Even the Fox reporter had to admit there was no evidence that there was any crime at all by President Biden. Yet the Republicans are being pushed hard by tRump to make sure they impeach Biden before the general election, so tRump can claim Biden was impeached also. Also, a Fox host had to admit the economy was doing well. Hugs. Scottie
At the NACL, Johnson knew he had a receptive audience. The group’s founder and president, Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator, recently fretted to a reporter that “with all the troubles facing our country, with Democrats and leftists that are advocating cutting penises off of little boys and breasts off of little girls, we have reached a level of debauchery and immorality that is at biblical proportions.” He has called LGBTQ people a “cult” that promotes “unholiness, unrighteousness and immorality in our nation.” He has expressed hope that in 2024, Americans “will re-elect Jesus to be on the throne here again in our country.” Rapert believes fetuses have constitutional rights, and that abortion is worse than slavery and the Holocaust. As a state senator, he sought to amend the U.S. Constitution to obliterate the rights of LGBTQ people through a statement that marriage “is between a man and a woman.”
Not everything in Johnson’s speech was a divine revelation. “What we’re engaged in right now is a battle between worldviews,” he declared in a short clip an attendee posted on Facebook. “It’s a great struggle for the future of the Republic.” That’s standard Christian nationalist fare, and yet another sign that Johnson believes himself to be at war with the majority of Americans.
By elevating yet another relatively obscure Christian nationalist group, Johnson can also notch a victory for himself. He’s taken another step in normalizing an extremist organization whose member pledge reads, in part, that “atheists and anti-Christian groups have recently been more strategic in pursing their godless worldview through the courts and legislation than Christians” and that these groups “are becoming more aggressive and are trampling on the Christian liberty we have enjoyed in this country for centuries.”
Thanks to Ten Bears for the link. This article debunks a lot of the myths pushed by republicans and the wealthy about social security and those that receive it. This article shows how most social security recipients receive about 20 grand a year, which in most places is not enough to survive in this profit is king country, many receive far less. The article removes that idea that to save the fund we must raise the age. It also shows how the Alan Simpson’s views are flawed and wrong. Below is a quote from the article. What they don’t mention is medicare and and part D is deducted from the monthly amount, and every time people on Scocial Security get a cost of living raise the premum for Medicare goes up also, some times more than the raise. Think about what that means. It means we who are on Scocial Security fall further behind every year. Hugs. Scottie
The average Social Security monthly check is $1,709.70, which works out to $20,516 a year. That’s about $800 more than the federal poverty line for a family of two.
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Blank Social Security checks await processing for many of the program’s more than 65 million beneficiaries.
Myths and canards about Social Security and its supposed fiscal troubles have steadily proliferated over the years. But it’s rare to find them all concentrated in one place as they were in a recent article on the online news site Slate.
Slate paired Eric Boehm, a writer for the conservative magazine Reason, with a writer named Celeste Headlee for a dialogue titled “Social Security Doesn’t Make Sense Anymore.” The roughly 2,000-word piece contained so many misconceptions, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies about the program that I almost gave up counting. That said, it’s perhaps worthwhile to have a one-stop shop for all these sophistries, if only for the purpose of debunking them en masse.
Most people 65 and older receive the majority of their income from Social Security.
— Kathleen Romig tells the truth about Social Security that Slate missed
The article called for a “radical rethink” of Social Security to make it somehow more relevant to Americans in the modern world. Boehm and Headlee evidently think that’s a world in which America is on the brink of insolvency and can’t afford to spend another dime on the disadvantaged, that Social Security recipients are rich, and that older Americans can have their pick of jobs that will keep them happy and healthy indefinitely.
Slate says their dialogue was “edited for clarity,” but the only thing it made clear is that neither of them knows the first thing about Social Security. More alarming, they showed no inclination to learn.
There isn’t space here or time for me to list every solecism in the piece, so I will focus on some of the most egregious errors.
