Let's go out to the lake, Earl

October 12, 2011 By Fred Clark 180 Comments

Last night, Republicans used a procedural maneuver to block a vote in the United States Senate on that American Jobs Act. That bill would, among other things, provide $85 billion in aid to cash-strapped state and local governments.

It’s not entirely coincidental, then, that it was also last night that the City of Harrisburg, Pa., filed for bankruptcy.

This budget crunch isn’t unique to Pennsylvania’s state capital. In Highland Park, Mich., the majority of street lights have been removed as part of a deal to forgive the city’s $4 million in unpaid electric bills. And, as The Wall Street Journal reported last summer, several states and dozens of counties are converting asphalt roads back into gravel to save maintenance costs.

Last night, the Republican Party obstructed a vote on $85 billion in aid to state and local governments.

But while my state’s capital city is fiscally bankrupt, it could be worse. In Kansas’ capital city, the response to this state and municipal budget crunch is also morally bankrupt. To save police, court and jail costs, Topeka repealed the local law against domestic violence.

The Topeka City Council on Tuesday voted to repeal the city’s law against misdemeanor domestic battery, the latest in a budget battle that has freed about 30 abuse suspects from charges.

One of the offenders was even arrested and released twice since the brouhaha broke out Sept. 8.

It started when Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor announced that a 10 percent budget cut would force him to end his office’s prosecution of misdemeanor cases, almost half of which last year were domestic battery cases.

With that, Taylor stopped prosecuting the cases and left them to the city. But city officials balked at the cost.

Did I mention that last night Senate Republicans used a procedural ploy to prevent the Senate from voting on $85 billion in aid to state and local governments?

In explaining his opposition to aid for Pennsylvania and for cities like Harrisburg and Topeka, Sen. Pat Toomey said his goal was “to reduce burdensome regulations.”

Well, that worked in Topeka. Sen. Toomey and his Republican colleagues in the Senate have helped to end that city’s “burdensome regulation” against domestic violence. Thanks to Toomey and his party blocking billions in aid for local governments, wife-beaters in Topeka have been unleashed from the shackles of Big Government.

Heckuva job there, Senate Republicans.

The Dixie Chicks were way ahead of antigovernment Republicans when it comes to this idea. Years ago they laid out a free-market alternative to those burdensome, tax-and-spend, Big Government efforts to regulate domestic violence.

Just let the private sector handle it, they said, providing a glimpse of the future for Topeka and the rest of Pat Toomey’s ungoverned America:

YouTube Preview Image

Amanda Marcotte has more on Topeka’s “intensely dangerous” repeal. She also notes the “Goodbye Earl” angle to this story, highlighting the effectiveness of consistent enforcement of domestic violence laws:

The Violence Against Women Act — which emphasizes outreach to victims and swift consequences for abusers — has led to a 50 percent drop in non-fatal domestic assaults, and a 20 percent drop in domestic murders. … Interestingly, the drop in female-on-male murders was more dramatic, mostly because enforcing domestic violence laws gives victims the option to leave, and they don’t get so desperate that they shoot their abusers.

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  • http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com Ross

    I don;t know why everyone keeps getting locked in on fetal personhood. The *woman* is a person. That’s unequivocal, and makes fetal personhood UTTERLY IRRELEVANT. If the woman is a person, then it doesn’t matter if you can prove absolutely 100% conclusively that a fetus is a person: A PERSON DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO FORCE ANOTHER PERSON TO ACT AS A PIECE OF LIFE SUPPORT EQUIPMENT. 

    If fetuses are people, then abortion may well be an unaviodable tragedy, but you CAN NOT hold that one person has the right to exist INSIDE ANOTHER PERSON’S BODY, and legislate that the person on the outside’s health, liberty, and self-ownership can be taken legally from their control for the benefit of the person on the inside, and that the person on the outside can not force the person on the inside to vacate, unless you are saying that the person on the outside isn’t really a person at all, but some kind of sub-person with only a contingent right to life, liberty and self-determination. A sometimes-person. Person-lite

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    You must not read many Libertarians, then.  I’ve heard more than a few who seem to regard income tax as the moral equivalent of a Viking raid.

