Melissa Harris-Perry had a stunning segment on her show on Saturday - speaking to two Arab-American women about the condition of women in the middle east, as well as the Arab Spring. There were disagreements, but look how they comported themselves:



I don't know about you, but I learned more from this segment than watching an entire day of sensation central on our so-called "news" stations.

I don't know if any of you caught it on Meet the Press yesterday, but when I saw the video, my eyes about fell out of their sockets. Against all evidence, two prominent Republicans - one strategist and one Romney surrogate (who is also a member of Congress) sat there, poker-faced, claiming that there women do not in fact make less than men in this country, and that the the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was a bad idea. Watch:

The genius and wonder of our President is his willingness, no eagerness to enter into our world. All of our world. He doesn’t demand that we enter his reality. He joins us in ours. In our languages. Attempting to look through our eyes and walk in our shoes.

This can’t be taught or faked. This is why the GOP is in despair.

—Comment by Vicki, on The Obama Diary

I've not much been a person of faith. I was raised Catholic, and went to church every Sunday until I hit high school, at which point my parents said it was my decision whether or not to go. Neither of my older brothers went, so I stopped going. 

It was at that point that I started losing faith in many things as I grew into my adolescent rebellion—God and other people being the two major things. I didn't see much goodness in humanity at large, aside from my family and close friends. I certainly didn't see goodness and right action in the political sphere. My family was that rarity: a Democratic Cuban family in the Age of Reagan. Even at the tender age of 10, when Reagan was first elected, I was rather politically aware. I remember how he broke PATCO during the air traffic controller's strike; we were a union family, and we were outraged that he could just destroy a union that represented working men and women doing a strenuous, stressful job. That was my first indication that Republicans simply didn't care about ordinary working people. The GOP preyed on their fears of downward mobility to garner votes, then, once in office, effected policies that fulfilled those fears, all the while blaming the Other for their plight, and managing to retain their votes.

Republicans legislatures and governors are hoping against hope to suppress the votes of young people, poor people, women and minorities by enacting laws that make voting harder and by enacting modern day poll taxes. Some of those laws have been blocked by the Department of Justice, and some others have been challenged in court. But court challenges take time, and the election is a little more than six months away. What do you do in that situation when you are the campaign of the disenfranchised?

You organize.

Field workers for President Obama’s campaign fanned across the country this weekend in an effort to confront a barrage of new voter identification laws that strategists say threaten the campaign’s hopes for registering new voters ahead of the November election.

In Wisconsin, where a new state law requires those registering voters to be deputized in each of the state’s 1,800 municipalities, the campaign sent a team of trainers armed with instructions for complying with the new regulations.

In Florida, the campaign’s voter registration aides traveled across the state to train volunteers on a new requirement that voter registration signatures be handed into state officials within 48 hours after they are collected.

And in Ohio, Mr. Obama’s staff members are beginning outreach to let voters know about new laws that discourage precinct workers from telling voters where to go if they show up at the wrong precinct.

It's a little late this weekend, but here's this weekend's TPVideo cast. Since Mitt Romney won't run on his record, apparently President Obama highlighting his amounts to politicizing national security. And while the President is fighting and winning the war on those who seek to harm America, Republicans are busy fighting and losing the war on women.

Matt Taibbi, the prep-school boy wonder attacked the JOBS act and demonstrated, yet again, that he knows nothing about finance and everything about producing incoherent indignation that his dim fans can use to fuel their anger against that "Dreadful Black Man who Betrayed Progressivism" ® . The key point of the JOBS act is that it permits small and start-up business to raise money without paying Wall Street a big fat commission. When a business "goes public" and gets listed on a stock market, there is a process called the "initial public offering" or IPO.  The "underwriters" are the Wall Street operators like Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan that parcel out the initial sale to the wider market and they get a fee that is generally around 6% of the initial offering price. Generally underwriters can make money both on the fee and on their ability to direct hot new shares to their favored customers at the initial price and by trading themselves. The fees alone are worth billions of dollars a year.   The JOBS act relaxes the regulations that forced companies to go public when they got too big or had over a few hundred shareholders. For a good summary, take a look at this blog.  Basically Taibbi is complaining that the government is not going to force new companies to pay commissions to Wall Street. He's complaining that the economy is going to decentralize and the Internet is going to be used to decrease the advantages of Wall Street insiders.

Why is Taibbi complaining about fewer fees for Goldman-Sachs? Well, it's partly that he doesn't know what the hell he is talking about, partly that he has an act, and partly that he is a defender of The Good Old Days when WASP prep-school boys ran Wall Street in a gentile um, genteel way and we didn't have all these scruffy new people stepping on our weejuns in the Street. Back in the good old days, when Rockefeller protegee and Taibbi hero Paul Volcker ran the Federal Reserve Bank, the government was committed to strong dollar and tight Wall Street management of the economy and everyone knew their place. Under Volcker, unemployment doubled, US manufacturing collapsed, debts of working Americans spiraled up, Union membership crashed, interest rates went past 20%, and the third world was forced into a massive debt crisis that literally killed millions of people. And yet, Taibbi is there in Rolling Stone, selling Volcker as the hero of progressive America against this Obama guy.  We live in a world where "Christian" moralists defend pissing on the poor and "leftwing" journalists advocate Wall Street commissions. Both agree, however, that Obama is the bad guy.

