Republican Freshmen are angry at Democrats for continuing to tell people that the Republican plan to end Medicare would end Medicare.

Well, they shouldn’t have voted for it, then, should they have?

Even more incredible, they accuse Democrats of “playing politics” with “MediScare,” trying to gain a political advantage by making people afraid the other party is doing something that would defund the popular Medicare program.

Why is that incredible? Because that is exactly how most of the Freshman GOP pols won their elections in 2010–by making voters afraid that Democrats were going to wreck Medicare with the Affordable Care Act. The main difference: the GOP line in 2010 was a bald-faced lie. The Democrats’ claims today are, if alarmist, mostly accurate and true.

It’s kind of hard to get more hypocritical than this. A group of politicians who rode into office just last year by lying about Medicare are accusing their opponents of playing politics because they are telling the truth about Medicare.

Republicans in New Hampshire are trying to pass a new anti-union law, claiming that weakening the unions would draw more businesses into the state.

The current right-wing drive to crush any pro-left entity aside, this brings to mind the fact that businesses get great deals by playing state against state. Just as they play workers against each other to the workers’ disadvantage, they shake down the states for billions with these coy “I’ll settle in your state only if you give me even bigger benefits than the next state” game.

If only the states were to form some sort of, oh, I don’t know, union, so they could join forces and gain from the advantage.

But that’s probably just crazy talk.

For a party that not only claims to love the Constitution so much, but to honor and respect it the way it was (in their opinion) originally drafted, conservatives sure love to push amendment after amendment, trying to reshape the document to line up with their current party platform. The latest: give states veto power over the federal government. If two-thirds of the states don’t like a federal law, they can send it back to Congress.

Now, this seems just a little bit redundant to me; after all, the people who vote for those state legislatures are the exact same people who vote for the Congressional representatives.

Of course, a lot of this is simply playing to the base; in conservative circles, there is a newfound love of states’ rights (which conservatives immediately and unabashedly ignore when states try to do stuff like legalize marijuana or or pass right-to-die legislation), and so a PR stunt (bound to fail, and even if not, it would be a horrible mess to put into practice) which would play up the states would play nicely in campaign commercials next year.

However, when conservatives propose Constitution amendments, it is often based upon short-term interests, like when they wanted to repeal citizenship requirements for the presidency because they were excited about running Schwarzenegger as the party’s candidate.

So I have to wonder: would they be introducing this amendment, even with it bound to fail, if it were Democrats and not Republicans who controlled a majority of state legislatures?

Conservatives love to blame runaway health care costs on a variety of things, including immigrants, liberal medical & insurance programs, and liberal-backed trial lawyers. The truth is, however, these things are not to blame. The real costs are pretty easy to predict: health care costs rise so much because the people making money off of them know they can raise costs nearly as much as they want, exploding profits–and people will still pay for medical treatment. Without socialized medicine and government regulation to control these costs, we wind up paying the most for the worst levels of care.

Part 1 of the graphic introduces the idea that we pay more than other 1st-world countries and get worse care. Part 2, a very long graphic, does an excellent job of laying out why, dispelling myths (there are four instead of the stated 3) and presenting the true reasons. It’s well worth scrolling through:

From Tom Tomorrow, the only conceivable way the Republican claims of Bush being responsible for getting bin Laden might be true.

Conservatives continue to find more and more ways to criticize Obama for his nailing bin Laden. One of the latest is Andrew Card, Bush’s former Chief of Staff:

SPIEGEL: At the beginning of the war in Iraq, you reassigned many experts. Did President Bush set any priorities higher than the hunt for bin Laden?

Card: He had many top priorities, but I honestly do not believe that the president neglected the hunt for bin Laden. People we moved out were replaced. I think there was a dedicated team whose job it was to wake up every day and say: “Where is Osama bin Laden today?”

SPIEGEL: But now President Obama is the big winner…

Card: I think he has pounded his chest a little too much. He can take pride in it, but he does not need to show it so much.

