Pacific Progressive

Interactive Assessment: Judge Vinson's Affordable Care Act Decision

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Neera Tanden, Ian Millhiser, Tony Carrk

Judge Roger Vinson's decision striking down the Affordable Care Act is wrong on so many counts that it’s hard to begin counting. Nonetheless, we did.

In the accompanying interactive examination of Vinson’s opinion, we show how he effectively writes an entire provision of the Constitution out of the document. How he butchers history, thumbs his nose at binding Supreme Court precedent, and relies on a constitutional theory that George Washington would find shocking. As we explain, even conservative legal scholars have questioned Vinson’s reasoning. And he wholly misunderstands health care and how it works.

We also explain that one section of Vinson's opinion was lifted from a brief filed by an organization that has been labeled a hate group. And when Vinson somehow concludes that the Boston Tea Party renders the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, we take apart that argument, too.

We have culled through all 78 pages of Vinson's deeply ideological opinion, highlighted all the errors we can find, and explained why Vinson was mistaken in each case.

Take a deep dive into this interactive graphic. You’ll discover Vinson’s opinion is such an outlier that it will not be taken seriously by higher courts. And if you find any errors that we missed please email us.

(Click on the yellow highlighted text throughout the interactive graphic to bring up an explanation of why Vinson is wrong.)

 

Neera Tanden is Chief Operating Officer at the Center for American Progress and a health care reform expert. Ian Millhiser is a Policy Analyst and Blogger for American Progress, where his work focuses on the Constitution and the judiciary. Tony Carrk is the Policy Director of Progress Central, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

 

 

Think Again: Glenn Beck and the Uses of Anti-Semitic Propaganda

By Eric Alterman

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

It’s annoying to have to write about Glenn Beck or even to pay any attention to him at all. If anyone truly believed the various things Glenn Beck claims to believe at any given moment, he would have to be either a schizophrenic, a lunatic, or both. Case in point: Beck: Obama has "over and over again" exposed himself as "a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” This followed by "I'm not saying he doesn't like white people” and then, "This guy is, I believe, a racist."

I agree with Beck’s own self-description that he’s no journalist, scholar, or much of anything else, save perhaps a “rodeo clown.” But because Beck enjoys the backing of the Murdoch empire, with millions of devoted viewers and listeners, his clownishness, whether intentional or not, is not merely his problem but ours as well.

Since the Obama administration began, the combination of hatred, lies, ignorance, and nativism that Beck serves up daily has poisoned the discussion of a number of issues and ruined numerous careers. According to Eric Boehlert’s careful reporting, it also appears to have come pretty close to inspiring a mass murder: one that was avoided by only fortunate happenstance. But just as all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing, so, too, all that is necessary for hatred, lies, ignorance, and nativism to triumph is for good media critics to stand too far above the fray and allow to pass without comment moments like Beck’s disgraceful attack on George Soros.

From a "Green Farce" to a Green Future: Refuting False Claims About Immigrants and the Environment

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Jorge Madrid

Read the full report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf)

Download to mobile devices and e-readers from Scribd

Combating climate change and reforming our broken immigration system are two of the greatest challenges facing Congress and the Obama administration. Legislation to address these issues has come up short thus far. Both have been fiercely debated throughout the country and many Americans demand solutions.

In the midst of these debates anti-immigrant groups are revamping their efforts to play these issues against each other using misinformation. These voices have long argued that immigrants destroy the environment, accelerate climate change, and undermine U.S. efforts to transition to a clean and green future.

Nativist organizations and hate groups are attempting to drive their political agenda using environmental concerns as a cover. And conservative lawmakers and opponents of clean energy and climate legislation who use phony environmental arguments as a political wedge are promoting these groups’ talking points.

Race and Beyond: Whistling Dixie

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Sam Fulwood III

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour just can’t let his old South memories wither and die without a fight for redemption.

Barbour, who is considered a leading contender for the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nomination, said in a recent interview with the conservative magazine and website Human Events that it wasn’t people like him who fostered opposition to school desegregation. No, it was all those “old Democrats” in the South who stood in the door to prevent blacks from attending public schools across Dixie.

