Traditionally conservative ideology has been and currently is making it significantly more difficult for young people to get to college and for families around the country to afford college. States across the country and the federal government are all cutting back support for pulbic colleges and universities. Additionally, rising interest rates on subsidized and unsubsidized federal student loans, and rapidly rising tuition costs are just a few examples of the changing education landscape since 2000; and the facts are even more depressing, writes Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the Campaign For America’s Future:

The facts are not in dispute. Faced with rising costs and tight budgets, states across the country are cutting back on support for public universities and colleges. Colleges pass the costs onto students—tuitions are up an average of 40 percent since George W. Bush took office in 2000. College aid hasn’t kept up. The president has broken his campaign pledge to increase the size of Pell Grants, the basic federal scholarship program. More and more students are forced to go into debt to pay for college. Graduates of four-year schools this year will be burdened by an average of $23,600 in student loans and $2,000 in credit card debt. Yet, the conservative majority in Congress voted to cut $12 billion out of the student loan program this year, even as Congress hiked interest rates on college loans to students and parents. Costs are going up, even as hundreds of thousands of students are forced to forego college or drop out because they cannot afford the education that they need and have earned.

Conservatives—who dominate all branches of the federal government and many of the states—have contributed directly to this reality. They champion “smaller government and lower taxes.” Tax cuts—which primarily reward the wealthy—lower revenue and force cuts in government. But conservatives believe in a strong military, won’t dare touch entrenched corporate welfare programs that waste billions and can’t take on popular retirement programs like Medicare and Social Security. So the spending cuts come from domestic programs that benefit working and poor Americans—in education, the environment, child care, housing, schools or transportation.

It’s saddening, not just for families looking to send their children to college for the first time, or have multiple children who will reach college age someday, or families even planning to send their children to college in the future, but it’s depressing for people who have obtained their college degrees and are considering graduate education, adults looking to get their degrees after several years or to participate in continuing education programs, or even students who are currently in college and wondering how they’ll pay for next semester’s tuition and books. It’s a terrifying situation, one directly contributed to by the conservative ideology of pleasing their base with fewer public services and public funding, giving away tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while forcing the middle and lower classes to pay more than their fair share, letting large industry slide on their tax and social responsibilities, and, as we’ve seen with this administration, cutting funding for education for the first time in over a decade.

So where do we go from here? Borosage has a few ideas, but first he takes the time to point out where we’re going wrong-education isn’t the kind of problem where throwing money at it mindlessly is going to improve its quality, but taking money away isn’t going to help to any remote degree. Borosage has some wise advice for this administration, and for conservatives around the country-the mantra may be popular, but the effects simply aren’t.

[ The GOP's School Daze ]
Source: TomPaine.com

Ah Tom; you never cease to amaze me, and never cease to be more than enough proof that when talking about racism, the best place to go to take it to the source is the conservative right. Now now, conservative readers out there, if you’re only insulted now, I have no idea what I’ve been writing about up to this point, but I wouldn’t dare make the proclamation that conservative equals racist, that’s way off base, and completely disrespectful-but it’s far far easier to find the bigotry lurking just under the surface-or in some cases, flowing over the top-on the right side of the aisle.

How do we know? Well, in promoting his pick for ABC’s Dancing with the Stars (between this and the 9/11 revisionist-history mockumentary they plan to air this week, ABC’s ratings must really be in the toilet for them to pull stunts like this), Tom Delay suggests some woman named Sara is a strong supporter of the Republican party and stands for strong American values, according to the Republicans. If that’s really the case, I’m curious why she was allowed to think for herself, much less walk around in public without a man to think for her-since after all, according to the Republican party, that’s what rings to the tune of “family values,” but the real reason Tom is a supporter is a bit more nefarious than that.

Sara’s husband is an ultra-right-wing, ultra-conservative, racist “activist,” and I use the term “activist” lightly. My preferred term for people like this are “homegrown terrorists,” of the like that we saw in America in the 1990s; you remember the folks, the super-christian, evangelical racists arming themselves with as many guns as they can fill a basement with and provisions in secret bunkers to prepare for the race war. You remember those folks, the one praising God around a campfire after training in rural Idaho. Her husband, Craig L. Schelske, is a failed Republican candidate and executive director of a group called “American Destiny.” Scared yet? You should be.

Let’s see what our friend Evan Derkacz has to say about the matter:

American Destiny is an organization that promotes a revisionist history of America’s founding as a theocracy and dedicates itself to busting the “myth” of separation of church and state. In order to do so, it must use the discredited scholarship of one David Barton, who used to speak at “Christian Identity” conferences. In Kingdom Coming, Michelle Goldberg wrote:

…In the past [Barton] was embraced by the racist far right, addressing at least two Christian Identity gatherings. (Christian Identity maintains that Anglo-Saxons are the true children of Israel, while blacks are “mud people” and Jews are the spawn of Satan).

