Religious Liberty

Recently the Right has been up in arms about threats to religious liberty. From PJ Media comes  the story of a simple man who just wanted to have family members come by for some bible study only to find the iron heel of the state grinding his religious liberty into a fine powder.

The truth, of course, rather different:

Michael Salman’s dispute with Phoenix dates to at least 2007, when, he claims in a video posted online, the city began harassing him and his wife as they tried to build a 2,000-square-foot game room adjacent to their home on their 1.5-acre property near 35th and Northern avenues.
“The only people who came to our home were family and friends,” Salman said in a video posted online before he reported to jail this week. “Our home was not open to the public; it was private.”
Information presented at Salman’s criminal trial directly contradicted his claim, however. For example, a private investigator testified that he was not acquainted with the Salmans when he attended the church and saw 40 or 50 people in attendance during regular services and 20 or 30 additional worshipers for special occasions such as baptisms.
Salman and his wife have not paid taxes on the property since an inspector from the Maricopa County Assessor’s Office approved Salman’s request to have the property classified as a church in 2008.

What awful things are demanded of the tax free church? That it not be up to code. Really much ado about nothing. How do we know that it really is much ado about nothing? Because I originally read about this grave threat to religious liberty here, the gist of which is still available here.

That's right the NRO realized it had been had and consequently scrubbed the story rather than apologize for trying to turn molehills into mountains.

Here In Wisconsin

Scott Walker is liar, creep, and hates democracy, which makes him an ideal Republican. He has refused to follow the ACA. First because he expected it to be ruled unconstitutional and now because he expects its repeal when Romney wins.

I was not aware that fidelity to the rule of law and reverence for the Constitution were tempered or could be held in abeyance by the possibility that something might change in the indefinite future. On this logic, Walker could ignore, OSHA, the EPA, Federal Child Labor Laws, etc.

At what point do the people who support this kind of thuggish anti-Americanism finally decide that the dishonesty has gone far enough.

The ACA's opponents have lost the political and judicial battles over the law and now, it seems, they are going to replay nullification and, one supposes, fire on Fort Sumpter when they again lose that battle.

Post Racial

This essay is worth reading. It is an intelligent discussion of the meaning of being a black American whose civil equality is always already understood to be contingent because he or she is a black American.

Horrid People

It isn't a secret that because of Citizens United and massive wealth, people like the Koch Brothers are running the Republican Party. Their front group ALEC writes anti-American and anti-Human legislation which their bought and paid for legislators duly submit. For anyone interested in the future of democracy as a going concern this kind of influence is beyond troubling. And rightly in my view,  President Obama is using these plutocrats undeserved political influence to run against robotic sociopathic plutocrat Mitt Romney.  Megan McArdle sees this and tries to mock the idea that anyone whose livelihood depends in total or in part on Koch cash is in the pay and pocket of these bloated plutocrats.

Why, one wonders, is necessary to hate America in order to be a spear carrier for authoritarians? Well, actually, I guess, the question answers itself.

Name That Pie

Here we see the Wisconsin Republican Party pushing an ALEC inspired mining bill:




Here we see my latest attempt at pie:

 It's called frog or jagger pie, anyone have a better name?

Being Right is No Excuse for Being a Horrid Little Man, But Still

 Over to TPM, Donald Trump correctly correct Chuck Todd on two important issues and they suggest that it is Trump who looks stupid.

Trump's essentially vulgarity and stupidity is beyond a doubt. But the points to take away from the first is that the NRO employes people who are actually dumber and more ideologically committed than Gingrich. And the second is that Chuck Todd is such an incompetent reporter that Trump, poster boy for ignorance, can school him on matters of fact.

Image the things of greater importance that Todd gets wrong or makes up. No wonder people vote against their interests; the press is incapable of reporting the time of day acurately. Why, one wonders, does TPM miss the point on this fundamentally key issue?

Bright Young Things Are so Often Wrong

Matthew Yglesias and Dana Goldstein are two of the bright young things of our new media. Each in their own way fail to understand what the 99% versus the 1% means. It isn't about income as such. 