—“People who are young and working … are funding the retirement of generally wealthier Americans.” This notion was popularized by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), who went around calling Social Security beneficiaries “greedy geezers” and disdained the program as “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”
The underlying idea is that the average Social Security beneficiaries are doing better than the poor souls in the working class who are paying for their lives of leisure through their payroll taxes. It’s commonly reported that retirees are, on average, the wealthiest cohort of Americans.
Here’s what’s wrong with that idea: The reason that so many seniors are able to live comfortably is because they receive Social Security.
As Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported, “most people 65 and older receive the majority of their income from Social Security.” The poverty rate among Americans older than 65 is 10.3%. Without Social Security, it would be nearly 38%. To put it another way, Social Security keeps more than 15 million seniors out of poverty.
The average Social Security monthly check is $1,709.70, which works out to $20,516 a year. That’s about $800 more than the federal poverty line for a family of two.
The idea that cutting off the wealthiest seniors or at least reducing their benefits would help save Social Security is a popular myth, with recipients like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates the most common illustrative targets. The goal is to promote “means-testing” the program.
But myth it is. As of 2017, about 47,500 millionaires were receiving Social Security. Their total benefits came to about $1.4 billion, or about 15 hundredths of a percent of the $941 billion in benefits the system paid out that year. If you’re intent on “saving” Social Security by means-testing, you would need to start cutting off or reducing benefits for recipients earning about $70,000 a year in non-Social Security income — not millionaires.
Boehm backed up his thoughts on this topic with some suspect data. He cites the Federal Reserve in asserting that “the average value of a retired person’s assets” today is $538,000. Hmm. My reading of the Fed’s latest digest from its Survey of Consumer Finances, issued just last month, places the median net worth of those aged 65-74 at about $410,000; for those 75 and older, it’s $335,600.
Does that make them rich? Using the common rule of thumb that one can spend 4% a year of retirement savings to have the best chance of not outliving your nest egg, $410,000 produces $16,400 a year. Not the basis of a lavish lifestyle. Even a nest egg of $538,000 doesn’t make for a life of leisure — in one’s first year of retirement the 4% rule would yield $21,520.
—Just raise the retirement age? Boehm: “When Social Security began, you could get benefits at age 65, but the average life expectancy in this country was like 61. So the average person actually died before they qualified for Social Security.” This is another quacking canard from the Simpson duck pond.
Average life expectancyfrom birth in 1940, when the first Social Security checks went out, was about 63 and a half, which I suppose is “like” 61. But that figure was skewed lower by high infant mortality; Boehm acknowledges this, but doesn’t bother to explore its ramifications, perhaps because it explodes his take.
For Americans who made it to their first birthday back then, average life expectancy was nearly 66. For those entering their working careers, say at age 20—the relevant cohort for assessing the chances of collecting Social Security — it was nearly 69.
In other words, the average person did not actually die before qualifying for Social Security; the average person collected for years. Indeed, those who were 65 in the late 1930s lived on average nearly to 78.
Anyway, life expectancy is closely connected to race, educational attainment and income. Those who live longest are whites, college graduates and the affluent. Raising the retirement age is a curse on those who don’t fall into those categories. White people aged 65 have gained more than six years of longevity since the 1930s; Black males only about four years.
By the way, what are workers supposed to do while they’re waiting longer to reach retirement age? Leaving aside the impact of age discrimination that makes it harder for older people to obtain or keep jobs, the Census Bureau has reported that more than half of all workers aged 58 or older were in physically demanding jobs or jobs with difficult working conditions — more than 13 million workers.
As economists Cherrie Bucknor and Dean Baker pointed out in a 2016 paper, “the workers who were most likely to be in these jobs were Latinos, the least educated (less than a high school diploma), immigrants, and the lowest wage earners.”
I don’t know what Boehm’s working conditions are like, but I’d bet they don’t “require dynamic, explosive, static, or trunk strength, bending or twisting of the body, stamina, maintaining balance, or kneeling or crouching” or involve “exposure to abnormal temperatures, contaminants, hazardous equipment, whole body vibration, or distracting or uncomfortable noise.” It’s easy to think that everyone else should work harder, if your frame of reference is your own office desk.