    I cannot say I have read too many of their blogs, no.  The closest I came was reading a few Heinlein books.  A character in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress argued against taxation, but never really said why he thought that was so, other than it was the forced removal of private assets.  But then again, he lived in a culture where people had to pay for their breathable air as a monthly fee, so how is taxation any different?  It is like paying rent and facilities.  If you do not like it, you can go live somewhere else.  Not that anywhere else will be much different.  

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    You must not read many Libertarians, then.  I’ve heard more than a few who seem to regard income tax as the moral equivalent of a Viking raid.

    I cannot say I have read too many of their blogs, no.  The closest I came was reading a few Heinlein books.  A character in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress argued against taxation, but never really said why he thought that was so, other than it was the forced removal of private assets.  But then again, he lived in a culture where people had to pay for their breathable air as a monthly fee, so how is taxation any different?  It is like paying rent and facilities.  If you do not like it, you can go live somewhere else.  Not that anywhere else will be much different.  

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    Every post they put up has the approximate value of whale dung sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

    Be fair.  Whale dung has some value.  

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    Every post they put up has the approximate value of whale dung sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

    Be fair.  Whale dung has some value.  

  • Beatrix

    You’re having a bad day, I can tell. 

    (Yeah, the Kill Bill thing’s a bit silly; I don’t even like the movies all that much.  Just a random decision to go with Black Mamba; and I actually think Beatrix is a pretty name, so when I commented occasionally at The Anchoress, also Patheos now, I went with that.  Um, Vehm isn’t your real name, is it?)

  • Anonymous

    And I still can’t work out why you think I’d lie about being Canadian.  What’s in it for me!?

    Republicans claim to believe that liberals hate America.  By impersonating a foreigner, especially from someplace like the supposedly-venerated Canada, a Republican might believe they gain credibility.  They’d be wrong due to the faulty premise, but that’s the logic.

    Personally, I don’t know.  You seem to have strong opinions of American politics, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you live here.  The U.S. certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on people who close their eyes to reality and loudly proclaim their version of the truth.

    Honestly, making citizens less beholden to the government behemoth, which is the central animating principle of modern Conservatism, seems rather the opposite of advocating serfdom (I assume you meant serfdom).

    Except this isn’t true at all.  Conservatives want the government to have more control over everyday life.  They want to dictate your private life from bedroom to marriage partner to even your religion (though they deign to allow you to choose your own flavor of Christianity).  The only ones they want to be less beholden to the government are either corporations or millionaires.  Tax plans like Cain’s 9-9-9 drastically increase the tax burden on the average American.  Despite the rhetoric of small government, their policy goals are the exact opposite.

  • Mr. Heartland

    Part of it is a simple refusal/inability to wrap their heads areound democracy. (I’m sure you’ve seen examples of rightous ‘Republic, not a democracy’ pendantry.)  They cannot grasp that the answer to the question of who makes the rules and who is made to obey them is ‘both’ to both.  Rather they can understand society only in terms of a strict division between who is wise enough to make the rules and brave enough to enforce them (Themselves) and those social children who must be made to obey and can only be trusted to do so through constant threat of punishment (The Other.)  Freedom is zero sum.  You only have the right to impose your will through adherence to mythical True Americanism or shut up and take your medicine if you deviate from it.  From this point of view the mere existense of any govenment power that applies to all is viewed as ‘socialism’, and taxation is the most obvious example of this.  To be subject to taxation is humiliating to them because they take it as a sign that authority considers them to be among the underclass that must be disciplined and kept in their proper place.  Read any anti-tax rant and you will always find the language of enfeeblement, emasculation, infantilization. 