DeLay is also known to cavort with Barton who, incidentally, was hired by the RNC in 2004.

And you wonder why the whole “where are your horns, Jew?” thing won’t die. And “mud people?” Wow. I guess that explains my complexion. Derkacz is loving ABC for this kind of promotion, but personally, I see it more as a damning proclamation of both mainstream media and how, for as much as it claims to, hasn’t lost their old touch when it comes to making sure the people we see on TV are nothing like the everyday American, and an even more damning proclamation of the Republican Party, since I can tell from the commentary above what real Republican ideals and values are like, regardless of what they try to tell me from the podium.

Actions speak louder than words, conservatives, and your actions have always managed to belie your true intent.

[ Tom DeLay, Dancing With the Bigots ]
Source: AlterNet

I like where this plan is going.

Seriously, it’s about time the Democrats took some firm legislative action to prove that this war is headed in the wrong direction. Whether you think we need to pull out now, pull out later, win the war, or whatever, you can’t argue that the war was started on false pretenses for the wrong reasons after having misled the American people into believing something that wasn’t true, and now that it’s devolved into madness and chaos that’s only exceeded by its body count. So who’s to blame for the situation? Sure, we can point the finger at the President, it was his war and his idea and apparently his score to settle in the first place, but the handling of the war-whose fault was that?

Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, the same man who’s infamous for misreading history, misunderstanding it, and then outright lying to the American people about the lessons of history, as he revealed again this week when he tried to liken anti-war activists and critics to the kinds of people who sought to appease Hitler in the Nazi march across Europe.

This week, Democrats interpreted a speech of his as equating critics of the war in Iraq to appeasers of Adolf Hitler, an interpretation that Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff disputed. But Democrats said the hyperbolic attack would backfire.

But even before that, Democrats and some Republicans had maintained that Bush has never held anyone in his administration accountable for decisions in the Iraq war that many military analysts say went disastrously wrong. The decisions include not mobilizing enough troops to keep the peace, disbanding the entire Iraqi army and purging all members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party — including teachers and low-level technocrats — from the Iraqi government.

“Secretary Rumsfeld’s stewardship of this effort is a failure, and he has let down our armed forces,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who is pushing for the no-confidence move.

…

Rather than change the subject to domestic issues, as they have tried in past years, Democrats are hoping to confront Republicans head-on.

“We will not be Swift-boated on this issue,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in an interview, alluding to the assault by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on the Vietnam war record of Democratic candidate John F. Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign. “We will fight them on national security.”

…

But Democrats — and some Republicans — say a debate on Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon will present a quandary to embattled GOP incumbents in districts that have turned solidly against the war.

“We are approaching 2,700 dead Americans, 20,000 wounded, many of them missing eyes, missing limbs, facing paralysis,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.). “They want to debate that; we’re happy to debate that.”

Then let the debate begin. The Republicans can’t continue to be led into believing they have the high ground on national security. The American people are tired of being “protected” from the “terrorist threat” that water bottles and toothpaste pose while commuter rail goes all but unprotected and the Federal government has proven itself incapable of protecting its people against a hurricane they saw coming from weeks ahead of time, much less a man-made disaster. The American people are tired of their sons and daughters coming home from a war without end and without point and without planning and without goal in body bags, a morbid testament to the personal global goals of a small handful of old, power hungry men lurking about Washington DC.

[ Democrats Target Rumsfeld ]
Source: The Washington Post

When Forbes.com reprinted some paltry statistical information (mostly outdated and inaccurate) and a hilariously lengthy article directed at men that begged them-no, pleaded with them, not to marry a woman who dared set foot outside of the kitchen and laundry room to take a job of her own, the feminist blogosphere struck back in fine force, and it wasn’t just the feminists either, a whole world of bloggers, commenters, and journalists flooded Forbes with comments both refuting the information in the article and lambasting them for publishing it in the first place. Forbes then had to back down from the story and publish an “alternative viewpoint” in the form of a rebuttal after the fact.

I read the article, and rolled my eyes as it regurgitated the same silly concepts and annoying myths that have come to the fore every so many years when men in the workplace yearn for the “good old days” of the 1950s when they ruled the home and the office, and could slap their secrtaries’ asses by day and beat their wives by night without so much as a societal blink. Oh, the good old days, when women weren’t allowed to think for themselves, eh Forbes?

Here’s to the bloggers and feminists who took Forbes to task about the issue. Two of these fine authors begin their story as such:

The two of us–my coauthor Rosalind Barnett and I–are standing on a mountaintop, being attacked by a huge, winged chimera with an enormous head and a mouth that keeps chanting, “Working women are miserable. Their marriages are terrible. Their husbands are miserable. Their children are wrecks.”

