EricByler's blog

by Eric Byler

Thank you Andrew Sullivan for your radio interview on NPR's All things Considered today.  Everyone in American needs to hear this beautiful, heartfelt, and nuanced response to President Obama's statement calling for marriage equality. 

The interview lasts only a few minutes, and the moment that grabbed me emotionally is in the first few seconds.  So please, LISTEN TO THIS!!

I dare not quote from it because I want the words to sneak up on you as they did for me.  Mr. Sullivan's voice helped crystallize the issue for me (even though I've been outspoken on equal rights for the gay community since I was in high school).

Let's not look to televangelists, politicians, or high-priced media campaigns in order to share in the cultural shift that we are making as a nation toward equality for all Americans.  Let's not rely on our President either, even though his words today are welcome.  Let's look into our hearts, our very own human hearts, and ask ourselves how we feel when we hear a fellow American, and a fellow human being express himself this way.  Andrew Sullivan!  You nailed it.

Below is the blog Sullivan wrote on this historic day, "Obama Lets Go of Fear."

I do not know how orchestrated this was; and I do not know how calculated it is. What I know is that, absorbing the news, I was uncharacteristically at a loss for words for a while, didn't know what to write, and, like many Dish readers, there are tears in my eyes.

So let me simply say: I think of all the gay kids out there who now know they have their president on their side. I think of Maurice Sendak, who just died, whose decades-long relationship was never given the respect it deserved. I think of the centuries and decades in which gay people found it impossible to believe that marriage and inclusion in their own families was possible for them, so crushed were they by the weight of social and religious pressure. I think of all those in the plague years shut out of hospital rooms, thrown out of apartments, written out of wills, treated like human garbage because they loved another human being. I think of Frank Kameny. I think of the gay parents who now feel their president is behind their sacrifices and their love for their children.

The interview changes no laws; it has no tangible effect. But it reaffirms for me the integrity of this man we are immensely lucky to have in the White House. Obama's journey on this has been like that of many other Americans, when faced with the actual reality of gay lives and gay relationships. Yes, there was politics in a lot of it. But not all of it. I was in the room long before the 2008 primaries when Obama spoke to the mother of a gay son about marriage equality. He said he was for equality, but not marriage. Five years later, he sees - as we all see - that you cannot have one without the other. But even then, you knew he saw that woman's son as his equal as a citizen. It was a moment - way off the record at the time - that clinched my support for him.

Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear. He is clearly prepared to let the political chips fall as they may. That's why we elected him. That's the change we believed in. The contrast with a candidate who wants to abolish all rights for gay couples by amending the federal constitution, and who has donated to organizations that seek to "cure" gays, who bowed to pressure from bigots who demanded the head of a spokesman on foreign policy solely because he was gay: how much starker can it get?

My view politically is that this will help Obama. He will be looking to the future generations as his opponent panders to the past. The clearer the choice this year the likelier his victory. And after the darkness of last night, this feels like a widening dawn.

Please join our on-going national conversation at Coffee Party Equality.

by Eric Byler

The Justice Department has made its case against Arizona’s SB 1070.  Few Americans know that the Bush Justice Department confronted a nearly identical Law in 2007, and, they did a smarter job of handling it.

by Eric Byler

Justice Sonia Sotomayor is right.  A challenge by the Department of Justice to Arizona’s ALEC-funded anti-immigration law without addressing the issue of racial profiling makes no sense at all.

However, it should not have come as a surprise to her.  The lawsuit that the Justice Department filed in 2010 was not based on the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution (our right as Americans to equal protection under the law regardless of race, gender, creed or sexual orientation).  It was based on the Supremacy clause of the Constitution, which clarifies that our 50 states are part of a single country, and that the federal government has sole jurisdiction in matters such as foreign relations and immigration.  

I shot the video below in Phoenix, AZ on May 30, 2010, a month before SB 1070 was blocked by a federal judge. The speaker, who later joined the Justice Department, makes a stronger argument here than the Solicitor General apparently did yesterday on both the argument the Justice Department chose, and, the one they chose to avoid.

