American streets are much safer today than they were thirty years ago,
and until recently most conservatives had a simple explanation: more
prison beds equal less crime. This argument was a fulcrum of Republican
politics for decades, boosting candidates from Richard Nixon to George
H. W. Bush and scores more in the states. Once elected, these
Republicans (and their Democratic imitators) built prisons on a scale
that now exceeds such formidable police states as Russia and Iran, with 3
percent of the American population behind bars or on parole and
probation.
Now that crime and the fear of victimization are down, we might
expect Republicans to take a victory lap, casting safer streets as a
vindication of their hard line. Instead, more and more conservatives are
clambering down from the prison ramparts. Take Newt Gingrich, who made a
promise of more incarceration an item of his 1994 Contract with
America. Seventeen years later, he had changed his tune. “There is an
urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population,
with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential,” Gingrich
wrote in 2011. “The criminal-justice system is broken, and conservatives
must lead the way in fixing it.”
None of Gingrich’s rivals in the vicious Republican presidential
primary exploited these statements. If anything, his position is
approaching party orthodoxy. The 2012 Republican platform declares,
“Prisons should do more than punish; they should attempt to rehabilitate
and institute proven prisoner reentry systems to reduce recidivism and
future victimization.” What’s more, a rogue’s gallery of conservative
crime warriors have joined Gingrich’s call for Americans to rethink
their incarceration reflex. They include Ed Meese, Asa Hutchinson,
William Bennett—even the now-infamous American Legislative Exchange
Council. Most importantly, more than a dozen states have launched
serious criminal justice reform efforts in recent years, with
conservatives often in the lead.
Read on...
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Showing posts with label conservatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservatives. Show all posts
Alito Rising: What to Expect From the Supreme Court’s New Alpha Conservative
“The Supreme Court follows the election
returns,” or so opined satirist Finley Peter Dunne in 1901 in language
purged of its original Irish brogue (see Chapter 3 of Dunne’s Mr. Dooley
book).
Back then, the court was headed by Melville Weston Fuller, its eighth
chief justice, under whose enlightened stewardship it handed down Plessy
v. Ferguson, the infamous decision that upheld the constitutionality of
state laws requiring people of different races to use “separate but
equal” public facilities.
What Dunne meant, of course, was that the court was a partisan political institution, often less dedicated to following constitutional values than currying favor with the nation’s elites, and that it was also capable of responding to shifts in public opinion. So it was at the turn of the last century and so it is today.
But exactly how the court reads and reacts to elections is by no means a given. Thus we must ask whether the court’s current ultraconservative Republican majority will interpret Barack Obama’s re-election as a call for reflection and moderation or as a signal to lurch even harder to the right. At least one member of the Republican majority—Justice Samuel Alito—has answered that he sees no reason to do anything but double down on past practices.
Read on...
What Dunne meant, of course, was that the court was a partisan political institution, often less dedicated to following constitutional values than currying favor with the nation’s elites, and that it was also capable of responding to shifts in public opinion. So it was at the turn of the last century and so it is today.
But exactly how the court reads and reacts to elections is by no means a given. Thus we must ask whether the court’s current ultraconservative Republican majority will interpret Barack Obama’s re-election as a call for reflection and moderation or as a signal to lurch even harder to the right. At least one member of the Republican majority—Justice Samuel Alito—has answered that he sees no reason to do anything but double down on past practices.
Read on...
The Conservative War on Prisons
Right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools:
hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform. Is
this how progress will happen in a hyper-polarized world?
American streets are much safer today than they were thirty years ago, and until recently most conservatives had a simple explanation: more prison beds equal less crime. This argument was a fulcrum of Republican politics for decades, boosting candidates from Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush and scores more in the states. Once elected, these Republicans (and their Democratic imitators) built prisons on a scale that now exceeds such formidable police states as Russia and Iran, with 3 percent of the American population behind bars or on parole and probation.
Now that crime and the fear of victimization are down, we might expect Republicans to take a victory lap, casting safer streets as a vindication of their hard line. Instead, more and more conservatives are clambering down from the prison ramparts. Take Newt Gingrich, who made a promise of more incarceration an item of his 1994 Contract with America. Seventeen years later, he had changed his tune. “There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential,” Gingrich wrote in 2011. “The criminal-justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it.”
