The Heritage Foundation likes to take the pose of being against big government when it opposes health and safety violations to protect the American people. For example, the Heritage Foundation is fighting against the protection of a temporary moratorium on the expansion of offshore drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Heritage Foundation writers worry about the impact on the oil industry.

When corporate interests aren’t at stake, on the other hand, the Heritage Foundation loves the idea of big government. The right wing organization promotes policies to have the federal government intervene in the most personal decisions in life there are, like when and how to get married.

Robert Rector, a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argues in favor of big federal government programs to direct Americans’ decisions about who to marry and when to get married. He writes, “Government could provide factual information on the role of healthy marriages in reducing poverty and improving child well-being. It could explain why it is important to develop a stable marital relationship before bringing children into the world. It could teach skills for selecting potential life partners and building stable relationships.”

Yes, the Heritage Foundation wants to create a big government bureaucracy that would go out into American communities in order to teach people how to select their wives and husbands. How are they going to do it – with a corps of government marriage agents, charged with telling people who they ought to marry and who they ought to dump? Who’s going to be in charge of this new bureaucracy? A Marriage Czar?

Note to the Heritage Foundation: Having the federal government create dating re-education camps doesn’t sound like a very direct way to reduce poverty. Why don’t you support the extension of unemployment benefits instead?

“And, ladies and gentlemen, while I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring. I have here in my hand a list of 205–a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in that State Department.

One thing to remember in discussing the Communists in our Government is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.” — Senator Joseph McCarthy in Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9 1950

“RT @marklevinshow: The list of known members of the left-wing now-defunct JournoList listserv http://fb.me/E3icTBfz” — Sarah Palin on Twitter, July 21 2010

Dear Sarah Palin:

You have repeatedly issued declarations online asking that “Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan” and that New York issue “a decision not to allow the building of a mosque.”

Let’s make a quick check of the facts:

1. It’s not “a mosque.” The Cordoba Center will be an inter-religious community center dedicated to inter-faith outreach, open to people of all faiths in New York City. It will have an auditorium, a swimming pool, exhibition spaces, meeting rooms, stores, restaurants and a mosque inside.
2. It’s not at Ground Zero. It’s three blocks away. A lot of things are within three blocks of other things in Manhattan.
3. There are 14 Christian and Jewish churches and synagogues that are also close to Ground Zero.

Anyone who exerts herself or himself can verify these facts.

You write this week with frustration of your call to ban the Cordoba Center that “This is nothing close to ‘religious intolerance,’ it’s just common decency.” But here’s a helpful hint: if you don’t want to attract accusations that you’re engaged in “religious intolerance,” you might not want to write an essay based on arguments about “sacred ground,” and you might not want to give your essay the title: “An Intolerable Mistake on Hallowed Ground.” It’s crazy, but people might get the idea that you were using religion to be intolerant.

Also helpful on that point would be not asking New York to use its power to ban a building because it is associated with a religion you don’t like. Some Americans are a little touchy about that kind of thing; apparently it has something to do with some sort of “Amendment” thingamabob.

The Republicans in the U.S. Senate (with the notable exceptions of Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe) voted last week against the extension of unemployment insurance for millions of American workers who lost their jobs and are out there looking for new jobs. This vote happened in two stages: first the Senate voted to stop a Republican filibuster against the unemployment benefits. Then, 30 hours later, the Senate voted to finally pass the unemployment benefits package on to the White House for President Obama’s signature.

The Republicans insist that they care about people who are unemployed and like the idea of an unemployment insurance extension, but just don’t want to spend money on accomplishing that goal. It’s a deficit thing, they say. We might be a bit dubious about this claim, considering how many Republicans in the Senate voted to start two wars in the last decade without considering the impact on the deficit, or how many Republicans in the Senate voted more recently to spend billions of dollars on subsidies for the record-profit oil industry and billions more on the construction of new C-17 transport planes that the Defense Department said it didn’t need or want.

We also might be dubious about this claim for a more procedural reason. Recall that there were two votes required in the Senate to pass the unemployment insurance extension bill, two votes separated by 30 hours. There’s a provision in Senate rules that allows a minority to delay final passage of a bill by 30 hours if they so choose. Usually this provision is waived. Last week, the provision was exercised by Senate Republicans.

The delay of final passage of the bill by 30 hours didn’t save the money for unemployment insurance from being spent. After the first vote occurred, final passage was guaranteed, so the insistence on a 30 hour delay didn’t further the supposed goal of deficit reduction. What the GOP’s delay did accomplish was a further 30-hour delay in laid-off American workers getting their unemployment insurance checks.

