Category: Republicans behaving badly

Obama to announce Supreme Court nominee this morning

March 16, 2016 • 8:30 am

Get your popcorn: this morning President Obama is going to nominate a Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia. There are, as announced by both the New York times and CBS News, three nominees on the short list.

Among the finalists are the federal appellate judges Sri Srinivasan, Merrick B. Garland and Paul Watford.

My money is on Garland, who’s seen as the candidate least likely to be opposed by Republicans, as he’s a moderate. Srinivasan seems more liberal, was born in India, and would be the first Hindu Justice. Watford, like Garland, is a moderate who’s received support in the past by both parties.

It’s canny of Obama to nominate all three, since none fall on the overtly liberal side of the spectrum, making it hard for the Republicans to find a reason to oppose them. Nevertheless, Senate Republic leader Mitch McConnell is still vowing to oppose any nomination until after the election. Such is the obstructionist nature of a party in the process of shredding its credibility. Trump’s nomination (which now seems likely) would be its swan song.

A New York Times graphic shows that, since 1900, six of eight Supreme Court nominees proposed by an incumbent President during an election year were confirmed (a couple of these were to fill vacancies the year before election year, but so what? In all cases the vacancies would be filled by a President whose term was ending.

A former law clerk: Antonin Scalia “generally detested science”

March 3, 2016 • 2:15 pm

Even before the inevitable encomiums about Antonin Scalia poured in after his death, it was already bruited about that he was a fiercely smart man—even if misguided in his originalism and conservatism. But how smart can a man be if he disses science? Can he be both smart and ignorant?

For surely Scalia wasn’t “ignorant” in the sense of not knowing that science was out there, and that there was a consensus about stuff like, say, evolution.

Remember, if you will, that Scalia, along with William Rehnquist, were the only dissenters in the famous case of Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), in which the Court overturned a lower-court ruling that a Louisiana law—the “Balanced Treatment Act” mandating the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in public schools—was legal. That was the case in which the three-pronged Lemon Test convinced the other seven judges that such a law did not have a secular purpose and that it advanced a particular religion and fostered excessive government entanglement with religion. You can read Scalia and Rehnquist’s dissent here. You’ll see that they denied that the Act had a religious purpose, but maintained that it fostered academic freedom construed as “students’ freedom from indoctrination.”  Scalia and Rehnquist lost, but science won.

One of Scalia’s clerks was Bruce Hay, now a professor at Harvard Law School, though he looks about 18 years old. In a February 27 posting on Salon, Hay has severely indicted his former mentor in a piece called “I thought I could reason with Antonin Scalia: a more naive young fool never drew breath.” Hay minces no words:

Antonin Scalia generally detested science. It threatened everything he believed in. He refused to join a recent Supreme Court opinion about DNA testing because it presented the details of textbook molecular biology as fact. He could not join because he did not know such things to be true, he said. (On the other hand, he knew all about the eighteenth century. History books were trustworthy; science books were not.) Scientists should be listened to only if they supported conservative causes, for example dubious studies purporting to demonstrate that same-sex parenting is harmful to children. Scientists were also good if they helped create technologies he liked, such as oil drills and deadly weapons.

His own weapon was the poison-barbed word, and the battleground was what he once labeled the Kulturkampf, the culture war. The enemy took many forms. Women’s rights. Racial justice. Economic equality. Environmental protection. The “homosexual agenda,” as he called it. Intellectuals and universities. The questioning of authority and privilege. Ambiguity. Foreignness. Social change. Climate research. The modern world, in all its beauty and complexity and fragility.

. . . When I applied for a clerkship at the Court, my hero Justice Brennan quickly filled all his positions, so Scalia became my first choice. He offered me a job and I thought I’d won the lottery. I knew we differed politically, but he prized reason and I would help him be reasonable. A more naive young fool never drew breath.

. . . What I took for the pursuit of reason in those chambers was in fact the manufacture of verbal munitions, to be deployed against civilian populations. From the comfort of our leather chairs, we never saw the victims.

In other words, Scalia was a master of confirmation bias.

