A Gentleman’s view.

Wisconsin Assembly Officially Ends Employment Discrimination Remedies

By Segway Jeremy Ryan

All across the nation we have seen a GOP assault on pretty much everyone who is not a rich white christian, male.  Today this took on a whole new level as the State Assembly passed Senate Bill 202.  This bill was introduced by Senator Glenn Grothman.  According to Representative Christine Sinicki, Grothman said a woman’s place is at home cooking, cleaning, and making babies.  For this reason he authored a bill making it so that people who are discriminated against by employers cannot sue for punitive or compensatory damages.  This bill passed the Senate on partisan lines.  Today, February 21, 2012, the bill was in front of the Assembly.  The Democrats gave speech after speech on how bad this bill was, focusing on the current income gap between males and females.  And after all of that, just one Republican stood up to defend the bill.  The one who spoke was Representative Michelle Litjens who pulled out a defense seen time and time again.  She simply said the Democrats were lying and that this bill doesn’t reverse any rights someone who has been discriminated against has.  To call her bullshit we need look no further than the title of the bill.

Senate Bill 202: An Act to repeal 111.39 (5) (d), 111.397 and 893.995; and to amend 111.39 (4) (d) and 814.04 (intro.) of the statutes; relating to: elimination of compensatory and punitive damages for acts of employment discrimination or unfair honesty or genetic testing. (FE)

I don’t know what kind of education Michelle got in school, but to me that is pretty clear.  And what I quoted above was written by the non-partisan Legislative Reference Bureau.  I do not see any way a bill that says “elimination of compensatory and punitive damages for…” would do anything less than eliminate the ability to receive such damages.  Do the Republicans really think we are that stupid?  The bill passed with every Republican Woman voting for it.  But what is really stunning is not that it passed, it is the realization that the women in the Republican party will not even stand up for their own gender.  They vote for legislation that discriminates against their own sex.  Do they truly agree with Grothman that a woman’s place is in the home?  Do they believe they do not deserve the jobs they have?  I am not sure what they believe, but they voted in agreement.  I find it sad that these women have no pride in the rights that they have earned.

We need to start calling the truth out.  This is an attack on women.  There is a reason the GOP loves people like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman.  It is because the GOP likes the image they project.  These people paint women as dumb and obedient.  They will vote against and support things against their best interests because men tell them to.  They want people to buy the image of all women being stupid.  So they embrace women like Palin and Bachmann.  Senate Bill 202 was nothing more than a move to “put women in their place”.  It sickens me that these bills pass.  But what sickens me more is how the women of the GOP just sit back and feed into an image that no woman would want.  Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Michelle Litjens represent a class of woman with very low intelligence.  These are people who are too stupid to hold any other job.  They represent a very small group of women, a group that sticks to pre-suffrage ideas that equate women to no greater than a slave.  This view may have flown decades ago.  But in this day and age such discriminatory laws are not socially acceptable.  I am also willing to bet the majority of women, minority, and disabled voters will not take to kindly to this assault either.  And fortunately for us, every single member of the Wisconsin State Assembly will be up for re-election this year.  Therefore, this assault is not likely to last much longer.

Jeremy Ryan

Executive Director

Defending Wisconsin PAC

jryan@defendingwisconsin.org

[Editor's Note: Donations made through this post go to the author, not the website]

Note: Segway Jeremy Ryan has become a full-time member of the protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol. Formerly a businessman, he gave up his business to join the fight for the middle class in the State of Wisconsin. Through videos and writings he has informed hundreds of thousands of people about what was going on at the Wisconsin State Capitol once the mainstream media had mostly abandoned the protests. His full-time activism is completely funded by the people.

Newt Gingrich Says Beating President Obama Is A Matter Of National Security

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

Newt Gingrich is obsessed with the Middle East. He’s also obsessed with painting President Obama as some kind of Islamic fundamentalist sympathizer who seeks to destroy America. During a speech in front of a crowd of Oral Roberts University students, Gingrich continued that line of attack, and said that defeating President Obama this November is a matter of national security.

“This is not smearing everybody, this is not Islamaphobia. If we can’t have an honest conversation about radical Islamists, and if we can’t figure out — there’s a very specific group of people across the planet. Across the planet today, the forces of religious repression are on the march and this administration has intellectually disarmed, it has morally disarmed, it is incapable of describing what threatens us. The president wants to unilaterally weaken the United States. He wants to cut the aid to Israel for its anti-ballistic missile defense. He refuses to take Iran seriously. We are in a world that is very dangerous. And I say this to those of you who represent the next generation because you’re going to bear the consequences. We are really at risk someday in your lifetime of losing an American city. So, defeating Barack Obama becomes, in fact, a duty of national security because the fact is that he is incapable of defending the United States.”

Here’s the video:

It never ceases to amaze me how Republicans can accuse President Obama of making America less safe when his foreign policy achievements include the killings of multiple terrorist leaders using a strategy of small teams of America’s elite military forces. Here’s a short list of them just to remind everyone of just how seriously President Obama takes the national security of the United States.

1. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Anwar al-Awlaki: KILLED

2. Al-Qaeda’s chief of Pakistan operations, Abu Hafs al-Shahri: KILLED

3. Al-Qaeda deputy leader ‘Atiyah ‘Abd al-Rahman: KILLED

4. Al-Quaeda commander Ilyas Kashmiri: KILLED

5. AQAP senior operative Ammar al-Wa’ili: KILLED

6. AQAP senior operative Abu Ali al-Harithi: KILLED

7. AQAP senior operative Ali Saleh Farhan: KILLED

8. Al-Qa’ida in East Africa (AQEA) senior leader Harun Fazul: KILLED

9. Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan leader Baitullah Mahsud: KILLED

10. Jemayah Islamiya operational planner Noordin Muhammad Top: KILLED

11. AQEA planner Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan: KILLED

12. Al-Qaeda operational commander Saleh al-Somali: KILLED

13. Al-Qaeda operational commander ‘Abdallah Sa’id: KILLED

14. Taliban deputy and military commander Abdul Ghani Beradar: CAPTURED

15. Haqqani network commander Muhammad Haqqani: KILLED

16. Lashkar-e Jhangvi leader Qari Zafar: KILLED

17. Al-Qaeda commander Hamza al-Jawfi: KILLED

18. Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri: KILLED

19. Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi: KILLED

20. Al-Qaeda’s number three commander, Sheik Saeed al-Masri: KILLED

21. Al-Qaeda senior external operations planner Abdullah Khorsani: KILLED

22. Al-Qaeda Mastermind Osama bin Laden: KILLED

And that’s just a short list. Let’s add multiple Somali pirates and multiple Somali hostage takers killed or captured as well. President Obama takes Islamic terrorists seriously. He just doesn’t want to declare war on the entire Arab world like Newt Gingrich does. But if you’re still confused about which man would keep America safer, I think the following quote will make it clear.

“This is one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we’re in danger … It’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.” ~Newt Gingrich, at a book talk in Huntington, NY, April 2008, saying that Republicans should allow terrorist attacks on American soil to remind us of the dangers in the world.

The above quote should seal Gingrich’s fate with the American electorate. Do we want to vote for President Obama, who has an iron clad record of killing terrorists and preventing attacks on American soil? Or do we want Gingrich, a man who has stated that the government should allow terrorist attacks to get through from time to time just to keep people afraid? The answer should be simple.

Where GOP Libertarianism, White Supremacy and Social Conservatism all Came Together as today’s Rethugliklans:

Walter Shapiro reads Rick Santorum’s book so you don’t have to. And it sounds like you really don’t want to. The guy sounds like a hot tempered idiot. He discusses the influence of the Catholic Church, naturally but there’s another, less obvious, aspect to his worldview as well:

Sometime, presumably early in law school at Penn State, Santorum was introduced to the concept of the slippery slope–and it changed his mental life. In It Takes a Family, Santorum repeatedly warns about the legal consequences flowing from popular Supreme Court decisions. He laments the reasoning behind the 1965 Griswold decision (overturning–yikes!–a Connecticut law that banned the sale of condoms) because it introduced the constitutional zone of privacy that later allowed the Supreme Court to legalize abortion. Santorum even expresses his concern with the precedent set by Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 civil-rights decision that decreed that states could not ban interracial marriages. What troubles Santorum is not the result (ending Jim Crow legislation) but that “16 years later, the IRS ruled that religious groups opposed to interracial marriage could be stripped of their tax-exempt status.” Now that, my friends, is a dogwhistle. A particularly shrill one:

[W]hat I try to expose in the book and I think I document copiously is that the religious right did not–did not–coalesce as a political movement in direct response to the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is hardly a bastion of liberalism, had passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, and this was a resolution that was reaffirmed in 1974, again in 1976. It was not the abortion issue. What galvanized evangelicals as a political block, as a political movement, was instead the actions of the Internal Revenue Service to go after the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, because of its racially discriminatory policies, and that Carter was unfairly blamed for this by the architects of the religious right, and they used that against him and mobilized to defeat him four years later in 1980. [...]

Bob Jones University did not allow African-Americans to be enrolled at the school until 1991 and did not allow unmarried African-Americans as students until 1995. The lower court ruling that really became the catalyst for the rise of the religious right was a ruling called Green v. Connelly, issued in 1971, by the district court of the District of Columbia; and it upheld the Internal Revenue Service in its ruling that any organization that engages in racial segregation or discrimination is not, by definition, a charitable organization and as such has no claim to tax-exempt status. And as the IRS began applying that ruling and enforcing it in various places, including Bob Jones University, that is what galvanized evangelical leaders into a political movement that we know today as the religious right.

According to one of the architects of the religious right, who told me this directly, after they had organized on the issue of Bob Jones University and more broadly the issue of government interference in these schools, as they understood it, there was a conference call among these various evangelical leaders and the political consultants who were trying to organize them into a political movement, and several people mentioned several issues. Finally the voice on the end of one of the lines said, `How about abortion?’ And that’s how abortion was cobbled into the agenda of the religious right, late in the 1970s in preparation for the 1980 presidential election.

Bob Jones University is where GOP libertarianism, white supremacy and social conservatism all come together in one big toxic stew.

By Digby