AROUND NEW HAMPSHIRE
1. The NH Economy in 2016
Forecast: 2016 'going to be a good year for New Hampshire economy'
by Dave Solomon, unionleader.com, September 29, 2015
MANCHESTER — The state’s economy is poised for continued growth in 2016, driven largely by the housing market and lower energy prices, according to the state’s leading economists.
“This (2016) is going to be a good year for the New Hampshire economy, with strong employment growth, continued growth in the housing sector and lower energy prices overall,” said Dennis Delay, an economist with the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies.
Delay joined economist Connor Lokar, from ITR Economics of Manchester, for the annual Economic Forecast hosted by the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday at the Derryfield Country Club.
Both men were decidedly bullish on the state’s economic prospects for the year ahead, with a few caveats, mostly surrounding the lack of immigration into the state and outdated land-use and housing policies.
According to Lokar, analysis by ITR suggests that the New Hampshire economy, which grew by 2.3 percent in 2014, will follow a national pattern, growing at a slower rate in the second half of 2015 and into the first half of 2016, before picking up again.
“We are not projecting any kind of recession,” he said, “but signs are that the U.S. economy will experience a slower rate of growth through the rest of this year and into early 2016. Momentum will pick up in the middle of 2016 and into 2017.”
Lokar said economists are expecting two and half to three years of economic growth before the possibility of a mild recession in 2019.
Delay said he expects employment in New Hampshire to grow at the fastest rate since the Great Recession, particularly if gasoline prices stay low.
“Two dollars a gallon for gas is a turning point,” he said. “That’s when people start to think they have more money to spend, so low energy prices are always good news for New Hampshire. We’ve already heard from most of the major electric utilities that they expect winter rates to be lower than the previous winter, and significantly lower than the winter before that.”
The major difference between this economic recovery and those of the past is the lack of in-migration. In the three decades from 1970 to 2000, New Hampshire saw annual population growth in the 20 percent range, with most of the in-migration coming from Massachusetts.
That trend has stalled, perhaps indefinitely. Population growth is projected to slow to 3.3 percent per year by 2020 unless the state takes steps to reverse the trend.
The state should be encouraging immigration and an overhaul of outdated land-use and zoning policies, according to Delay.
“The immigrant population in New Hampshire really helps solve labor market shortages at both the low end and in the high end,” he said. “A lot of the political discourse is being driven by a fundamentally wrong idea of how the economy works.”
Lokar agreed that immigration is key to the state’s economic future. “Demographics are not really working in New Hampshire’s favor,” he said. “Immigration is going to be the only way for us to overcome our anemic population growth.”
That means municipalities in the state are going to have to let go of zoning and land-use ordinances that were designed to control in-migration when population growth was actually a problem for many communities.
“We have a set of zoning, planning board and land-use ordinances that were designed to cope with population growth of 10,000 to 20,000 a year, but ill-serve the New Hampshire of today,” Delay said. “There has to be a serious look at housing policy and its impact on economic development
“This (2016) is going to be a good year for the New Hampshire economy, with strong employment growth, continued growth in the housing sector and lower energy prices overall,” said Dennis Delay, an economist with the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies.
Delay joined economist Connor Lokar, from ITR Economics of Manchester, for the annual Economic Forecast hosted by the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday at the Derryfield Country Club.
Both men were decidedly bullish on the state’s economic prospects for the year ahead, with a few caveats, mostly surrounding the lack of immigration into the state and outdated land-use and housing policies.
According to Lokar, analysis by ITR suggests that the New Hampshire economy, which grew by 2.3 percent in 2014, will follow a national pattern, growing at a slower rate in the second half of 2015 and into the first half of 2016, before picking up again.
“We are not projecting any kind of recession,” he said, “but signs are that the U.S. economy will experience a slower rate of growth through the rest of this year and into early 2016. Momentum will pick up in the middle of 2016 and into 2017.”
Lokar said economists are expecting two and half to three years of economic growth before the possibility of a mild recession in 2019.
Delay said he expects employment in New Hampshire to grow at the fastest rate since the Great Recession, particularly if gasoline prices stay low.
“Two dollars a gallon for gas is a turning point,” he said. “That’s when people start to think they have more money to spend, so low energy prices are always good news for New Hampshire. We’ve already heard from most of the major electric utilities that they expect winter rates to be lower than the previous winter, and significantly lower than the winter before that.”
The major difference between this economic recovery and those of the past is the lack of in-migration. In the three decades from 1970 to 2000, New Hampshire saw annual population growth in the 20 percent range, with most of the in-migration coming from Massachusetts.