For both a good summary of "conservatism" and also a clue about how much conservative Judges are distorting the Constitution, take a look at what the pro-Slave Confederate rebels changed in their version of the Constitution. They cut "more perfect union" and "promote the General Welfare" from the preamble to start: because Conservatism is about Austerity not Prosperity. And in the body their main changes are protecting slavery and prohibiting government assistance for economic development.  No country has ever become a prosperous manufacturing nation without government protection of and assistance to industrial development - and the Confederates knew that. The leaders of the Confederacy wanted a nation composed of  slaves, poor white people to be sharecroppers, overseers, and cannon fodder, and a few wealthy white landowners. They did not want their cotton business, based on cheap and slave labor to pay any taxes.

no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry;

The Confederates knew, as did the earliest American governments, that protecting manufacturing against "dumping" and "fostering" new technologies and methods was essential for growing local industry. They just did not want manufacturing industries offering workers higher wages and creating a middle class that would have scruples about slavery. And they were rich already, they did not want to share costs of giving the country  a prosperous manufacturing economy and providing opportunity to the insolent lower classes. Low taxes and low wages have always been the Confederate goals. The Commerce Clause of the constitution which is the basis of both government intervention in the economy (like cleanliness standards for meat packing plants and health care reform, and preventing child labor)  was also a target.  The Confederates didn't make up "interpretations" to support their economic ideas (like Scalia does),  they just changed the wording and added this statement.

; but neither this, nor any other clause contained in the Constitution, shall ever be construed to delegate the power to Congress to appropriate money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce; except for the purpose of furnishing lights, beacons, and buoys, and other aids to navigation upon the coasts, and the improvement of harbors and the removing of obstructions in river navigation; in all which cases such duties shall be laid on the navigation facilitated thereby as may be necessary to pay the costs and expenses thereof.

Federal government spending on roads, trains, or education? Not in the Confederate states.Why if the common people get educated, then they might wonder why it was right for them to be living in tar paper shacks and getting scraps from the plantation mansion. That would be insupportable. And that is the heart of "conservatism", Confederate or "Republican".

I just had to share. From Karl's own website (highlights mine):

Courage and Consequence is Rove's book, of course. Still, it's nice to see how Courage and Consequence ON SALE fits perfectly with Karl's entire existence.

Matt Rhodes, Mitt Romney's campaign manager (you gotta feel sorry for the poor sap), wrote in a memo today that the Romney campaign is starting the general election with a "bang." Sure, he threw out a bunch of inside-the-bubble words to make his memo sound all important and stuff, but really, his message was that Romney is starting in a big way. Well, it seems that while Rhodes' memo was still in nascent form, Rove was already stepping all over it. Here's Mitt Romney's big "bang" according to Karl Rove:

It wasn't even close. Today the Senate passed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) 68-31. Par for the course, all 'No' votes came from Republican men. One of those men, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, said this opposing the bill:

“Everyone agrees that [violence] against women is reprehensible,” Lee said. “The Violence Against Women Act reauthorization has the honorable goal of assisting victims of domestic violence but it oversteps the Constitution's rightful limits on federal power.

“It interferes with the flexibility of states and localities that they should have in tailoring programs to meet particular needs of individual communities,” he said. “And it fails to address problems of duplication and inefficiency.”

In other words, if a state or locality decides that you're allowed to beat your wife, the federal government should have nothing to say about it. After all, telling people that they can't physically or sexually abuse their dates, domestic partners or spouses is "overstepping the Constitution's rightful limits on federal power." If men want to beat their wives, it maybe reprehensible, but it's reprehensible the same way hate speech is reprehensible - bad, but Constitutionally protected.

A few items of news from the past few days.

First, the UK has slid back into recession.

THE UK slid back into recession yesterday after a drop in construction output and a stagnant services sector forced a 0.2% decline in GDP.

The decrease came after a fall of 0.3% the previous quarter and triggered the country’s first double-dip recession since the 1970s....

Wales’ First Minister Carwyn Jones had warned the Government’s spending cuts were “too deep, too fast” and believes a double-dip was almost the predictable outcome.

He added: “The UK Government's cuts - plus high inflation and weak growth in the eurozone - make these very difficult times for businesses and people in Wales.

“The Government now needs to change course and follow our lead by pursuing an economic policy which promotes sustainable economic growth, creates jobs and ensures people have the skills they need to fulfil their potential.”

In the Netherlands, the center-right government collapsed due to the anti-immigrant Freedom Party pulling out of its tacit alliance with the government over its austerity measures.

[Prime Minister Mark] Rutte's hopes to clinch a deal to lower the deficit to within the EU's 3% target evaporated Saturday when his most important political ally, populist euroskeptic Geert Wilders, cut off talks, saying a slavish adherence to European rules was foolish and would harm the Dutch economy.

I am running out of ways to say Obamacare works. Here's one way to say it: this year, 15 million people will receive checks from their health insurance companies totaling $1.3 billion. Here's the breakdown from the Kaiser Family Foundation:

Based on the preliminary estimates from insurers, rebates would total $1.3 billion this year, including $426 million in the individual market, $377 million in the small group market, and $541 million in the large group market.

This comes from something called the Medical Loss Ratio requirement: the requirement in the Affordable Care Act that insurance companies must spend at least 80% of premiums in individual and small group markets - 85% in large group markets - to actually provide health care. If they don't, they must issue refunds to their subscribers to make up for the extra amount they took in. That requirement went into effect in 2011, and the first checks are due to be issued by this August.

In the small group market, rebates will issue for nearly 5 million enrollees, and in the large group market, 7.5 million. In the individual market, this translates to an average rebate of $127 will go to 3.4 million people. - that is, nearly a third of the people in the individual market will get a check from their insurance company.

Let's start with this screen capture of an instructive Twitter exchange.