Yglesias' claim that NBA players are rich and therefore members of the 1% misses the point that your average NBA player isn't trying to create an oligarchical system. The Kochs, Bloomburg, and the Republican party's war on voting are. These folks are less interested in money then  they are in power. For them money is a means to an end and that end is creating a world in which the few dominate the many.  The 99% movement isn't some attempt to simply redistribute wealth but rather to end the creation of a market state in which the wealthy oppress the poor through a combination of the laws of supply and demand, which insists that markets follow the money, and the manipulation of the political system through the creation of a system in which the state functions solely as enforcers.

Goldstein makes a similar mistake in pooh poohing the linkage between the 1% and neoliberal educational reform when she concludes that

[t]The trouble with this narrative comes in comparing education reformers with greedy bankers. The dominant ethos of the school choice/Bloomberg/Obama reform movement is one borrowed not from Wall Street, with its desperate lust for profit, but from Silicon Valley, with its commitment to meritocratic innovation that—yes, of course—earns money, but also serves the public.

One suspects that she knows this as in a later post, she links to an article on the danger of the 1%ers drive to privatize and virtualize k-12. Privatizing education, much like the privatization of prisons, takes one of societies most important functions out its hands and gives it to corporations, whose ability to do anything right is of limited. The creation of public, as opposed to religious, education is one of the hallmarks of modernity; granting corporations and rich folks the right to "reform" and run our educational systems spell the end of critical thought and beginning of education as vocational training or, even worse, no education and no vocational training for the mass of humanity.

When people talk about a market state what they really mean is democracy's demise at the hands of technocrats.

Democracy Almost Broke Out

So the technocrats win yet again and the Greek people find their future in the hands of the mumble-brained thus and sos who got them in the mess in the first place. Hurray. By the way, if you haven't had the chance to read Neoliberal Hegemony you really should

Oh, For Dumbest

Long-time commentator John Rove alerts us to Matthew Yglesias condemnation of laws limiting shops operating hours in France.This situation is wrong, Yglesias intones with all the seriousness of a neoliberal intent on destroying human happiness, because

[t]he problem with leisure. . . is that you can’t tax it to pay off accumulated debt or to finance pensions for your senior citizens. The good news is that the much lower hours worked in places like France shows that a determined set of policymakers could push official GDP a lot a higher without the TFP fairy showing up.

First lets hope the poor adle-pated dope doesn't find out that Germany closes most of its shops at 12 on Saturday and doesn't reopen them till Monday. 2nd, really? The economy is a mess because of unregulated financial shenanigans and  neoliberal policies more generally. Yglesias' response? Work harder peons.Third "determined set of policy makers" is short hand for technocratic defeat of democracy. He knows that democracy, as Salvador Allende pointed out in his speech to the UN,means that democratic polities lead to social democratic societies and the only way the 1%ers can win is by recourse to anti-democratic means to oligarchic ends. What horrid little man.

And There You Have It

via

Unbearable Lightness of Apolitical Technocratism

Over to the Crooked Timber, there was a flurry of posts on left neoliberalism. One of the key points raised was its cluelessness when it comes to politics because of its technocraticism, should that be a word. Today, it seems to me, Krugman shows that this kind of cluelessness is more widespread than you might think.

He writes of the Fed's announcements on rate hikes, i.e., there won't be any with these, I won't say snotty or sophmoric but I will think them, remarks:

The Fed didn’t announce a new policy. And despite what some press reports said, it didn’t even commit to keeping rates low; all it did was say that if the economy stays weak, rates will stay low — well, duh — and that it might think about doing other stuff one of these days [.]

He then notes that " three members of the FOMC dissented even from that" silly, obvious and totally  duh worthy utterance. Get that? Something that was so obviously obvious roughly 1/3 of the board voted no. I bet the the 2/3s who voted yes are thrilled to find out that Krugman thinks that they are dolts and dullards.

Then he writes that

if you really thought that the Plosser-Kocherlakota view that rates need to rise even in the face of low inflation and high unemployment because, well, they just should was going to prevail, this might have given you some comfort.

What he means here is something like "just because the people who have been wrong about everything  didn't get their way this time there's no reason to be happy and praise those who did the right thing. The important point is to belittle people with whom you hope to craft a policy alliance."

Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with that. Except to the extent that alienating potential allies in a desperate moment is bad idea.