At this point in his piece, Hay digresses severely, discussing a brilliant transgender woman, Mischa Haider, who left physics after getting her doctorate at Harvard because she was hounded, shamed, and humiliated by others for her change of gender. Such discrimination is detestable, and of course stems largely from ignorance and lack of empathy. But Hay decides to pin it on Scalia and his dislike of science:

[Haider] could not live with herself, she tells me, if she did not devote her talents to helping the many trans women whose lives are decimated by the bigotry and ignorance of those around them. Bigotry and ignorance inflamed by demagogues like Antonin Scalia, whose toxic rhetoric has done so much to incite and legitimate fear of gender nonconformity and elevate it to the level of constitutional principle. She is resolved to become a trans rights activist.

So that is Antonin Scalia’s contribution to physics.

I certainly agree that Scalia did nothing to foster gender equality or transgender acceptance (but did any cases of the latter ever come before him as Justice?). Still, that is an issue separate from his retrograde views of science. Hay’s article thus is two disparate articles: one on Scalia’s anti-science views, and the other on the opprobrium received by transgender people. The connection between the issues is tenuous: only neurons in the brain of a man whom Hay calls “erudite and frighteningly smart”. But how smart could Scalia really have been to be so strongly anti-science—to the point of denying that the Balanced Treatment Act had anything to do with religion? He may have been smart, but he was blinkered by his Catholicism.

As for Scalia’s lack of empathy for the oppressed, that too goes with being so conservative. Nevertheless, Scalia’s views on both science and gender tell us why Obama needs to replace him immediately with a more enlightened Justice.

h/t: Stephen S.

Welcome to Republican America

February 17, 2016 • 4:00 pm

This is an unbelievable tw**t from a Presidential candidate, but it’s real:

. . . and a response from a saner land:

I can’t think of a worse symbol for America. What happened to a damn eagle? Or even a hot dog?

h/t: Chris B.

Sarah Palin’s ungrammatical grammar

February 4, 2016 • 2:30 pm

If you want to see a tongue-in-cheek but also serious analysis of Sarah Palin’s public speeches mind dumps, have a look at Tuesday’s New York Times article “Sarah Palin’s English” by Anna North.  We’ve all heard Palin babble on many times, but when her words are put into print, they look even dumber. But North, a staff editor for Op-Talk, takes the grammar seriously, explaining what Palin is trying to do, although in the last line of the piece (not reproduced here) she gives away the game.

A few excerpts:

Mrs. Palin is also a big fan of the participial phrase. “And that blank check too,” she said on Monday, “making no sense because it’s led us to things, oh gosh, to pay the bills then, we have had to uh, print money out of thin air.”

In this case “making no sense” and everything that follows appear to modify “blank check”; though it can be a little hard to tell with Mrs. Palin, the participial phrase seems to function as an adjective. Elsewhere in her speech Mrs. Palin got more sophisticated.

“Politics being kind of brutal business,” she said, “you find out who your friends are, that’s for sure.”

Here, “politics being kind of brutal business” defines the circumstances under which the action occurs. It looks like a construction that will be familiar to anybody who took Latin in school: the ablative absolute.

An ablative absolute in Latin is a particular kind of clause that, according to one definition, “modifies the whole sentence as an adverb modifies the action of a verb.” An example, courtesy of The Latin Library: “His verbis dictis, Caesar discedit.” Translation: “With these words having been said, Caesar departs.”

In fact, a lot of what Sarah Palin says sounds like it’s been poorly translated from the Latin. With her “he who” and “one who,” she’d sound almost Ciceronian if it weren’t for the holes in her logic and the way those complicated sentences sometimes dribble off into vaguely sinister, possibly offensive nonsense.

One more bit:

. . . Here’s Mrs. Palin using both a dependent clause and a participial phrase to attack President Obama on Jan. 19:

And he, who would negotiate deals, kind of with the skills of a community organizer maybe organizing a neighborhood tea, well, he deciding that, “No, America would apologize as part of the deal,” as the enemy sends a message to the rest of the world that they capture and we kowtow, and we apologize, and then, we bend over and say, “Thank you, enemy.”

I honestly am not sure what’s going on in this sentence.

