Their only saving grace is that they’re hilariously stupid. Many movement conservatives act like splooting FOX ‘news’ and GOP talking points all over a conversation without actually engaging opposing arguments means they’ve automatically won. Those dudebros in the previous post were basically doing an end zone dance while they were still in the parking lot.
Jindal's selective concern for the poor
Jindal and his allies want the public to see them as entirely sincere. They’re not trying to crush teachers’ unions, and they’re not on a privatization crusade, intent on destroying public institutions. They just want to help low-income children, even spending public funds to advance their goal.
But their purported concern for the poor is literally unbelievable. When the issue is health care and housing, Jindal and other conservatives say struggling families should rely on the free market and their capacity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. When the issue is education, suddenly the right cares deeply about disadvantaged children and is eager to “help.”
When Jindal and other school voucher advocates are ready to assist “poor and disadvantaged” families in ways that don’t undermine public schools and teachers’ unions, I’ll gladly revisit the debate. Until then, this looks a lot like a scam.
How conservatives can regain popularity in America's inner cities
This article kind of made my evening. The four-part plan (written by some conservative author I’ve never heard of):
- Tougher sentences for gang members
- Less unions
- No more teachers’ unions
- More charismatic candidates
So not only is any talk of a ~Republican civil war~ totally bullshit because everyone is still agreeing on the same set of principles but also it’s pretty clear that this is how Democrats can keep campaigning on a gradually eroding status quo and getting elected because holy eff if a key plank your opponent’s strategy is literally just “more charismatic candidates” then the bar is pretty damn low.
Hahaha they’re so screwed.
I have seen similar articles and ideas from conservatives since the day after the election. The ones who have been saying there’s some sort of civil war among conservatives have largely been moderates and liberals (wishful thinking, probably). Conservatives truly believe they’re completely right about everything and that what they need to do is figure out how to trick convince all the folks out there who didn’t vote for them.
Dear Conservatives: Your Opposition to Family Planning Comes with a Huge Price Tag
That deep-held distaste for women’s health providers led Texas lawmakers last year to slash $73 million from all of its family planning services and shift the money to other areas of the budget. This blunt instrument hit all of the state’s women’s health providers, but was meant to target Planned Parenthood and deny it taxpayer dollars—even though the clinics that received state subsidies for care never performed abortions.
This may be in line with their staunch opposition to what they see as a baby-killer, but that ideology comes with quite the price tag. News has surfaced that for the two-year period between 2014 and 2015, poor women are expected to deliver nearly 24,000 babies that they wouldn’t otherwise have had if they had access to state-subsidized birth control. Those extra births will cost taxpayers as much as $273 million, with between $103 million to $108 million of that hitting the state’s general revenue budget alone. Much of the cost comes from caring for those infants through Medicaid.
“The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste”
During the 1960s, campaign advertising appeared on some unusual consumer products. This can of “Gold Water” was made in support of Republican Candidate Barry Goldwater.
The Democrats also had cans of “Johnson Juice” for Lyndon B. Johnson.
Cheers!
-from the Truman Library
“Mmmm…tastes like freedom!”
But let’s keep in mind the choice Schnatter is really offering us. By avoiding the health care reform law through paying less to his employees as a result of cutting back their hours, Schnatter is only increasing the costs that you and I pick up when his employees—having no health insurance—show up at the emergency room for basic care because they have nowhere else to go. Thus, while Mr. Schnatter is deeply distressed by the notion of taking some responsibility for the health of the very employees who make his business work so that he can earn millions, he is perfectly happy to have you and I subsidize his profits by allowing us to pick up the cost of health care for his workers because he will not.
Conservatives are vicious assholes
CC: everyone who says “wahhhhh i don’t want to pay for your birth control”
Birth control makes sense economically
The crazy thing is that I’m pretty sure the GOP knows this. That’s how bad they want to control us and our bodies. That’s how afraid they are…
Then again, if you pay attention to what happened in the senate today (re: the UN Disability Treaty), this does seem about right, unfortunately. That’s why we gotta keep the momentum from this past election.
You’re implying your unplanned pregnancies should be costing us ANYTHING.