Full disclosure: I find JeffersonObama to be one of the best political minds on Twitter. His tweets are to the point and devastating. For a good part of the day he's been savaging Talking Points Memo for pushing a battleground state poll from Purple Strategies. That poll still has President Obama leading Mitt Romney by 4 points, but flies in the face of the commanding leads he's enjoyed from other pollsters. Follow the Tweets:

After being beaten up badly by President Obama's unflinching campaign to keep interest rates on student loans low, Speaker John Boehner is half-caving. He's given up on the Republican idea that students are just bitching, and says the House will vote on a bill to keep the rates at current level. But, he says, the House version will take the money out of the Affordable Care Act. Here's the Speaker, in his own words:

Today I’m pleased to announce that on Friday the House will vote on a bill to extend the current interest rate on federal student loans for one year. We will pay for this by taking money from one of the slush funds in the president’s health care law. 

The Wall Street Journal points out that said "slush fund" happens to be the pot of money in the ACA dedicated to public health and prevention. Be that as it may, the Speaker's "pay-for" has got a problem. You see, the current rates are set to expire on July 1, and so any Congressional mandate to keep the rates at that level will also take effect on July 1, after the Supreme Court is expected to have ruled on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

If the Supreme Court rules the entire law unconstitutional, all the funds in it - slush or otherwise - go away. How do you pay for something using a fund that you and your party is telling everyone will be out of existence by the time you need it? If you want to pay for a program by taking away from the ACA on July 1, inherent in it is the assumption that ACA will be in effect on July 1, implicitly meaning that John Boehner expects the Supreme Court to uphold it. Oops.

This week, the Senate will take up the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act - and with more than 60 cosponsors, passage in that body seems a foregone conclusion, although the House Republicans are still dragging their feet (on the account of teh gays and teh brown people). If past is prologue, Republicans might just ultimately back off and pass this, fearing the wrath of women at the polls in November.

Right now, the President is out pushing Congress to prevent interest rates from going up on student loans, and the nominee apparent of the GOP is running like the wind away from his previous positions to endorse the president's. That will likely get done, too.

The conventional wisdom on legislative achievements in an election year is that it doesn't happen. Except for a few appropriation bills that it takes to keep the government running, amidst all the election year stuff, members of Congress are really just too busy to do their job. But remember that President Obama's two biggest reforms (health reform and Wall Street reform) were passed through Congress in an election year - namely, 2010. What about 2012? We keep hearing nothing is going to get things done this year, but conspicuously enough, the president keeps getting substantive legislative accomplishment in the middle of an election year - perhaps a few even because of this being an election year.

It seems that the Obama campaign has fooled the Republicans once again: everyone thought that the president's campaign would wrap Romney with the flip-flopper cloth, but it appears that they are actually following the strategy of not letting Romney out of the radical right corner he's backed himself into. There's a lot of political postulation as to the merits of this strategy - some say it's the right thing to do; others say that the President's campaign should have stuck with the flip-flopper label. After all, George W. Bush hung that rope around John Kerry's neck pretty effectively in 2004. But really, the media is missing the boat a little, by oversimplifying a lot.

First, President Obama, of course, isn't the one painting Romney as ultra conservative. Mitt Romney painted Mitt Romney as an ultraconservative.



All the Obama campaign is doing is blocking Mitt Romney's escape from the radical Right corner Mitt Romney has painted himself into.

So I made another video, after hearing all the Rubio fever in the media. Rubio won't help Romney with minorities any more than Palin helped McCain with women.



When someone from a minority or traditionally disadvantaged community seeks to undermine the equal opportunity of those very communities, it is not simply them not getting it - it's a betrayal. It's worse.

"Dividend recap" is a great finance term that more people should know. It is a type of transaction that is common in the private equity world, the world of  Mitt Romney's Bain Capital. Basically the idea is that you take control of a company and then make the company borrow money to pay you for, well, whatever. Thanks to the Federal Tax code, the company can charge the government for the interest on this borrowed money and the owner, the lucky recipient of the dividend, is taxed at a 15% rate - less than a fireman or nurse gets taxed on salary.  The beautiful thing about dividend recap is that it's often the third loan taken out by the company being looted. The first loan pays for the original acquisition by the "investor". That's how Bain put up $27 million dollars of its own money to buy control of a company called Dade-Behring - with Dade Behring borrowing to finance the rest of the acquisition. That is, Dade-Behring borrowed money so Bain and Goldman-Sachs could buy the company. Then Bain had Dade-Behring borrow a lot more money to acquire other companies and "grow" while cutting expenses by firing workers and reducing benefits. They fired a lot of workers. These made the numbers look good enough to get a third, bigger, loan for the "dividend recap". Bain got $270 million dollars. And then Bain walked away and Dade-Behring went bankrupt. Even Forbes thinks dividend recaps are sleazy.

Here's how it works: When a private equity firm buys a company in a traditional leveraged buyout, it typically uses bank loans to finance much of the purchase price. Since the company being acquired takes out the bank loans, it's the one on the hook for future interest payments -- not the private equity owner. The extra twist comes when, often years later, private equity owners instruct the company to take out even more bank loans. Those proceeds are then funneled to private equity investors in the form of a "dividend," rather than being used for corporate purposes like buying new equipment or hiring new employees

Why is this legal? In corporate law taking money out of a corporation in a way that causes it to become insolvent or makes it unlikely to be able to pay its debts is called "fraudulent conveyance". But the conservative judges appointed by Presidents Reagan, Bush1 and Bush2 have come up with one inventive interpretation of bankruptcy law after another to protect this type of  "job creation". For example, George Bush's cousin, Judge Walker (you know, as in George Walker Bush ) decided that payments made by Enron as it was going out of business to certain investors were legal because of a provision in the bankruptcy code that was clearly intended for something else. So we see here a good example of Republican Free Market Principles: distorted law, government subsidies, and huge insider profits. President Obama has proposed legislation to take away the tax subsidies for this kind of scam, but the GOP House is not interested.

