Bill Donohue Is A Disgrace

Nice shit-eating grin.

Recently I wrote a post on the absurdity of Guardian writer Andrew Brown’s reprehensible defense of the Catholic Church in light of the most recent revelations of child abuse. His argument that Catholic priests are no more likely than adults in other professions to rape children is tasteless and irrelevant, especially since it has been documented that Church officials in various parishes and archdioceses actively covered up the abuses.

Until the other day, Brown’s recycled defense of the Church’s child abusers was the worst opinion piece I’ve read about any of the Church’s scandals. But enter Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, and loudmouth windbag extraordinaire. For CNN.com, Donohue writes,

Employers from every walk of life, in both the U.S. and Europe, have long handled cases of alleged sex abuse by employees as an internal matter. Rarely have employers called the cops, and none was required to do so.

Though this is starting to change, any discussion of employee sexual abuse that took place 30 and 40 years ago must acknowledge this reality. Thus it hardly comes as a surprise that Cardinal Sean Brady in Ireland did not summon the authorities about a case involving a priest in the 1970s. What is surprising is why some are now indicting him, acting as if his response was the exception to the rule.

Selective indignation at the Catholic Church is not confined to Brady. Why, for example, are the psychologists and psychiatrists who pledged to “fix” abusers treated so lightly? After all, employers from the corporate world to the Catholic Church were told over and over again that therapy works and to give the offender a second chance.

Where to begin? First off, Donohue is confusing sexual abuse with sexual harassment. It is true that employers often treat sexual harassment as an internal matter. Sexist jokes and unwanted physical advances—when reported—are generally met with disciplinary action, as they should be. The police are not usually called because although lewd jokes or even an awkward grope are tasteless, the victim generally does not notify the police. Suspension or termination may be enough to remedy the problem. Sexual abuse is an entirely different story. The children under the care of pedophile priests were not merely subjected to harassment; they were sexually assaulted. No one I know of, with the exception of Bill Donohue and KBR, would regard rape in the workplace as “an internal matter.” Victims are entitled to press charges, and they should in order to shed light on the sexual perverts who lurk in our places of business and elsewhere.

Bill Donohue thinks differently. If priests, or lawyers, or physicians, or indeed, even kindergarten teachers are believed to be raping children, Donohue says that their supervisors should handle it as “an internal matter,” as he says is the custom. And handle it that way they did. The former Cardinal of Boston, Bernard Law, handled it by simply shuffling accused child-fuckers from parish to parish where they kept abusing children. I guess this is what Donohue means we he says we should “give the offender a second chance.”

Donohue has made it his sole purpose in life to defend the Catholic Church against all enemies, real and imagined, no matter how corrupt, immoral, disgraceful, and discriminatory the institution behaves. Indeed, whenever a set of allegations arises accusing Catholic officials of child abuse, Donohue steps into the breach not to condemn the abuse, but to decry the “hysterical” reactions that inevitably follow, as if the level of indignation at the Church is unwarranted.

Amazingly, Donohue is not a fringe figure. He can occasionally be seen on the various cable news networks whining about perceived public insults to Catholicism, a hilariously ironic development given the ubiquitous and omnipotent presence the Church once enjoyed in the Western world. Clearly, much progress had been made if Catholicism’s defenders have been relegated to complaining about potshots at the Church which they can do absolutely nothing about. Still, Donohue is a minor nuisance despite his overall irrelevance as a cultural “warrior.” Thankfully, the sixty-two year old Donohue and those who think just like him constitute a literally dying breed. And for this endangered species, extinction can’t come fast enough.

- Max

Kill This Health Care Bill

I was glad to read that Democratic Congressman Stephen Lynch of South Boston will vote “no” on the health care reform bill. This bill does absolutely nothing to control the runaway cost of health insurance. And worst of all, the bill mandates that everyone purchase health insurance or face a fine. Honestly, I might approve of this bill were it not for the fact that it forces people to enter into private contracts with bloodsucking HMOs, just like we have here in Massachusetts.

