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If you don't want your pay docked
for being a woman,
then don't be one!
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From the "Whaaaaaaaaaa?" Department:
Kristol says that Palin makes Republicans look "extreme"

By Vyan at Daily Kos

Yeah, uh, ya think?

From ABC's This Week"

    Kristol seemed to agree [with Eric Holder's withering assessment of Palin] during an ABC News panel discussion on Sunday.

    “No responsible Republican official has called for impeachment,” he explained. “And one problem with it is, of course, is you just get Joe Biden as president. The Republican task is to elect a Republican Senate, and to elect a Republican president in 2016, not to create a phony issue that allows Democrats to make Republicans look extreme.”

    Republican strategist Ann Navarro agreed that “nobody of responsibility, nobody in leadership, nobody of relevance has talked about impeachment… So, can we stick to talking about people who can actually make something happen say, and not just folks who want to make headlines say?”
My my my.... so now we're supposed to only be talking about what "Responsible" Republicans have to say, not what those outside leadership, with no relevance, and who only want to make headlines say or think?

Sniff! I think I smell a really mean, snarky, semi-literate facebook post about Kristol in Palin's immediate future.

And just where exactly does all this put John Boehner and his Impeachment-Lite Plan to Sue the President?  Will it appease the pitchforkers, or simply enrage them further as too little and too late?

Somebody heat up the Reddenbacher...

It's almost cute that Kristol and Navarro think they can credibly sell the idea that somewhere, out there, over-the-rainbow... there are "Responsible Republicans" who should be taken seriously and who don't seem to spend every waking moment attempting to grab a shocking headline.

It's almost like Kristol went to sleep in 1987, then sudden woke up in the raging  drug-soaked, animal ritual sacrifice, frat toga goat-sex party that is today's GOP and can't understand who let all these rabid crazy kids into his house and where the adults are hiding? The thing is, the people with the virgin lamb on the altar about to carve him up live for Chtulu Are the Adults in the room. They're the GOP Base.

After all these years of screaming and crying about untrue bullcrap like "Death Panels", the President's "Muslim Faith", his "Kenyan Birth Certificate", his "Hatred for America" and "Anti-Colonial ways", the evils of "Fast and Furious", then "Benghazi", then "IRSghazi" then "BergdahlGhazi" and now "RefugeeGhazi" - is it any surprise that the term "Responsible Republican" is the very definition of an Oxymoron?

Let's take Texas Governor Rick Perry who thinks the most "humane" thing to do for the Central American Child Refugee Crisis is to put Troops on the border so we can send them back to the Murderers, Gangsters, Thugs, and Drug Runners even faster than we are now.

    Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) argued on Sunday that his plan to deploy the National Guard, and to deport thousands of refugee children back to their countries as quickly as possible was “the most humanitarian thing we can do.”

    In an interview with Fox News, Perry said that the best response to an estimated 50,000 women and children who were fleeing violence was a “show of force” on the border.

    “Because that’s the message that gets sent back very quickly to Central America,” he explained. “It’s important to do that because this flood of children is pulling away the border patrol from their normal duties of keeping bad people — keeping the drug cartels. They’re being distracted. So, that is a very obvious that I would suggest to you that those National Guard troops should come play an important role.”

Because nothing screams "Compassion" better than priming the pumps for the Death Squad Mill.  Even though what Perry is suggesting wouldn't speed up the handling of processing and determining the proper disposition of these kids one iota.  The National Guard have been deployed at the border before, and they haven't been used to interdict and "replace" what Border Patrol does, they've been used as extra sets of eyes to help identify and spot people attempting to cross through the rough terrain in remote areas which are far more difficult to reach and remain less patrolled.
Even Brit Hume realizes that the actual role that the National Guard can fulfill on the border, isn't anything like what Perry - or Palin - think it is.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/...

    "They need to be right on the river. They need to be there as a show of force because that’s the message that gets sent back very quickly to Central America," he said.

    Hume challenged Perry, asking what purpose troops could actually serve.

    "They’re not, under the law, allowed to apprehend any of these children that are crossing, are they?" he asked.