That trend has stalled, perhaps indefinitely. Population growth is projected to slow to 3.3 percent per year by 2020 unless the state takes steps to reverse the trend.
The state should be encouraging immigration and an overhaul of outdated land-use and zoning policies, according to Delay.
“The immigrant population in New Hampshire really helps solve labor market shortages at both the low end and in the high end,” he said. “A lot of the political discourse is being driven by a fundamentally wrong idea of how the economy works.”
Lokar agreed that immigration is key to the state’s economic future. “Demographics are not really working in New Hampshire’s favor,” he said. “Immigration is going to be the only way for us to overcome our anemic population growth.”
That means municipalities in the state are going to have to let go of zoning and land-use ordinances that were designed to control in-migration when population growth was actually a problem for many communities.
“We have a set of zoning, planning board and land-use ordinances that were designed to cope with population growth of 10,000 to 20,000 a year, but ill-serve the New Hampshire of today,” Delay said. “There has to be a serious look at housing policy and its impact on economic development
2. Treatment and Counseling as well as Jail
Merrimack County should explore TRAILS
Editorial, concordmonitor.com, September 30, 2015
Jails and prisons that fail to offer educational opportunities and treatment programs for substance abuse and mental health and behavioral problems are little more than graduate schools for criminals. Peter Spaulding, chairman of the Merrimack County Board of Commissioners, was spot on when he told Monitor reporter Jeremy Blackman that when inmates are warehoused, “they probably come out worse than when they come in.”
The chronically high recidivism rate for inmates of New Hampshire’s jails and prisons has been the costly result of incarceration without rehabilitation. The result is wasted lives and money, broken families and more crime. Nearly half of all released inmates are back behind bars within a few years, and that’s an improvement from a decade or so ago when the return rate approached two-thirds.
Five years ago, Sullivan County found a way to slow the revolving door. The recidivism rate for its high-intensity treatment and rehabilitation program is now at or below 20 percent. Most inmates not only do their time, they change their lives. Now, by making use of its old county jail, Merrimack County has the opportunity to mirror Sullivan County’s success.
Sullivan County’s former corrections superintendent, Ross Cunningham, now works as Merrimack County’s assistant corrections superintendent. He and superintendent Ron White want the county to renovate the old jail, which closed in 2005. Cell walls would be removed, and the facility would operate as a minimum security facility for up to 70 male and female offenders who participate in what’s called the TRAILS program of treatment and counseling. That program includes an education and support program for inmate’s families. One census of Sullivan County’s jail prisoners found that its 140 inmates collectively had 131 children affected by their parent’s incarceration.
Inmates in the program transition to jobs outside the facility followed by a closely- monitored transition year that could include treatment in the community. Inmates who fail to complete the program would be returned to jail to complete their full sentence.
The program clearly works. What isn’t clear is what it would cost, both to rehab the old jail and to staff and operate it as a TRAILS facility. Some $1.5 million in grants, including $400,000 in federal Department of Justice Second Chance funding, helped Sullivan County launch the program. The annual cost per inmate to operate a Merrimack County TRAILS facility is yet to be determined, but Spaulding and others say it would be less than the $100-per-inmate cost of housing in a high-security building.
As a rule, every dollar invested in inmate treatment, education and counseling has a return of $7 in reduced costs for crime, re-incarceration and the need to build or expand prisons. Plus, inmates who don’t return are paying taxes instead of costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per year. Merrimack County taxpayers will benefit if they turn their idle former county jail into a facility that meets some of the area’s dire need to break the cycle of abuse, addiction, crime and jail.
3. What Endorsements Mean, and Don't Mean
Clinton Dominating Sanders In N.H. Endorsement Game. But Will It Matter?
by Josh Rogers, nhpr.org, September 30, 2015
The Hillary Clinton campaign has been doing it for weeks, rolling out the names of prominent local backers. Sometimes the names are big, such as Gov. Maggie Hassan. Other times, they are smaller, like Wednesday's endorser, former Executive Councilor Debora Pignatelli.
Either way, the Clinton campaign keeps them coming. But the same thing can’t be said for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who counts no current office holders among his Granite State backers. The question is: Does that matter in this election?
Go to any Sanders event these days, like this one earlier this month at the University of New Hampshire, and the crowd will be big. And it will be loud.
But it won’t have much in the way of what tends to be a key source of support for would-be presidents: past and present local elected officials. Their absence is not a complete surprise. Sanders may be a U.S senator from a neighboring state, but he’s an outsider, seeking the nomination of a party he’s never seen fit to join. And fealty to the powers-that-be isn’t his thing.
“It has not been the people on the top, not been the president and congress who have made things happen. It has always, without exception been grassroots moment, people on the bottom forcing that change.”
