Democratic Diva

Howard Stern shows us how here, in his tirade about Gabourey Sidibe having the nerve to exist:

“There’s the most enormous, fat black chick I’ve ever seen. She is enormous. Everyone’s pretending she’s a part of show business and she’s never going to be in another movie,” Stern ranted. “She should have gotten the Best Actress award because she’s never going to have another shot. What movie is she gonna be in?”

And the fact that some of Hollywood’s most powerful players (uh, like Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry) are among 26-year-old actress’ biggest supporters, doesn’t mean squat to Stern.

He knocked Winfrey, who praised Sidibe at the Academy Awards Sunday night and said she was sure Sidibe would have a long, fruitful career.

“Oprah’s another liar, a filthy liar,” added Stern. “She’s telling an enormous woman the size of a planet that she’s going to have a career.”

Your concern about Sidibe’s race and appearance uh I mean career is duly noted, Howard. Then there were were (male) commenters to the article who added their own misogynistic screeds uh I mean concerns for Sidibe’s “health” to the mix. Like this one:

Reading through these comments reminds me when George Carlin famously said, “Picture how stupid the average American is and just think, half of ‘em are even dumber than that.” If anyone thinks this morbidly obese, disgusting pig will ‘have a long life’ or ‘lose weight while Howard can’t do anything about his face’, then you are living in an alternate universe where home prices never go down. Deep down, you know she is a walking heart attack and needs help.

I love how he defends his multi-millionaire hero, Howard Stern, against people who note that Stern’s not exactly easy on the eyes, by saying even meaner things about Gabi Sidibe. But hey, the commenter is worried about Gabi’s heart health, dontchaknow.

I have detested Howard Stern for many years. Both Stern and Rush Limbaugh have thrown red meat to bitter entitled white men every day for over two decades. But at least with Rush you know it’s overtly political and it’s never really been cool to be a Dittohead. OTOH, a liberal white dude can enjoy Howard Stern humiliating women every morning, while insisting that he’s a “feminist” because Howard is pro-choice.

I submit that Howard Stern has contributed more to the coarsening and polarization in the populace than Rush Limbaugh has. For over 20 years, Stern has given hipster cred to being a bigoted misogynistic asshole. But hey, ladies, he cares about our looks, our weight uh I mean, our careers.

Zelph alerted me to my name being mentioned on a popular AZ conservative blog. Sorry, but I don’t link to them so find it on your own. The blogger complained that Democrats propose tax increases on the poor to pay for the services that the less-poor and the middle class people use. His pique was based on this:

The Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association is working with consultants on an initiative it hopes will make it to the ballot in November. It would raise money to stop the state from cutting more than 310,000 people from the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the state’s Medicaid program.

Exactly what form the proposed levy would take has yet to be worked out. Laurie Liles, the association’s lobbyist, said consultants and pollsters are looking at what kind of tax would be most palatable to voters. Historically, voters have been particularly receptive to taxing cigarettes; the total levies on those are now $2 per pack.

Funny, I hadn’t realized that The Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association was a Democratic organization. Someone should let Don Bivens know.

I’ve mentioned here before that I smoke and I did vote for First Things First, though I do agree that tobacco taxes are somewhat regressive. And one of the flaws with using sin taxes to fund programs that don’t directly work to mitigate the harms of the sinful behavior is that they actually do work as disincentives (I smoke a helluva lot less than I used to and the $7 a pack cost has a lot to do with it) and diminish the available funds over time. This leads to having to impose higher fees or find other sins to tax. But when voters are presented with a choice of “pass this regressive tax or poor people will die because they can’t see a doctor” it kind of ties their hands.

That said, I’m immediately suspicious when Republican pundits handwring over “the poor”. Most of them don’t believe in public funding for social services in the first place. Most of them blame the poor for being poor. They definitely don’t think middle class and rich people should be taxed to pay for programs that benefit poor people. So, really, why should they care if poor people are regressively taxed to pay for their own services? Of course, it helps to paint Democrats in a bad light and let them pretend that decades of tax cuts to the rich and corporations had nothing to do with it.

They can also pretend that regressive taxation is fair and just when they present hypothetical contrivances that make it appear to be so, as the conservative blogger does here:

Take the guy who lives in poverty. He pays very little actual tax–primarily on tobacco and if he lives in Phoenix a new sales tax on food. He probably pays no income tax or property tax. Of course, what little tax he actually pays can look like a fairly high percentage, because he has almost no income.