    There’s a man in my family, back home in western Nebraska, who will always struttingly demand the execution of rapists, drug dealers, car thieves,… while at the same time denouncing the hellish tyranny of government regulations on his own personal hobbies; shooting, motercycle riding, smoking etc.  He got a twenty dollar parking ticket once, spent a full hour screaming profanities, called the county courthouse four or five times demanding that the clerk stay on the line and listen to him berate her.    

  • Anonymous

    Heinlein is a weird bird.  He has… not so much libertarian views later in his books as he has ‘rugged individualism’ and even then he went into some of the problems of it.  Not deeply, of course; I think it was more of a case of ‘Hey, this might happen, that might not be good– OH LOOK CRISIS!’  He made passing mention of a space station that charged for air in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and I got the impression that the protagonist accepted it reluctantly.  But Rugged Individualism doesn’t work too well when your life depends on (roughly) a metric ton of infrastructure per person.  And it doesn’t seem to really apply to colonizing Earth-like extrasolar worlds, but we really won’t know that for certain until someone builds a log cabin on Boondocks III.

    But Heinlein had a stroke at about the middle of his writing career, and his stories changed dramatically after that point.  (Time Enough For Love.  Need I say more?)

  • Anonymous

    Heinlein is a weird bird.  He has… not so much libertarian views later in his books as he has ‘rugged individualism’ and even then he went into some of the problems of it.  Not deeply, of course; I think it was more of a case of ‘Hey, this might happen, that might not be good– OH LOOK CRISIS!’  He made passing mention of a space station that charged for air in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and I got the impression that the protagonist accepted it reluctantly.  But Rugged Individualism doesn’t work too well when your life depends on (roughly) a metric ton of infrastructure per person.  And it doesn’t seem to really apply to colonizing Earth-like extrasolar worlds, but we really won’t know that for certain until someone builds a log cabin on Boondocks III.

    But Heinlein had a stroke at about the middle of his writing career, and his stories changed dramatically after that point.  (Time Enough For Love.  Need I say more?)

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    Rather they can understand society only in terms of a strict division between who is wise enough to make the rules and brave enough to enforce them (Themselves) and those social children who must be made to obey and can only be trusted to do so through constant threat of punishment (The Other.)  Freedom is zero sum.  You only have the right to impose your will through adherence to mythical True Americanism or shut up and take your medicine if you deviate from it.  From this point of view the mere existense of any govenment power that applies to all is viewed as ‘socialism’, and taxation is the most obvious example of this.  To be subject to taxation is humiliating to them because they take it as a sign that authority considers them to be among the underclass that must be disciplined and kept in their proper place.

    That might apply to a lot of cultural hegemons, I will agree.  Not necessarily to Libertarians though (assuming they are not just cherry-picking only the parts that benefit them from that philosophy.)  Of course, cherry-picking from philosophy and theology is a pretty common pastime among American voters.  I just wish more of them would cherry-pick what seems to make internally consistent sense, rather than just what confirms their own desires.  

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    Heinlein is a weird bird.  He has… not so much libertarian views later in his books as he has ‘rugged individualism’ and even then he went into some of the problems of it.

    I like Heinlein, and I have been known to quote him at times if I feel something he wrote was particularly resonant with me, but there are a lot of places that I disagree with his analysis as well.  

    Take for example another scene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  A very culturally conservative woman was proposing a measure to institute a bunch of blue laws, and she was booed down by the council she was making the proposal too.  The council members were eventually quieted down and convinced to hear her out.  After she finished her proposal, it was soundly defeated by vote.  The main character observed and made commentary to the reader that when people tend to propose laws limiting people’s freedom, it is always to limit the freedom of someone else, to keep them from doing something the proposer finds distasteful, rather than to limit themselves.  The implication of the vote was that a few wingnuts are not going to have a significant effect on the political process, and assuming a population composed of mostly rational people, we have no reason to try and shut them up or lock them out of the process.  