A report out today from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies points out that the Affordable Care Act is going to save taxpayers $200 billion through 2016 in Medicare spending alone - by ending private insurance giveaways, reforming payment incentives, and other provisions. The 2012 Medicare trustees' report, also released today, points out that the ACA is responsible for extending the life of the Medicare trust fund by at least 8 years.

Of course, conservatives are angry. Not because Medicare might become insolvent, but because President Obama and the Democrats won't let the Republicans use the veil of crisis to turn Medicare into Coupon-care, which could be run by big insurance companies and leave seniors holding the bag for premiums exceeding the amounts of their Ryan-care coupons. We have seen before on TPV that ending the Affordable Care Act is Paul Ryan's holy grail to achieving his goal of killing Medicare. And so along comes Avik Roy, Wall Street's health care "investment" foot-licker, Mitt Romney adviser (yes, redundant, I know) and Forbes columnist, to flat out lie about the Medicare Trustees' report and say that the Administration is "double counting" Medicare's savings and that Medicare is really going bankrupt in 2016.

How so? In Roy's words,

Think of it this way: if supporters of the Affordable Care Act came clean, they would say one of two things: (1) Medicare is going bankrupt in 2016, but the CBO scores the ACA as deficit neutral; or (2) Medicare is going bankrupt in 2024, and Blahous’ score of the ACA as increasing the deficit by $300-500 billion is accurate.

Ok, well, this is my first video! Here it goes:



Point is, Romney is not upset because someone called him rich. He's upset because he is FOR the rich. Happy Sunday everybody!

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Stop the Criminal-Black-Man Narrative 2012
by nancy a heitzeg

"Trayvon Martin was killed by a very old idea.."
~ Brent Staples, New York Times, 4/14/2102

The Black Man as Dangerous is a lethal idea, ironically, not to those who perpetrate and fear, but especially to those to whom it is attached. It is indeed also a very old idea, one that has evolved over centuries. The Savage, The Brute, the Defiler of White Women -- honed and solidified in the Post Civil Rights Era into an archetype that scholars and activists now refer to in aggregate short-hand:


The Criminal-Black-Man.

This image is ubiquitous -- it is the text and subtext of all crime-reporting and "reality" cop/prison programing. It shapes the contours of everyday racism, the school to prison pipeline, police patrols and profiles; it offers the framework for both creating and then perversely justifying the demographics of both the prison industrial complex and the face of death row.

At times, as in the Trayvon Martin case, the archetype and its' consequences are, at least briefly, openly examined and discussed. More often, as with the noxious Kony 2012 campaign, it looms just below the surface with an eerily subconscious pull.

The Criminal-Black-Man is the visible yet untouchable specter that lies at the center of fear and violence. It is personal and yes it is political.

Domestic violence and sexual assault. The original and literal war on women. And now, the Republicans in Congress are refusing to re-authorize the assistance for abuse victims. Yesterday, Vice President Biden gave a sobering speech on the importance of the Violence Against Women Act, genuinely stunned that the GOP has gone down the road this far. Joe Biden is not a Johnny come lately to this fight. He is the original author of the VAWA. He is the original author of the law.



Republicans are blocking it in the Senate right now, and even if the Democrats can muster enough votes to overcome a filibuster, the Republican House is not so keen on bothering to stop domestic violence. Why? There are stuff in there that are not "consensus items", argue Republicans.

Iowa Senator Charles Grassley (R), who leads opposition to the law’s renewal, said, “I wish we could proceed in a consensus fashion again. But there are provisions in the bill before us that have never been part of VAWA before. They’re not consensus items.”

Well, what are these non-consensus items that's forcing the Republicans hands to put at risk resources to fight sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence and physical abuse? What is the big poison pill? Not to spoil the surprise, but it's teh gays, teh "illegals" and teh Indians.

Tea Party nutjob and Florida Republican Congressman (is that redundant?) Allen West - after majorly failing in his attempt to spread a new red scare - went on CNN today to defend fellow gun-nut Ted Nugent's threat against President Obama. Watch:

Glenn Greenwald is known to his fans as something of a fearless leader raging against state power, thanks to his uncanny ability to manufacture outrage out of thin air. Thin air, though, is all he has, and now he's exposed that himself. In his zeal to defend International criminal snoop and all-around crazy guy Julian Assange, Greenwald is cheerleading a defense of Russian state-owned television channel RT, who gave Mr. Assange a job. A job, mind you, Assange opened with a chummy, non-challenging chat with the leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah.

Greenwald couches his love affair with Russian state controlled media on account of his deeply troubled intercontinental soulmate in the thin veil of attacking the New York Times for publishing an article exposing the gulf between the stated purpose of people like Assange and Greenwald and their purpose. Pointing out that US media, too, has corporate, political and at times state influence, Glenn gets crafty:

There is apparently a rule that says it’s perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government (Kaplan/The Washington Post), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it’s an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government.

The "mommy wars" aren't going Mitt Romney's way.

American women favor Barack Obama by a 14-point margin over Mitt Romney, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Tuesday, despite the recent partisan "Mommy Wars" flap over the role of women in society.

Fifty-one percent of registered women voters support the Democratic president, according to the poll, compared with 37 percent who favor Romney...

A CNN poll has the President up by 16 points, 55% to 37% among women.

You don't say. Insincere politicization of motherhood, and then bragging about how your wife got an "early birthday present" after a CNN employee said the wrong thing about stay-at-home moms isn't helping Mitt Romney? I am shocked.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll's crosstabs have more bad news for Romney - President Obama leads with women on all issues, including those ever illusive "family values."

This is the text of an email I received after the latest phone banking session in which I participated:

I thought you might want to know we made over 800 calls (!) last night, a very satisfying and record-breaking conclusion to our team's battleground test phone banks. And thanks to some diligent data entry people, we were able to get all our numbers in on time. I hope you are all proud!

