about it robs our children & theirs of far more than any budget deficit does.

If it's true, then doing something about it when third world countries don't feels unfair, even though our contribution per capita is higher than theirs--though to be sure China is passing us in total emissions, and they've got the smog-choked cities to prove it.

Their public schooling taught them facts but not how to think about facts systematically and empirically. So they generally rely on getting their conclusions from people they trust--pastors and politicians who look like them and sound like them
.
The voters I'm talking about are, for the most part, honest and responsible themselves. But they're susceptible to being deceived by politicians who tell them they share their values.

And these voters have been massively propagandized by the best in the biz, who work for companies that make bigger profits than many countries and want to keep it that way. Of course conservative voters don't hear it from these companies but through their sock puppets--mostly GOP politicians and conservative commentators.

This campaign has been so effective that most conservative voters believe the fact of dangerous human-caused global warming isn't settled science--that it's a controversial topic among climate experts.

This is exactly as true as the "fact" that cancer researchers were unsure about whether cigarettes cause cancer in, say, 1990.

Propaganda can't make people believe what they don't want to believe, but it's great at getting people to believe what they do want to believe.

Especially when this propaganda campaign has also taught them that everyone who accepts global warming belongs to an enemy tribe.

Even those on comment threads who are astroturfing (i.e. doing this for money) are useful at least in showing us the kind of propaganda that has worked so well on conservative voters--the cherrypicked facts, the biased interpretations, and demonizing of scientists and environmentalists.

People who understand human nature and have disengaged their moral compass are really dangerous.