    Unfortunately, the politics in the U.S. of late has shown that a few wingnuts in positions of influence can have a drastic effect on the voting population, which in turn brings the entire democratic process to a halt.  Imagine that on a place like the moon, where, despite people living as “rugged individuals”, everyone is dependent on artifice to survive, and the government controls the only method of international trade, and well… 

  • Anonymous

    Rape jokes aren’t funny, douchewad. And what the Occupy Wall Street people are on about is the L curve. More’n half the money and nearly all the political power is at the side of the curve that approaches infinity. Nearly all the people are at the side of the curve that approaches zero.

    I’m trying to imagine a child of yours having the sense to take women’s studies courses and not having the sense to disown you first. It’s not working.

  • Anonymous

    Everyone stop replying the troll.  It only encourages her to fling more feces.  The best thing to do is completely ignore her, so you won’t be tempted to try to correct her idiocy.  It’s a good habit to just skip over any comment with her name, and any comment that is replying to her name.

    I’m generally supportive of attempts to argue with trolls, if only for the benefit of third parties who are reading.  But this one is futile and a waste of time, and she continues to dominate every thread she can because you give her what she wants – attention.  Everyone, stop feeding this one.  She’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

    Incidentally, does anyone know of a good killfile that works with Disqus?  It would make it that much easier to skip over her comments.

  • Anonymous

    Everyone stop replying the troll.  It only encourages her to fling more feces.  The best thing to do is completely ignore her, so you won’t be tempted to try to correct her idiocy.  It’s a good habit to just skip over any comment with her name, and any comment that is replying to her name.

    I’m generally supportive of attempts to argue with trolls, if only for the benefit of third parties who are reading.  But this one is futile and a waste of time, and she continues to dominate every thread she can because you give her what she wants – attention.  Everyone, stop feeding this one.  She’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

    Incidentally, does anyone know of a good killfile that works with Disqus?  It would make it that much easier to skip over her comments.

  • Madhabmatics

    Women’s Studies owns and while majoring in it should prob. be done only by people devoted to an academic career, taking it as an elective out of a choice of many electives is a good idea.

  • Mr. Heartland

    Not necessarily to Libertarians, or in truth anyone.  But usually so.  The media divide between social and economic conservatives is mostly imaginary.  It’s the same basic claim to aristocracy.  You can look and Ron Paul’s stance on abortion for an example.  Like I said it’s a basic strict division between who makes the rules and who obeys them.  You’re either a Father or a child, much as I hate to get Fruedian. 

  • Anonymous

    I watched Prohibition recently, and one of the things that came up was the fact that most people supported the 18th Amendment with the understanding that beer and/or wine would be left unbanned.  Which of course proves to show that you should never support anything legally binding, whether legislation or a contract, “with the understanding” of anything.

  • Antigone10

    Alright, this worked last time, so I’m going to do it again.  Every time Beatrix posts on this thread, I will donate 10 cents to Planned Parenthood.

  • Guest-again

    ‘And I still can’t work out why you think I’d lie about being Canadian.’
    Canadian-Limey, snake – remember, educated on two continents? But neither Canada nor the UK are worthy of your veneration, so you remain exclusively focussed on only discussing American issues, using American vocabulary, with almost exclusively American spelling and phrasing.

    As for that first sentence – the ‘West’ has been also the source of some of history’s foulest and most hateful racist ideologies, the latest outbreak arising from its sickening influence involving a blond, blue-eyed, self-described Christian child mass murderer. A mass murderer influenced by exactly the same sort of racist garbage you attempt to link to here, as has been all too well documented in that murderer’s own publication of the sources of his disgusting ideology and justification for child murder.

    Snakes have no choice about what they are – you, however, seem to delight in choosing venomous lies and vicious hatred as your path.