Realizing change through a party primary can be done, but it can also be tough going. So says Hans Noel, a professor at Georgetown, and co-author of “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.”
“Whoever the party insiders want, they are going to find a way to get, so part of it is that," Noel says. "But probably the more important thing is that there are on the ground resources.”
Noel says the dynamic is pretty basic: The more elites who like a candidate, the more money, manpower, and institutional knowledge will flow that candidate's way. In that sense, endorsements, particularly early in a race, may be a more telling proxy for its ultimate outcome, than polls. A long list of high-profile backers can also help candidates weather the inevitable rough patch, says Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver.
“And if a candidate stumbles, if there is a scandal. If there is some reason they (voters) have to think about or call into question some of their assumptions, the candidate with the endorsement will tend to look a lot better," Masket says. "If they have any doubts, they say, 'Oh, so-and-so is still backing them.'”
In this race, pretty much all the so-and-sos are backing a single candidate, Hillary Clinton. Not a governor, senator or member of Congress anywhere has endorsed Sanders. In New Hampshire, the tally is just as lopsided. From Gov. Maggie Hassan and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, to Congresswoman Annie Kuster, to eight current state senators, Clinton’s list of known political supporters goes on and on. Sanders' is basically nonexistent.
As a cabinet member to one president, wife to another, and winner of the 2008 New Hampshire primary, Clinton is as close to being an incumbent as a non-incumbent could be. And while Sanders’ current polling suggests plenty of Democratic voters may be open to backing him right now, history shows New Hampshire Democrats tend to pass on insurgent candidates on primary day.
“It’s been a long time since New Hampshire Democrats have been that rebellious," says Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire. “You could point to Paul Tsongas in 1992, although I don’t know if that’s a clear cut case. But before that you’ve got to go back to Gary Hart.”
Which means it does happen, just not very often. But for Sanders’ backers, 2016 could be that kind of year. Former state senator Burt Cohen of New Castle is perhaps Sanders’ best known local supporter. Cohen says history has shown him the effect of endorsements in New Hampshire isn’t what it may be in other states, and anyway, he’s been here before.
“In 1992, I was the only elected official to come out for Paul Tsongas, and he joked that he was hoping to win the New Hampshire primary without any official support, and he did win," Cohen says.
Tsongas did win that year's New Hampshire primary, and it was over a candidate who had the backing of much of the state’s political establishment and who went on to win his party’s nomination and the presidency: Bill Clinton.
4. SunuNo
ICYMI: Chris Sununu Says Defunding Planned Parenthood and Blocking Women’s Health Care Was “A Very Easy Vote for Me to Take”
by Ajacobs, nhdp.org, September 30, 2015
Concord, N.H. – Not only did Chris Sununu vote to defund Planned Parenthood and block access to health care for New Hampshire women and families, but yesterday, Sununu even said it was “a very easy vote for me to take.”
Sununu also doubled down on his debunked claim that defunding Planned Parenthood would not actually block access to health care.
But here’s what leading doctors had to say about Chris Sununu’s false claim:
Dr. Barry Smith, chairman of OB/GYN emeritus at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center: “There is simply no way for other health care providers to meet the tremendous need for health care in New Hampshire without Planned Parenthood. The well-being of millions of women depends on Planned Parenthood health centers across New Hampshire and around the country. And the future of Planned Parenthood depends on all of us speaking the truth to these misleading political attacks.”
Dr. Mark S. DeFrancesco, President of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: “The suggestion that America’s health care infrastructure can support these millions of displaced patients is simply wrong… Without access to Planned Parenthood clinics, many women — especially low-income women — would have nowhere else to turn.”
And the Valley News editorial board agrees: “A number of prominent health care providers in the state are not convinced by Sununu’s assertion that there are many other organizations that can and should fill in for Planned Parenthood in New Hampshire. Neither are we. Call it political necessity or call it caving, but Sununu’s vote against state funding, at a time when many women need its services, does not bode well for New Hampshire’s leadership needs.”
AND NATIONALLY
5. A Farce
GOP leader accidentally tells the truth about Benghazi committee
by Steve Benen, msnbc.com, September 30, 2015
Even die-hard GOP partisans sometimes find it difficult to justify the House Republicans’ Benghazi committee. The party struggled to explain why it was necessary in the first place – the deadly 2012 attack was already examined by seven other congressional committees – and the rationale is even more elusive now that the investigation is the longest in the history of the United States.
Making matters slightly worse, the GOP-led committee has conducted itself in such a way as to raise concerns that the entire endeavor is little more than a taxpayer-funded election scheme.