“By my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn’t going to be that way anymore,” said Barbour, who at 62 is old and politically astute enough to know better than to say something so clearly inaccurate. “And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.”

Horsefeathers! They were the same people. Conservative white Southerners began fleeing the Democratic Party in 1948 with Strom Thurmond’s short-lived Dixiecrat Party to eventually find a warm embrace within the GOP some two decades later, just as legal segregation began to lose its grip on the South’s throat. This political evolution is well-established history. So well documented, in fact, that it has its own moniker: The “Southern Strategy,” which inflamed racial fears to persuade a majority of white Southerners to vote for Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I and II.

Millions Were Misspent by Arizona Sheriff's Office Facing Federal Lawsuit, Officials Say

by Marian Wang ProPublica

The office of the Arizona sheriff who was sued by the Justice Department earlier this month was this week accused by Maricopa County budget officials of misspending millions in taxpayer dollars over five years, according to The Arizona Republic.

The office of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is famous for his hard line on immigration as well as his controversial tactics, misspent between $60 million and $80 million in funds, according to county officials.

Money from a voter-approved tax restricted for use on jails, for instance, was spent on salaries for deputies and put to other unintended purposes.

Even the Sheriff2019s Office isn't sure how much money from this fund was improperly spent, the sheriff's interim chief deputy, Jerry Sheridan, told the Republic, but he called the county's $80 million figure "pure hyperbole" and 2"a vicious attempt to make Sheriff Arpaio look like he's a poor manager." More from the Republic:

As legal, political and administrative disputes have embroiled the nation's fourth-most-populous county in recent years, county officials said the Sheriff's Office refused to let auditors examine their books on a number of matters.

[Deputy County Manager Sandi] Wilson maintained her office's estimates of misspending are accurate, but said county officials need additional records from the Sheriff's Office to pin down an exact figure.

Upholding Our American Values: Ground Zero Mosque Counters bin Laden's Radical Views

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Ken Gude

The United States is at its strongest when Americans have the courage to stand up for the values that make this country great. President Obama is upholding the best traditions of our Constitution by supporting Muslim Americans’ ability to build a mosque and community center on private property near Ground Zero.

September 11 left deep scars on Manhattan and the United States. The family and friends of the 3,000 who perished have suffered the most, yet all Americans share in the pain of that fateful day. Ground Zero is hallowed ground and will forever live in our hearts. But it is misguided to believe that we honor the victims by rejecting the values they cherished while succumbing to the very fear and hatred their murderers were trying to provoke.

Osama bin Laden wants Muslims to believe that America and the West are at war with Islam. That distorted view is the best and virtually only way he has to recruit young Muslims into his murderous cause. That cause targets America and our allies, but his primary mission is to destroy contemporary Islam, and the majority of his victims are Muslims.

The biggest threat to bin Laden is precisely the kind of Islam that is embodied in the Cordoba Initiative mosque and community center. Muslim Americans practicing their religion in freedom, rejecting the perversion of the faith that drives Al Qaeda, and preaching against radicalism and violence is exactly what bin Laden fears. Building this facility will help the United States and its allies prevail in this struggle against violent extremist groups like al Qaeda by undermining Osama bin Laden’s narrative that America is at war with the Muslim world.

We understand the raw emotions triggered by memories of September 11, but we are not at our strongest when we are fearful. The American experiment with freedom and religious liberty would not have been unique if it was easy and would not have survived without brave decisions to sustain it. We support building this mosque.

Ken Gude is Director of the International Justice and Security Program at the Center for American Progress.

For more information, see:

• The Distorted Lens of Islamophobia

 

Fighting Back Against Copycat Immigration Laws Like Arizona's: Helpful Materials for Opposing Similar Legislation

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Henry Fernandez

Download this memo (pdf)

Since the passage of Arizona’s SB1070 law similar laws have been proposed in other states around the country. These laws have generally been found to be unconstitutional because they are preempted by federal law, as the federal court noted in Arizona last month. They are also problematic because they encourage racial profiling by requiring law enforcement officials to seek identification papers from anyone who looks like an immigrant. And they can cost states lots of money in legal fees and economic losses.

