Once, Mandela Even Made The GOP Do The Right Thing

When Ronald Reagan refused to lift a finger to bring America's tremendous economic pressure on South Africa's apartheid government in 1986, the GOP revolted and forced the President to do the right thing.

Even Mitch McConnell.

Conservatives believed the U.S. had no business hectoring the South African government over apartheid. Senator Jesse Helms (R–N.C.), the Senate's leading race-baiter, took the Senate floor to filibuster on behalf of the apartheid government of South Africa. Helms was an old pro at using the filibuster: he had launched a similar one three years earlier against establishing a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. He was joined by like-minded conservatives including noted segregationist Strom Thurmond (R–S.C.) and future presidential hopeful Phil Gramm (R–Texas) in voting against the bill's final passage. Over in the House, Representative Dick Cheney (R–Wyo.) joined the minority in opposing the Anti-Apartheid Act. In earlier battles over South Africa, Cheney had denounced Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and argued against his release. 

But conservatives were unable to stop the majority from acting. Congress approved the bill and sent it to President Reagan. 

He vetoed it. 

Reagan took his case directly to the people on a live TV broadcast. He echoed Crocker in urging Americans to be patient with South Africa's apartheid government. Reagan argued that sanctions would disproportionately hurt black South Africans without significantly undermining apartheid, and blamed black extremists for contributing to the violence. Change, if it were to come at all, would happen incrementally. He believed he had sold his case effectively, and considered the matter closed.

This is the Reagan I remember, the one who was truly, completely, and shamefully on the wrong side of both justice and history on a number of issues:  how he destroyed labor and unions with his relentless strikebreaking, how he was content to let thousands die and millions languish in fear with his horrific treatment and dismissal of the AIDS epidemic, and his most despicable act, the veto of the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.

Moderate Republicans (they existed back then) were so ashamed, that they overrode Reagan's veto in the House and Senate.  The rest of course is history:

Despite inconsistent enforcement by the Reagan administration, the law triggered a wave of international divestment in the apartheid regime. Banks refused to renew loans to South Africa. Foreign investment dried up, and exports to the U.S. and other countries contracted significantly. The enormous capital flight caused a dramatic decline in the exchange rate of the rand, and in 1989, Prime Minister P.W. Botha resigned. His successor, F.W. de Klerk, announced in his opening address to Parliament the end of the ban against the ANC and other black liberation groups, freedom of the press, and the release of all political prisoners. A few days later, Nelson Mandela walked out of Robben Island a free man after spending 27 years behind bars. Four years later, he was elected South Africa's first black president in the post-apartheid era.

Republican moderates deserve credit for having the courage to go against Reagan in passing the Anti-Apartheid Act. Though denounced by conservatives for their actions, they held firm. As a result, the United States directly contributed to the liberation of millions of people from one of the world's most oppressive regimes. It was a Wilsonian vision of America's ability to create positive change in the world, and it wouldn't have happened without Republicans working in common purpose with Democrats. When Newt Gingrich later became Speaker of the House, his partisan leadership style would make such collaboration all but impossible. But that was still eight years away, and for the moment members of both parties could take pride in what they had accomplished together.

Even Mitch McConnell, as I said, did the right thing.

"In the 1960s, when I was in college, civil rights issues were clear," explained Senator Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), who voted to pass the Act over Reagan's veto. "After that, it became complicated with questions of quotas and other matters that split people of good will. When the apartheid issues came along, it made civil rights black and white again. It was not complicated."

Which is about the most you can hope for and the most you're ever going to get out of a Republican senator on anything involving race.

PS, Reagan, Poppy Bush, and Dubya all considered Mandela a terrorist.

Endless GOP Sabotage

It's not like sabotaging the Affordable Care Act is new or anything, but our old friends at ALEC are pushing a red state boilerplate bill designed to remove state operating licenses for any insurance company that complies with federal exchange subsidies.

The ALEC bill works like this. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers receive subsidies to help offset costs of insuring more people at lower rates. Separately, businesses with more than 50 employees face a penalty if they don't offer health insurance. 

According to Cannon: "if an employer doesn’t purchase a government-prescribed level of health benefits, some of its workers may become eligible to purchase subsidized coverage through a health insurance 'exchange.' When the IRS issues the subsidy to an insurance company on behalf of one of those workers, that payment triggers penalties against the employer." 