    "The issue is with being able to send that message because it’s the visual of it, I think, that is the most important," Perry responded. "If you don’t stop the bleeding. If you don’t staunch this flow of individuals that are coming up here, this is only going to get worse."

    Hume continued to press Perry.

    "But the question I’m trying to get at with you is this: if these children, who have undergone these harrowing journeys to escape from the most desperate conditions in their home countries, have gotten this far, are they really going to be deterred by the presence of troops along the border who won’t shoot them and can’t arrest them?" he asked.

    "I think we’re talking about two different things here," Perry responded.

No, you're really not.  Hume is Dead-Right to point out that Guard troops are NOT Cops, nor are they Border Patrol.  They can't just walk in there and do what Border Patrol Officers do.
Perry is at least trying to address the issue that got Palin all "Impeachmentified" although he's going about it in exactly the wrong way, we still have to recall this is a long way from the first time a Republican has called to have the President Impeached for things he either didn't do or has no control of, they've been saying this Derp for years now...

http://swampland.time.com/...

    August 8, 2013.  From sea to shining sea, the howls of presidential impeachment have returned to the nation this month in grand fashion. “It would be a dream come true,” said Michigan Representative Kerry Bentivolio. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has declared Obama “perilously close” to meeting the constitutional standards required for an impeachment trial. Texas Representative Blake Farenthold has said the House GOP probably has the votes to do it.

So it's not like Palin is the first to bring it up.  Republican Talk Show Hosts have written books on it: Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama From Office.

But then how valid their arguments for this case, is yet another question entirely.

    A copy of the book released to TIME shows that the arguments for impeaching Obama appear to fall far short of the historical legal threshold. The book claims that one of Obama’s impeachable offenses is signing Obamacare, for example, because the law is “unconstitutional.” This might surprise members of the Supreme Court who affirmed the law’s constitutionality with a 5-to-4 ruling last year.

And who else, including the above,  have brought up the I-Word?  Well...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

    Sens. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Reps. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.), Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.), Michael Burgess (R-Tex.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), former congressmen Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) and  Allen West (R-Fla.), and the South Dakota Republican Party. Not all of these folks called for Obama's impeachment directly, but all of them suggested that it is or should be on the table.

The thing here is that to some extent Kristol is right.  None of these people are in GOP "Leadership" so what they say can be somewhat ignored.  However, Leadership isn't always defined by whether someone has granted you a title, but whether you command a following and an audience - which Palin does.

    What none of these folks have, though, is a national following. That's where Palin comes in. She's the first Republican of any significant national stature to make this call. And she's the kind of figure who could potentially recruit others to the cause — people who will want to be heard. Palin surely doesn't carry the kind of weight she once did in the GOP, but she still has a significant tea party following and is highly popular among the conservative base..

Palin is within her very deepest heart, a panderer.  And here, yet again, she is pandering to the GOP Base and Tea Party.  Giving them what they want.  And what they want, since they haven't been able to defeat Obama at the ballot box in 2012, is his head on a pike.

They want blood.

Just like the head of "Moms with Guns" who called for President Obama's Assassination this week
And as the Bloodhounds howl louder, the question is just what will the GOP "Leadership" do about it? Will their doomed attempt to "Sue" the President appease them?

    If a significant pro-impeachment portion of the conservative base does materialize — and that's a big "if" — it will put Republican lawmakers in the unenviable position of responding to questions about whether they, too, agree with the idea of impeachment.

Yes, Senator - how do you feel about "Impeachment"?  And let the squirming begin.  In fact, that questioning has already begun as we see with the current head of the House Judiciary Committee - the committee where Impeachments Begin.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/...

    Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, on Sunday said the House doesn't have grounds to impeach President Obama.

    "We are not working on or drawing up articles of impeachment. The Constitution is very clear as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment of the president of the United States. He has not committed the kind of criminal acts that call for that," Goodlatte said on ABC's "This Week."

But...

    But he still threw his support behind House Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) bill to allow the House to sue Obama for using executive authority to delay the health care law's employer mandate.

