Persecution Politics: Christian Leaders Sign Historic-Futuristic Declaration


Friday, November 20, 2009. 145 evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed the "Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience," in which they declared their shared opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Though only hours old, the declaration has already been declared "historic" by those whose job it is to designate historic declarations. Several reasons were cited for the historic designation of the declaration:

  • It is divided into sections with important titles, like "Preamble," "Declaration," "Religious Liberty," and "Life."
  • Famous people have signed it, including fifteen Catholic bishops, one Orthodox primate (not the monkey kind), and child psychologist James Dobson.
  • It refers to more or less historical things like Christian leadership against Roman infanticide, Christian leadership against black slavery, Christian leadership for women's suffrage, and Christian leadership for civil rights for every human being "regardless of race, religion, age or class." (Hmm, I think that they forgot one.)

While some may quibble with the Manhattan Declaration's historical accuracy, no one can dispute its inherent historicness. In addition, the declaration is also noteworthy for its futureness, envisioning a time when religious institutions will be forced to do really, really bad things by "soft despots." The signers vow that they will follow Martin Luther King Jr. in disobeying any law that would require their institutions to "bless immoral sexual partnerships" or "participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act." The day that those soft despots force the nation's churches to engage in embryo-destructive research will be a dark one indeed, and we owe our gratitude to these courageous religious leaders who are willing to face imprisonment or even loss of tax exempt status for resistance to such immoral hypothetical laws.

Thus does the Manhattan Declaration join the lofty ranks of other proud historic-futuristic declarations like the Declaration of Independence, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation (which while not technically a declaration has been awarded the designation of honorary declaration in light of its declarative qualities). Thank you, Christian leaders, for overlooking your petty theological squabbles to unify against our common enemies: desperate women, homosexuals, and all those judges, politicians, and newspeople who facilitate their immoral practices.

Witness history and sanity unravel in happy unison at my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.

Obama Bows Again!


Six months ago, I wrote a column decrying President Obama's compulsive bowing before foreign leaders and monarchs. After my editorial onslaught, the administration appeared to take note, and I thought that the matter resolved.

But now, as reported in the headline of the ever relevant Drudge Report, Obama is back to his old bowing games, shaming the nation with his obsessive genuflection. Here he is with Japan's Emperor Akihito, bowing almost to the ground like a shogun-era peasant before a guy whose dad bombed Pearl Harbor. Then he followed up the deep bow by jigglin' his noggin' like a drunken bobble-head to the Empress. These people don't even have an economy anymore!

President Obama, I deplore you! Stop this bowing immediately! Shake their hands, bear-hug them, grasp them by the buttocks and give them Eskimo kisses. You can even do the scary terrorist fist bump thing that you do with Michelle, but DO NOT BOW!

PS Those readers who have not already framed and memorized my original scathing editorial can find it here: http://dagblog.com/politics/obama-must-stop-bowing-585.

Persecution Politics: The Sarah Palining of Lou Dobbs


GQ Magazine's editors believe they know why Lou Dobbs left CNN: persecution.

Members of the right-wing media love to tell their audiences about how they've been abused and censored by vicious liberal attackers. Bill O'Reilly insisted that he had been "libeled" and his civil rights "violated" when the L.A. Times and the Denver Post disputed his reports, calling the criticism "far left fascism." Michael Savage complained that he had been repeatedly attacked by the "homosexual, fascist website" Media Matters, the "brownshirts of our time." Glenn Beck bravely vowed that he was not afraid of liberal persecution, "What they have to do is break my legs. What they have to do is silence me. What they have to do is Sarah Palin me."

Often, the accusations include some kind of conspiracy. O'Reilly theorized that Media Matters was a tool of billionaire George Soros. Michael Savage claimed that it belonged to Hillary Clinton. Glenn Beck feared a coterie of secretive "czars" in the Obama administration.

And Lou Dobbs, who gained notoriety by pushing the "birther" theory that Obama was born in Kenya, claimed in a GQ interview that the administration was out to get him too:

They are coordinating with a number of groups, including the Center for American Progress. The usual suspects. To carry out constant and absolutely insidious and sordid attacks on me. And the reason they're doing so, I'm the leading independent voice, and I am critical on their policies and intent, on unconditional amnesty, and leaving the borders and ports unsecure.