The following materials can be helpful in pushing back against such proposed laws.

Who’s behind these laws?

The Immigration Reform Law Institute, or IRLI, the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, drafted the Arizona law and most of the copycat bills. The Southern Poverty Law Center designated FAIR a hate group because of its founder’s writings, its repeated participation with white nationalist groups, and its receipt of major funding from a racist organization.

Copycat laws frequently rely on the work of attorney Kris Kobach, who works for IRLI. Kobach’s lawyering has cost localities who have hired him millions of dollars while the laws have been found unconstitutional. The Arizona law was brought forth by State Senator Russell Pearce, who the Arizona press has described as having a history of associating with neo-Nazis and sending anti-Semitic emails.

Sources:

• Mark Potok, “FAIR: Crossing the Rubicon of Hate” (Montgomery: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2007).
• Melinda Warner, “Meet Kris Kobach: Lawyer For The Anti-Immigrant Movement,” Political Correction, July 15, 2010.
• David Neiwert, “Profiling Arizona legislator Russell Pearce: Author of immigration law is pals with noted neo-Nazi,” Crooks and Liars, April 27, 2010.
• Mike Sunnucks, “State lawmaker under fire for citing neo-Nazi article in e-mail,”Phoenix Business Journal, October 10, 2006.

These laws are generally unconstitutional

First They Came for the Communists

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Bishop Gene Robinson

What is most disturbing about recent attacks by the political and religious right on Muslim Americans and their religion, Islam, is that it feels so depressingly familiar.

Christian and American conservative politicians and the religious right needed a new enemy that would mobilize their base in the 1990s when they were faced with the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of “godless Communists” as the enemy of everything civilized. Televangelists needed a new “evil” to rail against—a threat dire enough to convince Social Security pensioners to send in their $5 and $10 checks and keep them on the air.

So gays became the new communists.

Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, and other religious right leaders deliberately determined that gays would be the new enemy. Their tactics are documented in a memoir,Stranger at the Gate, by Rev. Mel White, a former conservative who was Falwell’s ghost writer but lost his job after coming out as a gay man.

Rev. White writes:

During the 1990s, when the religious right shifted the focus of their fund-raising appeals from the 'evil communist empire' to the 'homosexual agenda for the destruction of America', I began collecting samples of their terrible lies against us. One of my early hate-mail 'treasures' was an emergency Jerry Falwell fund-raiser sent in an oversize envelope (five by fourteen inches) with a bold red banner across its face stating simply: 'Declaration of War…Official Notice'. Jerry Falwell was officially declaring war against gay and lesbian people.

The Latest Fake Fact: President Obama is a Muslim

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

by Sally Steenland 

Here’s a new item to add to the growing list of fake facts dominating the news over the past year. Already on the list are death panels, a foreign-born president, the hoax of global warming, and rampant discrimination against white people. Now we can add a new fake fact: President Obama is a Muslim.

Despite the obvious truth that there is nothing wrong with having a Muslim president, the reality is that Obama is a Christian. Most Americans know this, but over the past year a growing minority seem to have misremembered his religion. It’s bizarre. After all, we’re not talking about something complicated, like health care reform. All we have to remember is one word. Christian. The president is a Christian.

And yet a new poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that nearly 20 percent of Americans believe the president is Muslim—an increase from 11 percent a year ago. Only about one-third believe he is a Christian—a steep decrease from 48 percent a year ago.

In terms of political affiliation, more than a third of conservative Republicans believe the president to be a Muslim. How do they know? About 60 percent say from the media. Back in the day, conservatives used to make a clear distinction between facts and opinions. Certain things were true and others were not, they said. You couldn’t reshape reality to fit your preference. Truth was stubborn. Facts didn’t budge.

Indeed, a conservative criticism of liberals was that they were a bunch of postmodernists who treated reality as subjective and truth as malleable in order to suit their whims. The alleged crime of liberals was that they encouraged conflicting, divergent truths based upon differences in race, gender, and class. Conservatives vehemently opposed this notion. Objective, universal truth did exist and deserved to be defended.

