Rand Paul Has a Little Problem w/ the Civil Rights Act

[Nordic]

And 17Breezes sprays a bucket of shit over yet another thread.

Thanks, pal.

[Wombaticus Rex]

It's a reliable indicator that reality is working, yes. I'm not saying it's the best but it's the one I go by.

Hey, is that a surly reply, or was your humanity just not so happy to see my post?

My point was that you were perpetuating an erroneous default assumption about the natural condition of, so to speak, mankind.

But I didn't mean anything unfriendly by calling it to your attention, and apologize if I inadvertently offended you.

Shit, I thought I was playing along. No hard feelings here.

[compared2what?]

You know, to me, anyway, the really notable upshot of this whole hullabaloo is that it shows just how repugnant Ron Paul's race politics are. And presumably always would have appeared to be had they not been obscured by Ron Paul's considerable gamesmanship at the straight-up self-promotional part of political campaigning.

Because his position on the Civil Right's Act is identical to Rand's in every way except that it doesn't generate the same amount of outrage..

See, for example, here and here.

The second of those links also being an example of his skill at insincerely finessing the issue when on the spot. Because the remarks Tim Russert is asking him to defend were very explicitly about the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Which didn't encroach on the private-property-sanctity card he successfully plays in response in any way, shape or form, as it happens.

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 did, it should be said. Though mostly nominally, since sellers and renters almost always have enough latitude in rejecting applicants to be able to do it on non-race-related grounds. And if that's what he'd been talking about, he would have had a leg to stand on in every sense -- historically, constitutionally, and just-plain-fairness-to-all-ally, too.

I mean, there are even perfectly reasonable die-hard civil-rights supporters who'd agree with him that there's no very good reason why equality under the law should require someone who's renting the apartment on the second floor to people he or she doesn't want to live in the same house as. And I'd be one of them, actually. It's just not really an equal-rights issue, per se, imo.

But that's a moot point, anyway, for present purposes. Except, as noted, as background to an example of his very sophisticated tap-dancing skills as a politician. Because it was what he said while shitting all over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that he was being asked to justify.

Not that any of the above will make a whit of difference to anyone, probably. I'm just saying it because hope springs eternal.

[Wombaticus Rex]

^^Made a difference to me, I was unaware of that distinction...much appreciated.

[seemslikeadream]

The shit doesn't fall far from the bat

[American Dream]

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/201 ... ights-act/

Why Libertarians (and Rand Paul) are wrong about The Civil Rights Act
Posted By Race-Talk On May 27, 2010

By Steve Menendian


Following his tea-party insurgent Senate primary victory over the establishment Republican candidate in Kentucky, Rand Paul created waves when Rachel Maddow forced him, uncomfortably, to admit his opposition to parts of the Civil Rights Act. To many in the civil rights community, and to the political center, this comes as a shock.

It shouldn’t be.

For years, libertarians opposed government interference with private business, whether that means opposition to environmental regulation, labor laws, or anti-discrimination laws. The son of libertarian presidential candidate, Ron Paul, it’s not surprising that Rand Paul also believes those things. Rand Paul has made it clear that he’s not in favor of a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that he supports the vast majority of it. What’s the problem then? He specifically opposes the provisions that prohibit discrimination in what are known as ‘public accommodations,’ which are really private businesses such as hotels, movie theaters, or lunch counters.

His view is that, while private racial discrimination is anathema and despicable, it’s not something that the government should regulate. His argument, a libertarian argument, is that regulating private discrimination goes beyond the sphere of government authority. In addition, he argues, private discrimination is better regulated by market forces. In his view, and in the view of many libertarians, the private market would regulate and weed out businesses that discriminate, since business with what economists call a ‘taste for discrimination’ would lose patrons.

They are wrong.

They are wrong, first and foremost, because they miss the point. Discrimination isn’t about economic efficiency; it’s about morality, fairness, and a basic conception of equality; it’s about justice.

There is a broad literature in economics about the efficiency of slavery, and whether, in time, the institution of slavery would have withered and died, as it did in many northern states. This literature, while fascinating, is beside the point. The abolition of slavery was a moral imperative, not an economic one. The abolitionist movement emphasized the contradiction between the values of the young nation and the institution of slavery, a contradiction which the founding fathers struggled with.

Similarly, the prohibition of private discrimination in ‘public accommodations’ is a moral issue, as are a host of regulations we impose on business. For example, we prohibit businesses from exploiting child labor based on a moral judgment which says that it is wrong. At the turn of the 20th Century, growing opposition to child labor in the North caused many factories to move to the South, until national child labor laws were passed.

Rand Paul’s viewpoint, that private discrimination on the basis of race should not be illegal, would seem to suggest that he opposes the 1968 Civil Rights Act (aka the Fair Housing Act) in its entirety, since, unlike the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act targeted private individuals, not states. And, his position would also seem to permit discrimination not just on the basis of race, but on the basis of sex, religion, familial status, and disability. Someone should ask him if he would repeal the Fair Housing Act, since that is the logical consequence of his position. Then, he wouldn’t be able to hide behind state-targeted provisions.

But there are also other reasons which make it wrong. Rand Paul claims that “intent of the legislation… was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.” He’s wrong. The Civil Rights Act was not simply targeted at state sponsored behavior. After all, the Jim Crow laws and the public segregation and discrimination embodied in them were a manifestation of the values of the society, and the individuals within it.