We deftly slice off the beast’s head with a sharp sword. Instantly 20 more heads appear to take its place, each chanting, “Working women are miserable . . . their marriages are terrible . . . ”

For the media, it is the story that simply will not die.

Sadly, it is indeed a myth that won’t die. Built on the shadiest and most politically motivated “sociological studies,” the stories claim to have the evidence to tell women to take off those shoes and get back in the kitchen and start rolling some pie crust. But the problem is not just with the assertions in the articles, but with the “science” that’s gone into the “studies” themselves. Let’s take a look:

Meanwhile, Slate media critic Jack Shafer weighed in, with a story headlined “Forbes’ Female Trouble. So what if career women are divorces waiting to happen?”

Shafer rightly said the original Forbes piece was largely junk and noted “the Web site entries appear to be a holding pen for crap Noer couldn’t shoehorn into his overstuffed thesis.” Noer included studies irrelevant to this thesis. One, for example, found that higher-income people cheat more in marriage.

But Shafer claimed he didn’t understand why women got so upset over the article, saying, “I’ve yet to read a blog item or a protesting e-mail from a reader that convinces me that the article, as opposed to the deliberately provocative headline, really insults women, career or otherwise.”

To which Jennifer Pozner, executive director of Women In Media and News and occasional commentator for Women’s eNews, responded: “He hasn’t been convinced that the article insults women? Really? Even after all these women online and on radio have said outright that it’s insulting?”

Shafer is right with his commentary, but herein lies a problem with that kind of logic. Shafer, you should know better-when women say they’re offended, they’re offended. They don’t need someone else’s, specifically yours, or any man’s permission, to be offended at something. They know how to think for themselves. Let’s move on, now to the hard science:

We have spent more than two decades researching the lives of working women, and written four books on the subject. We can reliably report that there is a growing consensus based on solid research that if a woman has a good job, the marriage benefits.

Jack Shafer says he “won’t quarrel” with Noer’s advice to men that “You’ll be unhappy if she makes more than you.” Shafer should quarrel, because Noer’s science is sloppy. Today, some 42 percent of college-educated married women out-earn their husbands. Are these marriages falling apart? Not according to recent divorce data. These marriages are as stable as those in which husbands earn more.

Noer appears to rely, for his contention that men are unhappy with career women, on a study based on data from the early 1990s by University of Virginia researchers. But this study says nothing at all about men’s happiness. It reports that women can be unhappy in marriage if they earn more than their husbands, if there is an unfair division of household labor and if men fail to do the “emotional work” to sustain the marriage.

Well then. Regurgitating half-facts and old research data and claiming that it’s recent and relevant sadly won’t make the case anymore, folks-the “good old days” good old boys will have to do better than that. That is, assuming they can fudge enough data to make it look at all truthful. Looks like they have quite the job ahead of them.

[ Career Women Bad Wives? Let's Ask the Guys ]
Source: Women’s News

This book goes on my reading list. Titled The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right by Rob Lanham, the book claims to contain helpful hints for the rest of the reality and sensically-based community for debating hot topic issues with evanglicals who inevitably drop the veil of even trying to use any measure of sense or reason to validate their opinions and fall back on the the classics: “faith,” and “I’ll pray for you,” when they realize they’ve got nothing.

Supposedly a comical jab at the bible thumpers, the book contains quite a few excellent ideas though, especially with how to deal with evangelical Christians when they get huffy about everything from gay marriage to defending the environment to “intelligent” design. Allow me a few excerpts that were also published at the Alternet piece (where the excerpts were published with permission) linked below:

Key Verses Bible-Believin’ Evangelicals Pick and Choose to Ignore:

On slavery: “Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.” (1 Peter 2:18, NIV)

On rape: “If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver.” (Deuteronomy 22:28, NIV)

On women wearing veils: “And every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head.” (Corinthians 11:5, NIV)

On illegitimate children being barred from church: “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” (Deuteronomy 23:2, KJV)

On Falwell’s apparent love of McNuggets: “…put a knife to thy throat, if thou [be] a man given to appetite.” (Proverbs 23:2, 3, KJV)

Oh wow. Funny which ones they choose to ignore, isn’t it? Lets move on to one of my favorite topics to discuss with evangelicals when I’m forced to linger in their presence, affirmative action:

Fundamentalists say: Minorities don’t know how good they’ve got it here. In fact, they just hired a couple of them coloreds down there at Roy’s Discount Muffler Shop. Roy even lets ‘em work the cash register when the cameras are turned on!

Sinners say: End affirmative action when equal opportunity actually exists.