If the Senate Republicans really did care about unemployed American workers, then when it became clear the insurance extension bill would pass, they ought to have stopped standing in the way, stopped with their delays, and helped Senate Democrats expedite the arrival of the insurance checks in Americans’ mailboxes. But instead, the Senate Republicans (again, with the notable exceptions of Senators Collins and Snowe) exerted themselves to delay help’s arrival, with no effect whatsoever but the further passage of time. It is hard to reconcile the Republicans’ claim that they really do care with their callous behavior on the floor.

The Maine Human Rights Act is a law prohibiting employment, housing, public accommodation, credit, or educational discrimination on account of various sociodemographic characteristics of individuals including race, color, ancestry, sex, marital status and religion. In 2005, the Maine Human Rights Act was amended to prohibit discrimination in provision of credit, educational, employment, housing, or public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. In 2005 and earlier this year, anti-gay forces in Maine made efforts to repeal the anti-discrimination provision by mounting a “people’s veto,” a feature of Maine law that allows laws to be overturned by a majority referendum vote. The 2005 effort was rejected by Maine citizens’ popular vote; this year’s effort didn’t even get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

On Tuesday July 13 2010, the Maine Democratic Party issued a press release claiming that Paul LePage had declared his intention to overturn the Maine Human Rights Act, despite the failure of two successive efforts to re-legalize discrimination against gay and lesbian people in the state. The press release read:

Mayor Paul LePage, has openly called for the repeal of the Maine Human Rights Act. The Act prohibits discrimination based on one’s race, color,sex, sexual orientation and religion. The sexual orientation clause was an amendment to the Act that passed with broad support from Maine voters in 2005.Yet Mr. LePage has said, “My thinking would be it clearly needs to be brought back and reformed. It should be challenged and brought back to the legislature.”(http://recordings.talkshoe.com/rss52956.xml)

Unfortunately, apart from the hyperlink provided in the Maine Democrats’ press release, the text appears nowhere else on the internet. The “talkshoe” link itself directs us to a long xml list of links to dozens of hour-long radio shows by the Aroostook Watchmen, not directly to the source for Paul LePage’s quote itself. The context of the quote is not provided, either.

This meant that it was time for us to run a fact check, and to facilitate that I challenged Irregular Times readers this morning to find, identify, and link to the direct primary source in which Paul LePage’s alleged remark in favor of discrimination occurred. Within hours, you rose to the challenge and provided the link. Thanks, Bruce and Tim.

The Aroostook Watchmen’s interview of Paul LePage on the subject (with then-fellow candidate Bill Beardsley) can be found here: http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-52956/TS-317643.mp3 (I’ve saved a copy to my personal computer and will make it available directly on Irregular Times servers if anyone tries to take the original down). You can listen to Paul LePage’s full remarks on the subject beginning roughly at 1 hour and 3 minutes in, or you can read a transcription of the unredacted exchange here:

Aroostook Watchmen: Would you work to have the Maine Human Rights Act rescinded, revoked, eliminated, whatever your choice of words would be, because the 2005 Human Rights Act is where the sexual orientation question was allowed to sneak under the tent. And without getting rid of the insane wording in that document, there’s nothing you can do. This will come back every time you come around.

Paul LePage: My thinking would be it clearly needs to be brought back and reformed. The law needs to be reformed. In fact, I’m not even so sure that the rules that they’re putting in place now don’t need to go back to the legislature. I think that they’ve gone beyond the intent of the law, and they’re clearly making a law, and in my mind at least I think it probably should be challenged and brought back to the legislature. I think the only thing, Maine’s funny: in the last 30 years you know you hear everybody on the street talking about these type of the issues. And they complain, complain, and complain. But every year we seem to be sendind back the same people we complain about. So it’s up to the Maine people to take a stand. The best place and the strongest place to take a stand is this fall in November. Send a real strong message and change the mentality of the people we send to Augusta. And then we can bring the laws, make laws that have some common sense and common decency and don’t use our children as pawns.

The full quote shows that yes, Paul LePage did declared his intention to undo protections against discrimination. If you live in Maine, it’s worth considering what LePage would do to change the state if he made it into the Blaine House.

1. Have an X chromosome.

2. Also have a Y chromosome.

3. Make babies if you want to, and don’t have babies if you don’t want, because we really have enough babies to go around.

These are the three key steps of authentic manhood. Anything on top of that is really about something else.

All of these statements are true.