SPIEGEL: He didn’t appear triumphant while announcing bin Laden’s death.

Card: I thought his statement was subdued, but I think his schedule is not subdued. Personally, I think it is premature to go to Ground Zero, in New York. I think my role model in this would be George H. W. Bush, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. It was a day to celebrate, but we did not dance on the Wall.

Wow. Okay, the first thing that stands out is the criticism that Obama “pounded his chest too much,” following up on the general right-wing complaints about Obama’s “narcissism” and hogging all the credit. Here, Card specifically criticizes Obama for going to Ground Zero. I mean, really?

Who here does not remember that, when the “major combat operations” had been “completed” in Iraq in May 2003, Bush famously dressed up in a flight suit and unnecessarily took a fighter jet to an aircraft carrier in a massively staged PR event culminating in a speech in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, a banner which the White House arranged but later tried to blame the soldiers for? Especially when Card himself was in the jet that flew in right before Bush, and Bush strutted around in his flight suit and bragged about how he flew the jet himself. The right wing loved that display. And if Bush had captured bin Laden, the right wing would be criticizing him (mildly, of course) only if he didn’t pound his chest about it.

Seriously, had it been Obama on 9/11 and he went to Ground Zero with the bullhorn, right-wingers would have bashed him for “pounding his chest” instead of lionizing it as a defining moment in U.S. history.

Aside from that, we have Card trying to make it look like Bush was intent on capturing bin Laden, despite Bush’s famous “I’m not all that interested in him” statement to reporters. Card is less than convincing when he says he “believes” Bush was dedicated, and he “thinks” they had a team working on it. Card was Chief of Staff; if he wasn’t sure, then it doesn’t sound like it was really a high priority.

Finally, note that Card chose, as his role model of restraint, Bush 41–not Bush 43. I wonder why. In any case, we find conservatives clashing in their criticisms–most right-wingers bash Obama for not going farther in dancing on bin Laden’s desecrated body. No matter what Obama does, it does not matter to these people–it’s always wrong, for some reason or another.

Interesting, John Yoo’s most recent criticism is that bin Laden was killed instead of captured. Despite the fact that he never seemed to voice any concern for Bush’s “dead or alive” policy, and Card mentioned that certainly Bush had no preference.

It will be interesting to see conservatives continuing to pick over the event as time goes on, but one thing remains clear: if they have their way, Obama’s killing of bin Laden will go down in their books as a huge blunder, a failure that made Obama look horrible as a president. The idea being that they want to mitigate, as much as possible, whatever currency, political or otherwise, Obama could take away from the accomplishment.

How come every time I spend billions of dollars and almost a decade to kill a guy in a suburban mansion, fly his body 800 miles, and dump him in the ocean I’m a bad guy?

— Jeff Rowland

Okay, it was a few days ago. But still.

Republicans attacked Obama for the GM bailout, claiming that when the government intervened, it was a “major power grab” that effectively put GM under the control of the federal government–and, in the eyes of many right-wingers, under Obama’s personal command.

Well, in early 2009, the company was near collapse, threatening to destroy the American auto industry and put huge numbers of Americans out of work. Today, as a result of the intervention, the company is not only back on its feet, but posted a $3.2 billion profit. It’s not perfect, but without doubt far and away much better than it was before Obama came in.

So, will Republicans–who claimed Obama owned the industry–give him credit for its success?

This is kind of funny. Republicans are trying to sloooowly back away from their whole “let’s destroy Medicare and say we’re saving it” plan. Apparently they didn’t do nearly as good a job of masking their intentions as they thought they were, and are really feeling the backlash, especially from town hall attendees. After all but six of them in the House voting to pass this legislation, Obama & the Democrats have had a field day–simply by pointing out exactly what the Republicans were doing. No exaggeration necessary. Funny thing, it turns out people don’t like the idea.