Absolute GOLD. Be sure to take a look at the entries for the holidays (read: war on Christmas) and stem cells. Good reading. Link to the book itself and where you can purchase it are at the article below.

[ The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right ]
Source: Alternet

And in related news, her stepfather, who raped the 11 year old girl is still going to heaven, because the Catholic Church doesn’t have anything to say about rape.

This is the kind of reason why the founding fathers wanted the state to not, in any way, shape or form, be a sponsor of any religion. This is why there is a separation of “church and state” in America. This particular case didn’t take place in America, thankfully enough, it took place in Colombia, but sadly since Colombia is a mostly Catholic nation, the medical team who performed the abortion did so knowing the danger and now the Church is planning to excommunicate them-one of the Church’s highest punishments, if not the worst they can do to a practicing and abiding Catholic.

So essentially, Colombia’s first legal abortion, performed under duress because of questions that the 11 year old girl wouldn’t be able to carry the child to term safely, and when both her life and the life of the fetus were in danger, is such a massive offense that the people who came to this poor girl’s aid, the people who gave her a chance at a healthy and stable life and a future, are punished for doing probably the most loving and Christian thing they could possibly have done-but that’s not important apparently to the Catholic theocracy at the Vatican; they’re not interested in the very life of the girl of the long-term quality of it, they’re only interested in making her an example while crying about her immortal soul. Something tells me her immortal soul is in better hands than the buffons at the Vatican.

Carlos Lemus, the director of Simon Bolivar hospital where the abortion was performed, said he respected the church’s decision but did not share its view.

“We acted within the constitutional framework,” Dr Lemus said. “We were faced with the petition of a girl who wanted to go back to playing with her toys.”

He said Cardinal Trujillo “calls the doctors and nurses ‘evildoers’. I think the person who raped her is the evildoer”.

A senator, Gina Parody, said: “The Vatican has the right to excommunicate whomever they choose. But I would hope that they also excommunicate priests when they rape boys or girls.

An excellent point. The priests guilty of and accused of raping children here in America were simply transferred from place to place, hidden and allowed to keep their horrible secret from justice. Apparently a priest who molested dozens of boys is more worthy of the grace of God than this poor girl or the doctors who came to her aid. Chalk up another inconsistency to the Vatican-not like we really needed more.

Wake me when the Catholic Church has something to say to her stepfather.

[ Church Condemns Abortion Performed on Raped 11 Year Old Girl ]
Source: The Guardian UK

A bill that would have allowed every American taxpayer to search through a database of tax-funded projects around the country, planned to be designed to be as simple to use as Google and to borrow from the design of Google, has been quietly and continually stymied. The project was touted rom both sides of the aisle as a tool that would allow the American people to search based on region, congressperson, type or project, or department and see how their tax dollars were being spent in very specific terms-on contructions projects, on hiring new staff, on buying new technology, and so on.

Unfortunately one Senator stood in the way, systematically trying to kill the proposal from the start. Many Senators stood up to say that it wasn’t them, and they supported more government transparency on how American tax dollars are spent. So who was the “Secret Senator?” Why it would be Alaska Republican Ted Stevens, famous father of the “bridge to nowhere,” and other such congresstional atrocities:

The measure had been unanimously passed in a voice vote last month by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It was on the fast track for floor action before Congress recessed Aug. 4 when Stevens put a hold on the measure.

…

In response, liberals and conservatives worked together to ask every Senate office whether they had placed a hold on the bill. Of all 100 senators, only Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) would not deny placing the hold. In addition, one of the bill’s leading sponsors, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), said of Stevens, “he’s the only senator blocking it.” Stevens’s opposition to such a bill is not surprising; he is one of the most prolific earmarkers in the Senate:

– In 2005, Stevens helped slip in legislation to begin construction on the “Bridge to Nowhere,” earmarking over $200 million for a bridge to an island home to 50 people. When an amendment jeopardized funding for the project, Stevens threatened to resign.

– Later that year, Stevens tried to insert an amendment into the national defense bill allowing oil drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge. When the Senate struck the provision, Stevens called it “the saddest day of my life” and has “written off” Senate friends who opposed drilling.

– This year, Stevens earmarked $450,000 to research baby food made from salmon and over $1 million for “alternative salmon product research.” This is the third year in a row he has appropriated money to research salmon products.

So not only is he a jerk, but he’s prone to temper tantrums as well as being too frightened to allow the American taxpayer to see where their hard earned dollars are going. You know, I’m amazed that people keep electing him, but then sometimes I figure that the people of Alaska know full well who they’re sending to Washington to represent them. And that’s very very sad.

[ Alaska Senator Ted Stevens Exposed as Blocker of Bill to Create a Searchable Database of Government Contracts ]
Source: The Alaska Report