Look, in the long run, there is no hope. On an individual level, in the long run we are all dead. Some of us have children, and some of them will have children, it’s true. But the Earth is a finite object with finite resources, and even if we all nibble on celery like nice little rabbits and compost our droppings, eventually the resources of the Earth will be exhausted. Even if we move on to a Moon colony or a satellite of Jupiter, the Sun will explode some day. Even hopping from solar system to solar system will provide no escape, because we can’t travel faster than light and the universe is expanding at an expanding rate: the safe spots for human habitation are falling away from each other faster and faster. Then the universe will begin its long, slow, freeze. One day, the story of us all will come to an end, and there will be no one to tell or hear the tale. Even if there really is a God who brings us all to Heaven, He is such a voluble prat with his floods and lakes of fire that we really can’t depend on Him to keep us around for eternity and not eventually throw another Holy Fit.

While we’re alive, we have to deal with finite resources both individually and collectively. As long as there are people in competition for those resources, there will be different ideas about what to do about them. And as long as people have the capacity for invention, they will have the capacity to invent reasons to mess around with other people and run their lives — either for reasons of actual advantage or for reasons of imagined salvation. So no, there’s no rescue from partisanship and division and contention in this world, either.

But you know, there are better ways to go down the long, long slide into oblivion, and then there are worse ways to go down that long, long slide. Human beings have come up with some pretty awful ways to slide into oblivion. Humanity has come up with the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Killing Fields and the Holocaust and the Salem Witch Trials and the Slave Trade and World War I and the Nuclear Bomb and oh-so much more. Humanity has also harnessed penicillin and come up with septic systems and jazz and water filters and body surfing and sterile surgery and the harmonica.

OK, some people would put the harmonica in the other category, but I hope you get my point. Regardless of the oblivion in which we seem destined to end up, we are here now. History shows us that when people direct their energies toward vicious and violent behavior, the long, long slide to oblivion is meager. History shows us that when people direct their energies toward solving the puzzles of our present miseries, we have the ability to alleviate some of them.

We may ultimately despair, but we don’t have to despair right now. Why don’t we try to stop hurting each other and causing despair? Why don’t we try to do things that minimize the despair of our fellow human beings? We can do this if we try.

By the way, this line of thought is called humanism. Some people say it’s evil.

When you buy one of our sweatshop-free t-shirts, you do more than spread a liberal political message across your chest. For every shirt we sell, we pledge to donate $1 to a progressive political cause and to send another $1 to someone starting up a small self-administered enterprise in the developing world.

This month, we’re combining the two pots of money and sending all of our donation to the World of Good Development Organization (related to but not the same as the World of Good network of Fair Trade shops) — and we’re doing so because World of Good combines progressive organizing with overseas microgrants. The microgrants are directed toward community improvement projects in the developing world, with local organizations hired to implement the projects in order to achieve a second-order infusion of community capital.

At the same time, World of Good seeks to empower the people who make goods and the people who buy goods with concrete information about existing and livable wage standards in countries across the globe. World of Good has a fair wage guide that provides four measurements for “fairness” and allows a person to compare what these fair wages would be to actual wages a factory worker receives in a country. Another project of World of Good is to gather empirical information about actual wages for particular types of jobs in a country. These sorts of information can provide bargaining power for factory workers and the power to make ethical decisions for consumers.

In his book, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, William Bryant Logan asks us to choose between the wood of an oak tree and the metal of the Eiffel Tower. He writes,

“If you put a skin on the Eiffel Tower or gave it branches, the thing would fall down in the first good blow. Iron is harder than wood. This is perhaps the lone advantage of the tower’s structure. But this advantage is counteracted by the fact that wood, though softer, is dynamic, while iron is passive… The oak is generative, the tower parasitic… The oak gives oxygen to the air. More than five thousand species live on, in or by means of the average oak… What does the tower give? A spectacle. To see and to see from. If you had to pick one or the other to emulate, which would you choose?”

Are we truly at a point in history in which we must accept Logan’s dualistic ultimatum, to adopt either a life of iron or a life of wood?

Can we not pursue a mosaic life that incorporates both materials? If we can, how do we decide when the situation calls for one material over another? Which moments are best structured in iron, and which are best left in oak?

Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, in their book Empires of Food, look to past shortages of food in order to learn about the dynamics that have led to famine in the past and identify the warning signs that could tell us when we are approaching famine again in the future. At the core of their analysis is a critique of the belief that the present historical moment has transcended the dynamics of previous generations, because of our technology. They identify three mistaken assumptions by those who suggest that our civilization’s current industrial food systems can protect us from the agricultural crashes of the past.

“The mistake of the modern food empire is to accept three apparently self-evident assumptions. The first is that the Earth is fertile… The second undermining assumption for the stability of food empires is that the forecast calls for sunny, mild weather, with possible showers… Our third mistake is to assume that it’s good business to do one thing well.”

