Downlo

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.

chiefelk:

In the past 24 hours, two new article emerged regarding the importance of VAWA for Native American women. PLease visit Facebook.com/Save.Wiyabi.Project for more information about how you can help. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/09/1167923/-Hey-House-GOP-How-many-Native-women-will-be-raped-today

http://masculinityu.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/not-in-our-name-a-sobering-realization/

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.

a-more-perfect-union:

From the article:

Leahy explained the provision, probably the least understood of the three additions in the Senate bill: It gives tribal courts limited jurisdiction to oversee domestic violence offenses committed against Native American women by non-Native American men on tribal lands. Currently, federal and state law enforcement have jurisdiction over domestic violence on tribal lands, but in many cases, they are hours away and lack the resources to respond to those cases. Tribal courts, meanwhile, are on site and familiar with tribal laws, but lack the jurisdiction to address domestic violence on tribal lands when it is carried out by a non-Native American individual.

That means non-Native American men who abuse Native American women on tribal lands are essentially “immune from the law, and they know it,” Leahy said.

The standoff over including VAWA protections for Native American women comes at a time of appallingly high levels of violence on tribal lands. One in three Native American women have been raped or experienced attempted rape, the New York Times reported in March, and the rate of sexual assault on Native American women is more than twice the national average. President Barack Obama has called violence on tribal lands “an affront to our shared humanity.”

Of the Native American women who are raped, 86 percent of them are raped by non-Native men, according to an Amnesty International report. That statistic is precisely what the Senate’s tribal provision targets.

The title seems to be a bit misleading. I haven’t seen the study this piece is based on, but given what they say here, it looks like everyone does better under a Democratic administration, not just minorities or the poor. But Republican presidencies tend to be especially bad for minorities and the poor:

Under Democratic presidents, the incomes of black families grew by an average of $895 a year, but only by $142 a year under Republicans. Across 26 years of Democratic leadership, unemployment among blacks declined by 7.9%; under 28 years of Republican presidencies, the rate increased by a net of 13.7%. Similarly, the black poverty rate fell by 23.6% under Democratic presidents and rose by 3% under Republicans.

The results for Latinos and Asians, though based on fewer years of data, show the same pattern. For example, Latino incomes grew an average of $627 a year under Democrats and fell by $197 a year under Republicans. The data similarly show that the living standards of Asian Americans have improved under Democrats and stagnated under Republicans.

More important, these gains do not come at the expense of whites. On average, white incomes have similarly grown, and white joblessness and poverty have likewise declined, under Democratic administrations. These numbers show that economic condition need not be a zero-sum game pitting races and ethnicities against one another.

[…]

First, even accounting for the overall state of the economy and other longer-term trends in well-being, partisan differences persist. When controlling for inflation and changes in the gross national product, and accounting for other factors such as oil prices and the proportion of adults in the workforce, we find similarly large gains for minorities under Democrats and equally sharp losses under Republicans.

Second, these partisan trends are remarkably consistent. Black incomes grew in 77% of the years under Democratic control, while black poverty and unemployment declined 88% and 71%, respectively. In sharp contrast, blacks lost more often than not under Republican administrations.

Finally, the longer Democratic administrations are in office, the more they appear to help blacks and other minorities experience economic gains. As Republican presidents stay in office longer, however, the fortunes of minority groups increasingly suffer.

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….

I didn’t realize that triggering court challenges is the point of extreme anti-choice legislation:

Ohio Republicans this week gave up on their so-called “heartbeat” bill, which would have banned abortions so early that many women might not realize they were pregnant by the time they needed to make a decision. You might think Ohio Republicans pulled their bill because voters sent a strong enough signal this month that restrictive social policies do not make for a winning agenda.

But that’s not why. The point of a bill like Ohio’s is to get sued over. Backers want supporters of abortion rights to challenge the law in court, and the higher the court, the better. With President Obama now in charge of picking Supreme Court nominees for the next four years, Ohio Senate President Tom Niehaus (R) decided he didn’t like his chances. From the AP:

Ohio anti-abortion activists were fiercely divided over the bill, with some fearing a court challenge could undo other abortion restrictions already in place.

“The risk became, do you send a bill to the U.S. Supreme Court that has the potential to undermine all of the good work that the right-to-life community has done over the previous decades?” Niehaus said. “Could it have undone Roe v. Wade? I don’t know the answer to that question. That appeared to me to be an extreme risk to take, and I was not willing to take that risk.”

The Obama reelection has set back the national anti-choice agenda for another 4 years at minimum and perhaps much longer if he ends up appointing another Supreme Court justice or two.

think-progress:

Also see: 19 white men.

Lest you get the idea that overly suspicious Maine GOP chairman Charlie Webster has something against black people, think again. “I know black people,” Webster tells TPM. “I play basketball every Sunday with a black guy.” Besides, Webster wasn’t trying to single out black voters. There was also that one Chinese guy who apparently voted without being cleared first by the White Man:

“If you live in a town of a few hundred people and you go to the post office every day, if there’s someone who doesn’t look like you, you usually know that,” Webster said. “And that’s why when folks called me and said, ‘Where did this Chinese man come from? We don’t have any Chinese people here. Where did they come from?” Well, I don’t know! It’s a good point.”