What’s funny is that they seem to know it’s political suicide, but they can’t seem to completely abandon the idea, either. Most of the Republican mixed-message scrambling is journaled here, but it boils down to the idea that they want to (a) blame Obama for making it look bad, (b) take it off the active agenda at least until after the 2012 elections where it could really hurt them, but (c) nevertheless somehow keep it “on the table” so they can use it as an extreme starting point from which to negotiate what they like (which is probably what they expected it would be used for from the start). Like the actions of some neurotic binge & purge dieter, it’s an interesting mix of “blame Obama,” “we’re not doing it,” and “but we still want to use it anyway.”

Democrats are being smart about this for once. They’re effectively saying, “until you say you’re abandoning it completely, we get to tell the public you stand behind gutting Medicare.” And it’s working.

I hesitate to really even call it “malware,” because it doesn’t really do what most malware does. It’s more like a scam, social engineering upon social engineering.

If you visit certain web pages, javascript code may automatically download a ZIP file on to your Mac. If Safari is set to automatically unzip files, you will be presented with an Install window which prompts you to install software called “MACDefender.” If you are careless enough to install an app you didn’t even look for, and click “Continue,” and then type in your admin password and complete the install, even then the software apparently doesn’t really “infect” your computer, not like malware usually does.

Instead, it sets itself to start up when your computer does, and informs you, with odd grammar (“This unique module allows to do unbelievable things”), that your computer is infected, and tries to sell you anti-virus software. If you’re still naive enough to buy all of this, you will be led to a web site where, if you buy a license, the fake virus alerts will stop while your credit card account is cleaned out. It is likely, however, that the web site will soon be abandoned, leaving the fake software merely annoying. One can apparently also rid oneself of the software just by throwing it in the trash, though it would be best also to stop its processes, remove mention of it from Startup Items, and see if you can dump any related files from the Library.

This barely qualifies as malware, in that it is software and tries to do something bad. However, it is qualitatively different from viruses, worms, rootkits, and even trojans in that it is nothing more than an avenue to steer you to a scam web site. I would class this more with risks like falling for the guy who claims that his wife is in the hospital across the state and he desperately needs a few bucks to get enough bus fare to see her.

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On a similar note, Facebook “malware” is on the rise. People are getting tricked by various scams where you get prompted to see or try something that sounds interesting on Facebook, but it turns out to be a scam which somehow hijacks your Facebook account and sends copies of the scam to your friends. I’ve seen at least three in the past week: one promised to show you people who are “stalking” you on Facebook; another advertised an app that would age your photo by 20 years; and a third, the most pervasive, promised to show pictures or videos of bin Laden dead.

In all of these cases, clicking the link takes you off of Facebook to a site which gives you a snippet of Javascript code, telling you to paste it into the browser window and execute it, promising the desired result if you do. Clearly, trusting that is the mistake people make.

Needless to say, you should never copy and paste any such script into your browser URL window and hit “Enter.” Just as with email spam or viral attachments, it doesn’t matter if it came from a friend. And since this is Javascript in a browser, it doesn’t matter if you have a Mac or a PC. Some of these scams use different methods that may be more platform-specific–a general rule of thumb, then, should be to stay away from anything bin-Laden-oriented if it doesn’t come from a major news site.

Obama Derangement Syndrome continues. While the Republicans running for office have to maintain some level of credulity, most of the right wing is finding new and creative ways to bash Obama over something for which, were it accomplished by a Republican president, they would be offering apotheosis.

This after being so very wrong about so many things. From the moment Obama was elected, they claimed that everything was his responsibility–everything bad, that is. Right-wingers couldn’t wait to dump the recession on Obama, and after claiming that 9/11 was Clinton’s fault, had no problem absolving Bush for any terror event that happened after Obama took office.

Worse, they claimed Obama was weak on terror. They claimed that he shied away from even the word “terrorism,” could not face up to our enemies, and neglected to address terrorism. Palin claimed that Obama’s “fundamental approach to terrorism is fatally flawed,” writing:

We are at war with radical Islamic extremists and treating this threat as a law enforcement issue is dangerous for our nation’s security.

