SC Prog Blog

Conventional wisdom says that the American public is fundamentally conservative – hostile to government, in favor of unregulated markets, at peace with inequality, wanting a foreign policy based on the projection of military power, and traditional in its social values.

But as a June report by Media Matters demonstrates, that picture is fundamentally false. Media perceptions and past Republican electoral successes notwithstanding, Americans are progressive across a wide range of controversial issues, and they’re growing more progressive all the time.

This report gathers together years of public opinion data from unimpeachably nonpartisan sources to show that on issue after issue, the majority of Americans hold progressive positions. And this is true not only of specific policy proposals, but of the fundamental perspectives and approaches that Americans bring to bear on issues.

Nor is the progressive majority merely a product of the current political moment. On a broad array of issues, particularly social issues, American opinion has grown more and more progressive over the past few decades. In contrast, it is difficult to find an issue on which the public has grown steadily more conservative over the last 10, 20, or 30 years.

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The Ticking Clock on Pay Discrimination
By Barbara Arnwine

Look around your office. Do you know what your co-workers are really being paid? Probably not. A recent survey found that only 10 percent of companies have pay openness policies. And if you were paid less by your employer simply because you are female how long do you think it would take to find out? Probably not until you’ve been working there a long time, maybe years.

That is exactly what happened to Lilly Ledbetter. Her employer, Goodyear, kept compensation information confidential and it wasn’t until decades after the fact she found out that she was being paid less. By the time of her retirement, she was paid $3,727 monthly, while the lowest paid male doing the same job was paid $4,286. Taking her employer to court, a jury found that she received raises less frequently than her male colleagues because of her gender.

The jury awarded her damages for this intentional discrimination, but on appeal to the Supreme Court earlier this year, a majority tossed out the award because Ms. Ledbetter failed to file her claim within 180 days of her employer’s discriminatory decisions – decisions she didn’t have reason to suspect until long after they were made.

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From the Aug. 22 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: Here’s [caller] in Lake Orion, Michigan. Thank you for calling. Great to have you on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s great to talk to you. I talked to you once before. I’ve been listening to you for a couple of years now, and I think I’m getting brighter, but there’s a lot to be learned. I know I’m no expert in foreign affairs, but what really confuses me about the liberals is the hypocrisy when they talk about how we have no reason to be in Iraq and helping those people, but yet everybody wants us to go to Darfur. I mean, aren’t we going to end up in a quagmire there? I mean, isn’t it — I don’t understand. Can you enlighten me on this?

LIMBAUGH: Yeah. This is — you’re not going to believe this, but it’s very simple. And the sooner you believe it, and the sooner you let this truth permeate the boundaries you have that tell you this is just simply not possible, the better you will understand Democrats in everything. You are right. They want to get us out of Iraq, but they can’t wait to get us into Darfur.

CALLER: Right.

LIMBAUGH: There are two reasons. What color is the skin of the people in Darfur?

LIMBAUGH: Right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them. You stand behind Nelson Mandela — who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to Ethiopia. You do the same thing.

CALLER: It’s just — I can’t believe it’s really that simple.

LIMBAUGH: Well, see, I knew you couldn’t believe it. But here’s the — here’s one that’s even going to be harder to believe and it is even more truthful. Could you tell me what vital national interest, [caller], is at stake in Darfur?

CALLER: Um, I don’t know.

LIMBAUGH: Nothing. Zilch, zero, nada. Darfur is not attacking us. Darfur has not said they want to attack us. So they will — same thing — Clinton sent the U.S. military off to Bosnia. No U.S. national interest at stake. The liberals will use the military as a “meals on wheels” program. They’ll send them out to help with tsunami victims. But you put the military — you put the military in a position of defending U.S. national interest, and that’s when Democrats and the liberals oppose it. And –

CALLER: Right. Terrorists have attacked us and our oil supply comes from, you know, Iraq and Iran and the Middle East, and yet that’s not worth defending.

LIMBAUGH: Right. That’s exactly right. You’ve got it. You’ve got it. Now you just have to believe your own instincts from here on out.

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Get your Rush voodoo doll here.

The propaganda war is full on.

Kill your TV now, before it’s too late.

Today Texas executed its 400th prisoner since the US reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Johnny Ray Conner, 32, was killed by lethal injection.

“What is happening to me is unjust and the system is broken,” he said in his final statement.

In 2005, a judge overturned Conner’s death sentence and ordered a retrial, claiming his lawyers had been ineffective. In January, a federal appeals court reversed that decision.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the US has executed more than 1,090 prisoners since 1976. A third have been carried out in Texas.

Are we to believe the population there is that much more evil? (Current president notwithstanding, this is not a trick question.)

Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist.
Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant.
Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant.
Omar Mora is a sergeant.
Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant.
Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant.
Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.

this is their NYT OPED

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

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