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Anti-Gay Tennessee Group Whines About Inclusive Insurance Agency | The Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT) is upset at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee for making sure its suppliers have non-discrimination policies that are inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity. Alleging the insurance agency was quietly joining the “culture wars” by showing a “cultural acceptance of homosexual conduct,” FACT’s President David Fowler suggested BlueCross BlueShield “trade in its traditional blue for a rainbow of colors.”

Climate Progress

Spokesman: Rick Perry’s Climate Denial Impervious To Evidence Of Texas Climate Disasters

By Brad Johnson on Sep 8, 2011 at 5:37 pm

This week, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) left the campaign trail to respond to wildfires in Texas that he described as “surreal” and “as mean-looking as I’ve ever seen.” The fires, fed by a summer of heat and drought far beyond anything Texas has ever experienced before, have destroyed over 1,000 homes.

“The science is not settled on this,” Perry said at last night’s GOP debate, rejecting the fact of manmade global warming. “Just because you have a group of scientists who stood up and said here is the fact,” comparing himself to Galileo, who was persecuted by religious leaders. Perry responded earlier this year to the Texas drought — then much weaker — by issuing an official proclamation to pray for rain.

ThinkProgress reporter Scott Keyes questioned the Perry campaign about whether the extreme heat, drought, and fires in his state have influenced Perry’s belief that global warming is a hoax concocted by scientists to get money. Mark Miner, Perry’s national press secretary affirmed that the “natural disaster” “doesn’t change his position”:

No, I mean this is a natural disaster going on in Texas right now. It’s a terrible situation. It doesn’t change his position. There are differing views. As president, you shouldn’t listen to one group and change all of our policies that are going to kill jobs just for the sake of one group.

Watch it:

Asked again if he sees a connection between global warming and the types of droughts and wildfires we’ve seen, Miner said that he thought the fires might have been started by arson, completely ignoring the question of how Texas got so dry and hot that its fires have become overwhelming.

Texan climate scientists do not agree with the Perry campaign, unsurprisingly. “We can be confident we’ve made this hellish summer worse than it would have been,” Texas A&M’s Dr. Andrew Dessler told NPR News about the effect of greenhouse pollution on Texas. Because of global warming pollution, Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon told ThinkProgress, “evaporation has been enhanced, soils and plants dried out faster, streamflow declined faster, and temperature records were easier to break.”

Justice

Perry Campaign Repeats False Claim That Rick Perry Never Said Social Security Is Unconstitutional

By Ian Millhiser and Scott Keyes on Sep 8, 2011 at 5:30 pm

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Republican presidential debate in Simi Valley, California.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) just doesn’t know what to do with his radical book arguing that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. The Perry campaign has alternatively embraced the book, distanced itself from it, run away from voters asking him about it, and misrepresented what it says.

ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes caught up with Rick Perry’s campaign manager yesterday, and learned that Team Perry is back to simply not telling the truth about what their candidate believes:

KEYES: Does the governor still think that Social Security exists at the expense of the Constitution?

PERRY SPOX: In the book he never said — he didn’t say it was unconstitutional. Is that what you’re getting at?

KEYES: Well, just that he wrote that Social Security exists at the expense of the Constitution.

PERRY SPOX: He believes Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and that we’ve got to address it. We’re starting a national conversation.

Watch it:

For the record, here is the passage in Fed Up! where Rick Perry says that Social Security is unconstitutional:

There is no ambiguity in this passage. Nor is there ambiguity in a subsequent interview where Perry reiterated his belief that Social Security and Medicare violate the Constitution:

I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in [the Constitution] were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that.

Simply put, the Perry campaign needs to stop misrepresenting what their candidate believes.

Yglesias

Climate Civil Disobedience Has A Long Way To Go

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 8, 2011 at 5:29 pm

I keep meaning to write something about the Tar Sands Action protests that had been going on by the White House and then I keep forgetting. And that on its own really sums up the only point I have to make, which is simply that even though these protests have a civil disobedience element to them — a number of celebrities have gotten themselves arrested — they’re not really having the impact of civil disobedience.