Read on...
American streets are much safer today than they were thirty years ago, and until recently most conservatives had a simple explanation: more prison beds equal less crime. This argument was a fulcrum of Republican politics for decades, boosting candidates from Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush and scores more in the states. Once elected, these Republicans (and their Democratic imitators) built prisons on a scale that now exceeds such formidable police states as Russia and Iran, with 3 percent of the American population behind bars or on parole and probation.
Now that crime and the fear of victimization are down, we might expect Republicans to take a victory lap, casting safer streets as a vindication of their hard line. Instead, more and more conservatives are clambering down from the prison ramparts. Take Newt Gingrich, who made a promise of more incarceration an item of his 1994 Contract with America. Seventeen years later, he had changed his tune. “There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential,” Gingrich wrote in 2011. “The criminal-justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it.”
Read on...
Study: Conservatives’ Trust in Science Has Fallen Dramatically Since Mid-1970s
Trust in Science Has Also Declined Among People Who Frequently Attend Church
While trust in science remained stable among people who self-identified as moderates and liberals in the United States between 1974 and 2010, trust in science fell among self-identified conservatives by more than 25 percent during the same period, according to new research from Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.
“You can see this distrust in science among conservatives reflected in the current Republican primary campaign,” said Gauchat, whose study appears in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. “When people want to define themselves as conservatives relative to moderates and liberals, you often hear them raising questions about the validity of global warming and evolution and talking about how ‘intellectual elites’ and scientists don’t necessarily have the whole truth.”
Relying on data from the 1974-2010 waves of the nationally representative General Social Survey, the study found that people who self-identified as conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to self-identified moderates and liberals, and ended the period with the lowest.
Read on...
While trust in science remained stable among people who self-identified as moderates and liberals in the United States between 1974 and 2010, trust in science fell among self-identified conservatives by more than 25 percent during the same period, according to new research from Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.
“You can see this distrust in science among conservatives reflected in the current Republican primary campaign,” said Gauchat, whose study appears in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. “When people want to define themselves as conservatives relative to moderates and liberals, you often hear them raising questions about the validity of global warming and evolution and talking about how ‘intellectual elites’ and scientists don’t necessarily have the whole truth.”
Relying on data from the 1974-2010 waves of the nationally representative General Social Survey, the study found that people who self-identified as conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to self-identified moderates and liberals, and ended the period with the lowest.
Read on...
The Courts
The conservative takeover will be complete.
For anyone considering the 2012 election’s importance to the future of the American judiciary, one fact stands out: next November, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be seventy-nine years old. If a Republican wins the presidential election, he or she may have an opportunity to seat Ginsburg’s successor, replacing the Supreme Court’s most reliably liberal jurist with a conservative. That would mean that the Court—currently balanced almost elegantly between four liberals, four conservatives, and the moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy—would finally tilt decisively to the right, thereby fulfilling Edwin Meese’s dream, laid out in his famous 1985 speech before the American Bar Association, of reshaping the Court around one coherent “jurisprudence of original intention.” Meese, who was then Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, wanted nine conservative constitutional originalists on the Court. He may soon get his wish. A 2008 study by Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge, and William Landes, a law professor at the University of Chicago, examined the voting records of seventy years of Supreme Court justices in order to rank the forty-three justices who have served on the Court since 1937. They concluded that four of the five most conservative justices to serve on the Supreme Court since 1937 sit on the Supreme Court today. Justice Clarence Thomas ranked first.
Read on...