Yeah, that turned out to be right, didn’t it?

When Obama, in 2007, held that we should be willing to go in to Pakistan to get bin Laden even without Pakistan’s cooperation, he was attacked as being a lightweight who knew nothing about foreign policy. They claimed his statement was irresponsible and reckless, and was not the way to go. William Kristol characterized it as Obama “losing ground to Hillary Clinton because he seemed naive about real world threats, frantically suggesting that he would invade Pakistan.” That turned out to be accurate, didn’t it?

And now that Obama is vindicated, they’re just as harsh, if not worse. The initial reaction was to claim that Obama had little or nothing to do with it, and what credit did not go to Bush should go entirely to the military; Obama, in taking any credit, was a shameless narcissist, politicizing the event.

Limbaugh now famously went into deep sarcasm:

In fact, it may be that President Obama single-handedly came up with the technique in order to pull this off. You see, the military wanted to go in there and bomb as they always do. They wanted to drop missiles and drop bombs and a number of totally destructive techniques here. But President Obama, perhaps the only qualified member in the room to deal with this, insisted on the Special Forces. No one else thought of that.

Ironically, he was more right than he knew. The military did want to bomb the target, and Obama did insist on a risky mission to go in there with SEALs. It’s not, as Limbaugh snarkily insisted, that nobody else thought of it–but it was Obama’s call, against what he was being advised. Had Bush done something like that, they would have been outraged at any sarcasm about it.

A lot of people had a confused initial reaction to bin Laden’s body being disposed of so quickly. Again, we see Obama’s preference to avoid drama. Right-wingers are livid that Obama didn’t bring the body back so they could do a victory dance on his crushed head. As satisfying as that might have been, it would have had too much negative blowback, making us more into villains and bin Laden into more of a martyr. Disposing of the body at sea may have been less satisfying, but it made eminent sense from a responsible, long-term point of view.

That, of course, does not stop a new right-wing movement from emerging, claiming that the decision is evidence that the whole thing was faked. Now termed as “Deathers,” in denial that Obama could have pulled off something like this, seeking some way of delegitimizing him. The DNA match is faked, they assert, and despite demands for photos of the body, there is little doubt that they’ll call that a fake, too.

Those on the right wing who do accept bin Laden’s death want to make it all about Bush. The Wall Street Journal “asked” if Bush should be given credit, leading a chorus of right-wing voices giving varying degrees of credit to Bush, who more or less gave up on bin Laden less than two years after 9/11. Palin stated, “We Thank President Bush For Having Made The Right Calls To Set Up This Victory.” A Breitbart blog writer exclaimed that this “vindicated” Bush, and was his victory, writing that, “If Any One Person, In Addition To Our Military Personnel, Deserves To Be Singled Out For Adoration At This Time It’s George W. Bush.”

Part of this is based upon the fact that information about the courier came from a Guantanamo detainee. This was immediately construed as vindicating torture. However, even Rumsfeld himself pointed out that the man who gave up the intel did not do so under torture, but only under standard interrogation techniques, after Obama had taken office. Nevertheless, right-wingers still cling to the idea that torture under Bush is now validated, and that because of this, Bush deserves credit for getting bin Laden, not Obama.

Here’s a question: reverse the party affiliations. A Democrat is in office when 9/11 hits. He then starts two massively costly wars, but after seven years in office, cannot track down the perpetrator, and in fact, at various points says he’s not even interested, that it’s not that important. And after all that time trying to spread “Democracy” throughout the Muslim world, he fails rather stunningly.

Then a Republican comes in to office, and in about two years, tracks down the terror ring leader, using new intel and a bold gamble of his own. In addition, after giving new popularity to the U.S. in the region partly just because of his name and partly due to a series of speeches that resonated with the people, a string of pro-Democracy revolutions rise up, so many that the effect is termed “Arab Spring.”

