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LGBT

Apple Violates Own Policy, Allowing Ex-Gay Harm To Persist In iTunes Store

By Zack Ford on Mar 22, 2011 at 4:55 pm

Over 125,000 individuals have joined Truth Wins Out in petitioning Apple to remove a new app from Exodus International. As an umbrella organization for hundreds of “ex-gay ministries” worldwide, Exodus and its app promote the fraudulent and harmful idea that sexual orientation can (and should) be changed. Apple has allowed the app to persist in its store, despite removing a similar anti-gay app last summer.

Apple’s lengthy list of potential reasons for rejecting an app includes many that the Exodus International app arguably violates, such as:

Any app that is defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited, or likely to place the targeted individual or group in harm’s way will be rejected.

Apps that depict violence or abuse of children will be rejected.

Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected.

Apps containing references or commentary about a religious, cultural or ethnic group that are defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited or likely to expose the targeted group to harm or violence will be rejected.

Apps that contain false, fraudulent or misleading representations will be rejected.

Both the American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association (among other groups) have indicated that efforts to change sexual orientation have no scientific credibility (“fraudulent”) and can cause psychological harm to patients. These groups also point out that such therapies are not guided by research, but a will to oppose the full civil rights of gays and lesbians, often increasing the stigmatization they experience (“defamatory”).

Last April, Sue Spivey and Christine Robinson of James Madison University published a study entitled “Genocidal Intentions: Social Death and the Ex-Gay Movement.” The study provided compelling evidence that the efforts of the ex-gay movement, as led by Exodus International, constitute four of the five definitions of genocide laid out by the United Nations.

Exodus International makes no secret of its effort to reach out to youth through its newly rebranded “Exodus Student Ministries.” In fact, in 2011, it put forth a new goal to “Simplify, Amplify, and Intensify” its focus on reaching young people with harmful, fraudulent messages. Exodus’ Student Blog features prominently on the new app, designed to take advantage of curiosities and insecurities young people have about their sexuality.

As of now, the Exodus International app continues to be available for download. It has a 4+ rating in the iTunes store, a rating that Apple reserves for apps that “contain no objectionable material.”

(Check out Truth Wins Out’s video challenging the app. Bryan Safi also chimed in about the controversy on his That’s Gay segment.)

Update

It look like Apple has pulled the app. Change.org reports that “if you try to access the controversial app this evening, this is the message you’ll get: “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the U.S. store.

Yglesias

Households and States

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 22, 2011 at 4:55 pm

In response to my claim that public understanding of fiscal policy is dominated by fallacious analogies between a national government and a household, MF asks for an explanation “Why is that analogy deceptive or misleading?”

Glad you asked. There are a number of reasons, but the main one concerns money. A household typically measures its wealth in terms of money. So many assets and so many liabilities. And it doesn’t just do this as an accounting convention. An influx of extra dollars into your bank account is a real increase in your wealth. Mo money mo purchasing power.

The United States of America also uses dollars as a unit of account for tallying up assets and liabilities, but the wealth of the United States is properly measured not by how many dollars there are but by what real production we’re engaged in and what real stock of assets we possess. We have the I-95 and the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan and the Hollywood movie studios and Yale University and the casinos of the Las Vegas strip and the Mayo Clinic and fertile farmland and many detached single-family homes. Unlike a household, if we as a country want more dollars, we can just print more dollars. But also unlike a household, if we as a country want more stuff we actually have to make more stuff not just obtain more currency. This means that to say we’re “broke” or “running out of money” is nonsense. The relevant issue is are we running out of productive capacity? If we try to boost demand faster than we can produce, we’ll end up with inflation. But if our level of demand is well below our potential for production, then we’ll get richer (have more stuff, more production) merely by increasing our demand to something closer to our potential.

I think people get an intuitive understanding of this if they try to think about a total war situation. In World War II, the Nazi-Soviet tank balance is determined by the quantity of tank factories, the quality of tank designs, the availability of steel and rubber and trained workers, etc. If you somehow “run out of money” but have plenty of aircraft and trained pilots, you’ll find a way to get the pilots into the planes. When people look at the balance of power between North and South in the Civil War they primarily look at available manpower, railroads, industrial capacity, trained officers, etc. The American budget needs to add up in an accounting sense, but the quantity of currency available should never really be the issue.