—Social Security is “a welfare program”: Boehm pushed this idea hard. “You would never build a welfare program, you would never get Congress to approve the construction of a new welfare program, that took money directly from the paychecks of workers and transferred it to a wealthy cohort somewhere in this country,” he says.
There’s a manifest danger in calling Social Security a welfare program. That’s because welfare programs are easiest to axe when conservatives go hunting for budget cuts — Americans typically view them as serving layabouts and malingerers at their expense.
Social Security is nothing like a welfare program, however. It’s a contributory system, funded entirely by its beneficiaries through the payroll tax. Its benefits are tied to lifetime contributions. That’s why billionaires get it, too — they contributed to it during their working lives. Nor is it only an old-age pension: It encompasses disability benefits and insurance to cover spouses and children when their breadwinner suffers an untimely death.
Before Republicans started casting “entitlements” as a dirty word, Americans saw their entitlement to Social Security benefits as a blessing — most still do. They’re entitled to it because they’ve paid for it with every paycheck.
The idea that the system represents a war between seniors and younger generations is just wrong. Whatever fiscal problems face Social Security, it’s because it’s exploited by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
In 1937, when the payroll tax was first collected, it applied to about 92% of all earned income. By 2020, that figure had fallen to 83%, largely because of an increase in income inequality. Were the payroll tax to be restructured to cover 90% of earnings, as the Congressional Budget Office reported last year, that would produce an additional $670 billion in revenue over 10 years; raise it to cover all annual earnings over $250,000,the gain would be $1.2 trillion — all without cutting benefits by even a penny.
—Social Security “is going to hit a brick wall in the 2030s.” This is Boehm’s gloss on the familiar projection that the program’s trust fund will run out some time in the middle of that decade. Is that a “brick wall”? Hardly: At that point, the program will still be guaranteed enough revenues to continue paying three-quarters of all scheduled benefits.
That’s a middle-of-the-road estimate. The system’s actuaries have also projected that given alternative demographic and economic assumptions — including assuming the unemployment rate and economy stay where they are today and immigration rises closer to its historical norm, the program might even be able to pay all benefits indefinitely.
—”The cost of Social Security is … ballooning quite rapidly”:This holds no water at all. The CBO projects that Social Security benefits as a share of gross domestic product, currently 5.1%, will rise to 6.2% by 2053. If that’s a balloon, it’s inflating pretty slowly.
In that time span, incidentally, GDP will more than triple to $79.5 trillion from $26.2 trillion, according to the CBO.
Boehm’s argument is that Social Security is becoming such a fiscal burden that it’s “killing the safety net.” He says, “There’s not enough money to go around,” which is absurd to say about the richest nation in world history. He says the cost of Social Security and Medicare, which he seems to think, erroneously, are related programs, is “pushing other things to the budget into a territory where we have to borrow more money to pay for them.”
That’s obviously not so. We wouldn’t have to borrow if we took such reasonable steps as repealing the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the rich that drove a hole into the federal budget, or started charging the wealthy for their fair share of Social Security. He mentions that Americans have experienced “decades of greater prosperity,” but not that the benefits of that prosperity have been collected overwhelmingly by the 1%.
Boehm and Headlee plainly intended to tell it like it is on Social Security. Unfortunately, their effort was hampered by lack of information. Would it have killed them to do even a little research?
A race for the Texas Supreme Court has an eight-year incumbent with the backing of the Republican establishment battling John Devine, an anti-abortion activist and frequent political candidate known for his fight to keep the Ten Commandments displayed in his Houston courtroom.
Despite past criticism, Devine has not shrunk from making his anti-abortion ideology a prominent part of his judicial campaign. At a June rally in Fort Worth, he described his convictions as being “forged in the crucibles” of the anti-abortion movement and told the crowd he had been arrested 37 times while protesting abortion clinics.
A campaign video relates a decision to continue a high-risk pregnancy, his wife Nubia’s seventh, which they said was likely to end in the deaths of both mother and child. Nubia Devine survived the birth. Their daughter lived for an hour after she was born.