    Which is why no one here is interested about your need to spread or justify the sort of beliefs that have led one blond blue eyed Christian representative of the West to dress up as a police officer, so as to lure children closer before killing them. Your fantasy world is one that leads to destruction, snake.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Patrick-McGraw/100001988854074 Patrick McGraw

    You must not read many Libertarians, then.  I’ve heard more than a few
    who seem to regard income tax as the moral equivalent of a Viking raid.

    They seem especially fond of the phrase “at gunpoint” and use it to describe every government action from taxes to anti-fraud regulations. Yet none of them want to avoid all this “at gunpoint” government oppression by going to Somalia where there is no functional government. Possibly because then they actually would find themselves in a real “at gunpoint” situation.

    I’m reminded of the Heinlein short story “Coventry” where a man fed up with his government’s onerous laws ends up going to Coventry, an area isolated and left completely alone by the government for those who want to “opt out.” Full of romantic ideals he sells all he has and equips himself with all the equipment and knowledge he needs to be a fully self-sufficient individual in a land populated by those like-minded people too independent to suffer under the nanny state.

    About an hour past the gate he is robbed by a warband and has all his possessions taken.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Patrick-McGraw/100001988854074 Patrick McGraw

    I’ll give an anecdotal, personal reason why I oppose “fetal personhood” laws.

    A close relative of mine had a miscarriage, and lost the daughter she had very much wanted. It was a devastating event for someone who had already been through a great deal the past few years.

    “Fetal personhood” laws would have required that she be arrested and subject to criminal scrutiny for having gone through this tragedy.

  • Consumer Unit 5012

    If fetuses are people, then abortion may well be an unaviodable tragedy, but you CAN NOT hold that one person has the right to exist INSIDE ANOTHER PERSON’S BODY, and legislate that the person on the outside’s health, liberty, and self-ownership can be taken legally from their control for the benefit of the person on the inside, and that the person on the outside can not force the person on the inside to vacate, unless you are saying that the person on the outside isn’t really a person at all, but some kind of sub-person with only a contingent right to life, liberty and self-determination. A sometimes-person. Person-lite

    Flashbacks to a facetious argument I made once for “Libertarian Abortion”:  Charge the fetus rent.  When it fails to pay up, the mother now has a MORAL RIGHT to use deadly force to evict the trespasser.  9_9

  • Consumer Unit 5012

     Which of course proves to show that you should never support anything legally binding, whether legislation or a contract, “with the understanding” of anything.

    Good Goddess, yes.  This is one thing that the “Police State, YAY!” idiots cheering Bush and company never seemed to understand – it doesn’t matter HOW well-intentioned a law is, sooner or later, someone who ISN’T well-intentioned will get to use it.

    I find it hilarious (and sad) how fast the Party of Rugged Individualism turned into out to be a bunch of thumb-sucking terrified infants after 9/11.

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    I find it hilarious (and sad) how fast the Party of Rugged Individualism turned into out to be a bunch of thumb-sucking terrified infants after 9/11.

    I saw a lot of contemptible cowardice among many voters after 9/11 and it drove me to disgust.  I felt like a commissar, wanting to execute the cowards for dereliction of duty to their country.  They have an obligation to soldier on, to go about their lives as normal, and to act like it was no big deal.  That is the only way to achieve victory after such an attack.  Anything less is intolerable weakness.

    Hell, even today I still feel some of that.  Every time I read about some jackass community voting to put some kind of special local regulations in against muslims, I just want to find the people making those votes and break a few of their limbs. 

  • Helena

    That’s cute how the same models in the video who pretend they’re singing also prtend they’re playing instruments.

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    You must not read many Libertarians, then.  I’ve heard more than a few who seem to regard income tax as the moral equivalent of a Viking raid.