Yet he vowed to soldier on...

But I will not be intimidated, and I understand that. Therefore they're trying to intimidate my network and my owners.

Evidently, Dobbs will not be soldiering on with CNN any longer. So ends a long and illustrious career with the network in angry paranoia. See ya later, Lou. Don't let the fascist liberal door hit you on the way out.

For more on Dobbs' battle with the CNN, check out NPR's What's Behind Lou Dobbs' Leaving CNN.

More fascist violations of commentators' civil rights at my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.

Health Insurance - The Cheap Rider Problem


I'm a freelancer and pay for my own health insurance. Since I'm (relatively) young and healthy, and since I rarely see a doctor more than once a year, I have a fairly inexpensive plan with a pretty high deductible.

Stupid question: If the House health care bill is adopted, shouldn't I opt for the cheapest plan that I can find?

Who cares about the deductible, the benefits cap, or the allowable procedures? Since the health care bill prohibits insurance companies from rejecting customers based on preexisting positions, couldn't I buy the "Kia" plan and upgrade to a "Cadillac" if I were to get sick?

Thought experiment: Suppose that there are two insurance companies, one that sells only Kias and one that sells only Cadillacs. Healthy folks buy the Kias; sick folks buy the Cadillacs. When the healthy folks get sick, they upgrade. In this scenario, the Kia dealer makes easy money because it never has to pay out anything. The moment its customers get sick, they upgrade, and then the hefty benefits payments are the Cadillac dealer's problem. Conversely, the Cadillac dealer gets screwed. No matter how high the premiums, benefits for sick people cost more than their premiums, which is why the sick people sign up for the Cadillacs in the first place.

Stupid question #2: If the House health care bill is adopted, shouldn't insurance companies offer the fewest benefits they can?

In becoming a Kia dealer, an insurance company can maximize the number of young, healthy members by offering low premiums, and it can minimize the number of old, sick members by offering paltry benefits.

If that's the case, then every insurance company would eventually become a Kia dealer, and there would be no more Cadillacs for sale. The nation's insurance premiums would go down, but the benefits would be poor. Deductibles would be high, and expensive procedures would be prohibited.

To date, there has been much discussion about the free rider problem, according to which "free riders" game the system by purchasing insurance only after they get sick. The mandatory insurance requirement of the health care bill avoids the free rider problem.

But what about the cheap rider problem, according to which "cheap riders" game the system by purchasing expensive insurance only after they get sick. Is there anything in the health bill to deal with this problem?

I should note that the the "cheap rider" problem may not be all bad. It could certainly bring down health care costs by eliminating expensive, unnecessary procedures. But it could also deny Americans access to expensive, important procedures that we may not want to give up. Worse, it could mean that Americans without a lot of money may forgo essential treatment because of the high deductibles.

I confess to limited understanding of the health care bill, and perhaps someone can explain how the bill avoids this problem. If so, please speak up...

Cross-posted at dagblog.com

UN Declares Afghan Election "Credible" and Pope "Jewish"


In a unanimous resolution, the United Nations declared the Afghan presidential election to be "credible" and "legitimate" despite widespread fraud allegations and the withdrawal of President Karzai's opponent, Abdullah Abdullah. In a separate unanimous resolution, the U.N. declared Pope Benedict XVI to be "Jewish" and "possibly Buddhist" despite his Catholic baptism, confirmation, papal election, and long history of pro-Jesus sentiment.

The U.N. General Assembly also encouraged President Karzai to press ahead with "strengthening of the rule of law and democratic processes, the fight against corruption (and) the acceleration of justice sector reform" and Pope Benedict XVI to press ahead with "abstaining from pork products, eating matzoh on Passover, rejecting Jesus, and keep wearing the beanie because it's kind of like a yarmulke. Plus the retro look is very cool."

