The Morning Pride: June 15, 2011

Welcome to The Morning Pride, ThinkProgress LGBT?s 8:45 AM round-up of the latest in LGBT policy, politics, and some culture too! Here?s what we?re reading this morning, but let us know what you?re checking out too.

One vote away from marriage equality in New York: “Senator Roy McDonald, R-Saratoga, told the Times Union Tuesday that he will back a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. He becomes the 31st senator to proclaim his public support for the bill. It needs 32 votes to pass the Senate.” Cuomo submitted his marriage bill yesterday. [Times Union]

New York Sen. Mark J. Grisanti could be the decider: Grisanti said on Tuesday that he “was moving from opposed to undecided on the issue.” “It’s something I think about almost every second of every day in the last couple of weeks,” he said. [Buffalo News]

Request to vacate Prop 8 ruling over Judge’s gayness denied: “The presumption that Judge Walker, by virtue of being in a same-sex relationship, had a desire to be married that rendered him incapable of making an impartial decision, is as warrantless as the presumption that a female judge is incapable of being impartial in a case in which women seek legal relief,” the court ruled. [AmericaBlog]

Obama’s relationship improves with LGBT community: “I think that people always took the president at his word that the commitments he made in the 2008 campaign were heartfelt and that he meant them,” said Richard Socarides, president of Equality Matters who does not count himself among the jaded. “I think what we learned about his governing style is that he is very process-oriented. He gets a plan in his mind and there is no changing course. He said at a gay pride event in 2009, ‘Give me eight years.’ A lot of us didn’t want to wait eight years. But two years into it, he has delivered on some pretty important, incremental, pieces.” [Sam Stein]

Education Department stresses importance of school gay groups: A letter from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan affirms that gay-straight alliance groups “should be afforded the same rights and protections as other student clubs at public secondary schools.” [Andrew Harmon]

El Paso restores rights to gays: “El Paso’s City Council on Tuesday reinstated health insurance benefits to gay and unmarried couples as well as other current and former city workers who were the unintended targets of a voter-approved ordinance.” [AP]

Dan Choi still facing charges over 2010 DADT protests: Yesterday, “U.S. Magistrate Judge Alan Kay set an Aug. 29 trial date for Choi on federal charges of violating a federal regulation prohibiting “interfering with agency functions,” specifically disobeying a lawful order of the National Park Service.” [Chris Geidner]

Pat Roberts thinks straight actors are being forced to play gay roles: “…the American people overwhelmingly vote for traditional marriage between a man and a woman, what is it with Hollywood, I mean they are inserting gays one after another, as a matter of fact straight actors are being forced to play gay roles.? [Towleroad]

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Five New York Magazine Stories That Should Be
Movies

New York Magazine just signed on with an agency to represent the magazine as it tries to sell more of its story rights for movies. I think one of the things Adam Moss has done really well is find ways to use local stories to take on national issues, and a lot of those would make pretty excellent adaptations. Here are five recentish stories that have cinematic potential, in no particular order.

1. “I Did It,” Oct. 3, 2010. David Grann’s famous New Yorker piece about the execution of an innocent man is searing, but its villains are also pretty clear, so we can learn a lot about systems from it, but not really much about humanity. But why innocent people confess to doing things they did not do, even convince themselves that they did things they did not do, is complicated and frightening and indict both our institutions for producing false confessions and the nature of what we understand to be true.

2. Rachel Uchitel Is Not a Madam, April 4, 2010. Once, I might have said that “The $2,000 an-Hour Woman” would be a better pitch. But Stephen Soderbergh made it and it’s not that great. Besides, prostitution’s the oldest profession. The story of bottle girls, so-called “half hookers,” of whales, and guys who wish they were whales, has a lot to say about class, and gender. And the story of a woman who lost her fiance on Sept. 11 and ended up as a sex scandal is interesting and uncomfortable in a way that doesn’t quite fit our national narrative.

3. “Sex and the City: The Horror Movie,” Nov. 27, 2005. Because someone needs to make a really great, rich, glossy, insane movie that reminds people that nobody actually lives like Sex and the City, and if they do, something’s very wrong at the heart of it. Because it’s a fantastic story about male obsession. And the cultural references are great.