    "We do believe that the President is not enforcing the law. And there's a wide array of issues, not just immigration, where we believe that," Goodlatte said. "And that's why the speaker, and many of us in the Congress, are getting ready to take legal action to stand up for the people's right, for their elected representatives to be the part of our government that passes laws, not a president with his pen and his cell phone."

Yeah, good luck with that diversion, pal.

This should be a good show to see just how much their willing to give their base red meat it will never be able to swallow, especially while the Democrats simultaneous pushing forward their legistation to overturn of the Hobby Lobby decision and getting their base out to the polls this November 2014.

The giant rift between establishment Republicans and the Tea Party is one that already took down Eric Cantor - just how much more damage could it do?

Yes, it should be interesting indeed.

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Hey, Republicans!

If CHILDREN are such a precious

GIFT FROM GOD,
then why aren't you all

scooping up all those poor
Central American kids

crossing over from Mexico?

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Daily Kos: Zombie Lies
Bill Maher calls out all the debunked GOP lies on Obamacare

See the video here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/12/1313451/-Bill-Maher-calls-out-all-the-debunked-GOP-lies-on-Obamacare?detail=email
Transcript below:

And finally, New Rule: Now that there's been an uproar over all the neocons who lied about the Iraq War with no consequences, someone must tell me why there isn't a similar uproar over all the Republicans who lied about Obamacare with no consequences.  (audience applause)  It's been four years since the bill passed.  Has anybody come across even one death panel?  The next liberal to tell a Republican, "you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts", should really just admit they've never seen Fox News.  (audience cheering and applause)

Now, look, I get it that neither party has a monopoly on lying, and in fact they all do it so often, they've invented their own word for it — "I misspoke".  But how come the rule for one party — the Republican Party — is that when they get caught in a lie, they don't have to stop telling it?

They said Obamacare would use death panels.  It doesn't.

They said it was a government takeover, and the insurance industry is making record profits.

They said it covered illegals.  It doesn't.

They said it was a job killer.  It hasn't been.

They said there were elves who bake cookies in trees.  Well, almost.  (audience laughter and applause)

Now for sure, Obama also told a lie when he said everybody who likes their health care plan can keep it.  And for about 2% of the population, that did turn out to be false.  The difference is, he stopped saying it!  He stepped up and said, you're right, my bad, because he understands there's this thing called observable reality.  (audience applause)

But on the Republican side, observable reality needs more study.  (audience laughter) Which is why their talking points that have been disproven, remain!  Like a guest who's been asked to leave a party, but does not.

It reminds me of a horror movie where you think you've killed the lie, but it won't stay dead.  Which is why I call them zombie lies.  (thunder crackles and camera shakes)

Ooh, what an effect!  (audience laughter)  Excuse me, I have a weak heart.

Yes, zombie lies.  Remember "fracking doesn't cause earthquakes"?  Zombie lie!  So stop saying it!
Voter fraud?  We studied it, it's not an actual problem.  Stop zombie lying about it.

Their entire economic philosophy — cut taxes for the rich, and it trickles down — is a zombie lie!  (audience cheering and applause)

And all these zombie lies are still out there, roaming the countryside, neither alive nor dead.  Like Dick Cheney.  (audience laughter and applause)

Hungry for brains.  Like Dick Cheney.  (audience laughter)

I mean, we think we've eradicated one, but it turns out it's just lying dormant in a cave full of bat blood, like the ebola virus.  Or Dick Cheney.  (audience laughter)

Dick Cheney, who did not even bother in his recent return from the dead to update the lies he told about Iraq the first time.  He's still out there saying, "Well, Saddam was building a bomb, and he was working with al-Qaeda."

What??  It's like when Chuck Berry sings "Sweet Little Sixteen".  You're 90, man!

There is no shame in their game.  One week they're out there saying, "No one will sign up for Obamacare."

And the next week, "Oh, OK, they signed up?  Sure, OK, but they aren't paying the premiums."

"Oh they are?  OK, uh, well, they're paying, but it's not the young people."