Encouraged by its success in Afghanistan and Vatican City, the U.N. then launched a tour de force of unanimous resolutionizing, including the following declarations:

  • Israelis and Palestinians "love each other"
  • The world is "pretty much flat"
  • White men can "jump"
  • Size "doesn't matter"
  • Global warming is "a fascist conspiracy"
  • You can too "pick your friend's nose"
  • Canada "is a real country"

But the night was not without discord. An attempt to encourage the Afghan candidate Abdullah Abdullah to accept the election results and change "one of his names" was thwarted by a faction of developing nations led by former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who argued that the U.N. should take its "head" out of its "tuchus."

Cross-posted at dagblog.com

Persecution Politics: Nazi Fever


One of the recent propaganda tactics of the right wing has been to appropriate the leftist language of discrimination and civil rights to argue that liberal elites are persecuting white Christian conservatives. The most extreme form of this tactic is the Nazi attack, according to which liberals are portrayed as Nazis or fascists in order to represent them as brutal oppressors of helpless conservative victims. Commentators on the right have revised history to represent fascism as a leftist movement. They have invented or exaggerated associations between Democrats and Nazis. They have belabored the slightest similarities between Nazi doctrine and liberalism. And they have darkly hinted at the possibility of a fascist revolution in America.

But perhaps I should just let them speak for themselves...

Discover everything that you never wanted to know about conservative paranoia at my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.

What's the Matter with New York? What Doug Hoffman's Election Loss Means for America's Future


In his book, What's the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank documented the emergence of an angry populist movement in the prairielands. Christian fundamentalists and anti-abortion activists had exploited the anxiety of working class midwesterners by fabricating a persuasive myth of persecution. According to the myth, a tyrannical minority of liberal elites in control of the media and judiciary seek to repress the religious practices and traditions of "regular Americans" whom they despise and disdain.

Though liberals represent the bogeymen in the conservative horror fantasies Frank described in 2004, they were not participants in the pitched political battles that roiled Kansas. Kansas has always been a reliably Republican state; there are no liberals to battle. Instead, the war in Kansas pitted right-wing conservatives against moderate conservatives, "Cons" versus "Mods." According to Frank, the Cons emerged victorious and effectively wrested complete control of Kansas politics.

But elsewhere in the country, the Republican establishment courted the Cons, regarding them as a potent political force against Democrats -- just as the Roman Emperor Valens invited the Visigoths to settle in Roman territory, seeing in them "a splendid recruiting ground for his army." And so, like the Visigoths, the Cons are now sacking the Republican establishment.

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Persecution Politics: Beck Predicts Dollar Collapse, American Land Sold to China and Russia, Polar Bears Executed by 'Ivan'


Last month, Glenn Beck accused the Obama administration of deliberately instigating a national emergency in order to justify a totalitarian revolution. No disrespect to Mr. Beck's investigative skills, but his account was short on details. He had not determined what kind of emergency would occur, when it would happen, or whether the revolution would be communist, fascist, or some monstrous hybrid of the two. (Fascmunism?)

Fortunately for America, FOX News' indefatigable conspiracy hunter has continued to the sniff out the plot, and as of this evening, we have a few more details. First, the emergency will be economic. According to Beck, the U.S. will not be able to pay its mounting debts, and the Treasury will be forced to print money in order to fulfill the nation's obligations, as Germany's Weimar Republic did in the 1920s. The value of the dollar will subsequently collapse, and the U.S. will again emulate the Weimar Republic by introducing a new currency backed by real estate, which the government will obtain in several ways:

Between Fannie and Freddie, the federal government already owns 55 percent of the mortgages in this country. And coupled with all the federal land grabs for parks, polar bears who are crowded but endangered and all the oil we're not drilling for or coal we're not mining, you might be able to base a currency on all that.

But then it gets a bit foggy. Beck predicts that we will need some kind of help to create the new currency, some allies in the endeavor, and he wonders aloud, "Who would the new regime responsible for this new system of currency...after they've destroyed our future and your children's future, who would they have on their side?" Beck then answers his own question. Our new currency buddies will be international all-stars, Russia, China, and Venezuela. The astute viewer can imagine what happens next. Our "helpers" will help themselves to our houses and national parks. That's bad enough for the American people, but it will be disastrous for the poor polar bears:

Do you really think Russia and China will be better protectors of the planet than we have been? Will Russians cordon off 200,000 square miles of extra space for polar bear roaming or will they shoot them in the head to get a barrel of oil that used to belong to you? I know I would. Surely, Ivan will.*

OK, so Beck clearly has some homework to do, but it's coming together. Will he get to the bottom of the plot in time? Will Americans be able to stop the the Obama administration's diabolical plan before it's too late? Stay tuned to Persecution Politics to find out.