4. “Everybody Sucks,” Oct. 14, 2007. It’s not really that anyone should make this article into a movie in particular as there should be a Gawker Media (not Gawker-the-website specific) movie that’s a Bright Lights, Big City for a new generation. Sure, Gawker turned snark into the holy grail, but more importantly, by building out news, sports, women, and consumer pages, while adding science fiction and a porn site, Nick Denton (who should be played by Jude Law, right?) reinvented the newspaper for a new generation.

5. “Conspiracy of Two,” Aug. 19, 2007. This story of two artists who got convinced that Scientology was after them and killed themselves would make for a great twitchy, paranoid mystery. Plus, it’s a good art-and-video-game-world business story, if someone took a harder look at the couple’s professional failures and aspirations than Julian Schnabel did in Basquiat (which I saw recently and thought was really not good).

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Econ 101: June 15, 2011

Welcome to ThinkProgress Economy?s morning link roundup. This is what we?re reading. Have you seen any interesting news? Let us know in the comments section. You can also follow ThinkProgress Economy on Twitter.

Programming note: Most of the ThinkProgress team is away at Netroots Nation. If you’re there, you should find them and say hi! I’ll be holding down the fort in Washington, D.C. with our excellent team of interns, but posting will still be lighter than normal.

• After losing a key Senate vote on swipe fees last week, the banking industry vowed to fight on. But Congress seems ready to move on to other things. ?I got other fish to fry, and we pretty well cooked this one,? said Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). [Politico]

• The White House “is considering how strongly to push for extending a payroll-tax break for workers and creating a new tax break for employers to jump-start the economy.” [Wall Street Journal]

• Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf warned yesterday that failing to raise the debt ceiling is a “dangerous gamble.” [TPM]

• With several Republicans saying that they might not vote to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, “the Obama administration is enlisting the business community to persuade lawmakers that a default will have dire consequences.” [Reuters]

• Federal Reserve officials are discussing the adoption of an explicit inflation target, as the Fed looks “to spur growth and reduce unemployment without fueling higher prices.” [Bloomberg]

• New rules for derivatives that were scheduled to go into effect next month may be delayed until the end of the year. [ProPublica]

• The Senate yesterday rejected a measure that would have eliminated subsidies for ethanol by a 40-59 vote. [Wall Street Journal]

• The Wisconsin Supreme Court yesterday allowed Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) anti-union law to move forward, saying “that a lower-court judge who put the measure on hold improperly interfered with the legislature.” [Wall Street Journal]

• Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) “is blocking President Obama?s nominees for two seats at the Securities and Exchange Commission until the agency decides whether victims of an alleged Ponzi scheme are entitled to financial relief.” [Washington Post]

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Corporate Lobbyists Get What They Paid For As
Wisconsin Justice David Prosser Reinstates Walker’s Anti-Union Law

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser

Earlier this year, after Wisconsin voters lined up in opposition to Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) assault on union workers, an unknown candidate named Joanne Kloppenburg started to rapidly close a 25 point polling gap against incumbent Walker ally Justice David Prosser. Realizing they could lose their corporate majority on the state supreme court, corporate front groups — some of with close ties to the Koch brothers — began dumping money into an effort to keep Prosser on the bench. Their corporate cash dump succeeded and Prosser won a narrow victory.

Today, Justice Prosser gave his corporate benefactors exactly what they paid for:

The 4-3 Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion upholding Gov. Scott Walker’s divisive union law shows a sharp partisan divide on the high court. . . .

Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson wrote a blistering dissent of the court’s ruling, accusing Justice David Prosser of appearing to have a “partisan slant” with his concurring opinion.

Although Prosser’s key vote in favor of Walker’s law is a clear victory for corporate union busters, this victory does not have to be permanent. Six of Walker’s GOP allies in the state senate are subject to a recall election next month, and Walker himself can be removed from office next year.

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Breakfast Links: June 15, 2011

? GOP less united on wars.

? “On balance, op-ed writing is a less rewarding activity than blogging, but the promise of a big audience seemed too good to pass up.”

? The UK’s promising approach to bank regulation.

? Texas redistricting plan: “the number of seats won by each party is constant for any Democratic share of the vote between thirty-seven and forty-eight percent.”

? Integrating armed groups in the DR Congo.

? The origins of summer vacation.

? Classic blogging on summer learning loss.

? Class CAP on kids going hungry in the summertime without the federal school lunch program to feed them.

? JL Wall with a smart rejoinder to me on Chernow’s Washington.