You really think that Republicans would give any credit to the Democrat?

If there were any event that could possibly bring left and right together, one would think that this were it. If there were any chance that bipartisanship and unity–which Republicans claim they are all about–were achievable, it would be for at least one day after nabbing bin Laden.

Instead, within hours, the right wing descended into the starkest, most hypocritical depth of accusation, recrimination, name-calling, and even conspiracy theorizing imaginable. While the big-league elected officials made grudging sounds of respect (though many with caveats and asides which detracted from them), most of the right wing simply turned this into yet another way to elevate the conservative establishment while denigrating Obama.

Keep in mind: one of their first criticisms of Obama was that he politicized all of this.

That’s something they would never do.

Inevitably, we now have “Deathers,” who believe that bin Laden was not killed yesterday. Some believe he was killed a while ago but was kept on ice until now. That makes no sense because (a) if Bush had him, he would have used him, and (b) if Obama was keeping him for political profit, he would have used him at a better time and would not have dumped the body–otherwise, why keep it around?

For those who might think bin Laden is still alive, that’s even dumber. Obama would have to be fantastically idiotic to leave bin Laden in a position where all he has to do is show up on tape with a newspaper dated after May 1, claim the news of his death is fake, and Obama would become such an object of ridicule and scorn that he would never, ever, ever recover.

No, neither theory makes the least bit of sense. Bin Laden is dead.

Which is why I expect future polls to say that at least 40% of Republicans don’t believe it.

I agree with the right-wingers on one thing: it’s not over. The “War on Terror” was not really a war to begin with, but what it really was–an attempt to quell the use of terror tactics by fundamentalists and others as a result of our Middle East policies–was around well before bin Laden, and will continue. Bin Laden’s death was significant, but not in that it ends all of our problems.

Getting bin Laden was not the magic bullet that makes terrorism stop. It was, however, greatly symbolic, and has value to that extent. It could be, in a way, our excuse to leave. Because Afghanistan was not really crucial to end the bigger problem, and Iraq certainly wasn’t. The answers lie elsewhere.

Do we need to be in Afghanistan? Will it bring great harm if we leave? Depends on what’s important to you, and what you think we can accomplish. I’m not expert, so my guess here is just that–a blind guess. But I would imagine that in the long run, it won’t make much difference. Unless we expend huge amounts of money and a great many lives to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely–which I do not see as being feasible–the country will probably, inevitably, devolve back into something similar to what it was before. Will that harm us and the region? Possibly, but I would argue that it would not be much better overall if we stayed.

We need to get out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan. We need to make the military into something far less bloated, far more surgical and precise. This is not a new idea, but it is a good one. Do this, cut the hundreds of billions wasted in that part of the budget, bring back more reasonable tax rates for the wealthy and corporations, and we stand a good shot of turning this sucker around. And maybe this event today was what we needed to start doing that.

Not that I think it’ll happen.

Here’s a question: who thinks that if Palin were president, she would have gotten bin Laden?

No, I don’t, either.

Nor do I believe McCain would have. Despite his bluster about knowing exactly how to capture bin Laden but he would tell us ONLY if he became president, McCain, during the debates, not only gave no clue about how to do it, but he opposed Obama’s idea of unilaterally going into Pakistan were we to find Osama there. Remember? And other Republican contenders echoed that sentiment.

If McCain had won, bin Laden would most likely still be alive today.

Nor does Bush deserve any credit. He had more than seven years to get the job done. He blew it. And he left Obama no leads, those developed only after Obama brought bin Laden back into our sights.

In the end, Obama was the one who got the job done. This was no accident of timing, he was no bystander. He’s not perfect, he’s not a miracle worker, and yes, I don’t like a lot of the crap he’s still doing. But he got this one right, and he didn’t do it at the expense of something else more important.

It took Bush seven years and he didn’t get close. Obama got him in two years.