For anyone considering the 2012 election’s importance to the future of the American judiciary, one fact stands out: next November, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be seventy-nine years old. If a Republican wins the presidential election, he or she may have an opportunity to seat Ginsburg’s successor, replacing the Supreme Court’s most reliably liberal jurist with a conservative. That would mean that the Court—currently balanced almost elegantly between four liberals, four conservatives, and the moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy—would finally tilt decisively to the right, thereby fulfilling Edwin Meese’s dream, laid out in his famous 1985 speech before the American Bar Association, of reshaping the Court around one coherent “jurisprudence of original intention.” Meese, who was then Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, wanted nine conservative constitutional originalists on the Court. He may soon get his wish. A 2008 study by Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge, and William Landes, a law professor at the University of Chicago, examined the voting records of seventy years of Supreme Court justices in order to rank the forty-three justices who have served on the Court since 1937. They concluded that four of the five most conservative justices to serve on the Supreme Court since 1937 sit on the Supreme Court today. Justice Clarence Thomas ranked first.
Read on...
Harper’s crime bill poised to pass - and Canadians still don’t know how much it costs
Stephen Harper’s crime legislation that triggered last spring’s election could pass through the Commons this week as it makes it way to becoming the law of the land - and Canadians still don’t know how much it costs.
The irony is delicious. Opposition politicians voted to find Prime Minister Harper and his government in contempt of Parliament last March - this was a historic first - for not giving up the full costs of its so-called tough on crime legislation. Now, it is poised to pass the bill and Canadians are still no wiser.
“It is a travesty that the Conservatives have told neither the Canadian people nor the provinces what all this is going to cost - with the slowing economy and big financial pressures all 'round this is even more irresponsible,” Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae told The Globe Monday morning. “Both the jets and the jails put the lie to the Conservative line about being the party of ‘fiscal prudence.’ Ridiculous.”
In fact, it was Mr. Rae’s predecessor, Michael Ignatieff, who tabled the non-confidence motion in the government last March that ultimately led to its defeat. The opposition was also concerned about the costs of the stealth fighter jets.
The Conservatives’ crime obsession is not magnificent
The Prison is the Answer to Everything omnibus crime bill introduced by the Conservative government this week has some worthwhile measures – sometimes prison is the answer – but it also tends to go too far. It gets onto a good thing, such as ending the overuse of house arrest in violent crime, and then can't restrain itself from including non-violent offences such as car theft. Or it decides tougher sentences are in order for drug traffickers and organized crime, and then slaps a six-month jail term on anyone who grows six marijuana plants. (The bill is formally known as the Safe Streets and Communities Act, and includes nine bills introduced by the Conservatives during minority rule and never passed.)
Read on...
Read on...
Republican Gomorrah: The Shattered GOP, Taken Over by Authoritarian Radicals, Is Incapable of Compromise
This is a long interview with Max Blumenthal author of "Republican Gomorrah". I've highlighted a couple of sections. If you're interested in the social/religous context of the "official opposition" in the U.S., it is worth browsing the whole thing. - Tom
"R.J. Rushdoony was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, who came to this country and became a theologian. He's the descendant of six generations of high priests, and he laid out a plan in several tomes for replacing the federal government, the secular government, with a totalitarian theocracy in which functions like road building and medical care and schooling would be provided by the church. The criminal justice system would be turned over to the church and run according to Leviticus case law, so disobedient children, adulterers, loose women, etc., would all be executed.
And, of course, you know, many of the people he influenced didn't take it as literally as Rushdoony did but he, as I said, provided the Christian right with a blueprint of the society they hoped to create."
And this:
Blumenthal: "Sarah Palin was campaigning that day and Bishop Muthee, the self-proclaimed witch hunter from Kenya, who had anointed Sarah Palin in 2005 as she was running for governor against the spirit of witchcraft, was there at a small house in Wasilla. It was pouring rain outside and I stumbled in and the entire congregation was speaking in tongues. And I had heard from other reporters that no media would be allowed, that taking notes was forbidden, that filming was strictly forbidden, so I began speaking in tongues. I'd never done it before so I just started rattling off the names of the Jackson siblings.
And insinuated myself into the congregation and watched Bishop Muthee as he, you know, referred to Sarah Palin as the biblical Queen Esther and then began leading the crowd in a really intense prayer to cast out the spirit of witchcraft."
Beginning of interview:
Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, argues the right is incapable of anything but scorched-earth politics, and are trying to delegitimize the Obama presidency.