"Oh, it is?  It's the young people?  OK.  Uh, OK, but it only covers you if you're gay."  (audience laughter)

You know, you just wanna go, wait, when did we switch over?  What happened to yesterday's lie? 

It's still out there forever, like a plastic bag in a tree.  But now we're just using the new one?

Yes, because what they do is they pass a zombie lie down to dumber and dumber people, who believe it more and more.

Hank Paulson may be over the one about climate change being a hoax, but it's still good enough for Sean Hannity.  Who then gets quoted by Michele Bachmann.  Who forms the intellectual core of the thinking of Victoria Jackson.  And when you think the zombie lie has finally gone to die at the idea hospice of the absolutely stupidest people on Earth, there it is being retweeted by Donald Trump.

With Tea Party Controlling the House and Zealots in the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby Is Only the Beginning for Religious Theocrats

Salon / By Paul Rosenberg
July 9, 2014

We're approaching a very scary time.

The United States is still a democratic republic, formally, but what that actually means in practice is increasingly in doubt — and the Hobby Lobby ruling, deeply disingenuous and sharply at odds with centuries of Anglo-American law, exemplifies how that formal reality is increasingly mocked in practice. It is a practice best described as neo-feudalism, taking power away from ordinary citizens, in all their pluralistic, idiosyncratic diversity, and handing it over to corporations and religious dictators in both the public and the private realm. The Supreme Court’s actions are not taking place in a vacuum — though they arefilling one: As Tea Party Republicans in the House increasingly bring democratic self-government to a halt, contracting the power of we the people to act as a cohesive self-governing whole, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority shifts ever more everyday power into the hands of private dictatorships.

Hobby Lobby handed for-profit corporations religious rights for the first time in history — a radical break with all previous precedent, and yet a part of a recent pattern, as Norm Ornstein rightly pointed out:

    [F]or the majority on the Roberts Court, through a series of rulings that favor corporations over labor or other interests, it is clear that corporations are king, superior to individual Americans—with all the special treatment in taxes and protection from legal liability that are unavailable to us individuals, and now all the extra benefits that come with individual citizenship. Call it the new Crony Capitalism.

The expansion of corporate power in Hobby Lobby has gotten too little attention, and I’ll return to discuss this further below. But the advancement of theocracy — religious dictatorship — is even less clearly seen through the fog of right-wing propaganda about “religious liberty.”

First, however, an important highlight of a neglected aspect of the Hobby Lobby case, the fact that Hobby Lobby’s self-professed belief appeared out of nowhere just in time for them to file suit, as Stephanie Mencimer noted in March:

    The company admits in its complaint that until it considered filing the suit in 2012, its generous health insurance plan actually covered Plan B and Ella (though not IUDs). The burden of this coverage was apparently so insignificant that God, and Hobby Lobby executives, never noticed it until the mandate became a political issue.

In short, Hobby Lobby’s “deeply held beliefs” claims are transparently bogus — as well as being scientifically invalid, since none of the methods involved are abortifacients, as Hobby Lobby claims. These would not matter if they only guided individual private conduct; that’s precisely what religious freedom actually means. You’re free to be a religious hypocrite, because letting someone else judge your sincerity can lead too easily to real religious tyranny. But when you’re already in a position to tyrannize others — as Hobby Lobby is — that’s a whole different ballgame. The tyrant’s freedom is everyone else’s slavery.

Historically, theocracy meant top-down religiously sanctioned dictatorship, exemplified in Western history by the divine right of kings philosophy. No one reads John Locke’s “First Treatise on Civil Government” anymore, because it is a refutation of the divine right of kings — one might as well read a refutation of four element theory in physics class. Locke’s “Second Treatise” provided a sharply contrasted legitimate foundation for civil government — the social contract and the consent of the governed. This is the air we breathe, and have been breathing ever since America was born.
And yet, theocracy and democracy are not two utterly distinct phenomena. Theocracy can well hold sway inside the family, for example, while the larger society retains its democratic form. More to the point, one stream of extreme Christian theocratic thinking — the dominion theology of the New Apostolic Reformation — has no problem (initially, at least) assimilating its goals of a theocratic government with the existing two-party electoral system. As researcher Rachel Tabachnick explains:

    Instead of escaping the earth (in the Rapture)* prior to the turmoil of the end times, they [the NAR] teach that believers will defeat evil by taking dominion, or control, over all sectors of society and government, resulting in mass conversions to their brand of Charismatic evangelicalism and a Christian utopia or “Kingdom” on earth.