Keep that in mind when reading about House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) – the likely next Speaker of the House – and his interview on Fox News last night. Roll Call reported this morning on the Republican leader’s on-air comments:
“What you’re going to see is a conservative Speaker, that takes a conservative Congress, that puts a strategy to fight and win. And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?“But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen.”
Michael Kinsley once said a political gaffe occurs when a politician accidentally tells the truth. By this measure, the man who’s likely to become Speaker of the House next month made an important mistake last night.
First, I’m reasonably sure “untrustable” isn’t a word.
Second, the ostensible point of the Select Committee on Benghazi was to examine a terrorist attack that left four Americans dead in Libya, not to create an election tool that can affect a presidential candidate’s poll numbers.
Note, McCarthy sees the committee as a legitimate accomplishment of the Republican Congress, not because it’s uncovered relevant details about an act of terrorism, but because Hillary Clinton’s “numbers are dropping.” This, in his mind, is evidence of the GOP majority using its power effectively – by using a supposedly non-partisan investigatory vehicle to embarrass a Democrat with dubious allegations.
It’s almost as if the House Majority Leader assumed he was among friends, dropped his guard momentarily, and admitted out loud what Republicans are only supposed to say in private.
There was no real reason to create this committee, and the panel itself no longer serves any legitimate purpose. McCarthy’s unexpected candor was welcome – it was, to be sure, surprising to see him make such a concession on national television – but it served as a timely reminder that the Benghazi investigation that no longer focuses on Benghazi is now little more than a taxpayer-financed farce.
6. How That "Free Stuff" Helps
How the ‘Free Stuff’ Jeb Bush Complained About Pays Off for Families and Children
by Eric Levitz, nymag.com, September 29, 2015
Last week, GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush pledged to lift up America’s poor by providing them with “hope and aspiration,” rather than seducing them into greater dependency with “free stuff.” In Bush’s view, giving unearned financial assistance to low-income households doesn’t merely burden the taxpayer — it also exacerbates the very poverty it seeks to relieve. By providing unearned relief in the short term, “government handouts” hurt the poor in the long term by inhibiting their “hopes and aspirations” for self-sufficiency, the former Florida governor explained.
This idea is a foundational premise of the Republican Party’s economic philosophy, and it has a certain intuitive appeal: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day,” goes the old proverb. “Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” But if that man can’t learn to fish, what happens to his children? A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research led by Randall Akee of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs suggests that, far from inhibiting the aspirations of impoverished children, government handouts may play a vital role in fostering their realization.
There have been plenty of studies showing that investment in early childhood education can improve impoverished children’s emotional and behavioral health, and thus their later-life outcomes. But the NBER researchers wanted to see whether similar results could be achieved simply through subsidizing the income of poor families rather than via directed subsidies for food, education, and so forth.
Finding the appropriate conditions for such a study wasn’t easy. At present, the U.S. government distributes welfare spending almost exclusively through targeted programs rather than direct cash transfers. Generally, if an American family experiences an increase in overall income, it’s the product of improved employment conditions for one or both parents. But the researchers found a perfect exception to this rule on a North Carolinian Native American reservation in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Back in the early 1990s, each adult member of the reservation started receiving annual payments of $4,000 as part of an agreement to build a casino on tribal land. Before the payments began, the average income of the eligible families was $22,145. To isolate the effect of this unearned income on adolescent development, the researchers divided the reservation's children into two groups — those who were younger than 16 when their families began receiving payments, and those who were that age or older — and then tracked their emotional and behavioral health over time through a variety of measures. (The researchers also included control groups of non–Native American families to make sure there weren't broader trends in the area that could account for any changes they observed.)
The resultant number-crunching was a bit complicated, but the key takeaway, as the researchers put it, is that “[t]he overall effect of an increase in unearned household income is an improvement in child personality traits by age 16. The results also indicate that there is a reduction in behavioral and emotional disorders.” Specifically, kids whose parents received the casino payments from the start of adolescence made far greater gains in the personality traits of “agreeableness” and “conscientiousness” than those who did not. What’s more, the positive effects were most pronounced in children who had lagged behind their peers before the casino was built. And these benefits appear to have improved the children’s later-life outcomes: When researchers reconnected with the subjects at age 25, those who benefited from the “gambling handouts” early in adolescence had, in the aggregate, attained a higher level of education and were more likely to hold a full-time job as compared to those whose families’ benefits kicked in after age 16.