So far California has made over 110,000 calls as part of this important test, and that doesn't even include the last couple of days. We have easily made more calls than any other state, proving California's value as a powerhouse export state in this campaign!

Thank you everyone for your huge contribution to this accomplishment.

OFA, of course, has paid staffers. No campaign can function without them. But no one at that Thursday phone bank was a paid operative. We were all volunteers, giving our time to make sure that 800 Nevadans who were sitting on the fence had a chance to hear our message. Some were truly undecided; a few rabid Republicans somehow made it onto our lists. We reached a few and persuaded them; some told us to never call them again. Such is democracy. But the driving force behind the Obama movement is the volunteer army that makes the calls, enters the data, and talks to people next door and across the country.

In my last essay I said that political work was too important to be left solely to politicians. In a representative democracy it is incumbent upon all of us to be political actors. Politics is the arena in which decisions of national and international importance get decided. And politics abhors a vacuum; if we're not engaged in the struggle, someone else will win by default, and we will probably not like the result. If we don't at the very least vote, 2010 will happen again and again.

I've found that I've had to take time away from monitoring political news over the past month. I've been cranky, out of sorts, and just no fun in general. I try—and mostly succeed—in keeping my mood hidden from loved ones and acquaintances. They've supported me over the years when things in my life weren't as rosy as they are now, and anything I can do to pay it back I do, even if it's as simple as keeping my mouth shut when complaining isn't warranted and won't better the situation. Most of my friends and family aren't as obsessed with politics as I am.

So while my sanity demands that, say, I stay away from blogs on the weekend and instead wallow in my own hobbies, the moment is too important, the stakes too grave for me to ignore politics for too long. The basic requirement of good citizenship is to be informed about what's going on; in a democracy we should all be politicians, and not leave political work and thinking solely in the hands of our betters. That the majority of our citizens don't think that way is one of the reasons why the Republic is in its current parlous state.

I've been thinking today about why this election matters so much to me, why who is in the White House and in control of Congress is of such existential importance. Haven't we all managed to muddle along, whoever happened to temporarily hold the reins of power? Isn't political life something that happens far away, with no real consequence on our daily lives? The sun will continue to shine, we'll continue to go to work or school—or not—and the world will keep turning. I remember when Bush won in 2004, one of my friends said, "Well, it's only another four years. Everything will work out." Political tides have come and gone, and the country still stands, if on wobbly feet.

The Buffett rule, as President Obama has said time and again, is about fairness. There is no reason why people who make more than $1 million a year should pay a lower marginal tax rate than the average middle class family. It's that simple. As we know, it isn't just President Obama and his socialist communist pinko hippie allies that think so. It would appear that Ronald Reagan, the Republican party's modern day Jesus, championed the principle himself.



60% of Americans support the Buffett Rule, including more than 2 in 5 Republicans. But as the Senate prepares to vote on the rule, most if not all Republican senators are poised to vote to block it. Why? The GOP will tell you that it would "raise taxes on small businesses" that file under the individual rates. Sure, if you consider hedge fund managers "small business" - but otherwise the claim is patently a lie. And the pundits in the media are busy telling everyone that it's just an election year gimmick since it won't pass Congress anyway.

When Hilary Rosen made some pretty untoward comments about Ann Romney being a stay-at-home mom and therefore not knowing anything about the economic hardships facing women, I had no sympathy for Rosen. I don't think that Ann Romney is out of touch with women's economic issues because she was a stay-at-home mom; I think she's out of touch with women's and the average American's economic concerns for the same reason her husband is: their massive family wealth was amassed by (a) inheritance, and (b) causing for countless American families exactly the kinds of financial hardships that require one to close their eyes to human suffering.

So as the Republican party continues to wage a war on both women's health care and on economic issues that women and middle class Americans of all genders and races care about, Republicans took Rosen's misstatement (which she apologized for) out for a spin to try to close the huge gender gap. Ann Romney got her first twitter account, and oh, it was bliss in the GOP twitland. But last night, Mitt and Ann Romney went into a closed-door fundraiser, and they couldn't keep a lid over their giddiness that they were, in fact, milking the Rosen flap for its political value. See, Ann Romney apparently wasn't really upset that Rosen had said something about stay-at-home moms. She was merely using it for politics. And so was her husband:

At the fundraiser, Haake adds, both Romney and his wife Ann remained absolutely giddy about last week’s Hilary Rosen flap. "It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it," Ann Romney said. The candidate went further, calling the episode a "gift" that allowed his campaign to show contrast with Democrats in the general election's first week.

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Prison Health Care as Punishment
by Kay Whitlock with introduction by nancy a heitzeg

Misrepresentations of the realities of prison life abound. These are a constant staple of media and public conversation, including unfounded claims that inmates are leading some sort of life of luxury, lifting weights, watching plasma TVs, dining finely and seeking college educations at the expense of taxpayers.

And this -- California Inmates Get Better Health Care than Ordinary Citizens: Thanks to Justice Anthony Kennedy, California prisoners have easier access to health care than ordinary citizens.

Those convicted of “non-non-non crimes”–non-serious, non-violent, non-sex related–are liable to get early release as a result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling that the state must reduce prison overcrowding in order to provide adequate medical, mental and dental health care.

Petty thieves and the like can get freed and have no more claim to health care than an honest citizen.

Killers, rapists, and armed robbers, on the other hand, are free of health-care worries until they make parole, if they ever do.

The court ruled 5-4 that the absence of adequate care for prisoners violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The majority decision was written by Kennedy.

In an added twist, J. Clark Kelso, the overseer of California’s effort to comply with the order was a law clerk to Kennedy in the early 1980’s. He says that he gets the same question wherever he goes: “How come we’re giving felons better health care than I get?”

