Secular Café: Explain US politics to us foreigners. Left,Right,Center ...

Secular Café For serious discussion of politics, political news, policy, political theory and economics and events happening round the world

Explain US politics to us foreigners. Left,Right,Center ... Oct 22nd 2012, 20:15 Left and Right is maybe very obvious to most. But Centrism I had to look up using Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical...%28politics%29 Quote: As a relatively grassroots movement, especially in the United States, there is no definitive statement of radical middle politics. A primary recurring theme, however, might be the idea of "sustainably improving choices." As is often the case with centrism, it can be said that the radical middle or center is an ideology broadly analogous with the ideas, principles and values of progressivism. Another wiki entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrism and then what makes it almost impssible to be a Centrist? http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...arry-democrats Quote: First of all, the parties are clearly much more polarized than before. So partisans on both sides simply feel more negatively about one another than they did in, say, 1970. But why are we so polarized--and more important for our purposes here, why would this polarization extend to non-political issues, like whether your darling daughter marries a Democrat? ... As political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler have shown, this has led to the parties being increasingly split over something called psychological authoritarianism. Republicans are increasingly authoritarian—craving certainty, inclined to view the world in black and white terms, you're either with me or you're against me—and Democrats are increasingly the opposite. And of course this filters into everything, because if you're authoritarian…well, one thing you are not very likely to be is open to new experiences. In other words, you're likely to score relatively lower on the personality trait of Openness, one of the Big Five traits. And we know that one key factor about Openness is that, well, Open people tend to date and marry other Open people, and vice versa. As the personality psychologists Robert McCrae and Sutin put it: Whether single, dating, or married, people have a good idea of what they want in their ideal partner—someone just like themselves, particularly on Openness. When contemplating the ideal mate, single individuals prefer partners who strongly resemble them on Openness, with Agreeableness and Extraversion coming in a distant second and third, respectively… I guess it is illegal to quote more read at the site. To me here in Sweden i realize that we most likely will have this situation within some decades or so. We usually mirror US but delayed :) So share your view on this polarization. Is it really a good thing?

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Secular Café: Uruguay legalises abortion

Secular Café For serious discussion of politics, political news, policy, political theory and economics and events happening round the world