The durability of these effects is important when thinking about cash transfers to the poor as a form of government investment. If providing a low-income family with a small income subsidy improves their children’s prospects for employment and emotional health later in life, then doing so may actually prove a cost-saving measure in the long term. This is especially plausible when one considers that adolescent emotional disorders not only correlate with later-life unemployment, but alsocriminality. The families in the study received a mere $4,000 a year. The annual cost of jailing a single prisoner in the U.S. can run as high as $40,000.
Ironically, this study suggests that “free stuff” produces improved outcomes by fostering the very “family values” that Republicans like Bush often champion as poverty’s panacea. The authors note that greater family income has been shown to correlate with decreased marital stress and increased parental involvement and supervision. Families that received casino payments reported significantly better parent-child relationships than those who did not. Give a man some unearned income, in other words, and he’ll have time to teach his son to fish.
Jeb Bush says black voters get ‘free stuff’. So does he.
by Max Ehrenfreund, Wonkblog, washingtonpost.com, September 30, 2015
Jeb Bush argues that black voters want more than what Democrats can offer them.
"Our message is one of hope and aspiration," the former governor of Floridasaid last week in response to a question about how he'd win over the black electorate.
"It isn't one of division and, 'Get in line, and we'll take care of you with free stuff,' " Bush continued.
It was at least the second time he has mentioned "free stuff" while campaigning this year. This time, he was presumably referring to food stamps, unemployment benefits, welfare and other public assistance programs that economically disadvantaged voters in particular rely on to get by.
Black voters aren't as well off as white voters on the whole, and they do benefit from these programs disproportionately. Yet public largesse helps support the lifestyles of Americans of every race and class -- including governors from wealthy families.
For example, taxpayers have long been able to deduct interest paid on a home loan from their income when filing taxes, giving them a substantial tax break that you could fairly describe as "free stuff."
According to a Wonkblog analysis of his federal income tax returns, the Republican presidential candidate has personally avoided at least $241,000 in taxes by deducting the interest on his mortgages since 1981.
Over the years, the Bush household (like so many other American families) has benefited substantially from this kind of special treatment.
It's hard to calculate other benefits Bush has received from the government with any precision. For example, he and his wife, Columba, have made regular contributions to their individual retirement accounts, the tax returns show. Doing so will allow them to avoid taxes on any gains the investments produce. The government gives them an additional financial advantage over families that can't afford to save for retirement at all.
And the income tax returns don't show at all the ways in which state and local governments have helped finance Bush's dealings during his long career in real estate.
Two decades ago, the city of Jacksonville spent $121 million renovating the stadium in which the newly formed Jaguars would play football, The New York Times reported at the time. Bush was an early investor in the team.
And while his father was in the White House, Bush was retained to help sell pumps built by a firm called Moving Water Industries. To expand its business in Nigeria, the firm relied on a $74 million loan guaranteed by the federal Export-Import Bank.
Few Americans have the opportunity to fly to Nigeria and make deals financed by the U.S. government. Even fewer have the chance to fly to Nigeria and say, "My father is the president of the United States," while they're there (as Bush is shown saying in footage of his trip).
These advantages are less tangible than food stamps or tax breaks, but there's no doubt wealthy and well-connected Americans get "free stuff" from the government, too -- including tax breaks on yachts, rental properties, lavish business lunches and more.
The tax break for mortgage interest is one of the best examples. The subsidy is available to every homeowner, but few working class people use it, since they can save more by taking the standard deduction. Affluent homeowners, who have enough interest and enough other deductions to claim, benefit the most. Data from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation shows that the the vast majority subsidy is paid to households with income over six figures.
Now, it's true that Bush has called for taxing homeowners on most of the interest they pay on their mortgages. His proposal would limit most itemized deductions to a total of 2 percent of a taxpayer's adjusted gross income. Byone estimate, the limit would save the government $54 billion annually. Overall, though, his plan reduces taxes in a way that gives the most relief to the wealthy.
The disproportionate benefit for higher income earners of the mortgage interest deduction can be seen in a couple of ways beyond simply the amount of the benefit. Economists say the primary effect of the tax break is to encourage wealthy families to buy larger houses, rather than helping poor families buy a home that wouldn't be able to afford one otherwise. One group of researchers estimated the increase in the size of the average U.S. residence due to the mortgage-interest deduction, along with other housing subsidies. Collectively, those policies add floor space equivalent to a laundry room, a master bath and two family rooms to homes in Los Angeles, the researchers found.
Wonkblog's analysis of Bush's tax returns adjusted for inflation and is likely a conservative estimate. The analysis did not account for the increased marginal tax rates that Bush would have paid had he been taxed on the interest.