My office is maybe three or four blocks from the White House and the only sign of these actions that I’ve noticed has been on Twitter or in my RSS reader (admittedly, this is my main form of interaction with the world so it’s not nothing). Nothing about life in the nation’s capital is actually being disrupted or inconvenienced here.

And that, as I understand it, has traditionally been the point of civil disobedience. It’s one thing to have a sign posted saying your lunch counter is segregated. It’s another thing to have your police department and jails and courts constantly tied up with efforts to enforce segregation. A brave and determined minority of people can, with sufficient commitment, make the price of continuing the status quo much higher than it was pre-disobedience. And that can change things. At this point, I think it’s pretty clear that if a serious climate measure is ever going to get back on the agenda, it’s going to take something like that. Not people holding signs or doing mock arrests, but real disruption and disorder that creates a sense of crisis. A relatively small group of people willing to get themselves arrested could, for example, grind the rush hour traffic of a major city (Washington, DC even!) to a halt. We’ve seen various small steps in that direction, of which these Keystone XL protests are the latest example, but I think nothing will change until we go several paces further down that road.

NEWS FLASH

Berwick To Become First Medicare Head To Enroll In Medicare | Medicare chief Donald Berwick turns 65 tomorrow and will become “the first head of the federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled to be a beneficiary at the same time,” Kaiser Health News’ Phil Galewitz reports. “I look forward to it,” he said of joining Medicare. “I am lucky, I am employed and love my work and have no plans to retire. I see myself working for a long time, but it’s good to know Medicare is there. It’s security and it feels safe.”

Alyssa

‘Deadwood,’ The Television Renaissance, And Gender; Or, Calamity Jane Is Brienne Of Tarth

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 8, 2011 at 5:22 pm

I’m behind on my Deadwood watching, but rather than leave you bereft on a Thursday, I wanted to think a bit about how the show fits into a framework Amanda Marcotte lays out in a provocative, and I think largely convincing, essay arguing that the defining feature of our current golden age of television is an examination of uneasy and untenable ideas about masculinity.

There’s no question that many of the great shows have put men squarely in the center of the frame, and featured women making critical, brittle decisions around them and in relation to them. Carmela Soprano and Skyler White are fascinating tragic figures, women, and most importantly wives, who have contemplated betraying their husbands, shedding that mantle of matrimony and becoming independent, morally integrated people, but who ultimately declined to act. The most arresting image of this season of Breaking Bad, for me at least, has been the sight of Skyler flipping coins at the Four Corners to determine if she should leave her increasingly monstrous husband and, resisting her own fate, pushing the coin back to New Mexico every time. Examining how men embrace, or run from, or reform their own masculinity is a first-order question for feminists in part because it determines what women have to react to, the space left for us to form our own identities, the things we will inevitably have to deal with and resolve as we continue our quest for equality.

But Deadwood shows us a world where the men at the center of the frame — and the show has a less rigid main character than the other shows on Amanda’s list — spend a lot of time tailoring their expressions of masculinity to the presence of women, and women struggle with the opportunities to redefine themselves that, if not exactly expansive, are broader on the frontier than they were at home. I’m not done with the show, and obviously there are falls to come. But watching Alma Garrett kick her drug addiction, put off her widow’s mourning, make love to Seth Bullock, plot revenge with Whitney Ellworth, and curse E.B. Farnum, claiming the territory of masculine crudeness and dark thinking for her own, is glorious. Trixie may be my favorite female character in the age of prestige television, vulnerable and striving, cautious of liberation, aware that there is always a price to be paid and suspicious of Sol Star, a man who wants to subvert the economy of desire. And Calamity Jane is Brienne of Tarth, more wedded to conceptions of honor than anyone around her, even if she can’t live up to her astronomically high standards.

