Cultural Direction

PAUL KRUGMAN: So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker. Now it would be wrong to say that all Republicans see increased pollution as the answer to unemployment. Herman Cain says that the unemployed are responsible for their own plight — a claim that, at Tuesday’s presidential debate, was met with wild applause. Both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have, however, put weakened environmental protection at the core of their economic proposals, as have Senate Republicans. Mr. Perry has put out a specific number — 1.2 million jobs — that appears to be based on a study released by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association, claiming favorable employment effects from removing restrictions on oil and gas extraction. The same study lies behind the claims of Senate Republicans. But does this oil-industry-backed study actually make a serious case for weaker environmental protection as a job-creation strategy?  Read more  →

Human Skin Mixed with Spider Silk Can Stop Rifle Bullets: What started as a work of art and science fiction may become a medical procedure that benefits burn patients, aids bone regeneration … Dutch artist Jalila Essaïdi and cell biologist Abdoelwaheb El Ghalbzouri blended synthetic spider silk with human skin to produce a super strong material that can stop a rifle bullet shot at half its regular speed.  Read more  →

Cain has also made a career of hurling insults at black people that no white man could ever get away with … Most of his comments are not the kinds of things he could say about other ethnic groups; if he were to say that all Jews were brainwashed (as he said about African Americans), he’d be off the stage before finishing his sentence. Herman Cain has become, in many ways, the perfect racist … [he] has volunteered to become the political puppet which allows white America to say the things that they are afraid to say. It is their ability to put Cain out front to absorb the criticism for racist remarks that makes millions of right-wing Americans so happy about his racial politics. Cain validates and brings security to a set of ideas that are generally unacceptable to those who understand America’s ugly racial history.   Read more  →
 
He gives the Republican party the gift of absolution. — Michael Eric Dyson

See also:  Explaining Herman Cain by Leonard Pitts Jr.  →

[W]ithout the fundamentalists and their “values” issues, many in the lower 99 percent could not have been convinced to vote against their (our) economic self-interest; in other words, vote for Republicans who only serve billionaires … The unstated agreement went like this: Republicans will pander to the Religious Right on the social issues — abortion, gay rights, prayer in schools, creationism in textbooks, and not so subtly the endorsement of religious schools to help white evangelicals and Roman Catholics avoid integration — as long as the Religious Right turned a blind eye to the fact that the Republican Party would sell the soul of the country to corporate America, a country-within-a-country where 1 percent of the population have more wealth than the 99 percent.  Read more  →
 
Also by Schaeffer: The Roots of Republican Actions Today  →

Senate Republicans Block American Jobs Act. This was 60-vote threshold (i.e., filibustered) cloture vote not to pass the bill, but only to begin discussion.  Read more  →

Moody’s: Senate GOP jobs plan wouldn’t help economy in short term, and it could even make things worse: “I could say, `My plan is to do nothing, and it will create five million jobs.’ And it could work, particularly if I don’t say over what time period.”  Continue  →

Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain has cast himself as the outsider, the pizza magnate with real-world experience who will bring fresh ideas to the nation’s capital. But Cain’s economic ideas, support and organization have close ties to two billionaire brothers who bankroll right-leaning causes through their group Americans for Prosperity.  Read more  →

Democrats Reject Draft House Bill That Defunds Health Law:  “The Senate will not agree to kicking hundreds of thousands of students out of the Pell Grant program, decimating programs that train unemployed workers to get a new job, or adopting any of the dozens of radical legislative riders that the Chairman has proposed.”
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GOP Threats to Planned Parenthood, Health Care Law, Heating Oil, NPR  →