* For the young and stupid: Ivan means "evil Russian dude who hates polar bears."

Persecution Politics: Bill Kristol Says, Rage On!


One reason that right-wing commentators continue to spout paranoid hysteria is that no one has told them to shut up. OK, Keith Olbermann and a bunch of left-wing bloggers have told them to shut up, and the White House has indirectly implied that they should please keep it down. But the people who really have the power to undermine the conspiracists--the non-paranoid conservative leaders, or what's left of them--have not said a damn word about the wild accusations hurled by Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Michele Bachmann. Some may be afraid, particularly after Limbaugh schooled RNC Chair Michael Steele when Steele called him an "entertainer." But others have cynically calculated that the paranoia works for the party, so they just let it ride.

Take Bill Kristol. Kristol is a very conservative man, but he is not a stupid man. Unlike Beck and Limbaugh, who never graduated from college, Kristol received a B.A. (magna cum laude) and Ph.D. from Harvard. Instead of beginning his career as a radio D.J., he taught political science at U. Penn and Harvard's Kennedy School. He has never expressed the kind of paranoia that has become the standard fare of FOX News commentary. But he has no intention of trying to stop it. Kristol believes that the Republican Party's center of gravity lies "with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties," and he praises their effectiveness:

Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots...The lesson activists around the country will take from this is that a vigorous, even if somewhat irritated, conservative/populist message seems to be more effective in revitalizing the Republican Party than an attempt to accommodate the wishes of liberal media elites. So the GOP is likely, for the foreseeable future, to be of a conservative mind and in a populist mood. In American politics, there are worse things to be.

In American politics, there are worse things to be. Kristol doesn't tell us what those worse things are, but red-baiting witch-hunters from the 1950's are fairly high on many peoples' lists--the politicians whose paranoid fearmongering tore the country apart until someone finally stood up and said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Conservative leaders of the day surely felt that the "populist mood" benefited their election chances. Eisenhower toured Wisconsin with McCarthy, and it probably helped him to win the Presidency.

But Eisenhower hated McCarthy and actively worked to undermine him after winning the election. We might also recall a more recent president, George H.W. Bush, who resigned his lifelong NRA membership after an NRA advertisement referred to "jack-booted government thugs," a fascist reference that seems almost quaint by today's standards.

Yet today, we hear nothing but silence from the right side of the aisle, or worse, complicity from politicians who seek to profit directly from the hysteria. As long as conservatives provide a haven for conspiracy theories, the paranoia will continue to boil and heave and devour the party that protects it.

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Stay tuned for more crazy talk in my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.

Why Bankers Make So Much Money


When I worked for a software company, a fellow computer programmer once lamented that the salespeople earned so much more than the coders, despite the fact that the coders were generally better educated, more intelligent, and more essential to the company's core value: its products. The reason for the disparity is straightforward. Salespeople are closer to the money. It is very difficult for executives to perceive the value good programmers, who represent cogs somewhere deep in the machine, but the value of good salespeople is obvious from their sales numbers. For instance, it is easy to justify paying $200,000 in salary and bonus to a salesperson who makes sales worth $500,000 in annual profits.

My colleague's dismay exhibited the wide gap between "merit value" and "market value." Merit value is an amorphous sense of the worth of an employee based on capability, education, seniority, and hard work. Market value is the perceived monetary worth of an employee. Our economy is primarily based on market value. Insofar, as we reward merit value, it is because of cultural reasons and a loose, indirect relationship between merit value and market value: people generally perceive monetary value in the meritorious qualities of capability, education, seniority, and hard work. Yet while this indirect relationship may hold true within a particular field, it varies widely between fields. Thus, the most capable coders are likely be the top paid programmers, but they are unlikely to be paid as well as the most capable salespeople.