No poll I’ve seen shows that majority of Americans favor this current (Senate) bill under consideration by the House of Representatives. Compare this with another poll indicating that 60% of Americans want a public option to compete with private insurance, including 86% of Democrats and 57% of independents. These and other polls indicate that Americans think that the efforts of the Democrats don’t go nearly far enough. And that’s not surprising considering that Democrats are one of the two political factions of what we might call the American Business Party.

So thank you, Stephen Lynch, for letting the Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and the other phony liberals know that you think this bill is a pile of dogshit.

- Max

Heinous Display By Teabaggers

Amazing video shot at a Columbus, Ohio tea party of a man, presumably a health care proponent, with a sign saying he has Parkinson’s Disease. The sign may be true, it may not. But it’s not like these teabaggers would know either way. Whatever the case may be, this is yet another horrifying display of the Randian ideal of looking out for one’s self while telling everyone else to go fuck themselves. It seems there are more Glenn Becks out there than I thought.

Got a horrible disease? Too fucking bad. No handouts for you. You should have thought about the consequences before you acquired what the health insurance companies call a preexisting condition.

It’s bad enough that Americans are stupid. We don’t need to add “malicious” to the equation.

- Max

The Doctrine Of Nullification Is Back!

The Tenth Amendment is not the be-all, end-all of the Constitution.

From the New York Times:

Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.

On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. That same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the [state] Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Hilarious article in the New York Times today about states’ rights, but as this excerpt shows, it’s more about straight up nullification. Which is funny, because the nullification issue was essentially settled by the Civil War. The Southern states thought that they should be able to nullify federal laws that hampered the institution of slavery. Abraham Lincoln disagreed. It actually should have been resolved in 1819 when Chief Justice John Marshall delivered the Supreme Court’s ruling in McCulloch v. Maryland. In that case, the Court ruled in part that a Maryland state tax on a branch of the Second Bank of the United States was unconstitutional because it violated the Supremacy Clause of Article VI. As Marshall wrote,

This great principle is, that the constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof are supreme; that they control the constitution and laws of the respective states, and cannot be controlled by them.

If the above-cited new state regulations are ever challenged in federal court, they wouldn’t stand a chance. I’m sure that most of the state legislators who passed them know this, but maybe they’re trying to inspire another secessionist movement. And if that’s the case, the rest of the country should do nothing to stop them this time. We will not make the same mistake twice.

- Max

Dick Armey Has No Idea What Alexander Hamilton Was About

Don’t know anything? Make shit up!

Former House Majority Leader and tea party financial backer Dick Armey spoke to the National Press Club on Monday, and made the following claim, cited here by Dana Milbank in his latest Washington Post column:

“The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers,” Armey explained. The problem with Democrats and other “people here who do not cherish America the way we do,” he explained, is “they did not read the Federalist Papers.”

A member of the audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government”?

Historian Armey was flummoxed by this new information. “Widely regarded by whom?” he challenged, suspiciously. “Today's modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton.”

As one of those “ill-informed political science professors,” I can say unequivocally that Armey is wrong. As Milbank points out in his column, Hamilton once advanced the idea of a president serving for life, senators serving for life, state governors appointed by the president, and a national bank. What Milbank and every other commentator on this story has missed, is that in his unadopted proposal for a new Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention, Hamilton also proposed giving the national government veto power over the actions of the states. If Hamilton were alive today, Dick Armey would be railing against him as an apologist for monarchy or tyranny. But most people don’t notice this discrepancy because 206 years have passed since Hamilton took an Aaron Burr gunshot to the abdomen. Plenty of time for a mythical status to be achieved—one that can be used to inspire any cause, no matter how at odds the philosophy of that cause and the ideas of Hamilton might be.

Dick Armey isn’t some shitkicking teabagger from rural Arkansas who happened to get quoted by the media. He’s a leader of the tea party movement. And he doesn’t know shit about the founding of America.

- Max

Card Check Opponents Advance Completely Nonsensical Arguments

Lobbying for the oppression of American workers since 1912.

The propensity of many Americans to oppose their own economic interests never ceases to amaze me. I find this utterly fascinating, as it is the most interesting and mind-boggling phenomenon in American politics. It’s a topic that I have touched upon in posts about the tea partiers, and I hope to explore it greater depth in the coming weeks. For now, I want to examine one particular issue through which this problem has so clearly manifested. That issue is Card Check.