Therefore, Cannon, claims, the penalty is triggered only if an insurance company accepts federal subsidies. The solution? Prohibit insurance companies in the state from accepting subsidies, by threatening to suspend their license. 

The problem is that the federal Affordable Care Act pretty clearly preempts states from implementing such a prohibition. 

Cannon's argument to the contrary is pretty weak. He acknowledges that the Affordable Care Act preempts state laws that “prevent the application of the provisions of this title,” but argues that Congress envisioned that states would retain their authority to set the terms of those licenses, because only state-licensed insurers can offer coverage on the exchanges. Therefore, Cannon argues, that because Congress made reference to state licensing in the Affordable Care Act, states therefore have free rein to enact restrictions on licenses, even if the exercise of that power would “prevent the application of the provisions of this title.”

It is a creative legal argument, but a pretty thin reed for states to rely upon when setting up a "nuclear option."

The plan of course is twofold:  to force a Supreme Court challenge on the constitutionality of the subsidies for policies bought on the federal exchanges (as well as the provision that stops states from penalizing insurers for complying with the ACA), and to get a friendly enough panel of federal judges to stay the payment of subsidies to states that pass this law while the case lingers in the courts.

If they can drag this out for years, the damage done to families looking for affordable insurance could be massive.  Imagine low-income families getting no subsidies at all to help pay for a plan when they would otherwise qualify, and you begin to see the political and financial carnage that would follow.

Even if the political damage would be mitigated by Republicans getting stuck with the blame, the damage to the federal exchange plan prices in a scenario like this would be pretty huge.  It would effectively shut down Obamacare in those states if allowed to continue, and that's the point.

Expect these laws to start ending up on the books soon as it becomes clear the law is working for people.

StupidiNews!

• Mexican law enforcement officials say the truck and all radioactive Cobalt-60 stolen earlier this week has been recovered, but that the thieves, still at large, may be suffering from fatal radiation poisoning.
• The International Red Cross says it will need $1.3 billion to cover humanitarian aid for Syria, Central Africa, the Philippines, and other region ins 2014.
• President Obama has met with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos at the White House, as the two men discussed trade, education, and the war on drugs.
• German lawmakers and Chancellor Angela Merkel have reached a tentative deal that would charge foreign drivers fees for using the country's famous autobahn roadways.
• The House has passed the country's first anti-"patent troll" bill, with a 325-91 victory for the Innovation Act, the legislation heads for the Senate.

Last Call: Nelson Mandela, Dead at 95

Finally put your burden down, Madiba.  The rest of us will carry it on together.

Mr. Mandela’s quest for freedom took him from the court of tribal royalty to the liberation underground to a prison rock quarry to the presidential suite of Africa’s richest country. And then, when his first term of office was up, unlike so many of the successful revolutionaries he regarded as kindred spirits, he declined a second term and cheerfully handed over power to an elected successor, the country still gnawed by crime, poverty, corruption and disease but a democracy, respected in the world and remarkably at peace. 

The question most often asked about Mr. Mandela was how, after whites had systematically humiliated his people, tortured and murdered many of his friends, and cast him into prison for 27 years, he could be so evidently free of spite. 

The government he formed when he finally won the chance was an improbable fusion of races and beliefs, including many of his former oppressors. When he became president, he invited one of his white wardens to the inauguration. Mr. Mandela overcame a personal mistrust bordering on loathing to share both power and a Nobel Peace Prize with the white president who preceded him, F. W. de Klerk. 

And as president, from 1994 to 1999, he devoted much energy to moderating the bitterness of his black electorate and to reassuring whites against their fears of vengeance. 

The explanation for his absence of rancor, at least in part, is that Mr. Mandela was that rarity among revolutionaries and moral dissidents: a capable statesman, comfortable with compromise and impatient with the doctrinaire.

President Obama spoke this afternoon on the occasion of Mandela's passing:

The world loses an actual hero, and we mourn.  Tomorrow we remember and move forward.

Keep On Losing, Boys

Meet Official GOP Black Spokesguy(tm) Orlando Watson, who keeps on proving exactly why I'll never vote for the current incarnation of the GOP:

In an effort to tamp down the controversy surrounding a recent tweet, the Republican National Committee deployed its resident black media spokesman for an interview Wednesday on MSNBC.