Protip - you spread your legs and get knocked up? That is NOT my god damn fault nor is it my responsibility to take care of it. Handle it yourself. Learn to put a condom on your boytoy. Or hey, if you really can’t afford to have a kid at all, and you dont think condoms are good enough (ie: they can still fail and you cant take the risk of them not working), then heres a funny little fact for you. Sex? Yeah you know, sexual intercourse? its 100% optional. Yeah funny that, isnt it? You dont HAVE to have sex. You can literally NOT have sex and shockingly enough, you WONT die. I know, weird right?
So here is a better answer for you than “hur its economically wise for you to pay for THIS than for THAT.” Its not economically wise for me to pay for EITHER of them, and more to the point it is not my responsibility to pay for either, or rather it is not the GOVERNMENT’S job to do so using MY money. it is YOUR responsibility to handle your life. If you cant have a kid, you shouldnt be having kids, if you’re in SUCH a bad spot you cant risk getting pregnant at all? Then dont have sex. But that might mean you have to sacrifice something in your life like an adult rather than childishly demand you have your cake and eat it to.
Now, heres another funny fact. When you stop taxing the rich and making them pay their money in to the government to fund programs they disagree with? They end up giving MORE money to charities as a result. And those charities often (if not always) do a better job allocating funds and helping society than the government will ever do. Meaning for those kids who do get born and the mothers really tried to not get pregnant (ie: not the morons who have unprotected sex and then go “whoops damn, i didnt WANT to get pregnant”)? There will be even more funding to help them and their children.
Oh right one last tiny little fact to talk about. 11 BILLION dollars may sound like a WHOLE lot of money. But we bring over 2.2 TRILLION dollars a year in revenue into the government. Thats 2,200 BILLION dollars. The 11B we spend on unplanned pregnancies? Thats about 0.5% of our income. Less than 1%, barely even half a percent. To put this in perspective, lets look at the median household US income. Its about $45k right? Lets say you make that much. you know how much 0.5% of that is? Right around $200 for an entire YEAR. Thats nothing, hell thats not even the price of a new tv or a video game system, hell most new video cards for computers cost more than that.
My point is this, if you want to appeal to our pocketbooks, you’re gonna have to get in line, right now were worried more about medicare/medicade/obamacare/SSI and other major forms of welfare that make up in total 60% of our governments budget. Your 0.5%? That is pennies compared to the hogs of SSI/medi that alone are over 40% of our budget (fyi: the entire cost of government, all agencies, congressmen, and yes including the military we spend “SO much on,” only make up 40% of our budget in total).
Oh and right, you know what we COULD be using that $11 BILLION on? rather than paying for american women to be ignorant or irresponsible or to continue to coddle them and further their entitlement mentality? We could take that money and send it over seas to aid programs to help REAL women who are suffering oppression. Women who arent allowed to vote, or even go outside without a man escorting them, or men who get locked in prison for being gay, or women who get acid thrown in their face for having an opinion. You really want to crusade for what is “right?” Then we should be spending every penny of that $11B on people FAR more in need of it than american women who just dont know how to keep their legs closed (BUT HAVE THE FREEDOM AND RIGHTS TO DO WHAT THEY WANT! isnt it glorious? You can do with your body whatever you please, and no one is telling you you have to stop, ALL they ask, all we ask, IS THAT YOU TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS)
For those of you who want a TL:DR version?
1) Neither is it my job, nor my responsibility, nor is it the governments job, nor its responsibility, to pay for EITHER your birth control OR your unwanted pregnancies. Telling us one is cheaper than the other means nothing because we shouldnt be paying for EITHER
2) Sex is optional, if women REALLY worried about unwanted pregnancies they’d have far less sex when they were worried about it. But they dont, meaning either they are very very stupid, or they’re entitled morons who think they should get to do w/e they want and someone else should take responsibility for it. So this does not encourage me to want to help you with birth control in any way.
3) $11B is almost nothing in our current government. $11B would fund the government for one day, yes ONE day. And you’re not even talking about cutting 100% of that $11B, just 85% or so of it, that still leaves us paying over $1.5B which means the money you saved us? wouldn’t even run the government for a full day. An appeal to our wallets means nothing in that regard.