You’ll have to go to the piece to see North’s peroration.

Another secular sermon on Salon!

January 30, 2016 • 12:00 pm

I’ve become aware of someone else besides Jeff Tayler who’s criticizing religion on Salon—a stand decidedly against the editorial current of that site. And the other anti-theist is Phil Torres, an author and ethicist described at Salon as:

. . . an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and founder of the X-Risks Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming book The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse.

(His Wikipedia biography is here, and notes that he’s a musician as well.) Note that Torres’s book comes out February 16, and has an introduction by Uncle Russell Blackford (Eric MacDonald has long since lost his avuncular status, and is reduced to osculating the rump of Edward Feser on the latter’s website).

I see that Torres has written about a half dozen anti-religious or progressive posts on Salon, and he’s just added to them with a very good and information-packed piece, “We’re No. 16! Why Donald Trump’s boorish American exceptionalism is so wrong.”

The reason why Trump’s American exceptionalism is wrong is because, says Torres, America is not exceptional—at least not in the way we think. We’re not by a long shot the most socially healthy country in the word. In fact, as I point out incessantly, we’re the most socially dysfunctional First World country. One of the good things about Torres’s article is that it serves as a compendium, with references, of all the ways the U.S. falls short compared to our “peer countries”—mostly in Europe. We’re horrible, for example, when it comes to these issues:

  • life expectancy
  • government-supported health care
  • gender parity
  • quality of education
  • happiness
  • income equality
  • ethics and lack of corruption
  • lack of waste in government spending.

The list goes on, with documentation, so it’s a good reference. Summarizing the U.S.’s ranking, Torres says this:

The point is that, as should be clear by now, there’s an unequivocal pattern of American inferiority when our country’s performance is juxtaposed with the rest of the developed world’s. Indeed, in many categories — such as childhood poverty, income inequality and family paid leave — we’re just barely a developed country, if even that. The result of these failures is that our collective quality of life is not nearly as high as it ought to be. Here it’s worth turning to the Mercer Quality of Life Survey, since it attempts to quantify the livability of some 221 cities around the world. And guess what it finds? The U.S. has only a single city in the top 30 — and it happens to be the ultra-progressive den of liberal debauchery called San Francisco. At the pinnacle of Mercer’s list are cities like Vienna, Zurich, Auckland, Munich and Vancouver. In fact, of all the cities in the North American continent, the top four are all in Canada. Now that’s just embarrassing, eh?

Indeed. I’m going to Auckland! Now what’s the reason why we think we’re so good but we actually are pretty miserable compared to our “peer nations”? Torres singles out two reasons: religion and conservative politics:

Why exactly are we ranked low in terms of opportunity and flourishing? What’s behind our middling performance compared to the world? Is it because our country is too progressive? Too socialist? Too secular? Too crowded with atheists?

The unambiguous answer to these questions is a resounding No! For example, the U.S. turns out to be among the most religious countries in the developed world. According to a 2014 Gallup poll, “nearly four in 10 Americans report that they attended religious services in the past seven days.” In contrast, only about 2 percent of Norwegians attend church on a weekly basis, as of 2009. Along these very lines, a 2011 study reported that religion is tumbling toward “extinction” in nine developed countries, namely Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland — all of which are doing just fine. And whereas a U.S. politician could hardly dream of running for president as an out-of-the-closet atheist, many other countries have had atheist leaders in the past. As the former Prime Minister of Australia — a progressive woman who doesn’t believe in God — said to the Washington Post, “I think it would be inconceivable for me if I were an American to have turned up at the highest echelon of American politics being an atheist, single and childless.” Yet the empirical fact is that secular people are “markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian” than religious folks. So it’s not that our country is too Godless.

Most of this I knew, but Torres take on American “progressivism” is pretty new to me:

The U.S. also turns out to be quite conservative by comparative standards. I find it hard to even map right-left American politics onto the political spectrum of European countries. On many issues, for example, the right-wing Tories in the UK are left of the Democrats. And Sweden, whose “thriving economy and society [are] based on a government of socialist principles, higher taxes, and healthy regulations,” has a tax rate that’s nearly double America’s. As an article in Forbes notes, the common thread that weaves together the tapestry of happiest countries is that “they are all borderline socialist states, with generous welfare benefits and lots of redistribution of wealth.” In these countries, civil liberties are taken seriously (some even permit prostitution and drug use), and everyone has a robust safety net to fall back on in tough times. So it’s also not that our country is too progressive.