In 1986, for example, Bush reported no taxable income as he was able to deduct everything he earned that year. No tax was levied on the first $3,670 of income that year, but Bush's household would have been in a higher tax bracket, and he would have had to pay tax at a much higher marginal rate if he had not been able to deduct the interest he paid on his mortgage.
7. Fighting the Christian Version of Sharia
The Christian Right, Gay Marriage, and the Abuse of ‘Religious Liberty’
by Steve Sanders, washingtonmonthly.com, September 24, 2015
The Christian right is deep in the grip of gay marriage derangement syndrome. As demonstrated by the vulgar spectacle instigated by Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis and her enablers, its activists refuse to adapt to the new world in which they live, and they find it impossible to exercise discipline over their demands, rhetoric, or legal arguments. And so, having lost the culture war they started decades ago over homosexuality, the Christian right is now on its way to losing the war it provoked over “religious liberty.”
Outside of fever swamps like this weekend’s Values Voters Summit, most Americans are skeptical of the Christian right’s persecution complex. For example, an ABC News/Washington Post poll last week showed that Americans overwhelming believe the need to treat everyone equally under the law is more important than someone’s religious beliefs.
And so the term “religious liberty,” which once signified a noble American value on which both the right and left could find common ground, appears to be headed toward the same fate as that old chestnut “family values”: a once-potent rallying cry that was so misused and abused that it became just another synonym for bigotry.
This is a tragedy for those who care about individual rights and a principled understanding of religious freedom. The most important voice on religious liberty once belonged to Supreme Court justice and liberal lion William Brennan, whose 1963 opinion in Sherbert v. Verner mandated strict judicial scrutiny of laws infringing religious exercise. (This was around the same time that one of the nation’s most prominent evangelicals, Bob Jones, Sr., was arguing that racial segregation was part of “God’s established order.”)
But Sherbert, like so many generous constitutional understandings, was a victim of the Rehnquist court, specifically a 1990 decision called Employment Division v. Smith. In that decision, the Court said the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause did not make the religious believer “a law unto himself,” and so religious objections could not overcome “neutral, generally applicable” laws - like, say, a law directing county clerks to issue marriage licenses to all qualified couples. Governments may give greater protection to religion if they choose in the form of exemptions or accommodations (more on that in a moment). But Smith goes a long way toward explaining why Kim Davis has no constitutional argument in her favor.
The Christian right was once a formidable political machine and home to some of the Republicans’ most celebrated strategists. But today it is a collection of sideshow acts like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee, who can’t even break double digits with the Republican base; hard-core theocrats like Roy Moore; disgraced frauds like Ralph Reed; and impresarios of fading relevance like Tony Perkins, organizer of this weekend’s evangelical summit in Washington.
And then there’s the over-the-top-homophobic group Liberty Counsel, which represents Kim Davis. In a filing to the very Supreme Court justices who had just legalized marriage equality in the name of “equal dignity,” the hacks in charge ofLiberty Counsel’s brief couldn’t even restrain themselves from referring to gay “marriage” in scare quotes.
To listen to her legal team, you might think Kim Davis was the first person ever to experience a conflict between religion and her responsibilities as a citizen, employee, or public official. In fact, at both the federal and state levels, there is a well-developed body of law concerning religious accommodations in the workplace.
American law is highly individualistic when it comes to the definition of religious beliefs. This means that if Kim Davis says allowing a gay couple to receive a form with her name machine-printed on it somehow inhibits her own personal exercise of religion, and that she believes citizens elected her to arbitrate whose marriages are valid in the eyes of God, a court will probably accept such assertions with a straight face. But accommodations made on behalf of a believer must be objectively reasonable. Beliefs may be grandiose, but accommodations may not unduly burden other people.
Even under so-called “religious freedom restoration acts,” a government’s compelling interest in maintaining efficient public services and complying with Supreme Court law on marriage equality weigh against claims like Davis’s. As a federal appeals court observed this year in a case under the federal RFRA, “The very word ‘accommodation’ implies a balance of competing interests.” (The federal RFRA, at issue in the Hobby Lobby case, doesn’t apply to the states due to another Rehnquist-era decision. Davis’s arguments under Kentucky’s state RFRA remain to be litigated.)
Such legal balancing tests don’t work when one side believes it is the center of the universe and everyone else’s rights must give way. As “accommodation” for her beliefs, Davis thought that gay couples should be forced to drive to another county for their marriage licenses, or that the governor should convene a special session of the legislature to change state marriage procedures. Even when her name was removed, Davis’s lawyers were blowing smoke that the marriage forms were invalid. To anyone who knows something about religious-freedom law, it was predictable that the federal courts would respond to all this by saying, in effect, “Get back to us when you have something serious to offer.”