Uruguay legalises abortion Oct 20th 2012, 13:08 http://world.time.com/2012/10/19/uru...rse-than-rape/ Quote: To better understand the importance of what Uruguay's Congress did this week, consider what Argentina's Supreme Court had to do last week. It ruled that a woman who had been kidnapped, forced to work in a prostitution ring and raped must be permitted to have the abortion she sought. Argentine law allows abortion in cases of rape or when the woman's life is in danger, but a lower-court, anti-abortion judge had insisted—in spite of everything the 32-year-old woman had gone through—that there was no proof of a rape. In fact, the supreme court said that the lower court judge, Miriam Rustan de Estrada, had helped leak the woman's identity and whereabouts to anti-abortion protesters, so they could demonstrate in front of her home shouting, "Murderer!" What the woman in Argentina had to endure is unfortunately the rule in Latin America. Uruguay, widely considered the commonsense Switzerland of South America these days, has now stepped forward to be the exception. On Wednesday, lawmakers there passed a bill to make their small but thriving nation just the third in Latin America to allow abortion beyond cases of rape, incest or a woman's health. (Only Cuba and Guyana have legalized abortion; it is also legal in Mexico City.) Under the decriminalization measure, which President José Mujica is expected to sign into law next month, women may now have legal abortions under any circumstances in the first trimester of pregnancy. The reform will likely make waves in Latin America, which has arguably done more than any region in the world, often quite cruelly, to stifle abortion rights... ...according to the World Health Organization, that more than 4 million women in Latin America have unsafe clandestine abortions each year, and that a quarter of them end up hospitalized or worse from complications. The Roman Catholic Church's lingering grip on Latin American politics is the most obvious cause of the draconian controls. That's especially true in Central America, where El Salvador has hundreds of women in prison for having abortions, many serving sentences as long as 30 years. "The way they carry out their laws in El Salvador can be vicious," says Alejandra Cárdenas, Latin America legal adviser for the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, which this week asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to intervene in the case of a mentally ill Salvadoran woman who in August was sentenced to two years in prison for inducing an abortion and then attempted suicide behind bars. Salvadoran lawyers recently won the release of Sonia Tábora, who in 2005 was sentenced to 30 years after she went into premature labor when she was seven months pregnant, lost her baby—and was then falsely accused of inducing an abortion. None of this, however, has had any deterrent effect. In fact, Latin America has one of the world's highest abortion rates, more than 30 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, compared to fewer than 20 in the U.S. and 12 in Western Europe. A big reason: much of Latin America also subscribes to the Catholic Church's insistence on restricting birth control. Among the results, teen-aged girls account for 45% of all pregnancies in Nicaragua, where the Church is quasi-omnipotent regarding reproductive policies, and where the maternal mortality rate is some 20 times higher than Western Europe's. Meanwhile, the tragedies mount. In 2006, a 13-year-old Peruvian girl known as "L.C." found out she was pregnant after being raped repeatedly by a man in her poor neighborhood outside Lima. But while Peru permits abortions in cases when a pregnant woman's health is at grave risk, it does not allow them in cases of rape. Distraught, L.C. tried to kill herself by jumping off a roof, but seriously injured her spine instead. Even so, doctors, cowed by Peru's harsh laws, refused to perform the necessary surgery to repair the damage because it might have terminated the girl's pregnancy. L.C. miscarried anyway—and today is a quadriplegic. Last fall, the U.N. condemned Peru—the first time it has designated the denial of a legal abortion as a human rights violation—and ordered the government to compensate L.C. So far Peru has not complied.

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Secular Café: David Stockman vs. Bain Capital (Cannibal?)

Secular Café For serious discussion of politics, political news, policy, political theory and economics and events happening round the world

David Stockman vs. Bain Capital (Cannibal?) Oct 19th 2012, 21:21 Republican Blows Whistle on Bain Cannibal, errr, Capital | Dispatches from the Culture Wars Quote: Growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, I remember David Stockman well. He came from very near where I lived at the time in Southwest Michigan, was our local congressman, and when he was named budget director for Ronald Reagan, he came in promising a supply side revolution. After four years on the job, he resigned and wrote a book about why the whole thing didn't work as promised. After that, he went in to private equity, the same thing Mitt Romney did, and he's now explaining why Bain Capital was a destroyer of companies rather than a saver of them... He then quoted from David Stockman: Mitt Romney and the Bain Drain - Newsweek and The Daily Beast Quote: Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims. Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain's billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise. ... Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn "roll-ups," and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better. Why David Stockman isn't buying it - CBS News Quote: Bernard Condon: Why are you so down on the U.S. economy? David Stockman: It's become super-saturated with debt. Typically the private and public sectors would borrow $1.50 or $1.60 each year for every $1 of GDP growth. That was the golden constant. It had been at that ratio for 100 years save for some minor squiggles during the bottom of the Depression. By the time we got to the mid-'90s, we were borrowing $3 for every $1 of GDP growth. And by the time we got to the peak in 2006 or 2007, we were actually taking on $6 of new debt to grind out $1 of new GDP. People were taking $25,000, $50,000 out of their home for the fourth refinancing. That's what was keeping the economy going, creating jobs in restaurants, creating jobs in retail, creating jobs as gardeners, creating jobs as Pilates instructors that were not supportable with organic earnings and income. It wasn't sustainable. It wasn't real consumption or real income. It was bubble economics. Then, Quote: Condon: Give me your prescription to fix the economy. Stockman: We have to eat our broccoli for a good period of time. And that means our taxes are going to go up on everybody, not just the rich. It means that we have to stop subsidizing debt by getting a sane set of people back in charge of the Fed, getting interest rates back to some kind of level that reflects the risk of holding debt over time. I think the federal funds rate ought to be 3 percent or 4 percent. (It is zero to 0.25 percent.) I mean, that's normal in an economy with inflation at 2 percent or 3 percent. Condon: Social Security? Stockman: It has to be means-tested. And Medicare needs to be means-tested. If you're a more affluent retiree, you should have your benefits cut back, pay a higher premium for Medicare. Condon: Taxes? Stockman: Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Let the capital gains go back to the same rate as ordinary income. (Capital gains are taxed at 15 percent, while ordinary income is taxed at marginal rates up to 35 percent.) Condon: Why? Stockman: Why not? I mean, is return on capital any more virtuous than some guy who's driving a bus all day and working hard and trying to support his family? You know, with capital gains, they give you this mythology. You're going to encourage a bunch of more jobs to appear. No, most of capital gains goes to speculators in real estate and other assets who basically lever up companies, lever up buildings, use the current income to pay the interest and after a holding period then sell the residual, the equity, and get it taxed at 15 percent. What's so brilliant about that?