Fraser and Rimas counter these three assumptions with the following observations:

1. Modern agricultural practices deplete the soil at unprecedented rates.
2. The climage is naturally variable, and humans are altering the climate as well.
3. Monocultures are vulnerable to pests and diseases.

If their analysis of our civilization’s food infrastructure is correct, we remain at risk, even as we are surrounded by racks full of Twinkies and frozen pizzas, of famines that could cause the populations of our largest communities to plunge, leading our social institutions to crumble.

If Fraser and Rimas are right, what can we do about it? What decisions can we as individuals make to change the way that we eat, in order to reduce the risk of catastrophe? Must we deny ourselves the foods that we desire, or are there aspects of our hunger that we can work with to support efforts at food reform?

The 2010 Texas Republican Party platform explicitly supports the idea to let foster parents beat the children under their care, “to help alleviate the shortage of foster parents.”

In the same document, the Texas Republican Party declares its intention to prohibit gay and lesbian Americans from serving as foster parents.

Republican moral values.

David Axelrod’s message to liberals who are upset about Barack Obama’s embrace of George W. Bush’s policies: You shouldn’t expect any better. “My admonition would be: Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good,” he said to them yesterday.

The top Obama advisor apparently believes that Barack Obama doesn’t need to do anything more to satisfy the liberals who were Obama’s base of support in the 2008 presidential election. He asks us to look for the “good”.

Barack Obama’s refusal to even consider single payer health care reform. Was that the good we’re supposed to be thankful for?

Obama’s support for expanded offshore drilling – is that good?

Is the “good” Axelrod was talking about the way that Obama sent his lawyers out to argue that homosexuality is akin to pedophilia, and to declare that the President has the right, as George W. Bush said, to keep secrets from the American people even when ordered by a court to share the information?

Breaking his promise for open government by covering up evidence of torture and refusing Freedom Of Information Act obligations is the good we’re supposed to be thankful for?

Is Obama’s work to give public money to support the “clean coal” hoax good?

How about Obama’s broken promise to reform the Office of Faith-Based Initiative’s corrupt system of religious patronage? How is that good?

Are we supposed to think it was good of Obama to continue George W. Bush’s policy of delaying endangered species protections?

Is keeping the prisons of Guantanamo Bay open good?

Is it good that Obama has organized kangaroo court military tribunals and declared that he embraces Bush’s belief that the President can keep people in prison without any criminal charge?

Are we supposed to categorize two record-breaking military budgets in a row as good?

Are we expected to place Obama’s opposition to marriage equality in the “good” column?

How about the continued expansion of government electronic surveillance of the American people? Is that good?

Really, what is this “good” that David Axelrod was talking about? Barack Obama has consistently worked against the liberal vision of what’s good, supporting a right wing version of morality instead.

When we liberals declare the withdrawal of our support from Barack Obama, we’re not making “the perfect the enemy of the good”. We’re merely being consistent in opposing the same old bad policies that we opposed under George W. Bush.

Krissah Thompson of the Washington Post characterizes the coalition of groups forming the new “One Nation” as “liberal,” but that’s not necessarily the best term. Liberals are interested in reforming the political process to protect the constitutional civil liberties of individuals and minimize the prerogatives of corporations to overrule those liberties. The ACLU and EFF are liberal groups. Liberal priorities are not the current primary focus of the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, AFL-CIO, SEIU and United States Student Association, the groups Thompson names as the core of the “One Nation” effort. Those groups, at least in their current incarnations, would be better characterized as “progressive” in nature, focused on ensuring that policies meeting the needs of their membership base (students or workers or ethnic groups) are promoted in national politics. Often the priorities of the two sets overlap, but often they don’t. Apart from the names of the involved organizations, you can tell that “One Nation” is a progressive coalition, not liberal, just from its name. Progressives are comfortable talking about unity of purpose and coordinated action. Liberals, on the other hand, chafe at the notion of being shoved into a conformist, obedient pigeonhole of “One Nation.” Who gets to decide what “One Nation” that is?

Speaking of “One Nation,” if Thompson is right that these groups took 3 months to come up with that name for their coalition, they really should be embarrassed. Somebody might have googled the name and found out that “One Nation” is already:

The name of an American Muslim nonprofit organization;
The name of an American Christian supremacy effort;
The name of a nationalist, socially conservative, white-centered political party in Australia;
The name of a socially conservative political movement in the UK.

Perhaps these progressive groups should have worked for four months on that name.

“I’ve built my career on unpaid interns, and the interns told me it was great.”

– John Stossel, defending the practice of not paying desperate young people for the summer work they do.