Shutdown Power Play: Stoking Racism, Fear Of Culture Change To Push Anti-Government Agenda

GOP platforms usually hold strong appeal for serial
killers, bombers,  wife beaters and other terrible,
mentally ill people unable to live normal,  lives.

with Larry Cohen

At first it seemed mystifying that reasonable voices didn’t prevail to prevent a government shutdown. The scorched-earth effort by the Tea Party caucus and compliant Congressional leaders to undo President Obama’s signature accomplishment didn’t seem smart in terms of outcome or politics. The anti-government zealots who picked this fight may well have miscalculated; at the moment their strategy looks like a failure.

But these folks are playing for the long term, building their brand and inflaming their base even as they infuriate the nation. They’ve also cynically played on—and reinforced—the racial fears of their followers and intensified the polarization of the nation. Senator Tom Harkin described the shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis as “one of the most dangerous points in our history…every bit as dangerous as the break-up of the Union before the Civil War.”

At first glance, Harkin’s quote seemed extreme but an analysis by Democracy Corps, a research group led by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and political consultant James Carville, makes his thinking understandable. READ MORE

Want to Find an Expert on "The War on Women?" Media Chooses Men

(The 4th Estate)

Are you a lady with lady opinions on issues that affect ladies?

Then shut your stupid ladyhole, stupid lady, because no one cares what you think about that lady stuff. At least, that's what the traditional media thinks, according to an analysis by The 4th Estate and shown in the infographic above.

The numbers are stark, but not exactly surprising. When it comes to coverage of issues that directly affect women, the beacons of traditional journalism—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Sunday talk shows—clearly subscribe to the Darrell Issa school of thought: that the people best qualified to talk about women are, in fact, men.

Rep. Issa, you may recall, held a congressional hearing in February about the president's new policy mandating that health insurance providers cover birth control without copays. This, as we know, made Issa and his fellow Republican men in Congress, as well as his friends at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (aka, the Catholic wing of the Republican Party), have a very sad sadness of sad. So sad that they needed to have an all-male hearing to share their sad feelings and console one another about how women's access to affordable birth control will simultaneously destroy the republic and bring forth armageddon. And, most importantly, make them very sad.  READ MORE

Right's Stupidity Spreads, Enabled by Too-Polite Left

A billboard put up by a 'birther' campaigner convinced
that President Obama was not born in the United States.
(photo: Bob Daemmrich/Alamy)

By George Monbiot, Guardian UK

08 February 12

elf-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today's progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly "different" others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the "critical pathway" from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to "rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order" and "emphasise the maintenance of the status quo". Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence, this feels hard to write.   READ MORE