Unlike all of the other television shows that define the golden era, programs in which the rules of business and of life are fixed, sometimes constricting to the point of physical and psychic death, Deadwood is about the creation of those rules in gender, and law, and business, the moments when we succeed and fail to make our own revolutions. It’s critical that we contemplate our cages, both the ones we’ve made ourselves and the ones designated for us. But the stories about what we do or don’t do in the moments when everything could be different are just as powerful.

Security

CHART: GOP Presidential Candidates Spend Little Time Debating Foreign Policy

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 8, 2011 at 5:20 pm

The Iraq war made its way back in to the headlines this week after Fox News reported that the Obama administration has decided that the U.S. will keep only 3,000 troops in Iraq past 2011 (administration officials have denied that any decision has been made). The news reverberated when Iraq war cheerleaders then attacked President Obama for not pledging to keep more troops there (an effort that seemed to ignore what the Iraqis might want). “[The] U.S. troop presence in Iraq is last shred of justification for war boosters,” CAP’s Matt Duss observed on Twitter, “so of course they’ll fight for it.”

But despite the news this week, the Republican presidential candidates mentioned Iraq a grand total of once during last night’s debate, and the reference had nothing to do with the war itself. “We’re spending — believe it or not, this blew my mind when I read this — $20 billion a year for air conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq in the tents over there and all the air conditioning,” Rep. Ron Paul said.

In fact, the GOP candidates spent just 9 minutes of last night’s one hour and 40 minute debate discussing foreign policy, a data point that establishes a trend in this election cycle’s Republican presidential debates:

Why are the Republicans — supposedly the party of national security — not talking about national security? A myriad of reasons, of course, one primarily being that jobs and the economy are the topics du jour. But also, it could be that Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and co. don’t really have much to criticize. Indeed both Perry and Romney praised Obama for nabbing Osama bin Laden and Michele Bachmann had an awkward moment last night when she continued to attack Obama on Libya even though Muammar Qaddafi is no longer its leader — thanks in part to Obama’s foreign policy. “If President Obama had taken the same view [as Bachmann],” debate co-moderator John Harris said, “Qaddafi would, in all likelihood, still be in power today.”

And as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius noted last weekend, Obama got elected in part because he pledged to change the course of President Bush’s disastrous foreign policy. “So what’s happened over the past 32 months?” Ignatius asks, “if you step back from the daily squawk box, some trends are clear: Alliances are stronger, the United States is (somewhat) less bogged down in foreign wars, Iran is weaker, the Arab world is less hostile and al-Qaeda is on the run.”

Economy

Wall Street Bankers Whine That They Shouldn’t Have To Pay For Their Fraud

By Guest Blogger on Sep 8, 2011 at 4:55 pm

Our guest blogger is Peter Swire, the C. William O’Neill professor of law at the Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Here’s another reason for the rest of us to get mad at Wall Street. Even where the government can prove massive fraud in the mortgage market, the finance folks are saying the suits should be dropped.

The suits were announced last Friday by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. FHFA sued 17 major banks and a number of individuals for fraud in the issuance and sale of mortgage backed securities during the buildup of the housing bubble.

In response, a columnist for the Motley Fool has called the suits a “misguided search for vengeance” and “an unnecessary distraction.” An investment banker told Bloomberg that the government should “stop punishing banks.” The mortgage fraudsters should get away, they say, because we don’t want to shake confidence in the big banks that FHFA says committed massive mortgage fraud.

But there are so many reasons why the people who perpetrate fraud should pay for it. To pick two often voiced by conservatives, take “personal responsibility” and “property rights.”

The personal responsibility part is that individuals and companies that signed fraudulent securities filings are responsible for the fraud. That punishes fraud, and deters the next generation of Wall Street financiers when they get tempted to do it again.

The property rights part is that fraud is theft — the fraudster took money from the other party. The banks are trying to argue that Fannie and Freddie were “sophisticated purchasers” who should have known better. But even sophisticated companies can be the victims of fraud — the suits allege that the defendants had detailed facts about the bad mortgages that were simply unknown to the purchasers.