Well, we aren't. California has yet to dramatically reduce over-crowding, often shuffling inmates out of state-run prisons to county jails, and despite some efforts to comply with the Supreme Court order, questions still remain as to what standards California is using to define "adequate care". In addition, the intolerable conditions of SHU confinement recently lead to a series of on-going prisoner hunger strikes and related deaths at Pelican Bay and elsewhere.

Hardly a "health care" paradise.

The reality of prison health care - throughout the nation -- is one of neglect, denial f treatment and untimely death.

In response to the false picture presented by The Daily Beast and others, CI is re-publishing a piece which outlines the on-going limitations of the oxymoron called "prison health care".

The Republicans are fast becoming not just a fringe party, but a comical (not the fun way, the caricature way) party. As President Obama pushes Congress on a common sense tax reform: the idea that those who make more than a million dollars a year should pay at least the same marginal tax rate as middle class families. But even after videos of that super-commie Ronald Reagan touting the same exact thing surfaced, I keep seeing suggestions that Democrats who want the ultra wealthy to contribute their fair share in taxes should somehow just make a voluntary contribution to the treasury and shut the hell up. The absurdity of this several iterations of... the stupid.

The Stupid Round 1: The finest Republican tax idea: the working poor needs to be taxed more in a mandatory manner, but the super rich should only pay if they want to.

Tax time is coming up, and the Republicans will soon be on TV bumbling about the falsehood that half of American tax filers don't pay any taxes! But it only concerns income taxes, they'd clarify. Half of American tax filers don't pay any federal income taxes. And even though these Americans pay federal payroll taxes on their entire incomes (whereas for the rich the payroll tax stops after about the first $110,000), and many pay Medicare Part B premiums, property taxes, sales taxes and other taxes in their states, the Republicans will be galled at the idea that some hard working people, including the working poor, are spared more taxation from Congress. We need to "broaden the base," they will say, in code language for raising taxes on the poor. No one talks about that tax being a voluntary one, now, do they?

But suddenly, if you want the wealthiest to pay their fair share, it must be voluntary. Why? Suddenly if you want Mitt Romney to pay more than 15% on his $21 million in income, that can only happen should Mitt Romney feel like sparing America the change. Suddenly, if you want to say that money made from work (earned income) should be treated the same way as money made from money (i.e. capital gains), you need a permission slip from the people who make money from money?

The Obama campaign has released the following video on the sixth birthday of Romneycare.



Mitt Romney can run, but he can't hide from his own record. Nor, it seems, thanks to the nutty party he now represents, can he run on his greatest achievement. Happy birthday, Romneycare!

You have got to hand it to Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. They know where their priorities are. The Paul Ryan budget - the one Mitt Romney couldn't be more in love with - will give an average of $394,000 in annual tax cuts to millionaires of America when the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (also part of the Romney-Ryan plan) is factored in ($129,000 from the Bush tax giveaways and an additional $265,000 from the current GOP budget). It will also cut $133.5 billion over 10 years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.

So, let's do some quick math. A $133.5 billion cut in SNAP represents a 17% reduction in the essential program to keep families and children in America from going hungry. 90% of SNAP funds go directly to food assistance for poor children and families (most of the rest goes to states for administering it), and nearly half of it goes to children and families below half of the federal poverty level. In 2013, there are projected to be 47.1 million people eligible for this program. Let's say the 17% reduction in the budget represents a 17% reduction in the number of people getting the benefits. That's over 8 million people in a given year. $133.5 billion also pays for the Romney-Ryan average tax breaks for 33,883 millionaires for 10 years (10-year cumulative average break for every millionaire at $3.94 million).

So. $133.5 billion = tax cuts for 33,883 millionaires = over 8 million people kicked off of food assistance. That works out to 236 people in dire need kicked out of assistance to give the average millionaire in America his (or her) tax break. Aren't you impressed?

I've been taking a break from politics for the past few days. I've had other things to do, and I just found that I didn't have the energy for our perpetual political death match, where one side is trying to protect an inclusive and expansive America, and the other side wants to impose a form of serfdom on the majority of the populace.

Then I return to see President Obama urging Congress to pass the Buffett Rule, wherein he makes a statement that will no doubt sting the GOP:

Some years ago one of my predecessors traveled across the country pushing for the same concept. He gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who payed lower tax rates than his secretary and wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why that was wrong. So this President gave another speech where he said it was crazy—that's a quote—that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multimillionaires to pay nothing while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary.  That wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior was Ronald Reagan.

The proof is in the video. So, here:

So, yes, Ronald Reagan, the man who started us down the road which has led to a pathological liar like Mitt Romney winning the Republican nomination for President, espoused enacting something similar to Pres. Obama's Buffett Rule.

At the end of Obama's speech, he makes another remark which should also leave a mark on the GOP:

He thought that in America, the wealthiest should pay their fair share, and he said so. I know that position might disqualify him from the Republican primaries these days.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll released this morning is showing the President widening the gender gap, as women flee the Republican party like the plague they are.

A wide gender gap underlies the current state of the race. Romney is up eight percentage points among male voters but trails by 19 among women. [...]

In addition to his big lead among women — Obama won that demographic by 13 points in 2008 — the president is moving to secure other key elements of his winning coalition. As he did four years ago, he has overwhelming support from African Americans — 90 percent back his reelection effort — and he has a big lead among those ages 18 to 29. [...]

Obama continues to trail Romney by a big margin among white voters without college degrees, and he loses white men with college degrees by double digits, 57 to 39 percent. He counters with a big lead over Romney among white women who have a college degree or more education.

Translation: the only people voting Republican as a block are white males. Women are gone, people of color are gone, and gone by big margins.