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Persecution Politics: Paranoia Rules the Right


In early August, I began working on a book to document a growing sense of paranoia among right-wing conservatives. At the time, the media was fairly quiet on the subject. With the exception of liberal blogs (ahem), no one paid much attention to the wild rhetoric of the tea parties and occasional paranoid outbursts from commentators like Rush Limbaugh and politicians like Michelle Bachman. Then Sarah Palin loosed her "death panels" broadside, and the floodgates opened. Health care paranoia spewed from the orifice every conservative media outlet, Lou Dobbs embraced the "birther" conspiracy, Limbaugh raged about Obama's Nazi agenda, Glenn Beck launched a week-long tour de paranoia in which he accused Obama of preparing for a fascho-socialist revolution, and D.C. roiled as rabid conservative activists congregated in the Mall. Suddenly, the mainstream media took notice, and articles about the new "paranoid style" of the American right rolled across major newspapers, magazines, news sites, and talk shows. TIME Magazine even put Glenn Beck's tongue on its cover.

Now, as TPM's Eric Kleefeld has documented, the consulting firm of James Carville and Stan Greenberg has validated the thesis of my Persecution Politics series: there is a very large, very determined block of conservative voters who have thoroughly embraced paranoid extremism. Based on the results of a series of focus groups, the organization concluded:

The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America...First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a 'secret agenda' to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.

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BREAKING: Obama Wins More Prizes


While President Obama's recent Nobel Peace Prize has been attracting media attention, he has been quietly reaping a number of other prizes, including the New York Marathon, the Heisman Trophy, Best Cooking Blog, Sikh Man of the Year, and West Duluth High School's Most Likely to Succeed.

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Persecution Politics: Dollar Falls, Amero Looms


KISS THE DOLLAR GOODBYE

So screams today's Drudge Report headline in a thunderous "xx-large" Arial font. The linked AFP article discusses the possibility that the dollar might lose its place as the preferred global currency, but based on the headline, the reader might be excused for thinking that the nation is about to return to the barter system or else adopt Chinese renminbi.

Indeed, the headline is intentionally misleading. The collapse of the dollar has become an idée fixe among paranoid right-wingers who believe that the government is deliberately killing the dollar in order to make way for a new international currency: the Amero.

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Conservatives Decry Obama Nobel Peace Prize, Award Alternative "Jesus Prize"


Conservatives reacted with shock and dismay to the Nobel committee's decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama. There are reports that some prominent conservatives exploded like Agent Smith at the end of Matrix. But FOX News commentator Bill O'Reilly reacted with little surprise, telling viewers, "Look, Sweden is a socialist country, so of course they elected one of their own." Rush Limbaugh blamed "reverse discrimination," claiming that, "Qualified white candidates have been passed over once again for a black man who doesn't deserve a peace prize." Limbaugh also complained that liberals were "playing the race card again." Glenn Beck wept aloud on his radio show and cried, "Run for your lives, America, the fascho-communist revolution is at hand!"

Other conservatives, led by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, hastily arranged an alternative set of prizes to combat perceived bias by the Nobel Committee. According to FOX News president Roger Ailes, the new prizes are called "Jesus Prizes" because "everyone looks up to Jesus." The Jesus committee has already selected winners for the 2009 prizes in the following categories:

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Persecution Politics: Beating on White Kids


One of the recurrent themes that contribute to right-wing paranoia is the fantasy that white people suffer from discrimination in Obama's America. This conceit erupted on the talk shows during the Sotomayor hearings and after Henry Louis Gates' arrest, when Rush Limbaugh said, "President Obama is black, and I think he's got a chip on his shoulder," and Glenn Beck exclaimed that Obama "has a deep seated hatred for white people."

Yesterday, the "white persecution" theme bubbled up again when Drudge reported, "WHITE STUDENT BEATEN ON SCHOOL BUS; CROWD CHEERS." The police officer who described the assault as racially motivated later retracted the characterization, but it was too late to stop Rush Limbaugh from representing the incident as an example of "Obama's America":

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yeah, right on, right on, right on!" And of course, everybody says, "Oh, the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white."

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