Read the full article. Devine last appeared him 2017 when he issued a minority opinion against same-sex spousal benefits for Texas residents because marriage is meant for “procreation.” During his above cited 2012 campaign for the Texas Supreme Court, Devine alleged declared that he chose the district he ran in because “I can beat somebody with a Mexican name.” The incumbent was then-Justice David Medina. Devine is up for reelection in 2024.
John Devine, one of the TX Supreme Court judges that issued an order preventing a pregnant woman whose unborn child has a fatal defect from getting an abortion, was arrested several times for blocking abortion clinics. His wife carried a risky pregnancy to term. The child died. pic.twitter.com/l2UsHAkDe5
Like I said yesterday: The Texas Supreme Court wouldn’t have issued the stay if their intent wasn’t to force this poor woman to carry this doomed pregnancy to term, even if it kills her. Controlling and punishing women, including for “failing” to bring a fetus to term, is the entire point.
I’m hoping that this case is, at the very least, on an expedited calendar, as time is truly of the essence. Otherwise, this poor woman has to get the hell out of Tek-Zis to seek the medical care she needs. How fucking deplorable.
That’s what gets me about this: The pregnancy is doomed. The genetic tests are conclusive. This trisomy condition WILL result in a dead baby, guaranteed. On ultrasound, it’s already seen not to have the major organs needed to survive. This woman has already had two previous c-sections, and each subsequent one reduces her chances to have another child successfully—which she says she wants very much. But trying to carry a trisomy fetus to term is itself inherently risky because the fetus can pretty much die at any time or miscarry, risking lethal sepsis infection.
Yet these Rethug motherfuckers don’t care about any of that. They want to inflict unnecessary and potentially lethal harm and suffering on this woman. Why? No reason other to ensure that no woman, girl, or transperson can escape a pregnancy, wanted or unwanted, that might kill them. Put in these terms, the intent is clear.
Why? Yes, I agree. But it’s also a message to ALL women — you are just a vessel for the child, and your life and health, not to mention your needs and wants, are of minimal consequence.
Sweet Jesus I rant through all these arguments TWENTY years ago now in the marriage equality “debates” – these people hold no coherent postions, they just hate gay people and women.
Logic has no place in their debates. Only their feelings matter. Nobody else’s feelings are relevant. Pregnancy not viable? Mother and baby likely to die? So what? It’s was jesus would want.
You identified those I call ‘The Feelers’. They’re the ones who’re most easily swayed by conspiracy theories, loudmouth narcissists, screaming evangelicals, the ‘voice’ of authority’. etc. Whenever they experience fear they ‘know’ that they’re wrong and have to repent, grovel or humiliate themselves publicly.
The Feelers dominate the GQP and they’re extremely dangerous since anything can trigger them… literally. They pull a trigger whenever they get sufficiently riled up.
Hell, how many Christianistas view an unintended pregnancy as a just punishment for sex outside of marriage, insisting the woman carry it full term, and then denigrating the innocent child as “a bastard.”
Elie Mystal was saying during an interview the other day, that if anyone is thinking about sitting out the 2024 election or if they believe that a second Trump presidency won’t be so disastrous, just shout “ABORTION… ABORTION… ABORTION !!” A Trump regime will insure that abortion (at least for the 99%) is an impossibility. As we’ve seen, these insane & unmercifully cruel zealots & misogynists don’t care about women and whether they live or die, as long as their draconian ideology prevails
Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. (left) likes to troll journalists on Twitter and stage feisty debates over preferred pronouns. Meanwhile, Florida’s SAT scores have dropped once again. The state ranks 45th in America. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel)
New rankings show Florida students are posting some of the lowest SAT scores in America.
We’re talking 46th place. Down another 17 points overall to 966, according to the combined reading and math scores shared by the College Board.
Florida trails other Southern states like South Carolina and Georgia. We trail states where more students take the test, like Illinois and Indiana.
We somehow now even slightly trail Washington, D.C. — a district long maligned as one of the supposedly worst in America, where all students take the test.
This should be an all-hands-on-deck crisis. Yet what are Florida education officials obsessing over?