Card Check, also known as “majority sign-up,” would make it easier for workers in a particular company to unionize. There is a bill currently stalled in Congress—the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)—that would make Card Check the law of the nation. The idea is very simple. Under Card Check, workers of a potential bargaining unit sign what are called “authorization cards” which state the employees’ desire to be part of a union. If a majority of workers in a unit sign cards, the cards are sent to the National Labor Relations Board for verification and certification. Once this is done, those workers are officially a union, even the ones who did not sign cards. Card Check simply allows the will of the majority to be obliged (either for or against unionizing), while preventing “free riding” in those units that do become unionized. It wouldn’t be fair if some employees didn’t pay any dues, and yet got to reap whatever benefits the union is able to secure. Even the current law dictates that once a union is formed, all employees are in the union regardless of how they voted. So Card Check changes nothing on this score.

Current law does not allow for automatic unionization after a majority of workers sign authorization cards. Under the present statute, if 30% of the employees or more sign authorization cards, which are then sent to the NLRB, the Board authorizes an election using a secret ballot, in which all employees vote on whether to unionize. The EFCA would keep this provision, while also adding the abovementioned majority sign-up rule.

Opponents argue, rather disingenuously, that Card Check would infringe on workers’ rights by eliminating the right to a secret ballot. But if a majority of employees have signed authorization cards expressing their wish to unionize, an election is superfluous. And if only 30% of employees sign cards, an election using the secret ballot is still held. So what’s really going here?

The main argument against majority sign-up is a strange one. Right-wingers do not publicly advocate against Card Check by stating the actual reason they oppose it, which is that it’s not a business-friendly piece of legislation. Any law that makes it easier for workers to negotiate collectively with management is anathema to American conservatism. But conservatives cannot tell the American people they oppose Card Check for this reason—that it has the potential to empower them as workers and to negotiate better compensation for themselves. Instead, the Right has had to cook up a farcical ruse of an excuse that invokes “worker rights” and the right to have a secret ballot.

A secret ballot is a good thing. But once again, under Card Check, if a majority of workers sign union authorization cards, there is no need—if you are an employee—to have any kind of election, secret or otherwise. However, if you are the employer, then you have every reason to drag out the process as much as possible. Opponents of Card Check argue that a secret ballot is necessary to protect “worker rights” because they say employees will undoubtedly feel pressured into signing a card by their coworkers. Take a look at this advertisement from the Orwellian-named Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, which is financially backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Retail Industry Leaders Association, among other groups of for-profit organizations:

Not that it would matter, but someone should tell the assholes behind this ad that this isn’t On the Waterfront. Not every union leader is a fucking mob caricature, which apparently is the only role that Vince Curatola can play. As someone who has engaged in a majority sign-up effort, workers don’t try to intimidate their fellow employees because (1) that’s not right; and (2) you’ll end up alienating people. The best way to approach coworkers is to tell them about the organizing effort and encourage them to ask any questions they have (which most of them will). In my experience, hardly anyone was outright against unionizing. It’s just that most of them had never even considered it and weren’t sure how it worked. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the employees who said they’d think it over, ended up asking to sign cards later on.

If workers have to worry about coercion from anyone, it’s their employer, who writes their paychecks. The employer, after all, can use the threat of job loss to whip employees against unionizing. (Even though this is illegal, it happens often.) If a majority of workers sign cards, all an election would do is allow the employer time to lobby against unionization through coercion and staff-splitting.

The passage of Card Check is questionable at this point, even with the supposedly worker-friendly Democratic Party in power. As for the American people themselves, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s magazine recently featured an article misleadingly titled, “Poll shows public opposes card check,” and cites a Voter Consumer Research poll indicating that 61% of respondents oppose Card Check. But if we look at the actual poll, we find that this figure represents 61% of the mere 28% of respondents who said they had actually heard of Card Check. It should also be pointed out that as a news topic, Card Check features more prominently in Right Wing media than anywhere else because it makes great fodder—albeit illogically—for screeds against Democrats and organized labor. Hence, it may very well be that politically-minded conservatives are more likely to have heard of Card Check than liberals.