But why?  Why did they choose to avoid the equal protection (racial profiling) argument?  I think it was a political calculation, but more on this in a moment.

I wonder if Justice Sotomayor knows that the Justice Department under President G. W. Bush was faced with the same conundrum in 2007 and 2008, when Prince William County, VA passed a precursor to the Arizona/Alabama law (drafted and pushed by the same anti-immigrant lobbying firm).  I wonder if she knows that the Bush Justice Department did a better job of handling it (albeit with less pressure from a hyper-partisan One Percent Media).

The Virginia law, which went into effect on March 6, 2008 in one of the nation's largest and most wealthy counties, was the first in the nation to require (not allow, require) police officers to detain people and check their immigration status based on a subjective standard of suspicion.  The Bush Justice Department didn’t like this one bit.  But instead of filing a lawsuit based on the supremacy clause, they simply informed the county government that they planned to join an inevitable lawsuit concerning racial profiling.  They said, in effect,

“Go ahead and implement this law and let’s see what happens.  As soon a citizen or person who is legally present in the United States is racially profiled by one of your officers trying to abide by this law, the Justice Department will join the law suit, you will lose, and here's what else will happen....”

The threat of such an embarrassing law suit — plus the millions of dollars in legal fees that would go with it — was one of the driving factors in the Republican-dominated Board of Supervisors’ decision to repeal the "probable cause" mandate only eight weeks after its implementation.  The other factors were the alarmingly negative impact the law was having on:

• Local economy — highest foreclosure rate in the region by a factor of five, businesses began closing down as consumers, workers, and business owners left the county
• Public safety — crime went up for the first time in many years as trust in the police fell to an all time low
• Fiscal solvency — implementation of the law was expected to cost more than $26 million, which looked especially bad to voters when coupled with a 25% tax increase, which would have been 33% had they decided to continue implementing this mandate.  

According to "The 700 Club" news report which I happened to watch last night, it is assured that the Supreme Court will uphold SB 1070, at least based on the case filed this time around.  In the future, the Obama Justice Department may end up making good on the threat that the Bush Justice Department used to put an end to the law's precursor.  Or, perhaps it will be the People, not the Courts, who repeal SB 1070 after it has gone into effect and has had the same tragic, but predictable impact that it had in Prince William County and in Alabama.  In Mesa, Arizona a trans-partisan coalition recalled and replaced the corrupt, anti-immigrant president of the Arizona State Senate, Russell Pearce, in large part because of his obsession with immigration, and in part because of his ties to the private prison industry and the shadowy corporate lobbying syndicate ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council).

[MORE]

In 2011, how much did you pay for the U.S. postal service, nuclear weapons
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?

by Mattea Kramer, National Priorities Project

Northampton, MA -- Ahead of the April 17 IRS filing deadline, National Priorities Project (NPP) announces the release of Tax Day 2012 with the numbers on how federal income taxes were spent in fiscal 2011 -- down the penny.

Twenty-seven cents of every federal income tax dollar went to the military; 21.4 cents went to Medicare and other health programs; 14.5 cents paid for interest on the federal debt; and 12.2 cents funded Social Security and other labor programs. See the full breakdown here.

And for the first time, National Priorities Project will provide a Tax Receipt. Individuals can enter the amount of federal income taxes they paid in 2011, and find out exactly how much money they contributed to space flight research, disaster relief, food stamps, and more. NPP found, for example, an individual earning $50,000 and paying approximately $6,000 in federal income taxes in 2011 contributed 64 cents toward high speed rail and $21.93 to rehabilitate and train veterans.

"Individuals are our nation's major bill payers, responsible for 86 percent of all federal revenue in fiscal 2011," notes NPP senior research analyst Mattea Kramer. "That includes our income taxes, as well as payroll taxes, estate and gift taxes, and excise taxes on goods like gasoline."

MORE on taxes and (God forbid) facts from National Priorities Project.

by Eric Byler

Remember when Glenn Beck was scary? Remember when he had some credibility? Why are America's right wing bullies having so little impact in 2012?  Please listen to Egberto Willies' latest Coffee Party Radio show in which he interviews Michael Charney, award-winning author of the book Chasing Glenn Beck. 

