Must-Read: If Conservatives Are Patriots, Why Do They Allow Corporate Tax-Dodging?

Barry Ritholtz flags a Fortune article that challenges conservatives' patriotism. Really, cons, do you hate America or what?

Must-Read: Echidne Speaks the Truth on Hobby Lobby (and Ur-Sluts)

Via Eschaton, I got a link to Echidne -- a statistics expert who waxes wise about many topics -- holding forth on what drives conservatives to rail against "employee subsidized consequence free sex." Read it. It's lays out the fallacies and hypocrisy quite nicely.

She reminds us -- though some of us men figured this out decades ago -- that for every slut woman having conception-free sex there is a willing man -- I'm not sure willing is a strong enough word -- at the heart of the operation. We men love us some sluts women.

I'm not saying liberals have a monopoly on uncomplicated, fun-filled sex, but I will say here's another reason to be happy not to be a conservative. The mixture of guilt, hypocrisy, self-loathing, fear, anger, confusion, resentment, and, I suppose, pleasure that must accompany the act of coupling with a conservative's favorite slut woman must make for a real moral haymaker of a sexual act.

Good luck with that, cons. We liberals just want to get laid. We could give a shit who pays for the conception-free part. (Observation: In an evolved society, everyone pays for it.)

Not that there's anything wrong with being a dad. Swedish men get
480 days paternity leave. Talk about an evolved society.

Why Hobby Lobby Decision Is Bad for Religious Groups

Modern contraceptives have been an unmitigated success in just about all of its intended uses, whether simply to prevent unwanted pregnancies or help in a variety of female conditions. It has also lowered the rate of abortions that occur as a result of unwanted pregnancies, and only an idiot would claim that it hasn't greatly helped in lowering teen pregnancies. States, like Texas, that teach exclusively that abstinence is the preferred method of birth control have higher teen pregnancy rates than states that teach that birth control is a successful method.

So with the Hobby Lobby decision, we have a Supreme Court -- need I remind you it was only five Catholic men (aka the Five Dicks) that voted in favor of a religious exemption? -- that has sided with the Christian conservative cause, effectively making access to birth control more difficult and expensive for most groups of women, including minorities and the young.

So why is this decision bad for religious groups in general? Simple: It's stupid. And it's based on religious beliefs. Case closed. Religion is stupid.

First, understand that almost all groups in America favor the use of birth control and believe it's good that it's provided free under the ACA. Read the stats here at the Public Religion Research Institute. Note that only among white evangelical Protestants do we find minority support, at  40%. Still, that's 40% of evangelicals in favor!

Conservatives lose while winning when they celebrate a position that most Americans disagree with. Eventually, the conclusion that will be drawn is that conservatives, yet again, insist that their ideas are antiquated, or outright stupid.

When enough women and men are negatively affected by this decision, the chickens will begin to come home to roost. And when the Supreme Court shows how broad their "narrow" decision actually is, in later Supreme Court rulings, the stupidity of the decision will sink in further.

How many bad policies do conservatives have to chase before the public, especially the new generation of voters, finally catch on and label conservatives and their Republican Party as stupid?

Go ahead, conservatives, piss off millennials. But prepare to live with this reality.

Birth Control Is Great for Business

Of course it is, and Slate's Jane Hu says why.

What the Real Fight Over Birth Control Is All About

Sheryl Sandberg says lean in. The Supreme Men say lean back and pop another baby.

So much has been written about the Hobby Lobby decision, but the response has been slow to call out the real reasoning: Keeping women barefoot and pregnant keeps them from successfully competing with men. It's about women's rights and equality. Certain men don't like that.

Here's a link to a Daily Kos post that nailed it two years ago.

Here's another to a Slate article by Eric Posner, who does a creditable job in explaining who wrote the stronger opinion. He says Alito did, but that doesn't mean the ruling is smart. Read the whole thing, but here's a key excerpt:

But the case will contribute to the Culture Wars. Early in her dissent, Ginsburg, quoting an earlier case, says, “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” So she sets up Hobby Lobby as a clash between women’s rights and religious rights.

Posner doesn't buy Ginsberg's argument here, saying Alito's decision urges the government to offer the same workaround to for-profit companies that it did to non-profits. Amanda Marcotte, again in Slate, makes this point clear, as she quotes Alito's decision:

In fact, HHS has already devised and implemented a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations while ensuring that the employees of these entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage. … according to HHS, this system imposes no net economic burden on the insurance companies that are required to provide or secure the coverage.

Although HHS has made this system available to religious nonprofits that have religious objections to the contraceptive mandate, HHS has provided no reason why the same system cannot be made available when the owners of for-profit corporations have similar religious objections.

Sounds reasonable and accommodating, right? But not so fast, say Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West also in Slate. The Supreme Men have acted since the decision with a clarification that totally gives away the game and destroys all pretense:

Wheaton [College], however, along with many other religious not-for-profits, have long objected to this very workaround. They filed lawsuits claiming that the mere fact of signing a form noting their religious objection to contraception coverage triggered third parties to provide the contraception, which triggered women to have access to morning-after pills and IUDs, which in their view were akin to abortions, and thus violated their religious consciences. Signing the form, they said, was the same as actually providing the contraceptives themselves. It’s the butterfly effect of contraception. Any time Wheaton flaps its religious-conscience wings, a woman somewhere ends up with an IUD, and Wheaton’s religious liberties are violated.

And Thursday night a majority of the court agreed. The order is a preliminary injunction. The court will need to decide this and dozens of similar cases in the future. The justices caution that this in no way reflects their views of the future cases. But for our purposes, let it be known that the very workaround the court gave to religious objectors only four days earlier now likely violates their religious liberty as well.