Let me say for the record that I don't think women are running as fast as they can from the GOP just because of the Republican party's obsession with legislating lady-parts. That's a huge part of it, but that's not all of it. The Republican party has waged a war on women on economic and social issues. Let's get a few examples, shall we?

Talk about coming off the hinges. Suddenly this morning, I get an email from Credo Action (the political arm of a self-pronounced "progressive" phone company whose goal is not to fight the Right but to help the Right take down President Obama). What's in the email? A freakout about how the task force the President announced in his State of the Union address to investigate mortgage securitization fraud is not big enough. Of course, many of CREDO's cohorts on the ideological-warfare Left, most notably Firedoglake, ran with it. Sound familiar? This has been the modus operandi of the anti-progress Professional Left - stay off of doing anything constructive, and constantly whine and complain about "not big enough," "not good enough" and "not Lefty enough."

So what's today's specific meltdown about? It's about how the 55 promised members of the mortgage securitization task force is "not enough," and how not all of them have been "deployed yet."

Election year promises aren't nearly enough. President Obama needs to prove his commitment to the financial crimes task force is real and provide the task force with the resources it needs to investigate Wall Street criminals.[...]

After the much smaller savings and loan scandal of the '80s approximately 1,000 FBI agents and dozens of federal prosecutors were assigned to prosecute related cases. And 100 FBI agents were tasked with investigating the Enron scandal, which involved just one company and caused none of the economy-wide damage we've seen since the collapse of the housing bubble.

Apparently, CREDO thinks that nobody else in the federal or state governments, outside the mortgage fraud unit specifically referred to here, is allowed to investigate financial industry crimes. Apparently, none of us got the memo except CREDO that President Obama has ordered all other federal agencies and agents to stop investigating the financial sector. Maybe CREDO will produce the memo soon. I'm waiting.

Free market progressive. Is that a contradiction in terms? Nearly everyone on the Right wing will tell you that it is, and a lot of self-crowned representatives of the Left will agree. Progressives do believe in a vital role for government in protecting individual rights and promoting the collective welfare of a people. But the deep and abiding commitment to the common good is as important to progressives as are equal opportunities and maximum freedoms for every individual. In fact, the two are co-dependent. In the recent memory, Democrats and progressives in the United States have traditionally been as fierce advocates for unions as they have been for small businesses, partly because the two serve the same progressive outcome, the ability of individuals to advocate for and advance themselves in a marketplace dominated by big players.

That is why I was more than skeptical when I heard the usual suspects - and to be fair, some labor and consumer groups - have a meltdown over a recent rare bipartisan measure that the President signed into law: the JOBS Act, full name: Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (full text). Their main contention seems to be that the same president who enacted the most sweeping financial industry regulations since the 1930s is now hell bent on deregulating the marketplace to make things easier for Wall Street. They say the JOBS Act weakens investor protections, and will usher in the next Enron. I don't think it carries water.

The March jobs report came out today, and the economy, in preliminary numbers, added 121,000 jobs over the month while the unemployment rate dropped to 8.2%. Republicans seized on the number as "lower than expected," and sent their minions out on the media to say that the rate dropped only because people gave up looking for jobs. Which, of course, is not true. Good news is, it won't take too long to show. Mark Zandy, Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics and John McCain's 2008 economic adviser cleared the air on MSNBC:

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Queer (In)Justice ~ Winner of 2011 PASS Award
by nancy a heitzeg

Each year, The National Council on Crime and Delinquency acknowledges outstanding contributions to public education on issue of criminal justice with the PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Awards.

The PASS Awards (Prevention for a Safer Society) is the only national recognition of print and broadcast journalists, TV news and feature reporters, producers, writers, and those in film and literature who try to focus America’s attention on our criminal justice, juvenile justice, and child welfare systems in a thoughtful and considerate manner.

NCCD established the PASS Awards to recognize and honor the media’s success in illuminating stories that further public understanding of criminal justice, juvenile justice, and child welfare issues. NCCD is seeking stories that illustrate current realities or the promise of reform, especially those that help people understand the complex causes of crime and what must be done to prevent and control it. A critical link in successful policies related to these issues is the education of the public. The media is uniquely positioned to be this link, and we gratefully acknowledge their efforts to fulfill that responsibility.

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States by Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie and Kay Whitlock is one of the most deserving recipients of the 2011 Award.

Congratulations!

Queer (In)Justice has rightly been described as "ground-breaking", "powerful and productively disorienting" and "revolutionary".

It is all that and more. Queer (In)Justice offers an intersectional analysis of the ways in which "criminalizing archetypes" shape the policing and punishment of sexuality/gender/race/class and offers a much needed critique of "hate crime" legislation and the pitfalls of continued reliance on the old law and order paradigms in pursuit of equality. Doug Ireland in his review, "Outlaws Still" says it best :

"Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock have collected — with meticulous, footnoted scholarship — a compendium of utterly revolting but perfectly legal persecutions of queer Americans. These stomach-turning horror stories won’t be familiar to the people who frequent those pricey, black-tie fundraisers given by the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, because they mostly concern people of color, or the poor, or gender-benders, and thus often receive little publicity...

Queer (In)Justice ought to be force-fed to the staffs and boards of directors of every national and state gay organization in the hope that it might open their eyes to a reality they too often deliberately ignore. And if the Gill Foundation wants to do something useful, it should buy copies of this book in bulk, distribute them to those closed-door “Outgiving” conferences of fat-cats whose big checks have such inordinate sway in determining the “gay agenda,” and invite the trio of its activist-authors to address them.

Needless to say, dear reader, you too should make sure Queer (In)Justice has a place on your bookshelf. It’s that important."

Yes it is. If you haven't read it yet -- please do.

