A new candidate for a Michigan seat on the Republican National Committee wants gays "purged" from the GOP and claims homosexuality is a "perversion" created by Satan himself.
Mary Helen Sears of Houghton County in the state's Upper Peninsula, elected vice chair of the Michigan Republican Party's 1st District last year, posted a rant in April on the Schoolcraft County GOP website -- preceded by a warning asking readers to "please use your discretion before taking any decisions based on the information in this blog."
In the post, Sears claimed that homosexuals prey on children, argued that "Satan uses homosexuality to attack the living space of the Holy Spirit" and advocated that Republicans "as a party should be purging this perversion and send them to a party with a much bigger tent."
Michigan's representatives on the Republican National Committee have lately stirred other controversy, mostly due to Dave Agema, a former state lawmaker who has regularly made anti-gay comments and has been condemned by fellow Republicans, including Gov. Rick Snyder.
Last month, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Michigan Republican Party Chairman Bobby Schostak issued a joint statement asking Agema to step down from the RNC "for the good of the party." Instead, Agema's Michigan co-chair on the RNC, U.S. Senate candidate Terri Lynn Land (who had condemned Agema's anti-gay comments), resigned her seat, saying she wanted to focus on her campaign. Under party rules, the state GOP must pick a woman to take Land's place, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Enter Sears, who is running for Land's vacated RNC seat. She's, "if anything, to the right of RNC Committeeman Dave Agema on the political spectrum," wrote Macomb Daily columnist Chad Selweski.
Sears, in her post on the Schoolcraft County GOP website, wrote that Communist college professors were indoctrinating young people and claimed that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory "gave rise to Hitler’s Third Reich, Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Russia."
"If the GOP continues down this trend and stand for perversions and the daily social fad ... The GOP will be truly dead and Satan will have had his day," Sears wrote.
Darren Littel, communications director for the Michigan Republican Party, told The Huffington Post the GOP supports a traditional definition of marriage, "but we also believe that all people should be treated with dignity and respect and these comments clearly don’t reflect those principles."
The prospect of Agema and Sears heading the Michigan delegation on the RNC is apparently striking fear in the hearts of some Republicans, according to the Macomb Daily:
Apparently some Republican insiders are so shaken by the prospect of having Agema and Sears as Michigan’s two representatives on the RNC that they’re growing concerned about two mainstream Republicans in the three-person field splitting their votes, thereby allowing Sears to claim victory. When the GOP State Committee meets to select Land’s replacement, Sears’ competitors are expected to consist of Ronna Romney McDaniel, daughter of Ronna Romney, and Sandra Kahn who, I’m told, is the aunt of state Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville and the ex-wife of Sen. Roger Kahn of Saginaw Township.
Ronna Romney McDaniel, incidentally, is the niece of Michigan native and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The RNC will choose a new national committeewoman on Feb. 15.
Although some Michigan Republicans may agree that Sears' views are extreme, at least one GOP group has taken to social media to express fear that a pro-gay agenda is taking over the Michigan Republican Party.
The Delta County Republican Party recently published a list proclaiming that influential GOP pols like Priebus, Schostak and Senate candidate Land had surrendered to a "homosexual and stealth jihad agenda."
Our local republicans here in Amherst County are supporting these hard right nut jobs by voting for republicans and keeping the house in GOP control. They don't give a tinkers dam what republicans do or stand for, just that they have an R after their name.
Crazy Rand Paul Compares Food Stamps to Slavery
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) equated government programs that prevent people from dying of starvation with slavery in a new profile of his medical practice published today, revealing himself to hold a view of the role of government so limited as to nearly define the state out of existence.
Paul’s philosophical excursus is buried in the midst of the too-friendly-for-parody article (it ends with a patient waxing poetic about how Paul “loves people“), but the words are unmistakably Randian. “As humans, yeah, we do have an obligation to give people water, to give people food, to give people health care,” Paul allowed, “but it’s not a right because once you conscript people and say, ‘Oh, it’s a right,’ then really you’re in charge, it’s servitude, you’re in charge of me and I’m supposed to do whatever you tell me to do.”
The comments are an echo of his 2011 claim that accepting a human right to health care “means you believe in slavery,” but the Senator’s new variation on the theme is notable because it puts the reasoning behind the crazy in stark relief. Particularly, this line: “You don’t have a right to anyone else’s labor. Food’s pretty important, do you have a right to the labor of the farmer?”
The basic idea is that if slavery means forcing people to do things, and saying people have a right to food means the government should require farmers to provide it to them, then a right to food means the enslavement of farmers. A moderately bright high school student could spot the leap of logic here: no one’s forcing anyone to farm against their will. In a democratic-capitalist economy, people have a right to choose their career and, as it turns out, enough people end up being farmers that there’s generally enough food to go around. A socially-accepted “right to food” merely means the government should pay for the provision of food to those who can’t afford it. No stealing, and definitely no slavery.