Culture

The NFL’s Ownership Rules

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 22, 2011 at 4:15 pm

Stephen Squibb’s N+1 piece on the NFL lockout sheds light on something I’ve wondered about from time to time. How come you don’t see more teams organized as co-ops the way the Green Bay Packers are? Conversely, how come you don’t see teams organized as regular firms with shares listed on the stock exchange? Apparently it’s against the rules in both cases:

It is this kind of public—a universally available and voluntary association—that the league outlawed in 1961, when it stipulated that “No corporation, association, partnership or other entity not operated for profit nor any charitable organization or entity not presently a member of the league shall be eligible for membership.” The new rules demanded that each team be owned by at least one person with a minimum controlling interest of 30 percent. As the value of each team has risen, so has the height of this barrier to entry, which has recently become so high as to trigger a kind of succession crisis in Pittsburgh. There the problem was that no individual Rooney child had enough millions to buy out any of the others in order to create the necessary 30 percent share. Acting quickly to preserve one of its prized aristocracies, the league declared some owners more equal than others, allowing the combined 32 percent stake of the two Rooney boys to count as that of one individual.

This kind of weird protectionism all occurring in a league that benefits from an anti-trust exemption and billions in taxpayer subsidies for stadiums. That leads to a good line:

It has frequently been said that in this country we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. What the case of the NFL demonstrates so clearly is that what we have, in fact, is whatever the rich want whenever they want it. And whatever they want always gets the same name, free market capitalism, regardless.

This, indeed, is what you see over and over again. “I can’t dump water on David Koch’s lawn” is property rights, and “David Koch can pollute the air as much as he wants” is also property rights; opposing progressive taxation is freedom and pharmaceutical monopolies are also freedom.

LGBT

Huckabee Supports Bringing Back DADT: ‘Soldiers In The Foxholes Make The Decisions’

By Igor Volsky on Mar 22, 2011 at 4:10 pm

Earlier this year, presidential explorer and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) said he would support reinstating the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and cutting funding off to implement the repeal. Now, his potential rival Mike Huckabee is following suit. Speaking to the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow, Huckabee said that he too would support re-imposing the ban against open service by gays and lesbians:

“I would — because that’s really what the military wants,” says Huckabee. “There’s been some talk that the military is fine with having same-sex orientation people. But if you really surveyed the combat troops, that is not at all the case.”

According to Huckabee, currently a political analyst for Fox News, politicians should back out of the picture. “…I don’t think that these are decisions that politicians should make. These are decisions that soldiers should make,” he says emphatically. “And when the soldiers in the foxholes make the decisions, they choose something different — and we should listen to them.”

A majority of servicemembers who participated in the Pentagon’s survey — upwards of 70% — didn’t believe that gay troops would undermine unit morale or cohesion and the study’s co-chairs argued that combat units expressed a more negative view about open service (40–60% in the Marine Corps and in various combat arms specialties) because of inexperience with gay servicemembers.

“One of the factors that causes a difference in the Army and the Marine Corps combat arms responses when compared to the overall responses is that we find in those two communities, Army and Marine Corps combat arms, — and this is probably unsurprising — that those communities have lower rates of actual experience of having served alongside a gay or lesbian servicemember,” the study co-chair Army Gen. Carter F. Ham explained last year. “We did find in the survey that there is a difference between servicemembers who have and those who have not served with gay and lesbian servicemembers. And I think this may be one of the significant contributors to the differences between combat arms responses and the force overall,” he added.

Ham also rebuffed Huckabee’s suggestion that combat troops should decide the policy outcome. “I can’t think of a good outcome that comes out of that,” he said, adding, “We don’t poll the force about potential military operations. We didn’t poll the army that says, you know, do you agree with 12 or 15 month-long combat tours.”

Finally, it’s unclear how reinstating the policy would work operationally. Reimposing DADT would require gay servicemembers who come out after repeal is certified to suddenly go back into the closet or face discharge. Straight soldiers would also have to pretend they did not know about the sexual orientation of formerly-out gay members. (H/T: JoeMyGod)

Politics

REPORT: Three States Propose Massive Tax Cuts For Millionaires, Tax Hikes for Middle Class

By Guest Blogger on Mar 22, 2011 at 4:05 pm

Last week, ThinkProgress documented conservative efforts in twelve states to shift the tax burden onto the middle class even while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. In three states, conservatives are going even further, proposing massive estate tax cuts for millionaires even as income inequality is at its worse since the 1920s. Here are the details:

MAINE: Tea Party Gov. Paul LePage’s (I) tax reform package would raise the state’s estate tax exemption from $1 million to $2 million — allowing four hundred of the state’s wealthiest estates to escape taxation. At the same time, the tax plan would raise property taxes on middle class Mainers while freezing health care funding for working parents, cutting money for schools, and raising the retirement age for public workers. Republican legislators want to go even further, and are currently considering eliminating the estate tax altogether.