Had this happened under Bush, even after seven years, one can assume that this would have been the beginning of a weeks-long self-congratulatory paroxysm of crowing amongst right-wingers, with the media showering praise on Bush in particular, followed by a double-digit jump in his popularity ratings.

One wonders how this will be handled differently now that it took Barack Hussein Obama, in a long-planned and well-coordinated mission, to accomplish.

Bush in March 2002, when he was diverting his attention from bin Laden and Afghanistan so he could prosecute the war in Iraq instead:

… I don’t know where [bin Laden] is. I — I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.

Obama in 2008:

And we have a difficult situation in Pakistan. I believe that part of the reason we have a difficult situation is because we made a bad judgment going into Iraq in the first place when we hadn’t finished the job of hunting down bin Laden and crushing al Qaeda.

So what happened was we got distracted, we diverted resources, and ultimately bin Laden escaped, set up base camps in the mountains of Pakistan in the northwest provinces there. …

And if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out.

Nor was this a chance or accidental result; Obama was truly focusing on the task, while Bush let his attention wander almost immediately. Obama today:

And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda. Even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat his network.

Then last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain. And it took many months to run this thread to ground.

I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside Pakistan.

And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abad Abad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties.

And, time until conservatives find some way to criticize Obama for taking out bin Laden, in three, two….

Indiana Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels now says he will sign a bill that will defund Planned Parenthood because they perform abortions. Not just of state funds, but of federal funds, including Medicare. Despite the fact that $0 of public money goes to abortions, despite the fact that 97% of their services are vital health needs for women, despite the fact that most (about 60%) of the people who depend on Planned Parenthood are below the poverty line, despite the fact that this move will threaten the health of women across his state, and despite the fact that this move will do nothing to stop abortions.

So, why is he doing it?

Daniels’ decision was closely watched since he is considering a presidential run. His earlier call for a “truce” on social issues had garnered the ire of social conservatives, and the bill was seen as a test of where he stood on such issues.

Oh, nice. Daniels is uselessly endangering women’s health and putting their lives at grave risk as a political move to slap liberals and pander to the right-wing core for the sake of his political career.

What a hero.

In Oklahoma, there is a bill that passed the legislature putting before voters a constitutional amendment that would ban “affirmative action” in the state government.

In the past, I have remarked on the confusion associated with this term: “affirmative action” in fact refers to a set of rules and guidelines which inform employers that when they hire, administer, and fire employees, non-relevant considerations such as race and gender must not play any part. Examples of “affirmative action” include rules about extending hiring information in broad environments, not just targeting one community or social group; or, if you employ men and women for the same position, you cannot pay the men more than the women.

What people often mislabel as “affirmative action” is quotas, a rudimentary practice of enforcing equality in a workplace which is identified as suffering from discriminatory practices. For example, if an office hires two hundred people, and 99% are white despite whites being only 70% of the qualified workforce, this is fairly substantial evidence of discrimination. Since such discrimination is rarely overt and cannot be redressed directly, the only options are to (a) allow the discrimination to continue unchecked, or (b) impose a requirement that hiring must reflect the makeup of the local qualified workforce–e.g., if the percentage of qualified workers of African-American descent in an area is 10%, then an office hiring 200 people should have 20 African-American workers. Quotas take into account standard deviations, and if an employer can demonstrate that they could not find enough qualified candidates to fill the quota, they are off the hook.

While quotas are seen as oppressive and unfair, this is primarily based on disinformation and misunderstanding. Quotas are attacked, usually using apocryphal and exaggerated stories of quotas run amok, creating the impression that they cause workplaces in which unqualified, undeserving minorities are hired and then become impervious to dismissal no matter how badly they perform. These stories are often taken as representative of the rules of quotas by managers, who, fearful of being sued, will sometimes follow the false rules instead of following the actual rules, thus providing more fodder to show that “quotas” are unreasonable.