But skip over the logic for a second and think through what Paul’s saying here. Because a farmer produced the food, no one but that farmer can have a right to it (“you don’t have a right to anyone else’s labor”). Presumably, because Paul believes in a market economy, whatever money the farmer makes from selling the fruits of his labor is also his and only his. Taxation in this worldview isn’t just theft; it’s slavery. Because what is the government taking money you’ve earned if not the Leviathan forcing you to work part-time for its profit?
The really bizarre part of Paul’s formulation of this principle is his use of food (and medical care) as an example. The thing about starvation and illness is that they make it impossible for you to participate either in the market economy or in democratic governance; generally, people with distended bellies and 103 degree fevers aren’t in good shape to contribute to civil society or the economy.
Don’t take my word for it; economist and libertarian icon Friederich Hayek believed in a basic guaranteed income and a social safety net (including health care) to ensure a fair democratic society. Here’s the key passage from The Road to Serfdom:
There can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. … Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individual in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision.
He made the same point in a less popularly known work, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, where he writes that “a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.” In a modern society, Hayek’s saying, we’re obligated to collectively take care of the people who aren’t being provided for by the people immediately around them.
Paul has somehow ended up to the right of a guy who believed that the government’s monopoly on currency production was destroying democracy. Taken seriously, the implications of Paul’s “food rights are slavery” view are that there’s no public good, no matter how basic it is to the functioning of a democratic society, that people have a right to demand from the government. It’s even hard to make the traditional hard-libertarian exception for the justice system and military stick in Paul’s schema; how can you justify “enslaving” a pacifist to pay for an army whose very existence they reject?
I’m not just picking on a few stray sentences here. The backlash against Paul’s 2011 comments in this line (including from more tempered libertarians) was immense. If he was going to bow to political pressures on the “rights are slavery” argument, he would have already done so. Indeed, Paul openly acknowledges in the article appearing today that this debate “often gets me in trouble:” he’s used to getting heat on this one and just doesn’t care. It’s what he believes.
So an influential Senator, a much-ballyhooed candidate for his party’s nomination for the presidency, has been consistently espousing a worldview, reflected in his budget, that logically implies virtually all major government programs are slavery. And we live in times where that’s acceptable enough that it’s buried in the middle of a piece about volunteer ophthalmology.
If you examine Rand Paul's thoughts you will reach the conclusion he makes no sense.
This was tragically on display last month, when at least five homeless people froze to death in a single week. Even in generally
warmer areas of the country like California, at least seven homeless people died from cold weather late last fall.
When temperatures drop, many cities take extra precautions to try to get homeless people out of the cold and into shelter. For example, between November 1 and March 31, Washington D.C. mandates that any homeless person who seeks it be given shelter when temperatures fall below 32 degrees (with wind chill).
However, a survey by the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) found stark disparities in the temperatures at which different cities will declare a hypothermia alert and provide additional shelter for the homeless — with no good medical explanation.
The most accommodating cities are Denver, Berkeley, and Mobile, all of which set their threshold at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. (Still, because hypothermia can set in at temperatures above 40 degrees Fahrenheit, even this level is dangerous for people who have no shelter.) The most restrictive city identified by NCH is Baltimore, which waits until temperatures drop to 13 degrees Fahrenheit (with wind chill) before opening its winter shelters:
“Lives are saved when communities open additional shelters during spells of cold weather,” NCH’s Director of Community Organizing Michael Stoops told ThinkProgress. “Keeping shelters open all winter long and not just when the temperature drops below a certain threshold would be the best way to help the homeless community get through the cold weather season.”
A good percentage of the homeless are vets. Have we as a society ever kept our promises to the war vets?
The right wing and big business have invented a new way to get rich off of the poor. These conservatives have to be stopped before they destroy the country. This get rich scheme on the backs of the poor sounds like something from some third world country and yet it is going like gangbusters in the red states of the United States of America. The red states are the states controlled by republicans, in case You Didn't Know.
For those who can afford it, many misdemeanor violations and traffic violations are punished with a fine that can be paid the very same day. But for those who can’t, those same offenses may become subject to a punishment much more menacing, in a profit-driven system of private probation that imposes interest and fees with a threat of jail time on those who are often least able to pay.
In one Georgia instance documented in an extensive new Human Rights Watch report, a man who stole a $2 can of beer ended up in jail for failure to pay a $200 fine that ballooned into more than $1,000 under the supervision of a private probation firm. Thomas Barrett’s entire income — which included selling his own blood plasma — was less than the monthly fee imposed by the private probation firm.
In Mississippi, a woman who had paid off her entire $377 fine for driving without a license was being threatened with arrest for failure to pay so-called “supervision fees” being charged by a private probation firm. Court officials told Human Rights Watch the firm had no authority to threaten arrest.
In Alabama, judges have enforced the threats of probation companies to impose jail time for those who fees and fines that piled up from private probation.
More than 1,000 courts around the country are shifting the burden of monitoring payment of fines to private probation firms, sentencing hundreds of thousands of individuals each year to their supervision. In what is perhaps the most extensive documentation of the practice of privatizing another aspect of the criminal justice system, Human Rights Watch finds that these firms are subject to scant monitoring by local governments and courts, free to impose fees and fines in amounts that are not regulated by any government entity.