In celebration of the PASS Award, Criminal InJustice is pleased to re-publish an interview with the authors. So much gratitude to all of them for this path-breaking work, and especially, here to Kay Whitlock, one of the original editors of the Criminal InJustice Series, our comrade in abolition/transformative justice, and most importantly , our friend.

"The government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state.

"And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting... I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don't find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance."

—Dimitris Christoulas, in his suicide letter

Athens is on fire again, after the suicide of a 77 year old pensioner in an act of political protest and personal desperation. This wasn't a quiet, out of the way suicide. No, he carried it out in broad daylight, shooting himself dead outside of the Greek Parliament building. It was every bit as dramatic a statement as the self-immolation of Buddhist monks in Saigon in the 1960s. Faced with government austerity measures that have slashed entitlement funding, many on the lower rungs of Greece's economy are facing an uncertainty and hopelessness which have been unseen in EU countries since the end of World War II.

Of course, Greece isn't the only EU member suffering. When states with weaker economies—like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland—joined the common currency, the euro's strength flooded those countries with money and cheap credit. Both governments and citizens went on a shopping spree, until countries like Greece had debts of 150% of their GDP. When the crisis of 2008 hit, the house of cards collapsed, until now the EU is in a condition in which there are concerns as to whether the common currency can survive as it is. In some corners, even the EU project is in doubt.

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In a few decades, when the political history of the early 21st century is written, historians of American politics will try to work out how the Republican Party began and completed its slide from a "business-friendly" conservative party to one that  wound up espousing blatantly fascist ideologies.

The "objective" press dare not call it fascism, for fear that they would be labeled with that most damning of epithets: "liberal". And the word itself—"fascist"—has been thrown around by those on the right to describe anyone to the left of them so frequently and with such vehemence that its meaning has been confused in the public's mind. When Jonah Goldberg can write a book entitled Liberal Fascism, and have it taken seriously in the parlors of the Right, it's a difficult task to resurrect the word's true and dark power.

It doesn't take much research or in-depth analysis to see that today's GOP has in fact descended into a fascist pathology. And in doing so is laying, or attempting to lay, the necessary infrastructure for a fascist re-ordering of the Republic.

The Republicans' giddiness at the possibility of high gas prices hurting the economy, and by extension the president may have just turned into a frown. In the midst of dire economic stress, when Mitt Romney was demanding that we let Detroit go bankrupt, and when many within the president's own party were disapproving of the move, President Obama placed his bet with the American worker, with the American auto industry, and with American ingenuity. Here at TPV, we have discussed the story of the resurgence and retooling of the auto industry. In March, American automakers had the best month in sales in four years.

Industrywide U.S. sales rose 12.7%, according to sales tracker Autodata, capping the best quarter for auto sales in the United States since the first quarter of 2008, before the combination of a gas price spike and the meltdown in financial markets later that year devastated sales and nearly led to the end of the U.S. auto industry.

U.S. sales hit a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 14.4 million vehicles for the month, the third straight month the pace of sales has topped 14 million. The only month to reach that mark from mid-2008 through the end of last year was in August 2009, when sales spiked due to the "Cash for Clunkers" program.

But, but, gas prices! Regular followers of TPV know that I have discussed how the President has beaten the beltway wisdom on the politics and economics of high gas prices by diversifying sources and increasing efficiency (in both homes and cars), but here is more concrete evidence.

Typically overall auto sales are hurt by gas price spikes, as the drop in demand for less fuel-efficient models outweighs any gains in high-mileage vehicles. But that has not been the case with the current run-up at the pump. While industrywide car sales rose 16%, truck sales also climbed 9%, according to Autodata.

During the Tea Party uprising of 2010, there were a few bright spots nationwide. One of them was here in California, where Democrats maintained their wide majorities in the Legislature and swept all the state-wide elected offices.

Jerry Brown, especially, was elected to office on a platform of fixing the dire straits into which the state budget had fallen. California, like many states, has a balanced budget amendment. It cannot run a deficit; it can float state bonds, and borrow, but the books have to be balanced every year. What this has meant in practice is a budget that arrives chronically late year after year, and cuts and more cuts to vital services because of the requirement—until the passage of Proposition 25 in, again, 2010, that dark year for progressives—that the budget required a super-majority of a 66% affirmative vote to be passed. That put the minority GOP in the catbird's seat every summer, exacting onerous cuts just to keep the state in a semblance of functionality. (By passing Proposition 25, the budget can now be enacted by a 55% simple majority.)

As part of his drive to remake state finances and put them on a surer footing, and keeping a promise to California voters that any tax hikes would have to be passed by popular vote (as it still requires a 2/3 vote for the Legislature to pass tax hikes), he's working to get a proposition on the November ballot.

Today, a USA Today Gallap poll of 12 swing states shows the President 9 points ahead of the Etch-a-Sketch guy. Explaining the lead? A gender gap. Men are split evenly between Obama (47%) and Romney (48%), but Obama has a big lead among women: 54% to Romney's 36%. The lead is something in line with what we have seen recently in other polls. It's not a surprise, given the GOP's insistence at once that the government could not tell your insurance companies that they couldn't drop you when you get sick and also that the government should stick itself up a woman's vagina should she opt for a legal medical procedure.

But while the conventional wisdom is that Republicans drew the ire of women voters by wanting to hand their medical decisions over to their employers and by pursuing mandatory state sponsored rape laws, polling suggests that the gender gap is about much more than abortion. A CNN/ORC poll last week showed the favorability of the health care law jumping by 10 points among women since November, from 37% to 47% (with 43% of women opposed). Men oppose it by a large margin. The two are more than likely intertwined. I have little doubt that health care is was brought front and center to women by the Republican war on women's reproductive health care.