4) if you truly cared about “women’s bodies” like you claim to, and thought the awful republicans were really out to “control your body” (fyi: i vote conservative, I dont give a damn about your womb, I dont want any control over it, but I ALSO dont want any responsibility for anything that goes in it or comes out of it, I want YOU to have to take responsibility for what you do with it) you’d stop dealing with government and start dealing with charities who are sympathetic to your cause where the “evil republicans” CANT tell you how you spend your money. Then maybe we could take that $11B and spend it on women who are ACTUALLY oppressed and who ACTUALLY have men controlling them, their bodies, and their lives. As opposed to wasting it on you who just want to whine that other people want to control you just because they dont want to have to deal with the consequences of YOUR actions.
Ladies, its time to open your eyes and take some responsibility.
But of course everything I just said will fall on deaf ears. Because lets face it, the meme about Sarah Fluke or whoever it is that was crusading for BC is true, you DO want the government in your womb, you just want it doing what you tell it to do. You want it to take away the need for you to be responsible for your actions. And thats pathetic ladies. Time to grow up.
I came.
Words of wisdom fellas.
^^^CONSERVATIVES ARE NOT ONLY MISOGYNISTS, THEY ARE MORONS HAHAHAHAHA^^^
Hey people: You pay for other people’s choices no matter. Either you’re paying upfront, like helping to pay for a public option for healthcare, or you’re paying down the line, like helping hospitals cover the cost of the emergency healthcare they have to, by law, give to people.
I don’t know why conservatives don’t seem to understand this. Is there a conservative brain condom that prevents basic economics from penetrating? Or are they too busy slut-shaming like the goddamned white patriarchs they are to fucking read a newspaper?
There’s an unhealthy habit in American politics to lay blame on perceived or actual “extremists” — libertarians and Randians are attacked today in sort of the same way anti-war protesters and “the angry left” were attacked during the Bush Administration — even though they’ve literally never wielded power. Meanwhile, moderates and centrists brought us the policies responsible for the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, the financial crisis, every giveaway to lobbyists ever passed, and most recently a multi-country spree of extrajudicial assassinations carried out in secret with hundreds of civilian casualties. It’s lucky for the centrists and moderates that they have oh-so-frightening “extremists” to distract us from their sometimes criminal misgovernance.
— Conor Friedersdorf, The GOP Establishment Has Done Far More Damage Than the Tea Party
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) is an asshole
Foxx said to the staffer, “This is a ‘members-only’ elevator; can you read?” She then demanded the staffer’s name before the elevator stopped after going just one more floor up. “Get out here,” Foxx supposedly commanded.
Before our insider and the berated staffer exited, the politician exclaimed, “What does this sign say? It says, ‘Members of Congress only.’ ”
But that wasn’t it. The innocent staffer attempted to point out that the sign next to it stated, “during votes,” which is when, our tipster says, Foxx started yelling, “Members only!” as she pointed to signs.
“I’m just making sure we are hiring people who know how to read,” the lawmaker said.
She also once referred to Matthew Shepard’s murder as a “hoax”. Why are Republicans such horrible people?
How to talk like a conservative
Serious (ser’ ee uhs) adj. any of a group of proposals that immiserates large numbers of ordinary people, either immediately or in the future, via cuts to broad-based social welfare programs.
Unserious (un ser’ ee uhs) adj. any proposal that slightly inconveniences rich people via modest tax increases or annoys military contractors via small cuts to the Defense Department.
I sometimes wonder if conservatives are even capable of calling a spade a spade.
jakke replied to your link: I honestly thought this was satire at first
These stats do demonstrate a problem, but it’s not the one he’s talking about. Wages for low-skilled workers are so low relative to the cost of living that you barely get ahead by working.
I’m not an economist, but I’ve read a fair bit about the history of the welfare system in this country and his argument sounded like the same old conservative BS about how poor people need the ‘incentive’ of dire poverty to work. The argument that a robust social welfare system encourages able-bodied poor people to be lazy moochers dates back to colonial era in this country. He should be honest and say that he thinks people who lose their jobs should be punished for not working because they somehow deserved it instead of posting all this malarkey about 100% taxation and ‘incentives’.
It’s Calvinism disguised as economics and I hate it.
What’s behind the creepy conservative obsession with the birthrate
Ross Douthat wrote a predictable, pageview-grabby piece about America’s declining birthrate. It’s not entirely terrible, but he chose to end with an eyebrow-raising point:
Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.
Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.