Orlando Watson, who was hired in October to serve as the RNC's "Communications Director for Black Media," said during his appearance on the cable news channel that a tweet sent out by the organization last weekend praising civil rights icon Rosa Parks for "ending racism" was nothing more than a typo.

"And talking about a typo and a tweet, it's old news," Watson said.

When MSNBC host Thomas Roberts asked if it was "defensible" for GOP governors to reject the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, Watson took aim at President Barack Obama's own record of helping the black community.

"What I don't find defensible is after five years of, you know, living under President Obama, you know, he has little to show for what he's done for the black community," Watson said, before claiming that the health care law has "particularly" hurt the jobless rate in the black community.

Oh, well then, let's take a look at the jobless rate under other Presidents.



Wow, Reagan must have really hated black people. And hey, it's almost like black unemployment has roughly been double that of white unemployment for more than a generation.  Apparently, that didn't matter until Obama came along.

And yes, black unemployment was pretty ugly in 2011.  In 2013, it's a lot better.

In fact, since Obamacare became law in 2010, the black unemployment rate has in fact dropped to 12.6% in August when it was over 16% in 2011.  It's 13.1% now, which is still nearly twice as much as the overall rate, but no, Obamacare has not raised the black unemployment rate.

So yes, Watson's an idiot.

The Existence of Privilege

Jonathan Chait actually does a very good job of explaining the modern Republican mindset on race, President Obama, and American society:

The broad social structure of white supremacy is not a part of the working conservative definition of racism. Conservatives see racism as a series of discrete acts of overt oppression. After slavery had disappeared, but before legal segregation had, conservatives considered it preposterous to claim that blacks suffered any systematic disadvantage in American life. (For an lengthy but fascinating expression of the conservative view, watch William F. Buckley in 1965 sneering his way through a debate over race relations with James Baldwin.)

Today, conservatives retroactively agree that legal segregation may have been unfair, but now things run on an even footing. Republicans, by a 60-40 margin, now believe discrimination against whites has grown to be a larger problem than discrimination against minorities. In fact, in nearly every way it can be measured, traditional white-on-black racism persists. Jamelle Bouie lists a few of them: Experiments show candidates with white-sounding names are vastly more likely to get callbacks than candidates with black-sounding names with equally impressive résumés; realtors show fewer homes to prospective nonwhite home buyers than to white buyers of equal financial standing; the criminal justice system imposes large racial disparities for the same criminal behavior; and on and on.

None of these experiments are known, or would even sound plausible, to avid followers of conservative news sources, where “racism” is encountered primarily as a politically motivated slander against conservatives by liberals. Again, it bears repeating that most conservatives find Klan-style white supremacy foreign, and usually completely unacceptable. The racial fissures of the Obama era do not look like 1957 Little Rock. Undisguised racism, while numerically frequent — it’s a big country — has largely remained confined to the political margins. Tea party activists have suppressed openly bigoted signs at their rallies, National Review fired two blatantly white-supremacist writers, a Republican precinct chair had to resign after boasting that a restrictive voting law would target “lazy blacks.”

Instead, the racial battlegrounds of the Obama era have settled on a series of more ambiguous controversies. Conservatives have made endless jokes based on the strange premise that Obama is unable to express coherent thoughts unless reading from a teleprompter, defined health-care reform as “reparations,” imagined a Reagan-era program to subsidize telephone use for the indigent is actually “Obamaphones,” or complained when black entertainers or athletes socialize with the First Family. The accusations of racism that follow merely confirm to conservatives that black-on-white racism is a canard, that the balance of oppression has turned against them.

What Jonathan Chait's article entails is his discovery of the difference between privilege and racism.  Conservatives will gladly tell you that overt racism exists in America and for the most part, they will tell you that it's awful.  But they will never, ever agree that racial privilege does and will dismiss even the idea that privilege exists in America while shouting as loudly as possible about why evil liberals refuse to live in a colorblind society.