Michael is a New Hampshire Republican who started an on-line social media experiment on Twitter to counter Glenn Beck about a year ago, had some encouraging success, and learned a lot about America along the way.  Michael explains in his book the diagnosis and the cure for what he calls "Elect-ile Dysfunction."  Michael was recently a guest on Don Manning's "Speaking of America" tonight and on Egberto Willies' show Politics Done Right.

For the sake of argument, let's say that Glenn Beck maintains the same audience he had when he had the full support of One Percent Media and Fox "News." Let's say 2 million people. The United States population is 330 million. By posting on this page, you are a voice in an on-line network called the Coffee Party that is just a fraction of the the 328 million Americans who prefer not to consume hate-based propaganda products.

Beck and others in One Percent Media have created illusions and created narratives using their audience as characters. They've created political movements using their audience as activists. At times, these tactics have been successful. But not so much of late. Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage are still starring in very expense, wide-reaching, and hateful soap operas, but somehow they are failing to impact the national narrative the way they did in 2009 and 2010.

Something is happening among the silent majority — the 328 million of which the Coffee Party is representative. We are not as intimidated. We are not as alienated. We are more engaged. We are more involved. And we are more informed. What brought about this change?

And, assuming we all prefer an America and a democratic process that is fact-based rather than fear-based, what can we do to keep it going?

In the second half of the show, Egberto talks about Coffee Party's approach, and I chime in to introduce some of our Social Media platforms, including Coffee Party News, and a new web page called Coffee Party Conservatives — to which Mr. Charney has been invited to contribute.

Toward the end of the show I make the argument that money does NOT buy votes in America; money buys media assets such as TV commercials, TV shows, TV networks, and radio networks, all of which are cost-prohibitive for 99.9 percent of our citizenry.  Congress is afraid of those who have money, not because they fear being voted out of office by .1 percent of the population, but because they fear being advertised out of office by them.  Why, because of the expensive forms of media they can buy. This weapon was all the more scary when One Percent Media was the only kind of media that could reach a whole bunch of people all at once. But with the advent of social media, We the People can do something to change the relationship between money and political outcome. We need to achieve a cultural shift where the vast majority of the American people feels a sense of civic duty to, not only consume political content, but also create and share political content.  The new tools at our disposal, and this new shift in the way that information flows through our communities — both of which have already begun to have tremendous impact in the U.S. and abroad — are the keys to a better future.  During the show, I submit to Mr. Charney, that these two changes can potentially restore the Republican party's dignity, sanity, and accountability.  And, of course I believe they will help us do so for our nation as a whole. 

The problem is not that the majority of Republicans are fact-free extremists; the problem is that a considerable portion of their primary-voting electorate consumes One Percent Media products such as Glenn Beck's TV and radio shows. Because they are expensive to produce and disseminate, the One Percent controls the content of these programs.  That is how they are able to bend and bully the Republican party: One Percent Media content impacts GOP primary voters to the degree that what is true no longer matters — it's what One Percent Media can make certain people believe that drives the GOP agenda.

It doesn't have to be that way. Moderate Republicans, independents, and principled conservatives can break this ugly cycle by using social media to, not only counter the One Percent Media's self-serving narrative, but also to reveal the truth: that most conservatives are neither ideologues nor extremists.  In a fair fight, We the People will prove as much.  That's why social media is so important.  Over time, it will even the scales so that money is not the deciding factor. Republicans like Michael Charney, Michael Stafford, Olympia Snowe, D.R. Tucker, David Frum, and Megan McCain will prove more convincing than people like Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh and Eric Cantor — people who, as Charney convincingly argues, have no right to call themselves Republicans, and only do so because their extremist, corporatist agenda could not win out in a free marketplace of ideas.  Their parasitic relationship with the GOP gives them credibility and access they would not otherwise have.

Victory is possible for principled conservatives, what Mr. Charney would call the real Republicans.  But they can't wait forever, because every day, another principled conservative leaves the Republican party in disgust, and abdicates a the stage and the microphone to the One Percent, and One Percent Media consumers who push the GOP farther and father to the right. [MORE]