Nor should we accept the idea that the government should stop the suits and forgive all the fraudsters because the markets might otherwise lose confidence in the big banks. Fortunately, this is not the fall of 2008 when financial markets froze and even the best borrowers could not get capital. The economy is not what we want it to be, but U.S. banks have raised many tens of billions of dollars of capital and financial markets are functioning.

Where evidence exists for fraud, the suits should go forward. Charles Keating went to jail after the S&L mess. Where the facts warrant it, this generation of wrongdoers should pay as well.

LGBT

Ed Whelan: Gay DOJ Lawyers Are Prejudicing Briefs Against Religion

By Zack Ford on Sep 8, 2011 at 4:45 pm

The National Review’s Ed Whelan seems to think the Department of Justice is prejudiced against religion because it has gay lawyers working for it. He argued as much in a blog post last week, suggesting that Aaron Schuham and Sharon McGowan — who he has confirmed have same-sex partners — are contributing to anti-religious “hostility” by writing briefs in the case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC:

Thus, insofar as personnel is policy, it may well be that the Obama DOJ’s hostility to the ministerial exemption in the Hosanna-Tabor case is part and parcel of a broader ideological agenda that would have gay causes trump religious liberty.

First of all, the case has nothing to do with LGBT issues whatsoever. A teacher working for a religious-run school was fired because she has narcolepsy, and the case is about whether or not the “ministerial exception” applies to her employer — in other words, does the organization’s religious affiliation exempt it from complying with the non-discrimination protections in the Americans with Disabilities Act?

As Truth Wins Out’s Evan Hurst and Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer point out, Whelan seems to not want gay people anywhere near the law, “lest it get all gayified.” He really doesn’t have a compelling argument to add to the Hosanna-Tabor case — he just wanted another excuse to vilify gay people and President Obama’s DOJ. This should not surprise, as his anti-gay and anti-Obama credentials are well documented in congressional record. In 2011 alone, he has testified twice before Congress defending the Defense of Marriage Act and criticizing the president for not defending it, once in April and once in July. He also has expressed previous concern about gays prejudicing the law, suggesting Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling against Proposition 8 should be vacated merely because Walker is gay. It’s interesting that opponents of equality like Whelan want gays and lesbians to exist outside of the law except when the law limits their rights.

One last point worth mentioning is that Whelan’s assumption that people who are gay are prejudiced against religion is extremely short-sighted. He essentially leaves no room for gay people to be religious, even though many are. This is not surprising coming from Whelan, as it further stigmatizes gays as supposedly existing outside of society’s moral structures while reinforcing the notion that anti-gay religious believers are the real “victims” in the gay rights struggle. If Congress continues to invite Whelan to be an “expert” on laws that affect gays and lesbians, they should clarify that he’s really only an expert when it comes to demonizing gays and lesbians.

Politics

Rick Perry Says It’s ‘Misinformation’ To Suggest He Wants To Abolish Social Security

By Tanya Somanader and Scott Keyes on Sep 8, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Today at a campaign stop in Newport Beach, California, one attendee asked Perry for his reaction to Romney’s charge that he wants to “abolish Social Security because it’s a Ponzi scheme.” Perry responded, “I’d say that’s misinformation“:

ATTENDEE: Romney’s advisers said you want to abolish Social Security because it’s a Ponzi scheme. What do you say to that?

PERRY: I’d say that’s misinformation. We just want to fix it.

ATTENDEE: Are they distorting your record?

PERRY: (No response, shakes his head.)

Watch it:

Certainly, Perry and his campaign camp are having trouble sticking to previously stated — or published — positions. But Perry only need re-read his own book “Fed Up” to recall that he views Social Security as “by far the best example” of a program “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.” On MSNBC’s Morning Joe last year, Perry explicitly said of Social Security, “Why is the federal government even in the pension program or the health care delivery program? Let the states do that.” Unless his own words are a source of misinformation, it is hard to see how he isn’t advocating for the end, rather than the reform, of Social Security.

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