Pointing out racism is one thing, but pointing out assumption of privilege is what really torques conservatives off.  They are immediately defensive about it because they think it's conflation of the two.  There's a difference.  Secondly, it's easy to spot overt racism.  Spotting your own privilege on the other hand is brutally difficult.  Would that more people would read Chait's column here and realize that the subtle things taken for granted by a white male in America represent a lot of privilege assumed and taken over the centuries, like say, the ability to peacefully congregate in groups of more than two on a public sidewalk.

Now granted, there are plenty of liberals who are clueless about privilege (and there's plenty of different types of privilege out there as well) but Jonathan Chait is not one of them.

Chait posted that article yesterday based on a Twitter conversation with National Review's Quin Hilyer, and the response today from Hilyer precisely proves Chait's point that conservatives have zero idea about the difference between racism and privilege.

The Left is so eager to see racism in every conservative heart and utterance that it ignores overwhelming evidence that more blacks these days feel racial animus toward whites, and more act in race-antagonistic ways, than do whites toward blacks. By huge margins, blacks vote in racial blocs more often than whites do. By significant margins, blacks commit a larger percentage of reported hate crimes (20.9 percent) than their total share of the population (12.6 percent) while whites under-commit hate crimes (59 percent) compared with their overall population share (72.4 percent) — even after what anecdotal evidence suggests is a reporting bias to the contrary. And at least some polls show that even blacks are more likely to attribute racist attitudes to their own race than to whites.

The point is not that blacks are inherently racist or ill-motivated, or that there aren’t good historical reasons for more residual black distrust of whites than vice versa. Of course there are strong historical reasons, sickeningly and inexcusably strong; and of course there is still too much white racism toward blacks, with such racism being more potentially devastating because of that terrible history. (One more personal note: I endured quite a backlash from some whites when I first moved to Mobile and wrote columns calling attention to some of this recurring racism.) And of course there is more white racism in private hearts than that which shows up in identifiable incidents.

But white conservatives have good reason to believe that wolf cries of racism do at least as much these days to exacerbate racial discord as do real racist incidents or even unexpressed racist thoughts. The reason we are oblivious to “alarm bells” is because so many of the bells are clanging so falsely.

It also would help promote racial understanding if liberals were not so likely to refuse to acknowledge the human cost to aggrieved whites and to unprepared blacks (note: not incapable blacks, but unprepared ones) when race-based government edicts stack the deck in education or access to employment.

Conservatives conflate racism and privilege all the time, so whenever you call one out on assumption of privilege, it immediately becomes an accusation of racism, which inevitably becomes "Black people are the real racists because they refuse to be colorblind."

Note Hilyer hits all the classic "I'm not a racist!" defense points in 4 paragraphs:  1) You're the racist for bringing this up, 2) How come black people keep bringing this up, doesn't this prove they are the real racists, 3) I have a personal anecdote about black friends that absolves me of racism, 4) What is actually privilege and I call institutionalized racism doesn't actually exist because I've never experienced it, 5) You know what, maybe black people aren't as good as white people at some things, finishing with 6) That brings me back to my first point, you're still the racist for thinking there's anything in glorious America in 2013 that still needs to be corrected by your reverse racist affirmative action.

It's amazing.  He ends with this:

So yes, Chait is right that my criticisms of Obama have nothing to do with an imagined “long-ago-imbibed white southern upbringing bubbling to the surface,” because my “white, southern upbringing” was devoid of racial animus.

What Chait doesn’t understand is that I am hardly unique. Almost every American under 50, conservatives most definitely included, was raised in a culture where such animus was shunned. We’re all the “cultural heirs” far more of Martin Luther King Jr., or at least of his famous speech on the National Mall, than of George Wallace. We’re not oblivious to racism; we just want to transcend it by leaving it out of discussions where it doesn’t belong.

Why are those people ruining Quin Hilyer's day by bringing up race?

The larger point is that since modern conservatism relies on the notion that all Americans have equal opportunity, admitting that privilege even exists would blow a hole the size of Peoria in the basic tenets of conservatism itself (not to mention mulching glibertarianism).   Much easier to conflate the two, scream bloody indignation whenever it's mentioned, and then pretend it doesn't exist, right?

StupidiNews!

