Monday, November 20th, 2017
Nicholas Kristof, Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: Everything is in this column by Nicholas Kristoff will be familiar to SR readers. I have been writing columns making this point for at least 10 years. What interested me, and helped me decide to run this piece was that the awareness of the failure of Republicanism to produce good government is attracting the attention of others who have, it must be said, larger platforms than me.
On the basis of social outcome data, forget about political partisanship, Republicans can't govern, and societies based on christofascist culture values produce a notably inferior quality of life. I used to feel bad for the people who live in Red value states, but the truth is they do this to themselves. Look at Alabama and Roy Moore, or Wisconsin and Scott Walker, or Kansas and Sam Brownback.
Liberals and conservatives have different views of strict moral codes, but their philosophies don’t match their behavior.
Credit Daniel Arnold/ The New York Times
As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach.
This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast, people in blue states don’t trumpet these family values but often seem to do a better job living them.
According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 32 states, those with the highest percentage of high school students who say they have […]
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Monday, November 20th, 2017
Michael Birnbaum and Greg Jaffe, - The Washington Post
Stephan: The leaders of other nations have also noticed the difference between Blue and Red value states and are acting on their preferences. I see all of this as part of the Great Schism Trend, and think the kind of coverage this story gives to this process is going to have a significant effect in the future. Republicanism is a dysfunctional governance philosophy because it is not based on fostering wellbeing but, instead, on some combination of short-term greed about profit, and stacking the system to bias it to the benefit of special interests.
California Democrat and Governor Jerry Brown
BRUSSELS — California Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent trip to the capital of the European Union had all the trappings of a visit by a head of state — he even got an upgraded title.
“Mr. President, welcome in Brussels,” Brown (D) was told this month as he exited his Mercedes van in front of the European Parliament in the spot usually reserved for national leaders. Then he was whisked off to a day of hearings, testimony and high-level meetings in the heart of European power.
Nearly a year into the Trump presidency, countries around the world are scrambling to adapt as the White House has struggled to fill key government positions, scaled back the State Department and upended old alliances. Now some nations are finding that even if they are frustrated by President Trump’s Washington, they can still prosper from robust relations with the California Republic and a constellation of like-minded U.S. cities, some of which are bigger than European countries.
Brown’s 10-day trip to Europe, which ended Tuesday, was just the latest in a […]
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Monday, November 20th, 2017
MIGUEL DE LA TORRE, - Baptist News Global
Stephan: Here is another example of a trend SR has been covering for over a decade that is now beginning to attract national attention, the capture of American Christianity by the christofascist cult. This piece comes from Baptist media, but the issues it raises will be very familiar to SR readers.
Christianity has died in the hands of Evangelicals. Evangelicalism ceased being a religious faith tradition following Jesus’ teachings concerning justice for the betterment of humanity when it made a Faustian bargain for the sake of political influence. The beauty of the gospel message — of love, of peace and of fraternity — has been murdered by the ambitions of Trumpish flimflammers who have sold their souls for expediency. No greater proof is needed of the death of Christianity than the rush to defend a child molester in order to maintain a majority in the U.S. Senate.
Evangelicals have constructed an exclusive interpretation which fuses and confuses white supremacy with salvation. Only those from the dominant culture, along with their supposed inferiors who with colonized minds embrace assimilation, can be saved. But their salvation damns Jesus. To save Jesus from those claiming to be his heirs, we must wrench him from the hands of those who use him as a façade from which to hide their phobias — their fear of blacks, their fear of the undocumented, their fear of Muslims, […]
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Monday, November 20th, 2017
Kathryn Brightbill, Legislative Policy Analyst - Coalitions for Responsible Home Education - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: You have heard me say many times that one of the hallmarks of fundamentalism, any brand of it, is sexual dysfunction, and an obsession with controlling women, often reflected in the lust of fundamentalist men for nubile girls. Roy Moore is the current poster child for this but he is far from alone.
Roy Moore, Alabama Republican candidate for the Senate, pedophile and teen stalker
Credit: AP/Dave Martin
We need to talk about the segment of American culture that probably doesn’t think the allegations against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore are particularly damning, the segment that will blanch at only two accusations in the Washington Post expose: He pursued a 14-year-old-girl without first getting her parents’ permission, and he initiated sexual contact outside of marriage. That segment is evangelicalism. In that world, which Moore travels in and I grew up in, 14-year-old girls courting adult men isn’t uncommon.
I use the phrase “14-year-old girls courting adult men,” rather than “adult men courting 14-year-old girls,” for a reason: Evangelicals routinely frame these relationships in those terms. That’s how I was introduced to these relationships as a home-schooled teenager in the 1990s, and it’s the language that my friends and I would use to discuss girls we knew who were in parent-sanctioned relationships with older men.
One popular courtship story that was told and retold […]
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Sunday, November 19th, 2017
Adam Davidson, Staff Writer - The New Yorker
Stephan: The Republican tax plans, House and Senate, are so awful that they ought to be center stage with the media, instead of being a peripheral story in a media circus dominated by Trump's tweets. It amazes me that the media herd falls for his shiny object chaffing again and again. But they do.
Anyway, I have been looking for a valid data-based assessment in standard English of these tax plans, and found it in The New Yorker. Unless you are a multi-millionaire if some variant of these bills passes, and is signed by Trump, you are about to be screwed big time.
What really stands out for me in this exercise is the corruption and scumbaggery of people like Orrin Hatch. Ethics and morality seem to play no role in modern Republicanism.
Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, co-chairs the Joint Committee on Taxation, whose reports this week make startling reading, or as startling as a series of spreadsheets of tax revenue data can be.
Credit: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg
If it gives us nothing else positive, the Republican tax plan—and, in its Senate form, the health-care repeal—at least provides clarity. There is no debate. The middle class will, in the long run, pay more in taxes than under current law, and the rich will pay less. For a brief moment last week, there did seem to be space for discussion, in the form of a disagreement between the centrist and highly regarded Tax Policy Center and the Tax Foundation, a pro-business group that is generally seen as more biased. Even if poorly matched, having two groups with similar, boring names set the stage for the appearance of a two-handed tax debate. One side says it helps the rich, hurts everyone else, and will lead to a bigger deficit; the […]
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