OHIO: In January, House Speaker William Batchelder (R) called Gov. John Kasich’s (R) proposal to completely eliminate the estate tax one of the Republican-controlled legislature’s “top priorities.” But already, the bill has garnered strong opposition from local governments, who depend on estate tax revenue and are already concerned state spending cuts. Even while finding room for estate tax reductions, Kasich’s proposed budget cuts 25 percent of funding for local schools, $427 million for nursing homes, $1 million for food banks, $12 million from children’s hospitals, and $15.9 million from an adoption program for children with special needs.

NEW JERSEY: In his 2011 budget proposal, Gov. Chris Christie called for raising the state’s estate tax exemption from $675,000 to $1 million even while proposing cuts to the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit and homestead rebates for working poor families. And last year Christie vetoed a bill passed by the Legislature that would have raised taxes on the state’s millionaires to help fund property tax relief for Main Street.

Last December, the federal government set the precedent for estate tax cuts when the bi-partisan tax deal signed by President Obama cut the estate tax rate to its second lowest level since 1931.

– Kevin Donohoe

Related Posts

Climate Progress

Media stunner: New York Times partners with Shell Oil to peddle elite access

By Joe Romm on Mar 22, 2011 at 3:36 pm

UPDATE: NY Times replies to this post

NOTE:  The NY Times has responded to this post (see below).  I have updated two phrases for clarity and posted their response and my reply at the end. Now if I could only get them to post my critiques of their climate coverage!

Robert Brulle:  The NY Times is, at best, oblivious to a blatant conflict of interest. How can we rely on the objectivity of this paper when they are co-sponsoring private conversations among an invited elite in league with the oil industry?

NYT Shell 2

What is the New York Times thinking?  The one-time paper of record has partnered with a major oil company to sponsor a private, elite conversation whereby Shell gets to leverage the credibility of the New York Times brand to attract an elite audience to peddle its greenwashing.

You can find that screenshot and full details at www.2011energysummit.com.  Don’t you just love the wind turbines on a grassy field!  How green Shell is!  My favorite part of the website is the constant loop of favicons (website icons) for Shell and NYT, as if they were almost interchangeable.

Read more

Alyssa

Transatlantic Imports

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 22, 2011 at 3:32 pm

Casting an Australian hunk to play Edgar Allen Poe is pure tosh, of course, but I’m glad for Natalie Dormer that she’s landed another pilot that will be high-profile stateside, ABC’s Poe.

I finally knocked off the second season of The Tudors and she, particularly in the arc leading up to Anne’s fall from grace and execution, is the finest thing in it. I don’t know that I think I’m going to continue watching the show—there is far too much of it that is unimaginative historical interpretation. And I think James Frain is rather wasted as Thomas Cromwell. Frain’s got the unique asset of a face that can be equally yearning and villainous, and he tends to get put to the latter use far more frequently than I think is good for his career. I think he could absolutely murder the lead role in an adaptation of Wolf Hall, and I’d love to see him do that. But there’s no greatness in watching him play the petty tyrant to John Rhys Meyers’ unworthy, and uninteresting king.

Dormer’s wonderful too, and she makes a group of ridiculous, scene-chewing performances around her plausible. She and Rhys Myers have genuine sexual chemistry, and the scene where she tells her father off for assuming he was the one who engineered her rise to royalty is genuinely thrilling, a bit of feminist retconning that illustrates the strictures placed on women at the time without feeling utterly ridiculous within their context. As a woman damned by the love she wasn’t supposed to feel for a capricious and nearly all-powerful man, she’s simultaneously composed and raw. I hope Poe gives her some scenery to chew, she’s rather good at it.