• Organizers say fast food workers in 100 US cities will walk off the job today to advocate raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
• Australian lawmakers were able to work together to avert a government shutdown scenario in Canberra by abolishing the country's debt ceiling altogether.
• The US Supreme Court has heard arguments on a Kentucky case involving when and even if companies can file false advertising lawsuits against competitors.
• President Obama gave a speech Wednesday on growing income inequality, which the president believes is the largest threat to the American economy.
• One-time Google Android smartphone division head Andy Rubin will now lead the firm's new robotics division for commercial applications.

Last Call For Don't Like It, So Sue Me

How long before Orange Julius and company are forced by the Tea Party to take this tack against President Obama?

Republican lawmakers bashed the Obama administration at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday for opting not to enforce core parts of the Affordable Care Act, such as minimum requirements for individual healthcare plans.

Rep. Trent Franks (Ariz.), the chairman of the Judiciary panel’s Constitution and Civil Justice subcommittee, said Congress should sue the administration to spur Obama to enforce the healthcare law as written.

“I think that’s the only choice we have, and that’s not just on ObamaCare, that’s on a host of different things,” Franks told The Hill.

“He simply embodies a breathtaking arrogance that ignores the law he’s sworn to uphold.”

Remember, these were the same guys that thought the Bush/Cheney "plenary executive" was awesome, and that the President could basically do whatever he wanted.  Now that Obama is in the White House, note the key word "arrogance" that Trent Franks uses.  That Obama boy, he's uppity.  Gotta be brought down, gotta be put in his place, so we're going to sue him on every executive decision we don't like.  At the very least, the plan is to get a federal judge to tie up Obamacare in the courts again until the President is out of the White House.

And if they can do it with Obamacare, they can do it with everything else.  Imagine the White House crippled by lawsuits on everything, and the whim of Anthony Kennedy deciding where to break a 4-4 tie.

I'm betting this happens and soon. 

On the other hand, Republicans do have a plan B if this doesn't work.

At Tuesday’s hearing, the committee chairman, Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), accused Obama of “picking and choosing which laws to enforce” and of being “the first president since Richard Nixon to ignore a duly enacted law simply because he disagrees with it.”

Contributed [GOP Rep. Lamar] Smith: “The president has ignored laws, failed to enforce laws, undermined laws and changed laws, all contrary to the Constitution.”

The majority’s witnesses added to the accusations. George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley said Obama had “claimed the right of the king to essentially stand above the law.”

This excited Franks, who embraced impeachment back in 2011. Obama’s actions, he said, “could be considered royal prerogatives, which is, if my history’s right, what we had that little unpleasantness with Great Britain about.”

Yikes! Why bother with impeachment? They need a revolution.

But of course, Republicans are rational actors in this scenario, and not complete lunatics.

Detroit Rock-Headed City

In a pretty awful decision, the federal judge in charge of Detroit's bankruptcy case has ruled that in spite of the state's constitution specifically preventing pension cuts to resolve bankruptcies, city workers and retirees now face the axe for the unpardonable sin of being government employees.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes ruled today that pensions of city retirees can legally be cut in Detroit’s bankruptcy — a decision that came as a significant surprise to people observing the case. 

Rhodes emphasized he won’t necessarily allow pension cuts to be approved in the city’s final reorganization plan, called a “plan of adjustment.” 

Rhodes previously signaled that he planned to decide the issue of whether the pensions can be cut later in the case. But today he said he changed his mind and decided ruling on the issue now would expedite the bankruptcy. 

Almost immediately afterward, Michigan Council 25 of AFSCME, the city's largest employee union, filed an appeal to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The union also plans to ask Rhodes to allow the case to be sent directly to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to expedite the case.

So the only question now is how much will Detroit's city workers be made to suffer.  Of course, that's the entire point:  a shot across the bow of what little worker union power is left in a country built by unions to let them know that if you spent your career working for a local or state government, that local or state government doesn't have to keep its word and will come for your pension, health benefits, and everything else.

You're not an employee, after all.  You work at the sufferance of the mob that believes government workers are parasites who can have everything taken from them by enough angry taxpayers, looking to take their own private sector miseries in an at-will, right-to-work employee world out on whomever they can lash out at the easiest.

After all, if your boss can take everything from you without warning or any hope of redress, why should "those people" not suffer the same fate when you, as a taxpayer, are their boss, right?

