The Republicans won control of the House and picked up seats in the Senate in the midterm election on nebulous promises to slash spending and reduce the size of the federal government. House Speaker John Boehner has pledged to reduce spending to 2008 levels, as per the GOP's campaign manifesto, known as the "Pledge to America."
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head at a constituent outreach event in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson on Saturday. In all, the gunman shot 18 people, killing 6, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl.
Jamelle Bouie of TAPPED urges President Obama to take up the issue of mental health care in his upcoming speech on the mass shooting. Several people who knew the alleged shooter came forward with stories of bizarre behavior and run-ins with campus police at his community college. College administrators ordered him to seek treatment before he returned to school, but he does not appear to have done so.
H. Clarke Romans of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona explained to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! that mental health services in Arizona have been devastated by budget cuts.
In 2008 the state eliminated support services for all non-Medicaid behavioral health patients and stopped covering most brand-name psychiatric drugs. At least 28,000 Arizonans were affected. Arizonans with mental illnesses can expect even more cuts in the future as the state slashes spending in an attempt to address its budget shortfall.
In AlterNet, Adele Stan, argues that, while we don't yet know the gunman's motives, the right wing's intensifying campaign of anti-government hysteria and violent rhetoric may have emboldened an already disturbed person:
Had the vitriolic rhetoric that today shapes Arizona's political landscape (and, indeed, our national landscape) never come to call, Loughner may have found a different reason to go on a killing spree. But that vitriol does exist as a powerful prompt to the paranoid, and those who publicly deem war on the federal government a patriot's duty should today be doing some soul-searching.
Note: There's a somewhat interesting pay-off in conclusions from the following, including more on Brad DeLong's desire for a explanation of why a return to pre-New Deal economic folly and ignorance. But it all starts with hard data.
And he shows that this is a relatively recent development:
He does all this hanging his hat on the following brief passage from a Ross Douthat op-ed that shows no other signs of sentient life:
This means that a culture war that's often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class -- pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club.
The rest of Douthat's column is his typical blather. But if you focus instead on the fact of state-level divergences in income/voting patterns one thing it immediately brings to mind for me is the terribly perverse/typically hypocritical (take your pick) fact that wealthy states that pay more in taxes than they get back are overwhelmingly blue, while poorer states that pay less in taxes than they get back overwhelmingly red. I wrote about that earlier this year--just after April 15, in fact--in my diary,
"Red-State moochers: States' returns on federal taxes favor those who complain the most", which included the following three charts, showing the strikingly strong pattern through the last three pesidential elections:
I've been gone all summer - traveling, gardening, volunteering a bit, and doing some other things - and as much as I had a lot of fun, it is nice to be back. In all that time, some interesting things have happened with what I consider to be one of the better Green campaigns in the nation this year, and one that I'm very involved with, Hugh Giordano's campaign for state legislature as a Green.
In case you don't know who Hugh is, he's a 25 year old union organizer running as a Green in PA's 194th district, which is mostly in Philadelphia and also a bit in Montgomery County (for locals, it encompasses Roxborough, Manayunk, parts of Lower Merion, and some surrounding areas). He's been running a great campaign, knocking on doors, holding fun fundraisers, getting in the newspaper, and raising as much money as a typical Green congressional candidate.
Anyway, below the fold is some news from the campaign, including an endorsement from a fairly prominent local Democrat.
The message that democracy works best when all citizens participate – including those reintegrating into society after serving time for felony convictions - is finally being heard by the public, the media, and the U.S. Congress. Whether the message will affect the change needed to enfranchise the millions of Americans who currently cannot represent their communities in the democratic process, it is encouraging to find more citizens recognize the value in voting rights restoration and its impact on rehabilitation.
Amidst the current economic downturn, states legislatures across the country are faced with some of the tightest budget crunches in recent memory. According to the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities,There are currently 20 states facing a combined budget shortfall of $35 billion in 2009, with 8 more projected to enter the red in 2010. With over half the country's states facing immanent deficits and the rest struggling to stay in the black, the temptation in most statehouses has been to "tighten up the belt," slashing spending on crucial social services and trimming back the public workforce wherever possible.
This slapdash strategy is a recipe for disaster. At a time when private spending is already plummeting, laying off state workers and cutting off help to those in need is the last thing our ailing economy needs. A far more humane and farsighted solution would be to seize the current economic challenges as an opportunity to create a fairer tax system; one that would increase state revenues, extend help to those most in need, and ask corporations and the wealthy to do their fair share to help the country through tough times.
I am seething with anger at Romney's speech, which rolled non-Christians (and especially non-believers like myself--atheists and agnostics) under the bus for the sake of portraying Romney and the evangelical Xtian community as being on the same side in an overarching culture war. I want to come out stomping and spitting and embrace the corresponding ideological demagogues on "my side," like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. (See? My reaction is so irrational that I'm ready to don the same jersey as Hitchens, despite his obvious derangement.)
>deep breath<
But that's what Romney wants. His speech is the rhetorical version of a terrorist attack on an iconic building (like, say, the Golden Dome mosque); he wants a passionate reaction from us because victory in the argument over the separation of religion and state is not important to him. What he wants, what he needs, is for the discourse about this issue to devolve altogether from a rational argument about such separation to a verbal conflict between all the "people of the Book" and everybody else. The more vicious that conflict becomes, the better for him, because such conflict will reinforce the (ludicrous) evangelical Xtian sense that they are collectively threatened by a "secular" serpent. The harder we lash out at him with our indignation, the easier it will be for him to make an appeal of unity to the religious right, and thus turn them out to vote.
So how do we respond? Some suggestions:
1) Focus on the enlightenmentfounding fathers' ideal of separation of church and state--especially the ideal that no one religion should be endorsed as a national faith. That language should help remind the faithful that we are talking about multiple, conflicting religions (some of which they disagree with!) rather than a monumental struggle between believers in Christ and everyone else.
2) Take every opportunity to remind people of the weirdness of Mormonism. Not that Mormonism is necessarily any weirder than any other religion, but its particular weirdness creeps out our evangelical right, and we should use their religious bias to our political advantage. It's a wedge, but wedges only work if you hit them with a hammer.
3) Resist the urge to lump all believers together as superstitious sheep. Remind yourself of the people of faith you know who are decent, generous, well-intentioned, smart, and intellectually honest. They don't deserve to be lumped in with Mitt and the people whom he hopes will respond to his dog-whistle appeal. Attacking them all as a single class would a disservice to many people of faith who deserve better, in addition to reinforcing Mitt's frame.
I'm sure there's more to say, but that's all I have for now.
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