Well that bit of nuttiness pretty much undermines all of the more sensible things he says earlier in the column. I’m lazy, so here’s a roundup of responses to Douthat that cover all the points that I was going to make anyway:
Echidne-of-the-Snakes highlights the implicit sexism of Douthat’s editorial, as well as its short-sighted nationalism:
Douthat’s piece wonders what might happen if the drop in fertility becomes permanent. He even hesitantly suggests public sector support for families with children but not the kind of support which has been shown to raise birth rates: Paid parental leaves and subsidized daycare. Those were probably omitted because they allow women to work in the labor force AND have more children. But anything which does NOT support women’s ability to remain in the work force will not affect the reduced fertility rates.
Whether high birth rates are desirable, from a global point of view, is a different question. Douthat limits his viewpoint to competition between countries, failing to ask how many people this earth can support if, as is most likely, all of them wish to have a style of living which is currently available for only the wealthier parts of the world.
Jamelle Bouie for The American Prospect points out that there’s nothing ‘decadent’ or wrong about people wanting to enjoy lives freed from the burdens of childrearing, especially given how difficult it is to balance work with raising a family. Douthat’s column seems to be insidiously blaming women, who are still the primary caretakers of children in most households, for not choosing motherhood in greater numbers:
The simple fact is that it’s only been in the last century that a substantial number of ordinary people have been been able to build decent lives free of severe hardship. If men andwomen are choosing to “embrace the comforts and pleasures of modernity,” it’s because they are far preferable to the pains and troubles of an earlier time, where happiness was a luxury for ordinary people.Which isn’t to say that things are perfect now, or even good. But they are substantially better than in the past. That is especially true for women, who seem to be the chief target of Douthat’s disdain.
I think Douthat has accurately described the attitude of modern people in the world’s richest societies. The fact of the matter, however, is that this is only “decadence” to those who—by dint of class and identity—can harbor fantasies of an earlier, harder time, secure in the knowledge that they would never have to suffer.
Lawyers, Guns, and Money notes the nativism in Douthat’s concern over the declining U.S. birthrate:
…while there’s generally a hefty amount of dishonesty in Douthat’s columns, one claim from today’s stands out: “with fertility in decline across Mexico and Latin America, it isn’t clear that the United States can continue to rely heavily on immigrant birthrates to help drive population growth.”
The US currently admits a tiny fraction of those who apply for legal resident status, and the number who apply is almost certainly depressed by the extraordinarily long odds of success, especially for those without a plausible asylum claim or family reunification angle. We could change immigration policy to admit substantially more immigrants than we now do…
Of course, a steady or slightly growing population generated by high immigration rather than birth rates will lead to a more racially and culturally diverse polity. This would be a welcome development for a host of reasons, one of which would be that it would hasten the coming of the moment in which the Republican party is forced to choose between being a nationally competitive party or a party heavily invested in nativist white identity politics.
Matthew Yglesias points out that social conservatives need to shift their views on economic policy if they’re serious about promoting families:
Josh Barro wrote a shrewd column the other day arguing that conservatives need to get over their gut-level hostility to “redistribition” in order to find an intellectually respectable way of making their agenda relevant to middle-class concerns. The sensible parts of Douthat’s column offer perhaps another way of looking at this. In much of the aughts, the GOP seemed to be pushing an unpopular, elite-focused economic agenda and getting away with it by yoking it to a popular social conservative agenda. But with public opinion rapidly shifting on gay equality and the demographic composition of the electorate shifting, that particular combo doesn’t work as well as it used to. The way back could involve shifting economic policy for social conservative reasons exactly as the extensive welfare states in Sweden and France are designed, in part, to specifically promote the interests of people with kids.
So whenever you see someone freaking out about the declining native birthrate in first world countries like the U.S. or Japan or Europe, question why that’s such a bad thing. In nearly all cases, the hand-wringing over fertility is really a concern over increasing immigration and greater reproductive freedom and economic opportunities for women.
Finally, if conservatives really are serious about wanting more young workers to help support an increasingly aging population, then they have to 1) institute a more liberal, flexible immigration policy and/or 2) figure out how to provide incentives for people who want to start families. Not just child tax credits, but things that allow people (especially women) to be workers and parents at the same time, like affordable daycare, universal preschool education, flexible work hours/career paths, etc. Blaming ‘decadent’ individual choices as if they’re divorced from the economic and social realities of having children is just conservative nonsense.