In early 2010, a leading NAR figure, Edgardo Silvoso, founder of International Transformation Network, which played a major role in promoting and passing Uganda’s anti-gay legislation, confidently said, “It doesn’t matter if the Republican or the Democratic candidate wins the governorship [of Hawaii]. Either one is already in the kingdom.” It didn’t turn out that way, because Neil Abercrombie, Hawaii’s popular long-term U.S. representative, defeated both the NAR-supported candidates — one in the Democratic primary, the other in the general election. Still, Silvoso’s vision might have come true, there could have been a contested two-party election in which both candidates were Christian dominionists — and most in the media (and thereby the public) wouldn’t even have known what was going on.

Sarah Palin was the NAR’s first full-throated state governor (revealing videos here), but Rick Perry has strong NAR connections as well — the religious kickoff to his 2012 presidential campaign was entirely an NAR-run event. But the point here is a broader one: The dividing line between theocracy and a democratic republic is not nearly as sharp as most might suppose, in fact, there may not actually be such a line, only a zone of blurriness for everything involved.

While the NAR represents an international evangelical grass-roots force of remarkable power for how little press attention it has gained, the theocratic push from above in America — duplicity framed in terms of “religious liberty” — comes from a Catholic/Protestant alliance forged in antiabortion political battles of the past 30-plus years, which is also undercovered and poorly understood in the mainstream corporate media, despite being grounded in a phalanx of powerful organizations, from the high-profile Family Research Council and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, through more specialized think tanks and legal advocacy organizations, such as the Becket Fund and the Alliance Defending Freedom. A useful reference is ”Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights” by Jay Michaelson, published by Political Research Associates in March 2013. In it, he writes:

    While the religious liberty debate is a growing front in the ongoing culture wars, it is actually an old argument repurposed for a new context. In the postwar era, the Christian Right defended racial segregation, school prayer, public religious displays, and other religious practices that infringed on the liberties of others by claiming that restrictions on such public acts infringed upon their religious liberty. Then as now, the Christian Right turned antidiscrimination arguments on their heads: instead of African Americans being discriminated against by segregated Christian universities, the universities were being discriminated against by not being allowed to exclude them; instead of public prayers oppressing religious minorities, Christians are being oppressed by not being able to offer them.

    In the “religious liberty” framework, the Christian Right attacks access to contraception, access to abortion, same-sex marriage, and antidiscrimination laws—not on moral grounds (e.g., that contraception is morally wrong or that LGBTQ rights violate “family values”) but because they allegedly impinge upon the religious freedoms of others (e.g., by forcing employers to violate their religion by providing contraception coverage)….

    In fact, there is not a single “religious liberty” claim that does not involve abridging someone else’s rights.

As I’ve already indicated, Hobby Lobby’s “deeply held beliefs” claims are transparently bogus, but this need not always be the case. What is the case is that the inversion Michaelson describes — that of turning anti-discrimination arguments on their heads — both derives from and contributes to states of confusion in which all manner of bogus claims may flourish. As I noted above, there are legitimate reasons why the content of religious beliefs should not be scrutinized when considering questions of free exercise. But when religion is being imposed upon others, the presumptions ought to be reversed; we ought to be extremely reluctant to allow anyone to impose their religious beliefs on anyone else, no matter how light or innocent that imposition might be claimed to be. The views themselves as well as the manner they are imposed on others ought to be scrutinized as rigorously as possible. Don’t want your religious beliefs questioned? Then don’t impose them on others. When push comes to shove, real religious freedom can be just as simple as that.