Terry Gross: ... The right is trying to de-legitimize the Obama presidency, according to my guest, journalist Max Blumenthal. There's the movement of people who claim Obama isn't even an American citizen, and others who accuse him of being a Hitler or a Stalin. In Blumenthal's new book, "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party," he writes that the Republican Party has gone from a big-tent philosophy to being fully in the grip of its right wing. Blumenthal has been covering the Christian right for six years, attending dozens of its rallies and conferences, listening to its radio programs, and sitting in movement-oriented houses of worship.
Read on...
"R.J. Rushdoony was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, who came to this country and became a theologian. He's the descendant of six generations of high priests, and he laid out a plan in several tomes for replacing the federal government, the secular government, with a totalitarian theocracy in which functions like road building and medical care and schooling would be provided by the church. The criminal justice system would be turned over to the church and run according to Leviticus case law, so disobedient children, adulterers, loose women, etc., would all be executed.
And, of course, you know, many of the people he influenced didn't take it as literally as Rushdoony did but he, as I said, provided the Christian right with a blueprint of the society they hoped to create."
And this:
Blumenthal: "Sarah Palin was campaigning that day and Bishop Muthee, the self-proclaimed witch hunter from Kenya, who had anointed Sarah Palin in 2005 as she was running for governor against the spirit of witchcraft, was there at a small house in Wasilla. It was pouring rain outside and I stumbled in and the entire congregation was speaking in tongues. And I had heard from other reporters that no media would be allowed, that taking notes was forbidden, that filming was strictly forbidden, so I began speaking in tongues. I'd never done it before so I just started rattling off the names of the Jackson siblings.
And insinuated myself into the congregation and watched Bishop Muthee as he, you know, referred to Sarah Palin as the biblical Queen Esther and then began leading the crowd in a really intense prayer to cast out the spirit of witchcraft."
Beginning of interview:
Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, argues the right is incapable of anything but scorched-earth politics, and are trying to delegitimize the Obama presidency.
Terry Gross: ... The right is trying to de-legitimize the Obama presidency, according to my guest, journalist Max Blumenthal. There's the movement of people who claim Obama isn't even an American citizen, and others who accuse him of being a Hitler or a Stalin. In Blumenthal's new book, "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party," he writes that the Republican Party has gone from a big-tent philosophy to being fully in the grip of its right wing. Blumenthal has been covering the Christian right for six years, attending dozens of its rallies and conferences, listening to its radio programs, and sitting in movement-oriented houses of worship.
Read on...
W's Worst Judges
By Stephanie Mencimer, Mother Jones. Posted September 17, 2008.
Forget Roberts or Alito for a minute; in eight years, Bush installed more than 300 federal judges. Here are a few to keep a close eye on. Over the past eight years, Bush has installed 310 federal judges -- two of them to the highest court in the land -- whose influence will be felt for many years. Here are some to keep an eye on, along with their more notable rulings before and after elevation.
1. WILLIAM H. PRYOR JR., 11th Circuit
Precedent: As Alabama's attorney general, he defended the state's practice of handcuffing prison inmates to hitching posts.
Case closed: Voted to uphold an Anita Bryant-era Florida law prohibiting gays and lesbians from adopting children -- even when they've served as their foster parents.
Read on...
A lot of blame to spread around regarding the approval of these judges. Checks and balances, and the concept of an agressive (Democratic) opposition party failed. Tom
Forget Roberts or Alito for a minute; in eight years, Bush installed more than 300 federal judges. Here are a few to keep a close eye on. Over the past eight years, Bush has installed 310 federal judges -- two of them to the highest court in the land -- whose influence will be felt for many years. Here are some to keep an eye on, along with their more notable rulings before and after elevation.
1. WILLIAM H. PRYOR JR., 11th Circuit
Precedent: As Alabama's attorney general, he defended the state's practice of handcuffing prison inmates to hitching posts.
Case closed: Voted to uphold an Anita Bryant-era Florida law prohibiting gays and lesbians from adopting children -- even when they've served as their foster parents.
Read on...
A lot of blame to spread around regarding the approval of these judges. Checks and balances, and the concept of an agressive (Democratic) opposition party failed. Tom
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