But what does he get from the state? Well, if his kids are in school, the state pays about $8,000 per year per kid to educate them and his family has free health care that’s worth another $5,000 to $10,000 a year. So if he has 3 kids, he receives about $30,000 a year in direct services from the state.

And the guy in Paradise Valley? He gets the same basic services that the poor guys gets, but he surely has health insurance and his kids are likely grown, or they went to private school. So he pays income taxes and property taxes and gets almost nothing in services while the poor guy pays taxes on his cigarettes and gets $30K a year in direct benefits.

Wow, that poor guy is really making out, isn’t he? Let’s look at the health care costs: Is ACCCHS a Cadillac health insurance plan now? Um, no. Assuming he and his family qualify for the full benefit, ACCCHS only pays for whatever health care they consume. If Poor Guy and his family went to the doctor for nothing but routine check ups and vaccinations in a given year, then the state paid far less than $5-10K.

As for Paradise Valley Guy, why assume he doesn’t have kids? Maybe he’s on his second wife and is working the fancy schmancy tuition tax credit racket to pay for Madison’s and Connor’s pricey private school tuition. That’s tens of thousands of public dollars right there. Hey, while we’re hypothesizing, let’s assume Poor Guy works for him. PV Guy pays Poor Guy crap wages and doesn’t give him any benefits. So PV Guy externalizes a truckload of his labor costs onto the public because his employee gets ACCCHS and a host of other benefits. We’re supposed to feel sorry for him and give him YET another tax cut? Don’t think so.

Or, we could stop with the hypotheticals and look at the numbers:

Hey, Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, I have one word for you. Oregon.

On edit: If you want to dismiss the percentage the poorest Arizonans pay because you assume they get more government bennies, I suppose you can get away that. But I don’t see what the rich have done to justify getting to pay over a third less what the middle class pays in taxes. People making $40-80K generally don’t qualify for ACCCHS or other public programs. IOW, they’re not getting anything that Paradise Valley Guy doesn’t get (well, except for the tuition tax credits). You can’t justify that disparity, no matter how hard you squint.

I’m on a quest to find good books on energy and the environment to read and recommend. My web surfing this morning led me to LifeTwo, a site devoted to midlife. The 2007 article I linked to cited Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by economist Bill McKibben. McKibben looks at growth from an economic, sociological, and sustainability standpoint. I reserved a used paperback on Amazon.

I stayed on the site for a while, reading articles by various contributors. The site’s emphasis is on self-improvement, health, and relationships but I liked the overall focus on simplicity and against materialism in many of the articles. A little on psychobabble-y and woo woo side, but still interesting.

At 41, I’m not quite ready to admit to being middle aged yet but I am increasingly aware that kids these days drive too fast and play music I don’t understand. Readers around my age who are dating someone older should know that when they join AARP at age 50, they might think it’s a laugh riot to you up for the group without your knowledge. I was just shy of my 40th birthday when I received my AARP card in the mail. Ha ha, Mark, but you’re still a decade my senior. Although I’m not AARP-age yet, it’s weird to realize that Gen X is entering middle age now, after over two decades of that being strictly Boomer territory.

Anyway since that seque had nothing to do with energy, I’m eager to read McKibben’s book since Amazon reviewers praise him for his clear and unsparing writing. There are too few voices talking about how unsustainable an economic paradigm based on unending growth is, which is tragic since it ought to be part of everyday conversation at this point.

I’ll have a post tomorrow about the bullcrap going on at the lege.

That’s what you’d think from reading the Republic piece on the Center for Arizona Policy today.

“There was concern about how public policy impacts families,” said Cathi Herrod, who joined the group a couple of years later and is now president. “We were seeing a need to have someone on-site at the Legislature on behalf of family issues.”

The group started out slowly. Herrod said that although there were legislators who supported the center’s agenda, it wasn’t a priority at that time. In recent years, that mentality has begun to change, she said, both in the Legislature and among voters.

“Increasingly, people are understanding that what happens down here impacts their daily lives,” she said.

Aw shucks.