And the phony “religious freedom” crowd knows it, which helps explain why outright lies repeatedly slip into their arguments, as Michaelson’s report makes clear. For example, anti-gay “religious freedom” advocates routinely repeat the lie that legalizing same-sex marriage means forcing churches to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies against their will — a flat-out lie.

Legalized civil divorce did not force the Catholic Church to marry divorced individuals, and legalized same-sex marriage would not force them to marry gay individuals, either. Institutional religious practice is almost entirely insulated from civil law. What does change are the rules applying to society at large. Michaelson explains:

    Typically, there are five tiers of actors:

    1. Churches, clergy, and religious institutions
    2. Religious organizations
    3. Religiously affiliated organizations
    4. Religiously owned businesses
    5. Religious individuals

    The law treats these tiers differently: churches are rarely required to obey antidiscrimination laws, for example, but religious organizations may be, and religious-owned businesses are. Conservative “religious liberty” rhetoric deliberately misstates harms upward, and tactically expands exemptions downward. On the one side, no clergy will ever have to solemnize any marriage against her/his beliefs, yet restrictions on tier 4 or 5 individuals are cynically extended by conservative messaging to tier 1.

Michaelson then addresses the context of the Hobby Lobby case:

    On the other side, conservative “religious liberty” advocates are clearly pursuing a staged plan to migrate extensions downward. In the current HHS benefit battle, for example, the Obama administration first exempted tiers 1 and 2, and then, in February 2013, exempted tier 3. Yet still the Becket Fund has objected that “millions of Americans”—i.e., tiers 4 and 5—are still unprotected.
And this is precisely the logic that the Hobby Lobby decision pursued. The Obama administration’s exemptions of Tiers 1 and 2 were not seen as signs of respect for religious liberty, in line with traditional practice, nor was its further exemption of Tier 3 seen as going the extra mile in a spirit of conciliation. Instead, the accommodation made for Tier 3 was used by Justice Alito to argue for similar treatment for Tier 4. The end result is that women in more than half the nation’s workforce can now be deprived by their employers of their most basic reproductive rights, involving birth control, not abortion.

But that’s just one side of the story. There’s also the economic, corporate power side, where things are a bit more complicated. I quoted above from Norm Ornstein, making the point that Hobby Lobby was part of a broader pattern of shifting power into corporate hands. But it’s striking that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did not weigh in on the Hobby Lobby Case — it produced no amicus brief. In fact, as noted by David H. Gans of the Constitutional Accountability Center, “the only noteworthy corporate voices to weigh in — the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce — actually came down against them [Hobby Lobby and its supporters].” Gans also notes another brief from dozens of corporate and criminal law professors, “who argued that Hobby Lobby’s argument would eviscerate the fabric of corporate law, undercutting the corporate veil that protects owners and shareholders from liability for the actions of the corporation.” The brief itself begins laying out its argument thus:

    Hobby Lobby and Conestoga each asserts that the religious values of its present controlling shareholders should pass through to the corporation itself. This Court should reject any such “values pass-through” concept. To do otherwise would run contrary to established principles of corporate law.

    The essence of a corporation is its “separateness” from its shareholders. It is a distinct legal entity, with its own rights and obligations, different from the rights and obligations of its shareholders. This Court has repeatedly recognized this separateness.

This is yet another indication of how radically the Hobby Lobby decision departs from the existing fabric of Anglo-American law. And yet, there are clearly some in the corporate world who welcome this development, and it’s surely no accident that the same five justices produced both Hobby Lobby and Citizens United. So what’s going on here?

The best answer I know of comes from political scientist Corey Robin, and it involves looking much deeper than the framework of corporate law. The day the decision came down, Robin published “A Reader’s Guide to Hobby Lobby,” listing what he called “a few posts I’ve written over the years that should help put the Supreme Court’s decision in theoretical and historical perspective.” They’re all well worth reading, but I want to focus on just one of them, the first of two that Robin described thus:

    2. Second, two posts on free-market types and birth control, how even the most libertarian-ish free-wheeler seeks to control women’s bodies: Love For Sale: Birth Control from Marx to Mises and Probing Tyler Cowen: When Libertarians Get Medieval on Your Vagina.