So how is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce defining “public?” For that, we need only do some simple math. Take the 28% of Americans who’ve heard of Card Check, and multiply that number by the 61% of them who oppose Card Check, and we find that when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that the “public” opposes Card Check, they mean that 17% of Americans oppose Card Check.

That’s a strange way of defining “the public.”

It remains to be seen whether the EFCA will become unstuck in Congress. As of now its prospects look bleak, and if it fails (which is likely), this will only add to the number of ways that Barack Obama has disappointed the people who elected him. If the EFCA is resurrected, expect a fierce battle involving the kinds of crazy conservative rhetoric we became accustomed to last summer during the health care “debate.” It may be an uphill battle. In 2009, for the first time since Gallup started asking the question, “Do you approve or disapprove of unions?” in 1936, less than a majority said they approved. Now, I’m not going to sit here and claim that every union is great and only has the interests of its members in mind, because that is not the case. But there are a lot of good unions that really protect the well-being of their members because they create bargaining opportunities for workers that would not otherwise exist. Everyone recognizes the truth of the “strength in numbers” maxim. And yet, America’s peasant mentality only seems to be worsening. Idiots like Glenn Beck make millions by incoherently ranting against heretofore uncontroversial ideas, such as social justice and collectivism in a sinister effort to perpetuate a notion of extreme individualism. Sure, he’ll support collectivist activities such as the tea parties in the short term, but only as a means to achieve a culture of isolationism and marginalization.

So it is with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Retail Industry Leaders Association, and other business interests of this nation. These organizations have spent millions of dollars to lobby against Card Check under the guise of lobbying for worker rights, which is laughable. And the only thing more absurd than the notion of big business looking out for us, is the fact that people are actually believing it.

- Max

The Public Option Is Officially Dead, And Apparently It's Nobody's Fault

Spare me the excuses, Pelosi.

Yesterday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that there would be no public option in the health care “reform” legislation that she will send to the House floor for a vote next week.

In the words of Sarah Palin, “How’s that hopey changey thing workin’ out for ya?”

Yes, it’s a sad day when the actions of the Democratic Party prompt me to quote the wordsmith of Wasilla, but this is what it’s come to in light of Pelosi declaring, “I’m quite sad that a public option isn’t in there. But it isn’t a case of it’s not in there because the Senate is whipping against it. It’s not in there because they don’t have the votes to have it in there.”

Pelosi made this statement on Friday, one day after Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said if the House version included a public option, he’d whip for it. The White House meanwhile, is publicly keeping its distance from the proceedings, and clearly doesn’t mind the lack of a public option.

So this is it, huh? It seems that just about everyone in the Democratic Party is for the public option, but everyone’s against it. Pelosi is blaming the Senate. The Senate’s leadership is saying they’d try to make it happen if the House passes the public option. And Barack Obama doesn’t seem to care what passes at this point, as long as he can call it “reform.” Call me cynical, but I think this has been one big carefully orchestrated charade in which all of the major players have plausible deniability on the question of who really killed the public option.

The more I watch the Democrats exercise their majorities in Congress with Obama in the White House, the more I’m coming to believe that the Democrats are pathetic on purpose. No powerful organization is this inept and unsure of itself. It’s no secret the Democratic Party is a corporatist party, but nonetheless they are more likely than the GOP to enact laws that are beneficial to the average American. But with the GOP out of power, we can clearly see just how bought-and-paid-for the Democrats really are. A huge majority of registered Democrats want a public option, as does a majority of Americans when Independents and even Republicans are included. And yet the Democratic Party is telling me that they don’t have the votes? Why the fuck not? Especially now with things looking as if the senate is going to pass health care using reconciliation, which will require a simple 51-vote majority in the senate. That means that nine Democrats could defect and vote against the bill, and it could still pass, with Vice President Joe Biden voting for passage to break this hypothetical 50-50 tie.

But this isn’t going to happen because the Democratic leadership is basically saying, “We would really love a public option; it’s just that too many people in the party would oppose it. Only 86% of registered Democrats favor a public option, and the support in Congress just isn’t there.”