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Secular Café: The atheist choice for President...

Secular Café For serious discussion of politics, political news, policy, political theory and economics and events happening round the world

The atheist choice for President... Oct 19th 2012, 16:46 ...according to the Secular Coalition for America: http://www.policymic.com/articles/16...e-gary-johnson eudaimonia, Mark

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Secular Café: Neil Barofsky: Obama's Wall Street Reforms Deserve An 'F' Grade

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Neil Barofsky: Obama's Wall Street Reforms Deserve An 'F' Grade Oct 17th 2012, 19:26 Quote: The former bailout watchdog says President Obama "gets an F" for his Wall Street reforms. "He's fighting to maintain the status quo of the too-big-to-fail banks and fighting against bipartisan efforts to break them up," said Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), the U.S. bank bailout program, in an interview with The Huffington Post on Wednesday. "The core stuff that was supposed to go toward resolving too big to fail has come up way too short." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...n_1973280.html

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Secular Café: Julia Gillard SUPERSTAR

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Julia Gillard SUPERSTAR Oct 16th 2012, 07:41 I have made low key posts as we in OZ have been watching with fascination which way the cat would swing... but now Julia has achieved world wide fame for doing what she does best... throwing away cue cards and letting her inner superstar do its thing.....I and anybody else with a brain support her... GO JULIA (apparently it went ballistic via Facebook):thumbup::joy::shithitfan:

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Secular Café: Rep Gay hater did Wallraff lost friends gaind insight?

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Rep Gay hater did Wallraff lost friends gaind insight? Oct 14th 2012, 13:34 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...n_1963657.html Quote: Timothy Kurek, Straight Christian Man, 'Comes Out' And Pretends To Be Gay For A Year He has now written a book about it. I have not even read that Huff text so just sharing because I think it is an interesting experiment. Can one get to know what it feels like to be discriminated buy acting like those that get discriminated? For to protect himself he let his bed male friend in on the secret that it where only pretend but his mother did not know and she got very disappointed about it and he lost some christian friends at school and so on. Using his best friend as alibi he looked "real" to the gay community? What did happen to the friends family? I guess I have to read to find out. He has his own homepage too it seems? http://timothykurek.com/ so if I get it he is strong supporter or Republicans and did hate Gays and he is a fundy Evangelical Christian and study at their most conservative school? Sorry one have to read it I know too little I can not compare. My experiment was very different. But the Captain, Sergent, Corpral and the soldiers told me taht I where too effeminate to be a real man so they concluded taht I must be Gay and I doubted that but the fact that I failed to attract girls and get chased by Gays got me to experiment and I met very many Gays due my 19years old to about 23 years old or so for to really find out if I where Gay. My conclusion is that maybe I am 95% straight and 5% romantic Gay. I can feel non-sexual romance towards Gays but I don't want to have sex with them. My body say know I feel raped. I kept these experiments secret AFAIK.

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