According to Think Progress, the state of Tennessee is prepared to pass a law that ties welfare benefits to the academic achievement of recipients’ children. As the article states:

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.

The real purpose of these laws is to serve the only tactic which the Right uses: divide and conquer. It’s a means to attain and maintain political power, setting what’s left of the hard-pressed middle class against the poor. And make no mistake: although all this legislation is aimed at “welfare cheats”, the real targets are the American poor, made so by decades of de-industrialization which sent well-paying, blue collar jobs off to low-wage countries; jobs which have been replaced by far lower earning service sector occupations.



The Right has to keep juggling these distractions; if the remaining middle class and the poor ever joined together to aim their ire at the true cause of their problems, the Right and its backers among the 1% would be swept away in a tidal wave of anger. We are starting to see this in the indebted countries of Europe, where citizens protest daily against the austerity measures imposed from Brussels and Berlin. China is starting to experience labor unrest at a level which might threaten the one-party state. The Right in this country has to create a target at which the middle class can direct its anger, fighting over crumbs rather than realizing that there is an entire pie held out of view in very few hands.

The sheer lack of empathy built up by the Right and its enablers in the media since the days of Ronald Reagan has been one of its greatest successes. When homelessness exploded in the 1980?s, it wasn’t long before there were news reports of “compassion fatigue”, where a middle class beginning to feel the effects of conservative economics just couldn’t care about those falling through the gaping holes in the safety net. The steady drumbeat castigating the unworthy poor built up and reached a crescendo in the welfare “reforms” of the 1990?s. Its maintained that plateau, as the middle class shrinks and is made more resentful of the undeserving. This resentment, stoked by the Right, is one of the few things still allowing it to hold onto the power it has. If that ever dissipates, its end will come all the quicker.

Thanks to the Women's Liberation Movement that got underway more than forty years ago, the issue of protecting women against violent men became a national concern. The 1969 Redstockings Manifesto explained women's circumstances in the starkest of terms. In the excerpts that follow, it also offered a context for understanding why violence against women has proven to be so difficult to alleviate:

I. "After centuries of individual and preliminary political struggle, women are uniting to achieve their final liberation from male supremacy. Redstockings is dedicated to building this unity and winning our freedom."

II. "Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men's lives. Our humanity is denied. Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence.


"Because we live so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition. This creates the illusion that a woman's relationship with her man is a matter of interplay between two unique personalities, and can be worked out individually. In reality, every such relationship is a class relationship, and the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively."

III. "We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest. All power structures throughout history have been male-dominated and male-oriented. Men have controlled all political, economic and cultural institutions and backed up this control with physical force. They have used their power to keep women in an inferior position. All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women." [1]

Today, Patriarchy is Coming Back.

First Dog food art is made with fondant, jellybeans, and Peeps at the Let's Move!-themed White House Easter Egg Roll...
White House Executive Pastry Chef Bill Yosses and his team annually make an Easter-themed work of food art for the White House Easter Egg Roll. This year's 135th anniversary eggstravaganza, unveiled on Monday, was a giant egg-shaped "basket," featuring a sweet rendition of First Dog Bo and--a little ironically--carrots and the Let's Move! theme spelled out in fondant: "Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You!"

First Lady Michelle Obama joined Food Network star Anne Burrell as she demonstrated a healthy pasta recipe, and the Bo egg was visible behind them the entire time. (Above, Burrell flips broccoli rabe as Mrs. Obama watches)

Bo starred in a White House video ahead of the Roll, hunting for souvenir wood Easter eggs on the South Lawn; there was a special teal wood egg featuring his "paw print" available for sale from the National Park Foundation.

Though the Roll included a mini-farmers market booth where kids could select their own hand fruit in the Play With Your Food area at the bottom of the South Lawn, all child guests went home with a gift bag that included some candy too: A four-pack of marshmallow Peeps, and a bag of M&Ms. There was also a bag of Goldfish crackers, and a pack of Welch's gummy fruit, in addition to other swag, including a wooden souvenir egg.

As I mentioned the other day, I've been thinking a lot about what "justice" means. And I was particularly struck with this statement about it from Al Giordano.

There are times when “The Law” is dressed up in liberal language in a way that masquerades the bloodlust behind witch hunts and impulses to scapegoat individuals for crimes or taboos that, in a democracy, we’re all responsible for having enabled.

The photo above was taken at the Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center. It was created by Maya Lin (the same women who created the Vietnam Memorial Wall in D.C.) and features the biblical quote used by Martin Luther King, Jr. at the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and again in his I Have a Dream speech..."Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a might stream."

Its clear that Dr. King was a man committed to justice. But I can't think of a time when that included a call to punish those who committed heinous crimes against him or others involved in the movement. He certainly had ample opportunities to do so. There was no shortage of brutality in the beatings, lynchings, bombings and assassinations of his day that might have stirred a call to implement the "rule of law" for the perpetrators.

But take a look at the powerful words he spoke when four little black girls were killed at the bombing of the church in Birmingham, AL.


SNIP:

Its clear that Dr. King was a man committed to justice. But I can't think of a time when that included a call to punish those who committed heinous crimes against him or others involved in the movement. He certainly had ample opportunities to do so. There was no shortage of brutality in the beatings, lynchings, bombings and assassinations of his day that might have stirred a call to implement the "rule of law" for the perpetrators.

The one thing I noticed in my continental run-around this past week is just how mad liberals are at Obama. I remain as baffled by this anger as I am by Republican contempt for the guy.New York magazine has two superb essays that sum up my own feelings on both sides pretty perfectly – by Jon Chait and David Frum. Chait notes how systemic and eternal liberal disenchantment is, and how congenitally useless Democrats are in rallying round a leader, even one who has achieved so much in such a short time. Many Dems even now think Clinton was more successful in fighting the GOP in his first term than Obama has been. (Memo to the left: universal healthcare was achieved under Obama). But much of this is the usual Democratic limpness and whininess. If George Bush had taken out Osama bin Laden, wiped out al Qaeda's leadership and gathered a treasure trove of real intelligence by a daring raid, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now. If he'd done the equivalent on the right of universal healthcare, he'd be the second coming of Reagan. But Obama and liberals? If I hear one more gripe about single payer from someone in their fifties with a ponytail, I'll scream.

But the right is more unhinged and more dangerously full of denial. Since I was never structurally or financially or socially linked to the Washington right, I was immune to the withdrawal of jobs, money and access doled out to any dissenter in the Bush years. But every now and again, I get some kind of amazed look – "You're not going to back Obama again, are you?" – from someone in the conservative cocoon, and when I respond, "So far, you bet!", there is often a long pause and a genuine sadness on their faces. "What the hell happened to him?" you can hear them asking themselves.

Some of this is as head-scratching for me as it is for David:

Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

Did you get the impression from the GOP debates that Obama had lowered taxes? That he had not nationalized but saved the banks? That he had dispatched Osama and Qaddafi? That he had 60 percent support for a sane and succcessful foreign policy? That he was an exemplar of all those social values conservatives say they support: a model husband and father, a black man who has eschewed identity politics almost entirely, a president whose speeches are among the most intellectually Christian of any in modern times? This strange, bizarre hostility to him I put down to displaced anger at Bush, to cultural panic among the old, but also to a wider propaganda support system that is truly a sight to behold:

SNIP:

It was never my party, but it was one to which I could once accord regular agreement and respect. No more. I remain unrepentant in my support for this president, a man who has accomplished more in the face of a more hostile environment in his first three years than any president since Johnson. I wish more reasonable Dems and a few moderate Republicans will soon have the courage to say so.