CAP may have started as a small, independent outfit, but very soon after its formation it was known to be affiliated with Focus on the Family, the extremely influential national Religious Right organization. Here’s a Public Eye report from back in 1999 that lists CAP as a FOF state partner organization. It’s hardly a hidden association; there are links to FOF and its subsidiaries all over CAP’s website. Yet CAP presents itself to the mainstream public as a local grassroots effort dedicated to the interests of Arizona families. Hogwash. CAP’s legislative agenda is identical to those of “Family Policy” groups in practically every other state. The hideous bill that requires the publication of personal information of abortion patients is exactly the same as the one passed by the Oklahoma state legislature last year. Yet news outlets in Arizona ignore all that and takes CAP at its word that its mission is independent and local, when in fact it is carrying out the national agenda of reactionary theocrats.

And let’s talk about our other “local think tank”, Goldwater Institute, for a sec. The Public Eye identified GI as an affiliate of the State Policy Network.

Founded in 1992, the State Policy Network
(SPN) evolved from the now defunct Madison Group, a network of
conservative organizations created in the aftermath of a 1986 meeting at the Madison Hotel in Washington, DC. The State Policy Network is based in Ft. Wayne, Indiana and serves as a coordination agency for
37 state-level think tanks in 30 states.

Although corporate money and executives are the dominant presence in these think tanks, they nevertheless do not solely promote business interests. The tendency is to focus on conservative/libertarian campaigns, from welfare reform to school privatization.
According to Byron Lamm, the longtime Executive Director of the State
Policy Network, all the think tanks advocate “free market solutions to public policy, with an emphasis on individual rights and responsibility.” While there are often different emphases, determined by the interests
of the leadership and the local situation, the think tanks share broad ideological agreement and nearly identical political agendas—primarily supporting privatization of most government services and advocating
“free market solutions” to public policy issues from health care to the environment. Most have a strong emphasis on school privatization. They favor deregulation of business and oppose organized labor.

Because the think tanks of the SPN generally reflect the business/libertarian wing of the GOP, some of them avoid dealing
with such social issues as abortion and gay rights, on which some GOP libertarians such as William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts, are often at odds with the Christian Right. Eight SPN think tanks,
including the Goldwater, Pioneer, and Heartland Institutes (but none
of the Family Policy Councils) reflect a specifically libertarian orientation through their “partnership” in Freemarket.net, an on-line libertarian
network sponsored by the Henry Hazlitt Foundation. However, the agenda of many SPN think tanks seems to mesh well with the Christian
Right, and others are indistinguishable from the Christian Right’s agenda. For example, the California Resource Institute described a 1999 bill in the California legislature (proposing that the states 140 “charter schools” be unionized like the rest of the publicly funded school system) as an effort to “squash the academic freedom of charter schools.” Such an anti-union stance reliably appeals to both the business and Christian Right wings of the Republican Party, and often generates popular appeal well beyond that base. The ideological differences among SPN affiliates
seem to originate in the circumstances surrounding their founding and funding.

Again, not a hidden association, but one that has never, to my recollection, been acknowledged in the AZ news media.

A while back I joked about Goldwater not having a position on gay rights or abortion because they were scared of Cathi Herrod. Now it’s clear why Goldwater and other SPN groups don’t articulate positions on those social issues. They let FOF groups like CAP drive the Republican base to the polls while retaining their libertarian cred. They’re all about their “classical liberal approach”. Well, except on immigration, where they suddenly remember that businesses need cheap labor uh Joe Arpaio is a racist thug.

Notice how silent CAP is on immigration? Remarkable that an organization touted as the most powerful lobbying group at the AZ Capitol, and that claims it looks out for Arizona families, has nothing to say about arguably the hottest and most contentious issue in this state, don’t you think?

I’m sure there’s a reason for it.

From yesterday’s East Valley Tribune:

With state finances evaporating, Gov. Jan Brewer is moving to help those with needs get their services from church and nonprofit groups.

In an executive order Tuesday, Brewer created a 20-member task force to coordinate volunteer efforts statewide. The panel also will look for ways to both inform people of the services that are available.

One of the focus areas will be helping put low-income families together with organizations that provide free or low-cost child care.

That follows budget cutbacks last year which have limited the number of people who will get state subsidies to help them pay for the services. That created a waiting list for any new applicants, a waiting list the governor’s office said now caps 10,500 children.

More than half of those children, according to the state, are in families below the federal poverty level of $18,312 for a family of three.

“Child care assistance is critical to helping families retain employment and become self-sufficient,” the governor’s office said in a release. More to the point, they said allowing parents to keep their jobs while knowing their children are in good hands avoids two less desirable alternatives: quitting work and turning to government assistance, or leaving children in unregulated facilities.