Pronouns. And censoring books.
While other states focus on algebra and reading comprehension, Florida’s top education officials are waging wars with teachers about what kind of pronouns they can use and defending policies that have led to books by Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston being removed from library shelves. We are reaping what they sow.
But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Florida’s current crop of top education officials isn’t just the misguided policies they’re pushing, it’s the way they behave. Like it’s all a joke. Like Twitter trolls.
They’re calling names, mocking those trying to have serious conversations about education and generally reveling in owning the libs.
A few months ago, Orlando Sentinel education reporter Leslie Postal spent weeks trying to get public records about a newly hired state education employee. Postal just wanted to explain to taxpayers how their money was being spent. But state officials refused to answer questions.
So Postal wrote up the piece, and Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz shared the piece on Twitter (now X) with a two-word comment: “Cry more!”
For those of you who don’t speak troll, “Cry more” is a response used by some social-media users — usually those juvenile in age or intellect — to mock someone who is unhappy. The folks at Urban Dictionary, who revel in all things trolly, define “Cry More” as a “phrase used in online games when someone is getting owned, and they b*tch about it.”
The game in question here, mind you, was the Sentinel’s two-month quest to get answers about how the state was spending tax dollars. And the response from the state’s top education official was: “Cry more!” What a role model for students.
That’s just one example. Last week, after I wrote a column about rampant book-censorship in the state — with one district shelving 300 titles — State Board of Education Member Ryan Petty responded (at quarter ’til 1 in the morning): “Just dumb. This passes as journalism.” Followed by a clown emoji.
OK, for argument’s sake, let’s say I’m the dumbest clod to ever set foot in the Sunshine State. Petty still wouldn’t answer any of the direct questions posed in both the column and on Twitter. Specifically, if the goal isn’t widespread book-banning, why won’t his education department provide a definitive list of what books it believes students shouldn’t have access to in school?
Petty opted for emojis over answers, because that’s what trolls do.
A member of the state board of education offers his insightful take on book censorship in Florida schools
If this is all "dumb" – and the goal isn't just to sow chaos – why won't DOE provide a definitive list of what books it believes students shouldn't have access to in school? https://t.co/QDGSYLFukm
The responses on Twitter to Diaz and Petty — both appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis — were about what you’d expect. One user told Petty: “My ninth grader could have crafted a more articulate response.” Several users responded similarly to Diaz’s “Cry More!” post, questioning his ability to maturely discuss policy and referring back to a Miami Herald investigation into student claims of “inappropriate behavior” by Diaz back when he was a teacher; claims Diaz said were bogus smears.
None of this did a thing to address this state’s education issues. Yet that’s where we are in Florida these days, mired in culture wars and trolling each other.
We also saw something similar last week when Diaz refused to directly answer questions from Orange County Public Schools about whether teachers were allowed to honor the requests of transgender students who wanted to be addressed with different pronouns — if the teachers wanted to and if those students also had their parents’ written permission. (Think about how bizarre it is that schools must even ask that question … in the so-called “parental rights” state.)
In his response to the district, Diaz offered a theatrical and condescending response that referred to “false” pronouns but which school officials concluded didn’t actually answer the question in a straightforward manner. Just more troll games … involving a population of teens more prone to self-harm and suicide, no less.
As far as the SAT goes, the test certainly has its share of legitimate critics. But it’s still one of the best apples-to-apples metrics we have for student learning.
Yet hardly any Florida media organizations even covered the October release of the new SAT scores that showed Florida’s poor showing. Why? Because we’ve been trained to follow the bouncing-ball, culture-war debate of the day.
So we see plenty of coverage about Florida supposedly ranking No. 1 in “educational freedom” by partisan political groups and scant addition to real education issues.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like hard numbers more than political posturing or magazine rankings. So do others who actually care about and study education.
Paul Cottle, a physics professor who authors a blog that focuses on STEM education, noted Florida’s increasingly cruddy SAT scores back in October when they were released — when everyone else was focused on the debate-of-the-day.