Because unions are the bad guys here, you see.  We should all be equally miserable with declining real wages, fewer benefits, longer hours and less worker safety like real 'muricans, dammit.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

This is the first sentence of Peggy Noonan's latest WSJ column/screechfest against President Obama, entitled "Low-Information Leadership":

The president’s problem right now is that people think he’s smart.

The choking, near blood-boiling irony of that title and first sentence coming from somebody as colossally ignorant as Peggy Noonan, a person who backed George W. Bush for 8 years, basically prevented my brain from reading any further.  If you guys want a crack at it, go for it.  Frankly, I have no desire to finish it because I know it will confirm my view that Peggy Noonan is about as condescendingly polite as racists can get, and I have no desire to anger myself at something I've seen all too often in my life.

Steve M. has some much-needed perspective at No More Mister Nice Blog:

A president who stakes his entire reputation on a complex scheme gone awry? And who never rides herd on the people who were supposed to make sure it went right?

Hmmm, let me think....

That 8-year selective amnesia about the guy before Obama is a funny thing.

StupidiNews!

• Over protests from prosecutors and some of the relatives of victims, selected 911 calls made in the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre a year ago will be released to news outlets today.
• The US has suspended shipments of equipment from Afghanistan by road through Pakistan, saying that a recent rise in Pakistani anti-drone protests are a threat to both truck drivers and cargo.
• The White House says President Obama will sign up for health insurance on the federal health exchange website, but exactly when is still being worked out.
• Germany's Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase are among six banks who have agreed to pay the EU a record 1.71 million euros in total fines for manipulating the LIBOR benchmark interest rate.
• Private space transport company SpaceX has successfully launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets to put a satellite into geosynchronous orbit, hoping for the first successful mission of its kind for the company.

Last Call For The Red Stick

The latest example of the post-Katrina permanent minority underclass in Bobby Jindal's Louisiana?  The rich, white area of Baton Rouge is proposing seceding and taking the city's tax base with it to form a new city.

The predominantly white and wealthy residents of the southern area of Baton Rouge have proposed seceding from the city proper and incorporating into a new one to be called “St. George.” 

The movement began as an effort to create a new school district, but after the state legislature repeatedly mothballed its proposals — claiming that they could not approve an independent school district that was unaffiliated with a city — organizers shifted their energies to the creation of “St. George.” 

The new city would be the fifth largest in the state, with over 107,000 residents, and would include two of the largest tax revenue bases in the state: Perkins Rowe and the Mall of Louisiana. A study by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber concluded that Baton Rouge residents “will be disproportionately paying taxes to the proposed municipality,” given city governance’s reliance on sales tax revenues. 

If the succession were successful, the study claimed, it “could entail the dissolution of the present system of governance.”

But this is exactly what Jindal's plan to cut property taxes and raise sales taxes was intended to do:  shift the tax burden from the wealthy (with their wealth in property, stocks, and savings) and shift it to the poor (who have to pay sales taxes on everyday consumption).  The proposed St. George municipality would mean that Baton Rouge residents would be paying sales taxes at the shopping district in St. George, and all of the benefit would go to the resident of St. George.

But nobody dares call it "wealth redistribution" or anything.  And if Jindal has his way, all the state's income and corporate taxes would be replaced by sales taxes.  The plan backfired only because Republicans realized voters would have revolted if they went along with the plan.

The problem with St. George goes deeper than taxes, however.

The demographic shift the incorporation of “St. George” would create is almost as troubling as the economic difficulties. According to recent study on the demographic impact of Hurricane Katrina, the city of Baton Rouge accepted over 200,000 displaced New Orleans residents, the majority of whom were black and settled in the northern, urban parts of the city. 

The “St. George” proposal would create a poor, black, and urban Baton Rouge and a wealthy, white, and suburban “St. George.” Supporters of the new city brush off such complaints. “Typically, the only comments you hear are those that try to create fear,” one of the leaders of the movement, Norman Browning said. “They never support it with any documentation to make those claims.” 

He did not address any of the specifics of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber’s study.

Taxpayer money went to create the improvements in southern Baton Rouge for everyone in the region.  Now they want to take those improvements and tell "those people" to get the hell out.  That's the way it's worked in America for 400 years.

All The Ladies Say What?