? Before and after photos of Japan.

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Republicans don't respect the truth, or democracy

Republicans really do "like nonsense." Jonathan Cohn is right.  Even their own people know it.

Libertarian blogger Conor Friedersdorf says that on climate change the entire Republican presidential field is embarked on a "race to the fringe" thanks to the way conservative talk radio "encourages politicians to make needlessly polarizing statements."

There are many possible positions that Republicans could have taken on global warming, for example, says Friedersdorf.  They could have said climate change may be happening but now is not the time to worry about it with unemployment so high.  Or, they could have said it isn't happening and those who think it is are mistaken.

Instead, the actual position Republicans have taken is by far the least popular with the general public who see the GOP position as both "wildly implausible" and based on "paranoid delusion," namely that climate change isn't happening "and the people who say otherwise are engaged in a widespread ideological conspiracy" to control our lives.

The problem for Republicans is that this implausible, paranoid position happens to be the most popular one with their base.

"By caring about the symbolism of issues far more than policy outcomes, the GOP is ensuring its eventual nominee will find it harder to win a general election," says Friedersdorf.

Funny, that's exactly what New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks said yesterday in his plague-on-both-your-houses column. Brooks offered a defensible, if mostly conservative, program for digging out of the recession that stood in sharp contrast to the demented Republican Party's own "growth agenda" of tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts that Brooks finds "stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible."

But it doesn't really matter that Republican budgets don't add up or make sense, says Brooks, echoing a point I made last week, since "Republican politicians don't design policies to meet specific needs. They use policies as signaling devices - as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal."

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein offers another example of Republican disregard for the truth in the extreme tactics used by Republicans to prevent implementation of the recently enacted Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

At the same time Republicans do everything in their power to defund and destroy those who might "dismantle firms that are about to detonate the financial system," Klein says they seriously try to pass themselves off as "anti-bank" with their own bank-hating populist base.

Since Republicans have not yet relinquished their self-appointed role as interpreters of what "the American People" want and believe, Klein finds it odd that Republicans would side with a Wall Street constituency that polls show the public rates about as highly "as the guy who ran over your dog when you were a kid, or the boss who fired you from your first job."

What Republican's servile attentiveness to the demands of bankers shows, at a time when almost 70% of Americans think banks have too much power, is that Republican's "substantive positions are meaningless," says Klein, since Republicans will pretend their agenda is anti-bank "even though it echoes the banks' agenda almost precisely."

When pressed for alternative financial reforms, Republicans mindlessly repeat their FOX News-approved talking point that Fannie, Freddie and the Consumer Reinvestment Act of 1977 were wholly responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008 and that Wall Street had nothing to do with it.

While thoroughly discredited, that position "has become such conventional wisdom on the Republican side of the aisle that they think, though can't clearly say, that regulation of Wall Street isn't really needed. The problem was Washington, and you can't solve that with more Washington," says Klein.

And then there is Tim Pawlenty, whose deficit-reduction plan is so transparently partisan and pandering that it's made him a laughingstock with commentators both left and right.

The non-partisan Tax Policy Center said Pawlenty's tax cuts will cost $11.6 trillion over the next decade with nearly all of those benefits going to the rich. Nevertheless, Pawlenty has resorted to defending his preposterous claims by recycling the most laughable of supply side economics' many debunked myths.

"Keep in mind, whether it be the Bush tax cuts, the Reagan tax cuts, or other tax cuts, they always produce an increase in revenue," Pawlenty told FOX News with a straight face. "There's no dispute about that.... We don't have to guess what will happen to revenues if we do bold tax cuts, and mine are amongst the boldest in the modern history of the country. We saw that the revenues increased dramatically because of President Reagan's tax cuts, same with Kennedy, same to significant extent under President Bush the second. So it's not a question of whether revenues are going to go up. They will."

Absolutely none of this is true and Pawlenty knows it. The record of debt, and where it comes from ever since supply-side became conservative religion, is well known and irrefutable. But we've become so inured to right wing nonsense from conservatives who simply make stuff up that it's not even news anymore when they offend the truth. Perhaps that's because we've all becomes Stockholm Syndrome victims ourselves - not as hostages of kidnappers this time but as targets of the blatant falsehoods and fabrications that a right wing movement will tell whenever it thinks a Big Lie will enhance its power, protect its interests or advance its conservative agenda.