Political dog-whistles don't have an off-switch
This is just common sense. If your party has a long history of using racist coded language to win elections, then you can’t blame minorities for distrusting you when you suddenly start courting their votes. If your party has a long history of using racist coded language to discredit and attack prominent black people, then you can’t blame minorities for detecting racism in your attacks of Susan Rice (emphasis added):
[Jonah] Goldberg and [Charles] Murray…are casting about for a way for the GOP to win over minorities without saying ‘sorry’. Indeed, they are looking for a way to win over minorities while saying ‘you’re welcome!’ in an aggrieved, long-suffering sort of way (this white man’s burden hasn’t been lifting itself, y’know!)
[…]
…If you have earned people’s distrust, by not saying what you mean, you have extra work to do, convincing people you mean only what you say. If white people have found tribalism an attractive value, for so long, why shouldn’t non-whites find white tribalism to be off-putting, to a comparable degree?
[…]
Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that Rice’s handling of Benghazi was plausibly incompetent…Problem is: if you have a history of saying abstract things, signaling something else, you have painted yourself into a rhetorical corner when it comes to saying abstractly negative things about Susan Rice and not having black people suspect you are really saying something else. It’s also obvious why Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, etc. do not remove the suspicion that you are trying to paper over your race problem without addressing it.
It might seem unfair that you can’t just be taken at your word, that you get accused of tokenism when you hope appointments of prominent blacks will betoken your good intentions. But, if you don’t like it, build a time machine, go back in time and kill Lee Atwater as a child or something. It’s a bit like whites who complain about the unfairness of being unable to say the n-word – even though every black rapper can! It’s not exactly mysterious how and why this admittedly superficially unfair state of affairs arose, so it’s a bit hard to see who you could complain against, unless it is your own ancestors….
The GOP made its bed decades ago, and now Republicans are complaining because they have to lie in it. Too fucking bad.
Conservatives blame Liberals for all that ails American socieity, but liberals are not the cause of the destruction of the traditional values and mores that conservatives cherish. Industrial capitalism in the 19th century began their destruction, and consumer capitalism in the postwar period finished it. Liberals are simply those who have adapted to the new, non-traditional social reality given to us by the disruptions of capitalism.
So Now Republicans Wonder What Happened to the Asian Vote?
As the post-election quarterbacking heads into its second month, pundits are now turning their gaze on this forgotten group, wondering, if Asians are so good at math, why didn’t they vote Republican? The fact is that 73% of Asian Americans cast their ballots for Obama – that’s a higher percentage of Democratic support than even the coveted Latino bloc.
David Brooks started opining in the New York Times just a few days after the election, wondering how the “party of work” lost Asian Americans. Because, you know… they are such hard workers.
Over at Slate Richard A. Posner performs the post-mortem. And conservatives are getting in the game, too. The American Conservative is pondering the “loss” of the Asian American Vote. And the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute asks Why Aren’t Asians Republicans?.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a good thing that the media is paying attention to the political power of Asian Americans, even if it is after the elections.
But all the discussion about Asian voters seems to neglect… Asians. As one white male after another opines about why Asian Americans voted the way they did, where are the voices of Chinese, Korean, Indian, Vietnamese and Filipino Americans? Sure, Slate quotes the Pew Research Center report from last summer (that Asian American groups criticized for reinforcing the old “model minority” stereotype and overlooking many current needs and issues) and then even brings up the “new Jews” comparison.
What all these writers seem to have forgotten is that we are still in the room. And we even speak English.
I have seen quite a few articles wondering why such a high percentage of Asian voters (73%) went for Obama instead of Romney and almost all of them have made me deeply uncomfortable. As OP states, they’re nearly always written by white American men who are examining Asian Americans in this creepy, dehumanizing way. Stereotypes abound.
What’s particularly obnoxious about the articles examining the Asian vote is that hardly any of them to mention how diverse the ‘Asian’ demographic is, especially in terms of class, which is what a lot of these analyses focus on. But no—Asians are just an indistinguishable mass. Same with ‘the black vote’ and ‘the Latin@ vote’.
Meanwhile, whites have always been carefully broken down into many distinct sub-racial demographics: soccer moms, rural, urban, blue collar workers, the wealthy, the religious, students and young people. It’s only very recently that I’ve seen main stream media outlets acknowledge the fact that whites—no matter their other demographic characteristics—vote as a racial bloc.
(Source: nomoretexasgovernorsforpresident)