In “Love for Sale,” Robin discusses Ludwig von Mises‘ classic 1922 text ”Socialism,” and some contemporary discussions concerning it, particularly its fourth chapter, “The Social Order and the Family.” Here is where Robin gets to the heart of the matter:

    The real reason Mises’s arguments about women are so relevant, it seems to me, is that in the course of making them he reveals something larger about the libertarian worldview: libertarianism is not about liberty at all, or at least not about liberty for everyone. In fact, it’s the opposite.

    Here’s Mises describing the socialist program of “free love”:
        Free love is the socialists’ radical solution for sexual problems. The socialistic society abolishes the economic dependence of woman which results from the fact that woman is dependent on the income of her husband. Man and woman have the same economic rights and the same duties, as far as motherhood does not demand special consideration for the women. Public funds provide for the maintenance and education of the children, which are no longer the affairs of the parents but of society. Thus the relations between the sexes are no longer influenced by social and economic conditions….The family disappears and society is confronted with separate individuals only. Choice in love becomes completely free.

Sounds like a libertarian paradise, right? Society is dissolved into atomistic individuals, obstacles to our free choices are removed, everyone has the same rights and duties. But Mises is not celebrating this ideal; he’s criticizing it. Not because it makes people unfree but because it makes people — specifically, women — free. The problem with liberating women from the constraints of “social and economic conditions” is that … women are liberated from the constraints of social and economic conditions.

If you want to know why libertarians reflexively embrace the National Rifle Association’s vision of freedom, but not Planned Parenthood’s (contrasting visions I discussed here), you need look no further. This passage also helps explain why there’s at least a germ of historical sense in the otherwise ridiculous Tea Party accusation that Obama is a “socialist”! By using government to empower women to make their own reproductive choices — not just in theory, but for real — Obamacare’s reproductive healthcare mandate really is acting in the socialist spirit as Mises described it, however market-based the mechanisms involved may be.

But it’s worth lingering a bit further with the socialist vision as Mises describes it, because it is so intimately bound up in what a functioning democratic republic actually does, or at least has the potential to do, when, for example, we take the Constitution’s general welfare clause seriously. What the socialists want, Mises argues, is to eliminate all manner of “natural inequalities”. This would, ironically, make everyone—not just privileged, straight, white males of means — into classic libertarian subjects, exercising their own, individual, unconstrained and uncoerced free choice. And this is the very last thing that libertarians actually want.

This helps explain why, for example, today’s Tea Party Republicans reject unemployment insurance as “socialist” — if someone out of work has any freedom at all to hold out for a job that will cover their mortgage, say, that’s socialism as Mises would describe it. And he has a point: socialism really is just another word for collectively removing the hidden and semi-hidden forms of coercion that otherwise shape and control our everyday lives. That’s why public education is socialist, too — and why Democratic politicians as well as Republicans are so eager to destroy it nowadays. But none of these other examples is quite as visceral or far-reaching as that of giving women reproductive autonomy equal to that of men.

This, then, is the bottom line: Conservatives (including libertarians) stand for the preservation and reinforcement (if necessary) of purportedly “natural” inequalities, which automatically structure all of society into overlapping forms of dominance and submission, in which the vast majority of people are inherently unfree “by nature.” Anycollective action taken to free people from such dependent, powerless living conditions is anathema to them. Democracy itself is anathema to them. And Hobby Lobby is just the latest signal that they are firmly in charge.

Do they contradict themselves? Of course! So what? Do facts or logic matter anymore? Don’t be ridiculous! Dictatorship means never having to say you’re sorry — much less even a teensy bit wrong. The damages done to the structure and logic of corporate law? Irrelevant!

At the beginning, I wrote, “The United States is still a democratic republic, formally, but what that actually means in practice is increasingly in doubt.” This doubt can simply be summarized in the fact that any action to promote the general welfare will be automatically blocked and denounced as “socialism” by Tea Party Republicans in the House, while at the same time, the 5-4 conservative majority in the Supreme Court rewrites decades or centuries of precedent to further empower the most powerful elements in our society, to the ever-deepening detriment of the whole.