We've even adopted cute little slogans to explain all this away, such as the idea that liberals live in the "reality based community" while conservatives inhabit a "faith based" one.

But the contempt which contemporary conservatives seem to have for the truth is neither charming nor harmless, and here is why.

Democracy is not just a system of political mechanics. It's a mindset. If the Constitution is the hands, feet, skeleton and muscular system of our body politic, the Bill of Rights is its soul.

There is a reason the Founding Fathers made freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly - freedom of the mind, spirit and conscience, in short -- the subject of the very first amendment in their Bill of Rights. By enumerating these political guarantees right from the start, the Founding Fathers hoped to create a republic governed by the head and not the gut or the spleen. They wanted a republic whose politics would be fought out using reason and science, rules of evidence and fair debate, rather than ignorance, prejudice, superstition and the lies which inevitably attach themselves to self-interest.

So, isn't it fitting that the right wing corruption of American politics would begin with the corruption of the First Amendment itself?  

The Counter-revolutionary radicals of the Republican Party have tried to transform the First Amendment's guarantee of a freedom TO associate into a constitutional justification for racial discrimination in which racists and bigots are given a corresponding right NOT to associate with people who look and think differently from them. In the minds of the right, the amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion has been re-christened as the freedom to impose one's religion on others. And, among right wing conservatives, freedom of speech has become a barrier to free expression as it is used to justify repealing the Fairness Doctrine so that right wing broadcasters can mislead and deceive tens of millions of Americans without the impediment of rebuttal or correction.

The Tea Party has made a cult out of hero-worship for the Founding Fathers in much the same way that ancient tribal societies once created early religions based on the worship of dead ancestors. But the American Republic was not created by those who thought "Truth" was already known or held in safe keeping by privileged and self-perpetuating elites. America was created by those who thought "Truth" was the product of a never-ending process and that societies were better off when people of very different backgrounds, experiences and views searched for that truth together.

Democracy is simply not possible as an intelligible form of government except upon the basis of principles of public behavior that Walter Lippmann once summarized as the "traditions of civility."  

And the most important of these - the "sovereign principle of the public philosophy" as he called  them -- is that we live in a rational order in which sincere inquiry and rational debate are what we use to help us distinguish the true and the false, the right and the wrong.

"Rational procedure is the ark of the covenant of the public philosophy," said Lippmann. "There is no set of election laws or constitutional guarantees which are unchangeable. What is unchangeable is the commitment to rational determination."

Only in the maniac minds of right wing conservatives, who think they have a god-given right to deceive, is it considered a violation of free speech to use the law to deny them the pleasure of suppressing the free speech of others.

Modern conservatives and the Republican Party they control are unfit for democracy. This is not because their ideas about debts and taxes, spending and war, faith and science disqualify them from democracy, however obnoxious those ideas might be.  

No, what disqualifies conservatives from popular politics is their lack of respect for impartial truth, for fair comment and free debate and for values that are superior to party -- all of which shows that conservatives simply lack the discipline for democracy or even the desire for it.  


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licans-dont-respect-the-truth-or-democracy

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Letting Go

Earlier in the week, I learned an important lesson. The effect was an abrupt about-face that revealed my own flaws and also granted me an opportunity to gain greater wisdom. For over a year, I have been actively involved in almost every aspect of the[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Docudharma/~3/VQMHS4H4_HE/letting-go

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Prison Privatization as Political Payback

Across the country, politicians have been selling off public assets to private businesses in exchange for hefty campaign contributions and sweetheart deals. The politicians claim they are saving tax dollars, but when the real costs are examined, it?s[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/UH33k0izsCY/

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Just Some of 'Lessons of War' Not Learned!!

And now we're over a decade of oh so many lessons not learned and in not one but two theaters of with a third front being bombed and invaded right next door to one of the two and joined with NATO in bombing another that the previous administration had[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Docudharma/~3/Gc6ihdFgaHw/just-some-of-lessons-of-
war-not-learned

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JPMorgan Chase Screws Alabama County

JPMorgan Chase exploded an Alabama county's budget along with corrupt politicians. MSNBC host Cenk Uygur explains how the bankers suffered no consequences.   [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mydd/~3/zTM6Q4opE2s/jpmorgan-chase-screws-alabama-
county

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