Cottle noted that Florida’s math scores for 4th graders were solid but that the SAT scores for graduating seniors were so bad, they suggested something was going awry for students before Florida schools sent them into the real world.
Cottle called the showing “a sad state of affairs.”
He’s right. Yet we’re getting precisely the educational environment and results that our culture-warring politicians are cultivating — an environment where trolls thrive, even if students don’t.
I just posted the Joe My God article on this. Here is the story in more detail. Hugs.
“Fearmongering has been Ken Paxton’s main tactic in enforcing these abortion bans,” Marc Hearron, senior counsel at Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents Cox, said in a statement. “He is trying to bulldoze the legal system to make sure Kate and pregnant women like her continue to suffer.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday threatened to prosecute any doctors involved in providing an emergency abortion to a woman, hours after she won a court order allowing her to obtain one for medical necessity.
Paxton said in a letter that the order by District Court Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Austin did not shield doctors from prosecution under all of Texas’s abortion laws, and that the woman, Kate Cox, had not shown she qualified for the medical exception to the state’s abortion ban.
Paxton said in a statement accompanying the letter that Guerra Gamble’s order “will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws.”
The letter was sent to three hospitals where Damla Karsan, the doctor who said she would provide the abortion to Cox, has admitting privileges.
“Fearmongering has been Ken Paxton’s main tactic in enforcing these abortion bans,” Marc Hearron, senior counsel at Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents Cox, said in a statement. “He is trying to bulldoze the legal system to make sure Kate and pregnant women like her continue to suffer.”
Cox, 31, of the Dallas-Fort Worth area filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking a temporary restraining order preventing Texas from enforcing its near-total ban on abortion in her case, saying her continued pregnancy threatened her health and future fertility. Guerra Gamble said she was granting the order at a hearing Thursday morning.
Cox’s lawyers have said her lawsuit is the first such case since the U.S. Supreme Court last year allowed states to ban abortion.
Cox’s fetus was diagnosed on Nov. 27 with trisomy 18, a genetic abnormality that usually results in miscarriage, stillbirth or death soon after birth.
A few abortion rights demonstrators remain in the crowd after hours of public comments and discussion as Denton’s city council meets to vote on a resolution seeking to make enforcing Texas’ trigger law on abortion a low priority for its police force, in Denton, Texas, June 28, 2022. REUTERS/Shelby Tauber/File Photo
Cox, who is about 20 weeks pregnant, said in her lawsuit that she would need to undergo her third Caesarian section if she continues the pregnancy. That could jeopardize her ability to have more children, which she said she and her husband wanted.
“The idea that Ms. Cox wants desperately to be a parent, and this law might actually cause her to lose that ability, is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice,” said Guerra Gamble in Austin, Texas, state court, at Thursday’s hearing.
The judge’s ruling applies only to Cox, and does not expand abortion access more broadly.
Cox’s lawyer, Molly Duane of the Center for Reproductive Rights, told reporters on a call after the hearing that Guerra Gamble’s order allowed Cox to obtain the abortion. She declined to provide any details about Cox’s immediate plans, citing concerns for her and her doctors’ safety.
“I want to emphasize how unforgivable it is that Kate had to beg for healthcare in court,” Duane said. “No one should have to do this and the reality is 99 percent of people cannot.”
The state’s abortion ban includes only a narrow exception to save the mother’s life or prevent substantial impairment of a major bodily function. Cox said in her lawsuit that, although her doctors believed abortion was medically necessary for her, they were unwilling to perform one without a court order in the face of potential penalties including life in prison and loss of their licenses.
Johnathan Stone, a lawyer for the state, had said at Thursday’s hearing that Cox had not shown she qualified for the exception. He said showing that would require a more through hearing on evidence, rather than a temporary restraining order.
Cox’s husband, Justin Cox, and Dr. Karsan are also plaintiffs in the case.
Karsan is also one of 22 plaintiffs in a separate lawsuit seeking a broader order protecting Texas women’s right to abortions their doctors deem medically necessary, in which the state’s highest court heard arguments last week. The court has not ruled in that case.
Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Richard Chang and David Gregorio
Scottie's Playtime 