Working With Faith Communities for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Human Rights

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

Download this fact sheet (pdf)

Analysis of same-sex adoption laws in Arkansas

The Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative released “Faith and Family Equality” this May with generous support from the Arcus Foundation. The report examines the 2008 ballot initiative in Arkansas that aimed to ban same-sex adoption and analyzes the efforts of religious groups on both sides of the issue: conservatives who sponsored the initiative, worked to get it on the ballot, and engaged in a strong grass-roots campaign to win, as well as moderate and progressive religious groups who joined with LGBT advocates, children’s rights experts and advocates, medical professionals, and others to defeat the ban. The ban passed in November 2008, but an Arkansas state judge struck down the law as unconstitutional earlier this year. “Faith and Family Equality” provided an in-depth analysis of the battle and created a list of “lessons learned” to help LGBT and faith groups work more effectively in coalitions in Arkansas and in states across the country. We paired the report’s release with an advocacy briefing to LGBT rights advocates and religious leaders involved in adoption policy.

Collaboration between faith and advocacy groups in Michigan

It is important for advocates fighting for equal rights to engage strategically with progressive and moderate faith communities. The Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative conducted in-depth interviews and onsite roundtable conversations this year with over 90 faith and LGBT leaders in the state of Michigan to assess effective collaborations and challenges between the faith and advocacy communities. The project also sought to discover levels of awareness regarding second parent adoption, as well as its “winnability” compared to other LGBT issues in the state. We prepared this work for the Arcus Foundation.

Calling Out the Hatemongers

By Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

Progressive faith activists are on the march this summer, challenging the misperceived monopoly of conservatives who for far too long have tried to establish themselves as the sole guardians of faith, morality, and values. Interfaith groups, Christian groups, and even seminary students and faculty are all involved in this new faith activism, working proactively, not reactively, to present progressive faith values in strong and yet less-divisive ways than the angry hate-filled rhetoric of the extreme far right. From radio ads to blogs and YouTube videos, diverse people of faith are countering the distortions of the extreme right wing while demonstrating the inclusiveness of faith communities united in pursuit of social justice.

Consider this new radio ad created by Faithful America, an online community of more than 100,000 people of faith. In it, listeners are asked:

Would you support a leader who said Jesus’ teachings can lead to Nazism or who attacks Christian pastors for preaching the full Gospel? Then why do so many Christians tune in to Glenn Beck?

Growing Out of a Racist Upbringing

In the latest Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC) Intelligence Report, the article Children of Hate:  Fighting Against Racist Parents, interviews with three people who grew up learning to hate are featured.  The interviews include a woman who, while a teenager, drove her father to Klan meetings, the daughter of one of the most powerful Klansmen during the civil rights movement, and a teenager who renounced his white nationalist father.

These stories are important and relevant for those living in Orange County, the seeming epicenter of the birther/tea bagger movement.  When you read these stories, you see that the parents may be ignorant, but thankfully, there seems to be no genetic link and their kids don't pick up their traits.

Riverside Neo-Nazis Protest Illegal Immigration and Challenge Counterprotestors

On Saturday, September 16, Neo-Nazis gathered in Riverside, the West Coast headquarters for the National Socialist Movement, and protested at Madison Street and Indiana Avenue.  The Neo-Nazis were met by SWAT officers and counter protesters from groups as diverse as Chabad, First United Methodist Church, and Chicano activists.

The story was covered by the Southwest Riverside News Network.

Southern California Public Radio is reporting the Neo-Nazis have scheduled another rally for October 24 in Riverside.

KABC 7 covered the story.

" I Wish More African-Americans Were Like the President: Raised by White People"

Stephen Colbert is one of the commentators that always gets things right on the nose.  People who criticize Obama by calling him "uppity" or referring to "that boy" or send postcards with watermelons on the White House lawn are just expressing their frustration current policy.  Stephen Colbert clarifies the issues for us.

 

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Blackwashing
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

Lou Dobbs Promotes Website that Hosts Several Pro-Secession Articles

from Media Matters (complete transcript available)

On September 17, 2009, on his radio show, Lou Dobbs featured Michael Boldin, founder of the Tenth Amendment Center, a pro-secession group.