Properly understood, religious liberty refers to limitations on the government’s power to interfere with a believer’s conscience and how she chooses to live her own life. But as used by the Christian right, it is a demand that government laws or policies conform to evangelical doctrine. Like everyone else, religious believers are entitled to try to persuade their lawmakers and fellow citizens in the political marketplace. But a diverse democracy cannot function when one side basically claims a constitutional right to get its own way, or labels a court decision as atyrannical assault on the rights of those who disagree with it.
The Christian right has stopped even pretending that its understanding of religious liberty involves anyone other than certain Christians. Witness the remark of evangelical standard bearer Ben Carson Sunday on Meet the Press that a Muslim could not be president. (And by the way, did we ever hear about the religious liberty of gay Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ, Unitarians, or Jews whose congregations were forbidden from marrying them by state “defense of marriage” acts the Christian right rammed through not so many years ago?)
Religion has long enjoyed a variety of special rights and legal privileges - tax breaks, God on the currency, a minister’s authority to act in the state’s name in solemnizing a marriage, to name a few. Conservative Christians grew accustomed to hegemony in a world where judges and lawmakers frequently deferred to their preferences. Only last year, the Supreme Court, relying on nothing more than “history and tradition,” said it was just fine if a city wanted to make everyone sit through appeals to Jesus and other sectarian prayer at government meetings. But as Americans become markedly less religious, things are changing, and the law’s treatment of homosexuality is a cutting edge of that change. So far the Christian right is reacting exactly like an indulged child throwing a particularly stormy tantrum.
Americans are not very sympathetic. The ABC News/Washington Post poll in the wake of the Kim Davis circus showed 63 percent believe she should be required to do her job regardless of her religious objections. Nearly three-quarters (including 66 percent of Republicans) said it was more important to “treat everyone equally” than to accommodate someone’s religious beliefs when the two conflict.
The Christian right hasn’t learned from its experience with the state Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana last spring. Although RFRAs can be used to challenge virtually any law that is alleged to substantially burden someone’s religious exercise, the politics made clear that the only thing most Christian-right activists cared about was winning exemptions from civil rights laws that protected gays against discrimination. Legislators and business leaders became so concerned that the RFRA would tar Indiana with a reputation for anti-gay bigotry that they rushed through an amendment so that now, the one scenario where a religious accommodation is not available to a private business is in defense to any charge of illegal discrimination.
Never did the Shakespearean metaphor “hoist by his own petard” - to be destroyed by one’s own scheme intended to harm another - seem so appropriate.
Because most Americans seem to yawn both at the existence of gay marriage and at right-wing panjandrums saying some of the most incendiary possible things about both homosexuality and the Supreme Court, the republic likely will survive the end times of this particular culture war. But it may be with a distorted understanding of religious freedom, deeper confusion about the Constitution, and a more-impoverished understanding of our rights and responsibilities as members of a pluralistic society.
8. Republicans and Their Planned Parenthood Lies
Carly Fiorina Abuses the Truth Just Like a Teenage Conservative Hoaxer
by Brian Beutler, newrepublic.com, September 28, 2015
Comparing female politicians to petulant 13-year-old boys is generally unwise, but in Carly Fiorina’s case it is apt.
CJ Pearson, a black conservative teenager from Georgia, became a sensation on the right this year for denouncing President Barack Obama in homemade YouTube videos, two of which have now been viewed over two million times each. Pearson isn’t the first precocious conservative tobecome a right-wing celebrity, but he is probably the first to parlay that fame into a campaign gig, specifically as Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s youth-outreach chairman.
Late last week, though, the charismatic kid was revealed as the perpetrator of a number of hoaxes, including a trumped up beef with Facebook for censoring his speech (he was 12 years old at the time, too young to run a Facebook account of his own), and engaging in a Twitter fight with a supposedly racist Obama supporter, who turned out to be Pearson's own sockpuppet. Most recently, he staged evidence suggesting that Obama had blocked his Twitter account, and got busted by a reporter at Glenn Beck's conservative website, The Blaze.
Rather than admit to the prank, Pearson has continued to insist that his word was good.
“[H]ere's what the PR folks are saying: say you lied and apologize to avoid backlash,” he wrote in a series of tweets. “But, instead, I choose to stand by my word. While the article will be incriminating, all we have in politics is our word and I stand by it.”
Carly Fiorina's mode of deception, and her response to being fact-checked, is nearly identical. The main difference, of course, is that Fiorina is a 61-year-old former corporate executive who’s a top contender to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, while Pearson is still going through puberty. The fact that so many conservatives are lining up to defend her is indicative of the degree to which conservatism has become a movement defined by affective rage and imagined victimization by mainstream forces. This toxic brew contributed to the party's difficulty winning recent national elections. It is already poisoning the party's campaign for the presidency in 2016.