The “good news” is that the Democrats are going to implement near-universal care by mandating that people buy private insurance or face fines. With a public option, such a mandate is dubious. Without a public option, such a mandate is downright cruel. If the government wants to provide people with a cheaper alternative to private insurance in order to help working class Americans, I’m all for it. But where the fuck does this administration and this Congress get off telling me I have to purchase insurance? I can’t possibly see how that’s constitutional. While the health insurance mandate has been compared to auto insurance mandates, this is an inappropriate comparison. Drivers must buy auto insurance by virtue of having bought cars. Under the health care bill mandate, people would have to buy health insurance by virtue of simply being alive. Not even the broadest interpretation of the Necessary-and-Proper Clause arrives at a justification for mandating business transactions between private parties under such a circumstance. Of course, we’d like to think that if such a law passes, there would be a benefit in having a constructionist majority on the Supreme Court if the mandate were ever challenged and got that far. But the Roberts Court has shown itself to be so rabidly pro-business, I would not put it past the robed reactionaries to rule in favor of the mandate simply because it helps corporations.

In a recent letter to the Democratic Party, I suggested that I might stay home in 2010 if it didn’t clean up its act. Well, the Democrats aren’t going to clean up their act, so you can count me out of the November midterms. And unless Obama starts to push an actual progressive agenda, you can count me out of the 2012 presidential race too. I won’t legitimize this bullshit we call a political system anymore.

- Max

Hick High School Cancels Prom To Avoid Having To Allow In A Lesbian

Forsooth

A Mississippi high school faces a lawsuit over its decision to cancel its prom rather than allow a lesbian high school student attend with her girlfriend…

...At the center of the lawsuit is a memorandum from the school to students, dated February 5, which states that prom dates must be of the opposite sex.

Also, when McMillen expressed a desire to wear a tuxedo to the prom, the superintendent told her only male students were allowed to wear tuxes, according to court documents.

Superintendent Teresa McNeece also told McMillen that she and her girlfriend could be ejected from the prom if any of the other students complained about their presence there, according to the documents.

The prom was canceled after McMillen and the ACLU tried informally to get the school to change its stance.

CNN

You may have noticed that at select points in some of my writings, I trash the American South. Several people have emailed me to complain about my “Northeast liberal elitism.” But this isn’t about elitism. It’s about the South being as backwards as shit. Whether it’s an attempt to teach creationism in science classes, or willfully telling a journalist that they don’t like Obama because “He’s a fucking nigger,” or treating gays like second class citizens, many Southerners of this fine nation have a serious problem. This isn’t to say that most of them are like this, but there sure are enough ignorant redneck fuckwits to give the whole region a terrible reputation.

Such is the case with Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi, which apparently is run by people so sexually repressed, that in the 21^st century they cannot bear the sight of two gay students attending a prom. As if the poor girl weren’t feeling ostracized enough by her school’s official policy to exclude her and her partner from the prom, the school has sinisterly cancelled the whole thing. Sane people will consider this episode and determine that it is the school officials who are being ridiculous and inconsiderate. But yours truly has spent some time today on the comments threads of the local Southern news media. The anonymous responses are astounding. Many people commenting from locations in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and other red state backwaters have seen fit to blame the lesbian student for the cancellation. There wouldn’t be a problem, one of them says, if only gays wouldn’t try to advance “their perverted lifestyles down all of our throats. Are you really proud of your sickening selves?”

The claim that gays “flaunt it” is a ragged canard. It’s not as if gays go around unwelcomingly hitting on people of the same sex. When homophobics say that gays flaunt themselves, what they’re really complaining about is the fact that more gays are simply out of the closet. The haters liked the good old days when gays were afraid to let it be known who they are. Thankfully, gays are becoming increasingly accepted in American society. And some people just don’t like it.

Why? Who knows? Religion I’m sure plays a large role. Also, people who merely are different have often been the targets of social ridicule, especially in the South. Different religions, different skin colors, different languages, and different sexualities have never played well down there. These are important factors, as is another commonly overlooked motive because of its uncomfortable premise: the theory that homophobia is often (though not always) the product of repressed homosexual desires in the homophobic himself. Think Roy Cohn, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Roy Ashburn, or any other anti-gay religious or political figure who turned out to be a flaming homo.

So whenever I see rabid homophobia on display, I can’t help but ask myself, what’s really going there?

- Max