    You know, it is kind of funny.  Regarding a lot of those financing companies that received bailouts, though I supported the bailout as a necessary step to prevent total economic meltdown, I felt that the bailout money should have come with some pretty strict stipulations.  Part of this was regulation to prevent such problems in the future, and part of it was limiting what those institutions were allowed to spend that money on.  This included not allowing executives to take huge portions of it as bonuses, even if that was otherwise a contractual obligation.  As far as I am concerned, their contracts were void the moment they became insolvent.  Add to that, I think that a lot of those who individually profited from the downfall should have had their liquid assets repossessed by the government to partially offset the bailout.  And you know what?  I was okay with calling that “looting the rich”.  Hell, I would go so far as to call it “pillaging”.  If they are going to rip money out of our hands, we are justified in taking it back.  

    This gives me a fabulous idea.  When we protest to call for wealth redistribution to mitigate financial disparity, we should do so dressed as norse raiders.  Yes, we are coming to burn and pillage, and you should fear us.  

  • Sgt. Pepper’s Bleeding Heart

    If fetuses are people, then abortion may well be an unaviodable tragedy

    It’s worth pointing out to the original poster, who I read as believing a feeling about abortion may keep him/her from ever being “a progressive”, that this is what many of us do think. That abortion is a tragedy which is in many cases unavoidable. Or one of a set of options, all of which are tragic. That being the case, we aren’t going to be in favour of anything that makes things worse.

  • Anonymous

    I for one am well aware of this attitude, but I still don’t really understand it due to the fact that it requires some… odd beliefs, like the notion that our modern, industrialized, relatively democratic society somehow materialized out of the ether, that redistribution is an aberration rather than a necessary component of every functioning society in existence in some form or another, and that Homo economicus is a valid model of sociology.

  • Anonymous
    in the event the woman cannot prove that there was “no human involvement whatsoever in the causation” of her miscarriage.

    Does the presumption of innocence have no legal basis in the US?

    Presumably this should be read as ‘in the event the prosecution can prove there was some form of human involvement in the causation…

    You remind me of nobody.  You have no presence.  You’re sort of… invisible.

    Like some kind of neutrino!

    That said, I can’t wrap my brain around the backlash against the personhood of a fetus. I mean, I absolutely understand the spirit of it – women are people and their bodies cannot and should not be regulated, and the idea that miscarriages could be called manslaughter – but what about the kidney bean-sized fellows taking up residence inside these bodies? (That sounds like Alien, doesn’t it? Whoops.) They lack experiences and memories, yes, but even if they’re not people YET, isn’t it enough that fetuses are on their way to becoming people eventually?

    Eventually.  Not now.

    Modern Western society is the best society that has ever existed in which to be a woman.  (It’s the best society that’s ever existed period.)  It is not legal to beat women (or anyone) in any civilized country.  By and large, Western culture does not look kindly or with indifference on domestic violence.  This is not the case in much of the world.

    Premise A and B: I’m not familiar with all societies that have existed ever, but I’m actually inclined in a direction of agreement.  However, ‘best’ does not imply perfect.

    Such as?  Honestly, making citizens less beholden to the government behemoth, which is the central animating principle of modern Conservatism, seems rather the opposite of advocating serfdom (I assume you meant serfdom).

    He meant ‘fiefdom’ – a domain ruled by a local landowning aristocrat.
    You know what feudal societies don’t have?  Strong central governments.  You know what ‘modern western civilization’ universally exhibits?  Strong central governments.  This is because a modern civilization (of *any* stripe, really) requires a lot of stuff to be done that doesn’t offer instant profit.

    As for that first sentence – the ‘West’ has been also the source of some of history’s foulest and most hateful racist ideologies, the latest outbreak arising from its sickening influence involving a blond, blue-eyed, self-described Christian child mass murderer. A mass murderer influenced by exactly the same sort of racist garbage you attempt to link to here, as has been all too well documented in that murderer’s own publication of the sources of his disgusting ideology and justification for child murder.

    Well… in large part, the ‘West’ has merely been the faction most able to act upon their foul and hateful racist ideologies.  ‘Privilidge’ is what gives prejudice its teeth, but tribalism is not unique to white people.

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