Two weeks ago, during the second GOP primary debate, Fiorina delivereda crowd-pleasing condemnation of Planned Parenthood for, as she’d have it, delivering children alive to steal their organs and sell them for profit.
"I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these [Planned Parnthood] tapes," she said. "Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.'"
If the footage she described existed, people might go to jail. But it doesn’t. In fact, basically every factual claim in those two sentences is untrue. Florina’s conservative defenders, and her super PAC, have produced footage unrelated to the Planned Parenthood sting depicting a life-like fetus—but not a verifiably aborted fetus, nor a fetus delivered during a procedure conducted in a Planned Parenthood facility. Nobody performing the procedure said, “we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain,” either.
Fiorina’s fabricated description of the Planned Parenthood videos wasn’t issued in passing, but in a way that was calculated to dominate cable news highlight reels. She can’t admit to confusion, or to unintentionally blending unrelated footage into a single, imagined scene, because that would amount to telling her new supporters that the thing that attracted them to her wasn’t real.
So, like young CJ Pearson, she’s cooked up extremely weak post hoc defense, hoping that over time the truth and her twisted version of it will bleed together. "That scene absolutely does exist," she said on Meet the Press this weekend, "and that voice saying what I said they were saying—'We're gonna keep it alive to harvest its brain'—exists as well." (It doesn't.) But while Pearson’s reputation on the right is in free fall, many conservatives are twisting themselves into epistemological knots arguing that Fiorina’s right, even though she’s wrong. In the Los Angeles Times, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg explained that while "the exact scene, exactly as Fiorina describes it, is not on the videos ... anybody who has watched the videos would find Fiorina's account pretty accurate."
In a way, that the wagons are circling around Fiorina helps explain why Pearson thought his own fabrications might pay off. Recent history is replete with examples of conservatives racing to defend other conservatives caught peddling stories no less fictional than Pearson’s.
James O'Keefe, a propagandist and agent provocateur with a history of selectively editing his sting footage to make the opposite of reality seem true, is a right-wing celebrity. Republicans in Congress, including Pearson’s boss, Ted Cruz, want to shut down the government over videos that everyone knows have been doctored. In 2012, conservatives dedicated themselves to the fiction that Obama had refused to call an attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi an act of terrorism, when in fact he had called it terrorism the day after it happened, in the White House Rose Garden. When Mitt Romney repeated the myth at the second presidential debate, CNN moderator Candy Crowley famously embarrassed him by interjecting to set the record straight. To this day, conservatives detest Crowley, and insist that she didn’t give Romney a fair shake by telling the truth.
As more interviewers and moderators interject to debunk Fiorina’s story about a video segment that doesn’t exist, Fiorina’s reputation among conservatives isn’t suffering. Instead, the right’s journalist shit-list is growing longer.
Pearson can be forgiven for expecting the conservative media to rush to his aid, rather than orchestrate his demise. He's coming of age in a movement that often treats reality as subordinate to perception; that will embrace obvious distortions of facts if doing so might move the needle of public opinion, and dissemble and whine, rather than admit error, when the media gets wise. If the stakes were higher—if Pearson were a 61-year-old presidential candidate instead of a 13-year-old kid—he would be climbing in the polls today.
Whatever you think of Planned Parenthood, this is a terrible and dishonest chart
by Timothy B. Lee, vox.com, September 29, 2015
On Tuesday morning, Congress held a hearing on Planned Parenthood, as conservative Republicans try to build the case for defunding the organization after a pro-life group released a series of "sting" videos critical of the organization. During the hearing, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) showed this chart to make the point about Planned Parenthood's activities:
This is not how charts work! Since 935,573 is a larger number than 327,653, the pink line should be above the red line. Here's what you get if you chart the numbers accurately:
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(Javier Zarracina/Vox)
The chart is misleading in another way, too. It's true that Planned Parenthood performed 290,000 abortions and 2 million cancer-related services in 2006. But the organization also provided more than 3 million treatments for sexually transmitted diseases and nearly 4 million contraceptive services that year. By 2013, the number of STD treatments had gone up to 4.5 million, while the number of contraceptive services declined modestly to 3.6 million:
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4108478/abortion_chart_2.0.jpg)
(Javier Zarracina/Vox)
So it's not true, as the chart implies, that Planned Parenthood has been performing more abortions while drastically cutting back the provision of other services. The overall number of non-abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood barely changed at all, going from 10.29 million in 2006 to 10.26 million in 2013.
FINALLY