Psst…Governor…you know, when government coffers are bare, the same situation tends to hold for charities. I’m sure your efforts to link people in need of childcare to charities will bear some limited fruit, but I predict that the state will still be left with thousands of single mothers who will be left with no choice but to go on welfare.

Since we’re on the topic, and because my status as a childless spinster makes me the foremost expert on parenthood, I have to ask: Why is it that conservatives insist middle class mothers absolutely must stay home with their young children while at the same time acting as though poor women staying home with their children is a heinous offense against society? As an expert on childrearing, I must insist that the children of poor people deserve the same consideration as their better, whiter, non-poor counterparts. Therefore, it stands to reason that we should just go ahead and pay welfare to the poor mothers. Right, conservatives?

Bookmark this site! It’s Skeptical Science: Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism. The good folks there are compiling global warming denialist arguments and providing quick rebuttals to 91 of them. Sample:

Skeptic Argument vs What the Science Says

1 “It’s the sun” In the last 35 years of global warming, the sun has shown a slight cooling trend. Sun and climate have been going in opposite directions.
2 “Climate’s changed before” Natural climate change in the past proves that climate is sensitive to an energy imbalance. If the planet accumulates heat, global temperatures will go up. Currently, CO2 is imposing an energy imbalance due to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Past climate change actually provides evidence for our climate’s sensitivity to CO2.
3 “There is no consensus” That humans are causing global warming is the position of the Academies of Science from 19 countries plus many scientific organisations that study climate science. More specifically, 97% of climate scientists actively publishing climate papers endorse the consensus position.

Click on each rebuttal, and you get an in-depth explanation. This is a godsend. It’s like a snopes.com on global warming for us non-scientists. They do a nice job on the “Climate-gate” email hubbub.

I’m fairly certain that Rep. John Kavanagh (R-Fountain Hills), retired police officer and member of the Scottsdale Community College faculty, enjoys great health care benefits. And because he’s a Family Values^TM conservative and Pro-Life^TM he couldn’t care less if poor people can’t see the doctor. It’s not like they’re real people like fetuses, rich people, and corporations are. John Kavanagh would like to give rich people and corporations more tax cuts while poor and middle class people pay higher sales taxes to backfill the cost. Kicking the poor people off their Medicaid too? Win!

Sadly for Kavanagh, the Democrats and Governor Brewer are totally trying to harsh his mellow with their tedious “legal arguments” about some bogus law that passed by the stupid “voters” back in 2000. It mandates that Arizona fund Medicaid for people making 100% Federal Poverty Level or less. Whatever.

Brewer, in her budget plan, said Arizona can’t afford to have more than 1.2 million people — about one out of every six Arizonans — getting their care from the public. She proposed taking the question back to voters.

Kavanagh, however, said that’s not necessary.

He is relying on a section of the initiative which says the expansion is funded by tobacco dollars “and shall be supplemented, as necessary, by any other available sources including legislative appropriations and federal monies.”

“As of now, there are no other available sources,” Kavanagh said.

“We’re broke,” he continued. “We’re $3 billion in the hole.”

The Gov wanting to take it to the voters isn’t going to go over well with the GOP legislators but at least she retains some of her Family Values^TM and Pro-Life^TM cred with her willingness to boot poor people off health care benefits.

Speaking of corporations, here’s what I want folks to take away: The vast majority of people who will be thrown off the program are working people. They will be added to the already swollen ranks of the working uninsured, currently 37% of the under age 65 population in Arizona. According to the Families USA pdf I linked, 80% of the uninsured in Arizona are in the labor force. 60% of them are below 200% FPL in income. Now we’re looking at the possibility of over 40% of working Arizonans not having any form of health coverage.

But the companies that employ many of them deserve more tax cuts, right?

Give me a break.

One of the things I dislike about public assistance programs is that they effectively function as a subsidy to low wage employers. If you know your workers will qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, EITC, free school lunches and a host of other government programs, you can pay them as little as you can get away with and know that they are mollified enough to keep working at your burger joints instead of burning them to the ground. Which is why I find business owners whining about taxes and minimum wages to be incredibly annoying.

Unfortunately, cutting burger flippers off Medicaid won’t cause their employers to start providing them with affordable health coverage. They’ll just go without. Of course, if you are a person like John Kavanagh, that doesn’t trouble you. It probably enhances the pleasure you take in your nice home in Fountain Hills and your generous health plan if burger flippers are not getting to go to the doctor.