Myth Of The 28% Foreign Aid Budget By Ezra Klein November 7, 2013 For years, the example budget wonks turn to when they want to underscore the public's ignorance about the budget is the baffling, but persistent, belief that foreign aid is bankrupting the country. "Foreign aid is the only program that [people] consistently favor cutting," said Bruce Bartlett with a sigh, "perhaps because of grossly overestimating its share of the budget." He went on to list poll after poll showing the public's wildly incorrect opinions about how much the United States spends helping other countries. And yet the perception persists. Of course, foreign aid isn't that pricey. But as of yet, budget wonks haven't had a shadow of success at convincing the country that foreign aid is a tiny sliver of federal spending.
Confessions of a Public Defender I am a public defender in a large southern metropolitan area. Fewer than ten percent of the people in the area I serve are black but over 90 per cent of my clients are black. The remaining ten percent are mainly Hispanics but there are a few whites. I have no explanation for why this is, but crime has racial patterns. Hispanics usually commit two kinds of crime: sexual assault on children and driving under the influence. Blacks commit many violent crimes but very few sex crimes. As a young lawyer, I believed the official story that blacks are law abiding, intelligent, family-oriented people, but are so poor they must turn to crime to survive. The media invariably sugarcoat black behavior. Although blacks are only a small percentage of our community, the courthouse is filled with them: the halls and gallery benches are overflowing with black defendants, families, and crime victims. When I am appointed to represent a client I introduce myself and explain that I am his lawyer. No fathers
31 states have heightened religious freedom protections The recent flurry of state bills giving religious exemptions from certain laws -- including the Arizona law that Gov. Jan Brewer (R) just vetoed -- raises a question: How many states already provide heightened protection for the exercise of religion? The answer? Thirty-one, 18 of which passed state laws based on the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. "These state RFRAs were enacted in response to Supreme Court decisions that had nothing to do with gay rights or same-sex marriage," explained University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock in an e-mail. A new political fight has emerged in part because some of these more recent proposals are shifting the definition of when citizens can opt out on religious grounds. Kansas, for example, already has the Kansas Preservation of Religious Freedom Act. This week the Kansas state Senate declined to take up the House bill. Indiana Gov. Continue reading 10 minutes left
Barry Goldwater Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Barry Morris Goldwater (January 1 1909 – May 29 1998) was an American politician. §Quotes[edit] I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn't first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century. … To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom. §Washington Post interview (1994)[edit] §Misattributed[edit]
The War on the Private Mind In Indiana, in Arkansas, and in the boardroom There are two easy ways to get a Republican to roll over and put his paws up in the air: The first is to write him a check, which is the political version of scratching his belly, and the second is to call him a bigot. In both cases, it helps if you have a great deal of money behind you. Tim Cook, who in his role as chief executive of the world’s most valuable company personifies precisely the sort of oppression to which gay people in America are subjected, led the hunting party when Indiana’s governor Mike Pence signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, while Walmart, a company that cannot present its hindquarters enthusiastically enough to the progressives who hate it and everything for which it stands, dispatched its CEO, C. Douglas McMillon, to head off a similar effort in Arkansas, where Governor Asa Hutchison rolled over immediately. RELATED: Religious Liberty and the Left’s End Game RELATED: RFRA: Now More Than Ever
Social Justice Bullies: The Authoritarianism of Millennial Social Justice Social justice, as a concept, has existed for millennia — at least as long as society has had inequity and inequality and there were individuals enlightened enough to question this. When we study history, we see, as the American Transcendentalist Theodore Parker famously wrote, “the arc [of the moral universe]…bends towards justice.” And this seems relatively evident when one looks at history as a single plot line. Things improve. And, if history is read as a book, the supporters of social justice are typically deemed the heroes, the opponents of it the villains. And perhaps it’s my liberal heart speaking, the fact that I grew up in a liberal town, learned US history from a capital-S Socialist, and/or went to one of the most liberal universities in the country, but I view this is a good thing. But millennials are grown up now — and they’re angry. Many will understand this term I used — millennial social justice advocates — as a synonym to the pejorative “social justice warriors.”
KOHLBERG'S STAGES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT Lawrence Kohlberg was a moral philosopher and student of child development. He was director of Harvard's Center for Moral Education. His special area of interest is the moral development of children - how they develop a sense of right, wrong, and justice. Kohlberg observed that growing children advance through definite stages of moral development in a manner similar to their progression through Piaget's well-known stages of cognitive development. These conclusions have been verified in cross-cultural studies done in , , , , , , , , and . An outline of these developmental stages follows: FOCUS: Self AGES: Up to 10-13 years of age, most prisoners Behavior motivated by anticipation of pleasure or pain. STAGE 1: PUNISHMENT AND OBEDIENCE: Might Makes Right Avoidance of physical punishment and deference to power. response of physical retaliation. determine its goodness or badness. holocaust who were simply "carrying out orders" under threat of punishment, illustrate that others? peers. "nice." here.
Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party | The Weekly Sift Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think. Late in 2012, I came out of the Lincoln movie with two historical mysteries to solve: How did the two parties switch places regarding the South, white supremacy, and civil rights? The first question took some work, but yielded readily to patient googling. Who really won the Civil War? That sounded crazy until I read about Reconstruction. And oh, those blacks Lincoln emancipated? Here’s what my teachers’ should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It wasn’t just that Confederates wanted to continue the war. The Lost Cause. But eventually the good men of the South could take it no longer, so they formed the Ku Klux Klan to protect themselves and their communities. A still from The Birth of a Nation That telling of history is now named for its primary proponent, William Dunning. The first modern war.
A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System | The Weekly Sift If you’ve seen the Lincoln movie, maybe you’re still walking around with this bit of cognitive dissonance: In 1864, the Democrats are the party of slavery and the Republicans the party of emancipation and racial justice. What’s up with that? How did we get from there to here? The story is doubly worth telling because Republicans like Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg have been misrepresenting it so grossly. A good place to start is the presidential election of 1860, which brings Lincoln to power and convinces Southern whites (the only people who can vote in the South in 1860) that secession is their best chance to maintain slavery*. Lincoln gets only 40% of the vote, but in a four-way race (the Democratic Convention split over whether the platform should endorse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision) that’s enough to win. 1876 electoral map 1896 electoral map 2012 electoral map The “solid South” stays Democratic through 1944, when FDR carries Mississippi with 94% of the vote. Phillips writes:
How Corporate America Invented Christian America In December 1940, as America was emerging from the Great Depression, more than 5,000 industrialists from across the nation made their yearly pilgrimage to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, convening for the annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers. The program promised an impressive slate of speakers: titans at General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Mutual Life, and Sears, Roebuck; popular lecturers such as etiquette expert Emily Post and renowned philosopher-historian Will Durant; even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Tucked away near the end of the program was a name few knew initially, but one everyone would be talking about by the convention’s end: Reverend James W. Handsome, tall, and somewhat gangly, the 41-year-old Congregationalist minister bore more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Stewart. It all sounds familiar enough today, but Fifield’s audience of executives was stunned. They just needed to do one thing: Get religion.
David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show' | US news America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx. I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. We understand profit.