The fact is, if hiring is equal and fair in the first place, quotas would never apply in any way, shape, or form. And when they do apply, they never require any employer to hire anyone who is not qualified, nor do they provide one iota or special protection or special preference to a worker once they are hired.

So, back to the Oklahoma bill. It took me a little bit to find the specific legislation, but eventually I found it listed as Senate Joint Resolution 15. It would amend the state constitution to read:

Section 36. A. The state shall not grant preferential treatment to, or discriminate against, any individual or group on the basis of race, color, sex, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.

Now, that sounds reasonable. However, note the language: “preferential treatment.” Also note the word “group.” Those are the key terms. “Preferential treatment” has long been a code word for people who attack affirmative action. The basic idea is that the effects of discrimination are partly or wholly ignored, and the immediate effects of quota-based hiring are considered completely out of context. Imagine considering sending a person to prison but ignoring the crime they committed; it would seem a horrific injustice. This is how affirmative action’s critics view it: not as a redress to an imbalance, but as a special boon, a bonus given only to minorities and women at the expense of white men.

Now, the rest of the language is pretty much the same as standing law. Here is Oklahoma’s state law on equal employment, a.k.a. affirmative action:

Title 25 O.S. 1302 – It is a discriminatory practice for an employer:

(1) To fail to refuse to hire, to discharge, or otherwise to discriminate against an individual with respect to compensation or the terms, conditions, privileges, or responsibilities of employment, because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or handicap unless such action is related to a bonafide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the employer’s business or enterprise.

(2) To limit, segregate, or classify an employee in a way which would deprive or tend to deprive an individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect the status of an employee, because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or handicap unless such action is related to a bonafide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the employer’s business or enterprise.

The only real differences are in the terms “preferential treatment” and “group,” and that is what they likely hope will kill off quotas.

Discrimination is not overt. Very few employers ever announce that they are hiring based on race or gender. As a result, it is impossible to address the damages of discrimination specifically, on a case-by-case basis. Instead, it can only effectively be addressed in a general way, i.e. quotas. What this may mean, however, is that if a workplace is hiring an individual, but because of past discrimination, white men have been hired over women and minorities and an imbalance exists, a qualified but less-experienced black person may be hired over a more experienced white person. This could be termed as “preferential treatment” for the individual. Since it could be argued that it is the group which is being given preference, the new legislation adds that term. Of course, the group is not actually being given preference–it is being compensated for preference given to white men. But this is the consideration that conservatives hope to dance around.

In effect, the amendment would, if effective in what it is designed to accomplish, forbid the use of quotas in the state. Racial and gender discrimination would therefore go unchecked, leaving strong “preferential treatment” only for whites and men.

The impetus behind this bill was made rather transparent Wednesday through the comments of one rather infamous Oklahoma state legislator named Sally Kern. On the floor of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, she made this statement:

We have heard tonight already that in prison there’s more black people. Yes there are, and that’s tragic. It’s tragic that our prisons here in Oklahoma – what are they, 99-percent occupancy? But the other side of the story, perhaps we need to consider: Is this just because they are black, that they are in prison or could it be because they didn’t want to work hard in school? And white people oftentimes don’t want to work hard in school, or Asians oftentimes. But a lot of times that’s what happens. I’ve taught school for 20 years and I saw a lot of, a lot of people of color who didn’t want to work as hard, they wanted it given to them. As a matter of fact, I had one student who said, “I don’t need to study. You know why? The government’s going to take care of me.” That’s kind of revealing there.

Yes, it’s revealing, just not how she thinks it is. Frankly, I have strong doubts that she really had black students who seriously admitted that they didn’t want to study hard because the state would support them no matter what. It is far more likely that students made statements meaning something entirely different, but which she interpreted the way she wanted to–or she just made the whole thing up, based more on what she wanted to believe rather than on what she actually observed.