And indeed, I’ve seen David Cameron take positions that American Democrats would consider too left wing. Not that I favor the Tories, but I’m not a big fan of Democrats (except for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) as genuine progressives. They’re too beholden to the banks, the industries, and the gun and health lobbies.

Torres’s conclusion?

I would argue that our country lags behind the developed world precisely because of how religious and conservative we are. As Bertrand Russell correctly observed way back in 1927, “I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.” As a matter of fact, religious conservatives in America have consistently opposed attempts to implement equal pay for women legislation, universal health care and stricter environmental regulations. For reasons that continue to baffle me, many middle-class people still vote for Republicans, even though the effect of Republican policies has been to knock us out of the top bracket with respect to nearly every metric of life-quality.

In the past I’ve argued that America is religious precisely because it’s socially dysfunctional, but Torres reverses the causal arrow: America’s hyper-religiosity makes us bad off.  Yes, many religious people oppose social progress, and there’s no reason why there can’t be an insalubrious synergy between religion and social well-being. That is, perhaps religion makes society poorer off according to Torres’s indicators. (I’ll need to ponder that one, but it’s almost certainly true in many Muslim countries.) And when society gets poorer off, it becomes more religious (there’s ample sociological documentation for that). If Torres is right and an important causal direction is from religiosity to social dysfunction, then we need to figure out why America is so much more religious than other First World countries.

As for conservative politics holding back social progress, I’m prepared to believe it. Conservatives consistently oppose measures to equalize income, as well as to equalize rights: the rights of gays, blacks, immigrant, the impoverished, and women. They consistently oppose government intervention to level a playing field tilted by the vagaries of genes and environments.

Torres’s article does the best thing a piece like this can: it gives us food for thought. If you think that American religiosity itself has promoted a dysfunctional society (or if you take the other side), weigh in below.  And if you agree, then let us know your hypothesis for why the U.S. is so much more religious than other First World nations.

Ted Cruz: “I’m a Christian first, American second, conservative third and Republican fourth.”

January 29, 2016 • 9:15 am

As Politico reports, Ted Cruz made a statement on January 20 showing where his allegiance lay:

Cruz’s initial comments came in response to a question about former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, who said in a New York Times interview that Cruz would be more damaging to the GOP than Trump, specifically that Cruz would generate “wholesale losses” and be unable to work with Congress. In the interview, Dole also said he questioned Cruz’s “allegiance” to the Republican Party.

“I’m a Christian first, American second, conservative third and Republican fourth,” said Cruz, who is currently a distant second place, behind Trump, for the GOP nomination in several national polls. “I’ll tell ya, there are a whole lot of people in this country that feel exactly the same way.”

Yep, that’s what he said, and it’s no surprise: music to the ears of his religious supporters, but clangor to everyone else. As the reader said who sent me this, “What if Cruz had said “I’m a Muslim first, American second. . . “? Or, “I’m a Scientologist first, American second. . “? Now those wouldn’t sound so good to Americans, would they?

The two big problems with this are that Cruz gives primacy to his faith over his governance, so we can expect, as with W., a country where the President seeks guidance from God. As we know, such consultations with the divine don’t go well. Second, 28% of Americans don’t identify as Christians: they’re either “nones” (which include atheists) or members of other faiths. What are those 89 million people supposed to think about a President whose foremost self-image is that of a Christian?

I didn’t watch the Trumpless GOP debate yesterday, but I seriously doubt whether the moderators (or any reporters) have asked Crus (or any faith-touting candidate) a question like this:

“Senator Cruz, you’ve publicly stated that you see your Christianity as more important than your nationality or your political views. Does this mean that, if elected, you’ll be governing based on your religious beliefs?”

Just once I’d like to see a reporter have enough moxie to ask a Republican this kind of question!

 

h/t: Lesley