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.

Paul H. Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Lengths News, a biweekly serving the Los Angeles harbor area. He runs the site Merge Left, a community of progressive thinkers free to submit their own content.

SCOTUS's Summer Vacation Plans

Click to enlarge.

Lest we forget ...

Snopes remains a great resource for debunking not only urban legends but also right-wing BS about Obama:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/obama.asp#wakeup

From Daily Kos: God, guns, and...uh...derp

Yessir, this the Plan Nine from Oregon Right Wing Victimology Emporium!  Come on down, WE'RE C-R-A-Z-Y.  This week, it's the previously little-known Holly R. Fisher who's been Standing Up For Freedom® by tweeting about the wonders of Hobby Lobby, Chick-fil-A, etc., and apparently has come to be known, at least among the socialistic twitterariat as Holly Hobby Lobby.

And since in addition to blessing us with the wonders of cheap Chinese-made goods and greasy chicken ready to go, the God of Abraham also invented firearms (including the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, well, go ahead and combine all that and tweet out to the world and the gun-grabbing God-less liberal riff raff that you mean business!  Or at least you are trolling them good by combining the three things every liberal hates: The Bible, the (military-style) Rifle, and the American Flag, and the observance of which will turn them into dust like vampires in the sun.

But then one of those America-hating low-information voters did a bad bad thing, and ... takes you seriously, creating this:

© Probably some impious Obama worshipper whom the Lord shall eventually smite.(source)

Blast from the past...

Q: If al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq before we got there, then who were we fighting for those eight years?

A: al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, which created a huge power vacuum that al Qaeda came in and took advantage of.

Hope this clears things up!

George Takei: What if Hobby Lobby imposed Sharia law on its female workers?

Link: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/02/george-takei-what-if-hobby-lobby-was-run-by-muslims-imposing-sharia-law-on-workers/

By David Ferguson
Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Former Star Trek actor George Takei blasted Monday’s decision by the Supreme Court allowing the craft store Hobby Lobby to opt out of the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act.

In a post on the website for his new play, Allegiance, the openly gay Takei called Monday’s decision “a stunning setback for women’s reproductive rights.”

“The ruling elevates the rights of a FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION over those of its women employees and opens the door to all manner of claims that a company can refuse services based on its owner’s religion,” Takei wrote.

He referred to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s blistering 35-page dissent to the decision, saying, “Think about the ramifications: As Justice Ginsberg’s stinging dissent pointed out, companies run by Scientologists could refuse to cover antidepressants, and those run by Jews or Hindus could refuse to cover medications derived from pigs (such as many anesthetics, intravenous fluids, or medications coated in gelatin).”

“(O)ne wonders,” he said, “whether the case would have come out differently if a Muslim-run chain business attempted to impose Sharia law on its employees.”

“Hobby Lobby is not a church. It’s a business — and a big one at that,” he continued. “Businesses must and should be required to comply with neutrally crafted laws of general applicability. Your boss should not have a say over your healthcare. Once the law starts permitting exceptions based on ‘sincerely held religious beliefs’ there’s no end to the mischief and discrimination that will ensue. Indeed, this is the same logic that certain restaurants and hotels have been trying to deploy to allow proprietors to refuse service to gay couples.”

Takei pointed out what many have noted, that Hobby Lobby has invested in multiple companies that manufacture abortion drugs and birth control. The company receives most of its merchandise from China, a country where overpopulation has led to mandatory abortions and sterilizations for women who try to have more than one child.

“While we work to overturn this decision by legislation, people of good conscience should BOYCOTT any for-profit business, including Hobby Lobby, which chooses to impose its religious beliefs on its employees,” said Takei. “The only way such companies ever learn to treat people with decency and tolerance is to hit them where it counts — in their pocketbooks.”

[image of George Takei via Facebook.com]

David Ferguson

David Ferguson is an editor at Raw Story. He was previously writer and radio producer in Athens, Georgia, hosting two shows for Georgia Public Broadcasting and blogging at Firedoglake.com and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book.