Disproportionate numbers of black people are not in prison because affirmative action made them lazy; they’re in prison due to a variety of factors, including racial discrimination over decades and centuries up to and including today, which induced poverty and a sense of hopelessness; sub-standard educational funding for people in poorer areas, which “just happen” to be largely minority; and laws written which disproportionately target and more strongly punish people of color.

To instead claim that it’s primarily or even partly due to laws which promote equal treatment and higher employment rates is farcical at best.

Listening to Kern’s whole remarks, there were several other telling points. One was that she extensively quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; when a conservative does that, you know it’s a cover for killing off civil rights and fair treatment. They love trotting out King’s statements and interpreting them in such a way as to kill the spirit and intended meaning of those statements.

Kern also made distinctions between “equal opportunities” and “equal results” (famous among affirmative action deniers), saying that opportunities were more important than results. This is another tell, as she clearly meant that the results should be determined wholly by a person’s accomplishments, and that affirmative action destroys that–completely ignoring the fact that before affirmative action can play any part, racial and gender discrimination must first destroy fairness, thus leaving affirmative action to restore it.

These people see affirmative action as anathema to equal opportunity, once again completely ignoring the effects of discrimination. In effect, in the absence of affirmative action, they blame minorities and women, and not discrimination, for their inability to attain employment on an equal level with white men.

Kern went on to explain why women don’t earn as much as men:

Women don’t usually want to work as hard as a man because … women tend to think a little bit more about their family, wanting to be at home more time, wanting to have a little more leisure time.“

Ah. I see. Women earn less than men because they spend more time at home. You can observe the logic at work here. The actual issue is that, when at work, with the exact same background and qualifications, doing the exact same job, women are paid a lower wage than men. Obviously Kern doesn’t even understand this; she thinks that the complaint that women earn less than men is about how many women work and how many hours they put in, not about equality in wages.

All of these claims center around a basic theme: blame the victim. It’s not discrimination which is hurting them, it’s their own decisions.

All of this echoes what we heard in the Tennessee legislature when they passed a bill to teach creationism in public school science classes: a vast lack of understanding of the reality of issues accompanied by a desire to implement laws which follow a strongly conservative bias.

These bills being passed are not about reality, they are more about Colbert’s ”truthiness,“ about establishing and codifying conservative beliefs and tenets in law.

John Boehner, April 25, 2011, in an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

JONATHAN KARL: Now Paul Ryan’s budget, which you voted for, which all but a handful of your members voted for, it ends Medicare as we know it.

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: Now that’s Democrat talk.

JONATHAN KARL: Okay, what does it do then?

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: I wanted to call it somethin’ else, because that’s what it is. It transforms Medicare into a plan that’s very similar to the President’s own healthcare bill.

Hmm, OK. Let’s see, what did Boehner say about “the president’s own healthcare bill”? Allow me to introduce John Boehner, on November 3, 2010, talking about Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which he called a “monstrosity”:

Listen, I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country.

So, taking Boehner at his word, he wants to “transform Medicare into a plan that’s very similar” to a “monstrosity” that “will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country.”

Keep talkin’, John. Those Democratic campaign ads won’t write themselves, y’know.

Obama finally released his long-form birth certificate. So, now that the document Birthers have said would end this once and for all has been released, they will finally stop their stupid, bizarro conspiracy theories.

Yeah, right.

Maybe Obama sensed that the right wing was reaching a threshold and would soon leave the whole thing behind–but that this action would stoke the flames of interest and resuscitate what is, after all, a great boon for the Democrats.

The GOP is whining again:

The National Republican Congressional Committee struck back Tuesday at a Democratic ad that attacks House Republicans for voting for a GOP deficit-reduction plan, calling the ad “shameless scare tactics.”

Mind telling me what right-wing political tactics are not based on capitalizing on people’s fears in a shameless manner? I’m having trouble coming up with any, seriously. At least the Democrats’ arguments are based on fact, and not on “death panels,” communist fascist dictatorships, or Kenyan impostors.