Among the monthly fees lobbed onto probation are monthly “supervision” fees, even where the only supervision mandated by the court is collection of a fee, rather than other probationary terms that would impose a cost on the company. Other times, it is the heavy cost of electronic monitoring or drug tests.
In the case of Barrett, the man who stole a beer, he was put on electronic monitoring at a cost of $360 per month. Barrett was living on subsidized housing and food stamps. Even using the money from sale of his blood plasma, Barrett could not keep up with the payments. But the most perverse thing about the scenario was that Barrett’s alcohol consumption was being monitored, even though his probation terms did not include a ban on alcohol. “As Augusta attorney Jack Long put it in an interview with Human Rights Watch, ‘He could have sat around and drank beer all day and it would have monitored that but it would not have been a violation of his probation.’ ”
In another instance in Augusta County, Ga., a homeless man was placed on electronic monitoring that required him to have land line, and spent 52 days in jail because he could not physically comply with the monitoring order. Companies also order weekly drug testing, sometimes at a cost of $25 per test, or $1,250 per year.
While probation is typically aimed at those who would otherwise go to jail if they were not subject to monitoring, these private firms have expanded their purview to glorified debt collection — with jail time as punishment for failure to pay. This practice of jailing those who can’t afford to pay — so-called “debtors’ prisons” was invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court more than 30 years ago. Probation company officials and courts claim to comply with this court ruling by assessing ability to pay, but in many instance they use factors such as a defendant’s possession of a pack of cigarettes or two cell phones that they can pay, even where they are homeless, on public assistance, or otherwise make clear that they have no sufficient sources of income.
“In fact, the business of many private probation companies is built largely on the willingness of courts to discriminate against poor offenders who can only afford to pay their fines in installments over time,” the report explains.
As the Human Rights Watch report explains, this phenomenon emerged in part from a resource squeeze throughout the criminal justice system. State resources focused on probation for felony offenses punt misdemeanors to county and municipal governments, who cannot afford to oversee probation services. Private probation firms offered to fill those gaps at no cost to the municipalities, and many jumped at the opportunity.
So-called “offender-funded” probation means that the private firms shoulder the cost of monitoring an individual by charging that individual interest. Private probation firms then impose interest and fees as they see fit, and “make probationers’ freedom contingent on paying those fees.” Some states such as Montana have publicly run “offender-funded” probation systems. The difference, however, is that if fees collected are insufficient to cover the costs of the system, public resources cover the balance. “Only private probation firms can offer courts a probation service that is guaranteed to cost them nothing,” the report explains.
The industry has also been encouraged by an ideological preference for privatizing government services, tracking the proliferation of privatized prisons and prison services. And while the probation services claim to be free of cost, jailing those offenders for nonpayment of fees imposed by the private firms costs an average of $50 a day.
The report found that the practice of jailing those who can’t afford to pay violates both constitutional and international law.
Several courts have invalidated particularly questionable practices, including illegally extending probation sentences and one Alabama judge even invalidated imprisonment of those who don’t pay their fees, rebuking the firm for running a “debtors’ prison.”
But in many jurisdictions, the absence of even the most basic monitoring prevents jurisdictions from knowing how these firms are operating.
Ohio Supreme Court Tells Judges To Stop Reviving Debtors’ Prisons
To reverse an Ohio trend in which courts are sentencing individuals who can’t afford fees and court costs to probation or jail, the Ohio Supreme Court agreed this week to instruct all of its judges that they cannot jail defendants for failure to pay fees and court costs, nor for their inability to afford a criminal fine.
An April American Civil Liberties Union report documented in Ohio what has become an increasing trend around the country — the revival of so-called debtors’ prisons in which those who cannot pay fines face incarceration. The ACLU found that judges were illegally imposing jail time on the poor in two ways: First, they were threatening criminal punishment for those who don’t pay a non-criminal fee, such as court costs, a civil fine, or other fees. Second, they were failing to assess whether an individual ordered to pay a criminal fine has the ability to pay that fine before sentencing them to jail time — a violation of a 30-year-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
A new “bench card” that the Ohio Supreme Court will disseminate to all judges explains that imposing either one of these sentences is illegal. “An offender CANNOT be held in contempt of court for refusal to pay fines,” the memo states. “Accordingly, unpaid fines and/or court costs may neither be a condition of probation, nor grounds for an extension or violation of probation.”
In many places, this trend has been significantly exacerbated by private firms that handle probation while charging all sorts of monthly fees with the threat of jail time. Probation firms sell their services by offering a cost-free mechanism of collections; they make all their money by extra fees charged directly to the individuals who owe fines — often those least able to afford them.
But the ACLU’s reports on debtors’ prisons in Ohio and elsewhere have pointed out that the cost of jail far exceeds the cost of an unpaid fine.
Amherst County Virginia Democratic News
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