Where this is headed seems clear. The workaround, the "accommodation" that Justice Alito used to make his decision narrow, will be declared "too restrictive" and thus illegal some time in the next term. And by granting the temporary injunction, all institutions that object to the birth-control mandate will not have to accept the accommodation until the Court issues a final opinion, which looks likely to strike down the accommodation.

Game over. The Court has effectively, for now, banned government-mandated birth control, in all its forms and will likely set that in stone next year.

As Lithwick and West pointed out, those affected by these decisions -- including the women of the Supreme Court who dissented -- "share a highly relevant personal characteristic: a uterus." Thus the true nature of the case is established: religious discrimination aimed strictly at women. Why? Amanda Marcotte knows why and thinks its a short-lived victory for religious conservatives:

This feels like an extremely reductive view of religion: As simply a way to codify reactionary beliefs about human sexuality. Or, as Atrios put it on Twitter, "religion is now only about unapproved fucking." And it’s ultimately not good for the religious right to have one of its own—Alito—limit the scope of legitimate religious grousing to matters of sexuality, as if religion has nothing else going for it. Hobby Lobby may have won this battle. But it won at the price of portraying the Christian right as little more than a movement of sex-obsessed busybodies.

Isn't that what the Christian right is all about? I'd say yes. Even their stand against gays is about sex. Yes, with Hobby Lobby, religion has shrunk indeed.

 Religion in the 21st century: Is it only about sex
and death? Woody Allen would agree.

If Your (Red) State Isn't Serving Your Interests, What Can You Do?

Turn it Blue. Register to vote. Vote. Tell your friends to vote. Work to register people who would support the issues you care about.

Obviously it's no secret that I feel Democrats better represent their constituents. I also believe that working to register minorities is the best way for residents of states, especially in the Sun Belt, South, and Mountain West, to change their political environment. Register minorities!

Why would registering minorities hurt GOP chances? Latinos, as a group, have even more reason since Republicans killed immigration reform (a key reason they did so was out of concern for what Latino voters could do to them in the future) to vote Democratic. And here's a study that show why Republican fears are justified. Here's the graphic from it:

And we're only talking Latino voters here. As for Asian voters, once solidly in the GOP camp, they've now shifted radically toward the Dems. Blacks have always been there, and after the GOP have been trying to prevent black voting, well, forget about it. As for women, after the Republican glee over blocking access to birth control in the Hobby Lobby case, you can bet they'll continue trending toward the Democratic Party.

Finally, look at the youth vote. Millennials are trending Democratic, too, because of social issues. The millennials just don't care about a host of issues that incense social conservatives, like gay marriage, race, abortion, etc. It will only get worse for the Republicans because their core constituency has been trending further right on social issues.

All the above groups don't tend to vote as much in off-year elections, and some of them resist getting registered to vote. Change those realities, and the future reality for the GOP is very dark indeed.

Why Does the South (and the Sun Belt) Remain So Poor?

The most obvious takeaway from this map should be that poverty is enduring. Once it gets rolling, it's hard to curtail. Poverty begets poverty, generation to generation. To change direction takes a powerful effort of will and determination. To remain mired in poverty can be and is exacerbated by wrong-headed state and local government policies. And, it must said, choices made thirty, fifty, a hundred, and even a hundred fifty years ago matter.

Observations:

1. The Old South has long had a strong rural component, as well as a high African-American population, which suffers the highest rate of poverty in rural areas at 34%. Remember, though, that whites make up 63% of rural poverty, largely in the South. 
2. Texas has the highest outright number of people living in poverty at 730,000. Oklahoma by all accounts is an especially backward state, especially bad for women. The state has long been among those with the highest poverty rates.
3. The rest of the Sun Belt, Arizona and New Mexico, have their poverty numbers skewed by their high Native American populations, which suffer poverty at double the national average. Arizona, however, was also hit hard by the Great Recession, with all of its counties ending up with 25% of their populations in poverty areas, with middle-class jobs being replaced with minimum-wage jobs. In New Mexico, Hispanics and Native Americans make up 57% of the population, with both groups greatly exceeding the national average for poverty.
4. This particular measure, people living in poverty areas, is different from those living in poverty, but both statistics generally track each other. However, the idea of measuring poverty by area is an important distinction, in that those not below the poverty level but living in high poverty areas still suffer the lack of employment opportunity and low quality of life that is endemic to such areas.

Of course, I stress from a policy standpoint that these Southern and Sun Belt states, largely run by Republicans, are ill-served by their political overseers. Since the voters of these states consistently vote Republican, especially in state and local elections, they get the government they want. But these state and local governments tend to enact policies against the self-interests of their own residents.

A current example is the general trend in the South and Sun Belt to refuse to take federal money to expand Medicaid to help the poor get health care. (Exceptions: Republican governors in Arizona and New Mexico went with the Medicaid expansion; Arkansas, with a Democratic governor, requested and got a waiver to receive Medicaid money that will be spent on private insurance for the poor.)

What motivates the voters to aid and abet those who consistently ill-serve their constituents is a conundrum. Partly, it's ignorance. Partly, it's bamboozlement. And partly, it's a misbegotten notion that if you vote for lower taxes, smaller government, less regulation, a smaller safety net, and lower government spending, things will get better for you even if you're working class, middle class, high-school or college graduate.

The map above paints a picture that illustrates starkly the failure of the vision and policies of the Sun Belt and Southern states. When will they get wise?

Note. Voters don't always know why they vote the way they do, and how they make their decisions can be incredibly random. Read this Chris Hayes article from way back in 2004. It demonstrates better than anything I've read how the low-information, undecided voter operates. It's almost tragic, but it explains a lot.

Savannah, Georgia, voters. Which party do you think they favor and why?