Ryan Cooper over at Washington Monthly makes a number of points on how the GOP could very well come to regret the Hobby Lobby SCOTUS case and its attack on birth control:

But the most striking fact when it comes to women and birth control is this one: 99 percent of sexually active women use it.

Pundits have often pointed out that historically, neither party tends to dominate the political system for very long. The reason for this is that, like how corporations exist to make money, political parties exist to win elections, and if the party keeps taking positions that alienate huge fractions of the electorate, then they’ll change those positions.

But the GOP isn’t doing this. After the 2012 defeat, driven in large part by being absolutely crushed in practically every minority demographic, Republicans halfheartedly tried to choke down an immigration reform bill to at least stop the bleeding. President Obama signaled his support, and the Senate passed a half-decent measure. But now reform looks dead because House Republicans refuse to let the Senate bill come up for a vote. For the GOP, it’s almost the worst of all worlds: a bill supported by all the prominent Democrats goes down due to extremist Republican intransigence. Now Democrats get to blame the GOP for breaking their promise, and quite possibly increase their share of the minority vote. It would have been better to not do anything.

He then ends with this:

Maybe if they lose women by 20 points in 2016, they’ll wise up.

To which I reply "If the GOP loses women by 20 points and wins men by 25, it's a GOP landslide in a midterm year."  They just have to keep it close among white women and win white men overwhlemingly.  The demographics will still allow this to happen, especially in a midterm election, and doubly so when the GOP is doing everything it can to suppress the minority vote in red states.  And even in 2016 if they can keep white women close and get 45% of the vote, there's nobody on the Dem side that's going to get 90%+ of the black vote to make up for that.

The practical upshot is they don't care if they can frame birth control as an Obama giveaway to "those people".  It's a small price to pay, as Megan McArdle says.  Small enough that enough women voters won't miss it when its gone, and besides, they'll just say "Well, *my* company wouldn't do that to *me*."

And when it happens, it'll just be time to blame Obama and "those people" for ruining it for everyone.

Meanwhile, In Syria...

And while the chemical weapons are being dealt with, the much larger problem of the Syrian civil war and millions of refugees remains, the UN is about to make life very uncomfortable for Bashar al-Assad.

A growing body of evidence collected by U.N. investigators points to the involvement of senior Syrian officials, including President Bashar Assad, in crimes against humanity and war crimes, the U.N.'s top human rights official said Monday.

Navi Pillay, who heads the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the scale and viciousness of the abuses being perpetrated by both sides almost defies belief, and is being well documented by an expert U.N. panel of investigators.

"They've produced massive evidence," she told a news conference. "They point to the fact that the evidence indicates responsibility at the highest level of government, including the head of state."

But Pillay said the lists of suspected criminals are handed to her on a confidential basis and will remain sealed until requested by international or national authorities for a "credible investigation," and then possibly used for prosecution.

Pillay said she worries about striking the right balance in determining how long to keep the information secret. The lists "rightly belongs to the people who suffered violations," she said, but they also must be kept sealed "to preserve the presumption of innocence" until proper judicial probes can be done that could lead to trial.

In other words, the movement for Syrian regime change is about to get a major shot int he arm, and this time the world's not going to be able to look away.  With a formal declaration of war crimes against the Assad regime, somebody's going to have to go in there and get the guy out.

Well, unless Russia wants to play chicken with the UN some more, which would actually keep troops out of there.  Considering there's a very likely possibility those troops will be American, I'm thinking that some sort of deal for Assad's departure will be worked out.

Hopefully.

If not, well, it's going to get ugly.

StupidiNews!

• National Transportation Safety Board officials say the Bronx commuter train in Sunday's deadly derailment was going 82 miles an hour through a curve rated for just 30 MPH. 
• Police in Reykjavik, Iceland are apologizing for the country's first fatal police shooting as officers were unable to subdue a man with a shotgun without resorting to lethal force.
• US Justice Department officials are accusing a former governor of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas of using millions in drug cartel bribes to invest in Texas real estate.
• New global finance figures show China's yuan has surpassed the euro in 2013 as the second-most used global currency in the world, behind the US dollar.
• Facebook is finally allowing users to channel their inner passive-aggressive tendencies by having users keep their friends, but be able to unfollow their posts.