Yglesias

Supply-Induced Demand for Military Intervention

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 22, 2011 at 3:29 pm

One of the long-simmering controversies on the Internet is whether increased US investment in counterinsurgency capabilities actually makes it more likely that the US will engage in misguided “regime change” interventions in the future. Watching the Libya debate, whatever you think of the merits of intervening, I think clearly counts as data that supply-induced demand for military intervention is a real phenomenon. If it just weren’t logistically possible for the United States to launch air strikes into Libyan territory, nobody would be saying that our inability to do so is scandalous or irresponsible. But given that we can intervene, it looks to many people like a failure of “leadership” to stand aside.

Conversely, one important reason we’re ruling out ground troops right now is that we clearly don’t have any to spare. But if in the future we develop more “excess capacity” in our national security apparatus, then the number of global problems that appear to call for killing people leadership will go up. Then when people wonder why our humanitarian concern seems so politicized and hypocritical we’ll be urged to “grow up” and stop complaining.

Economy

Majority Leader Cantor’s Economic Plan Includes Huge Corporate Tax Giveaway

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 22, 2011 at 3:25 pm

Potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R) earlier this month endorsed giving multinational corporations a huge tax break by allowing them to bring money they have stashed offshore back to the U.S. at a dramatically lower tax rate. Usually, money brought back to the U.S. is subject to the statutory corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

A group of multinational corporations have launched a quiet lobbying campaign to try ginning up interest in this idea, which is known as a tax repatriation holiday. In addition to Romney, they seem to have won another convert in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who supported a tax holiday during a speech yesterday on his “pro-growth economic plan“:

We must make America competitive again by lowering the corporate tax rate to at least 25% – equal to our competitors. And we will do it as part of fundamental tax reform, which will minimize the impact on government revenues.

Forging consensus on this type of fundamental tax reform will take time, so in the meantime I propose that we allow U.S. multinational companies to bring back almost $1.2 trillion in overseas profits at a lower tax so they can invest in our economy here at home.

Both the corporations themselves and the Republicans supporting a tax holiday claim that allowing companies to repatriate billions of dollars at an extremely low tax rate will spur domestic investment and job creation. However, in 2004 Congress approved a repatriation holiday; it resulted in corporate executives lining their own pockets, not investing in new jobs.

Kristen Forbes, who was on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers when the last repatriation holiday was approved, said that it “didn’t accomplish the stated goals of bringing jobs and investment to the US.’’ In fact, the holiday encouraged corporations to stash more money overseas, because they figured they could sucker Congress into consistently approving tax holidays.

The Obama administration and Democrats in Congress have, thus far, been opposed to the idea of a repatriation holiday occurring outside of comprehensive corporate tax reform. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) said that approving another tax holiday “makes a farce out of the whole system.” Even Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who is usually adamantly opposed to fair corporate taxation, said of a repatriation holiday, “probably from an accounting and tax standpoint, that’s not a good way to go.”

Politics

American Family Association Adopts Qaddafi’s Talking Points, Says No Fly Zone Is ‘Aiding And Abetting’ Al Qaeda

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Mar 22, 2011 at 3:11 pm

For weeks, in a desperate attempt to legitimize his regime and invalidate the pro-democracy rebels, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi has been claiming that the rebels are actually Al Qaeda fighters “loyal to Bin Laden,” and that if there were any civilians involved, they are merely under the influence of Al Qaeda’s “hallucinogenic pills.” On Sunday, Qaddafi’s son warned that the U.N-athorized no fly zone over his country was “supporting the terrorists,” including Al Qaeda. While nearly everyone without the last name Qaddafi has ridiculed the ludicrous claim, Qaddafi found an unlikely defender today in Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, a hard-right social conservative organization. In a blog post titled “No-fly zone aiding and abetting Al Qaeda,” Fischer happily parrots Qaddafi’s message:

Al Qaeda is behind the rebellion in Libya. So this no-fly zone is in fact helping the Muslims who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11. But helping our sworn enemies, especially if they are Muslims, does not seem to be a bother to Obama.

To be fair to Fischer, his stance probably has more to do with his hatred of Islam — not just extremists, but the entire religion — than his feelings about Qaddafi. Outrageous positions like this have earned AFA a “hate group” designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Nonetheless, leading conservatives, such as potential presidential candidates Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee, regularly appear on AFA’s radio show, which is hosted by Fischer. Three sitting Republican congressman have appeared on the show in the past week alone. And potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich secretly funneled $150,000 to AFA Action. Will Fischer’s defense of Qaddafi finally be too much for these conservative leaders?

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