In the South, segregation and Jim Crow were an expression of the values of the society, of the extant social norms and mores. Those values were also present in the north, except that segregation was more a matter of practice and custom than legislation. The Civil Rights Act targeted those laws, without question, but it also targeted the practices, values, norms, and prejudices from which those institutional forms of discrimination were an expression. It targeted the North, not simply the South. Rand Paul and other libertarians are attempting to rewrite history by suggesting that the Civil Rights Acts were merely targeting the institutionalized expression of these values. The Fair Housing Act (aka Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act), which targeted private housing discrimination, belies this point.

But even more deeply, the private/public distinction at the heart of the libertarian argument is flawed. As Justice Kennedy put it in his concurrence in Parents Involved: “The distinction between government and private action, furthermore, can be amorphous both as a historical matter and as a matter of present-day finding of fact. Laws arise from a culture and vice versa. Neither can assign to the other all responsibility for persisting injustices” (emphasis added).

He’s absolutely right.

In fact, the relationship between individual racist attitudes and law is at the heart of Chief Justice Taney infamous Dred Scot opinion. Chief Justice Taney held that persons of African descent were not – and could never be – citizens of the United States because white folks, not simply white governments, regarded them as inferior. It was the way in which white people in their private pursuits regarded black folk, not simply how states and white governments regarded them that was decisive:

“[Persons of African descent] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.”

Because blacks were regarded as inferior, both in ‘morals as well as in politics,’ Chief Justice Taney reasoned that they could not possibly have been part of the political community that formed the nation, and therefore could not be full and equal citizens of that nation. It was the prejudices of white people, not the discrimination and prejudices of the states, that ultimately led the Chief Justice to inscribe a race line into the heart of American citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment, the Reconstruction Amendment that underpins the Civil Rights Acts, was passed specifically for the purpose of overturning Chief Justice Taney’s legal holding. It did precisely that, first and foremost, by extending the status of national citizenship to all persons born or naturalized here, not simply white persons. And it was passed over the objection of President Johnson, who vetoed the precursor Civil Rights Act of 1866 precisely because he believed it went too far, reaching beyond state action and into private conduct, and was therefore unconstitutional. In fact, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to override such objections, and put them to rest forever.

The distinction that Rand Paul is making between private and public discrimination, between state sponsored segregation and Jim Crow and private discrimination, is a false one. Not only are laws a product of private values, but laws also drive and influence private attitudes. A history of race in North America makes clear that racial attitudes and racial prejudices were, in large measure, a product of colonial laws, such as colonial anti-miscegenation statutes, which accelerated the understanding of racial difference. In fact, colonial elites (the colonies were not democracies) passed the first anti-miscegenation law in 1662, and did so specifically to keep the races apart as a way of color-coding labor, a process instrumental to the development and promotion of racial prejudice that would accompany and come to justify full blown racial slavery. As Steve Martinot points out, if there had been general antipathy to mixed marriages, its occurrence would have been minimal or required no law to prevent. As a result, these colonial statutes, and others serving similar ends, were a precondition to the full development of a racial worldview, and the racial prejudice that it engendered.

Private attitudes and private market decisions are often a product of or influenced by state action, and state action is often a product of or influenced by private attitudes and private conduct. Libertarians elide this reality. Yet, no one can deny that the market demand for automobiles is preconditioned by the state created network of highways and roads that make automobile travel both convenient and possible. The private market and state action are not as neatly divisible as libertarians assert, and this is no less true in the race context, where state action and private attitudes and market behavior are deeply intertwined.

The Civil Rights Acts and the Reconstruction Amendments whose values they carry were targeted at racial discrimination in its entirety, both its expression in law, but also at the social norms and private customs that those laws embodied. The Radical Republicans – not Rand Paul and his fellow tea partiers – but the Reconstruction era Republicans, sought not just to free slaves and make citizens of them, but to remake society and to purge our nation from the racial prejudice that was used to justify racial slavery and that survived its aftermath. After all, if Chief Justice Taney denied black’s citizenship because of social relations and private attitudes, then reversing that decision, and granting full citizenship to blacks, not just as a legal technicality, but as a matter of social reality, required that those amendments reach into the sphere of private conduct. The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s were an attempt to see that promise fulfilled.

The Civil Rights Acts were targeted at racial discrimination broadly, both at the racist attitudes and private conduct that continues to negatively affect so many in our society, and at the legislation that embodied those racist attitudes. What Rand Paul sees as government overreach and interference in private markets is nothing less than a moral imperative to ensure a fair and just society, to guarantee that no one is denied a job, a promotion or other opportunities to succeed in life because of their race, sex, religion, familial status, or disability. Hiding behind the claim that the purpose of the Civil Rights Act was simply an attempt to redress institutionalized discrimination both misses the point and is entirely wrong. If someone asks Rand Paul specifically about the Fair Housing Act, which targets private housing discrimination, he won’t be able to hide for very long.

###

Stephen Menendian is the senior legal research associate at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University. Stephen directs and supervises the Institute’s legal advocacy, analysis and research, and manages many of the Institute’s most important projects. His principal areas of advocacy and scholarship include education, civil rights and human rights, Constitutional law, the racialization of opportunity structures, talking about race, systems thinking and implicit bias.



URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/201 ... ights-act/

[seemslikeadream]

Hitler finds out about Rand Paul's appearance on Rachel Maddow

[compared2what?]

Rand Paul also has a little problem with a non-profit that does nothing, apparently.

Highlights from the post at link:

In 1999, Paul created a new non-profit organization, the National Board of Ophthalmology (NBO), headquartered at his home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in order to "provide information to the public concerning physicians with exemplary qualifications in the medical specialty of ophthalmology," according to the organization's founding document, filed online with the Kentucky Secretary of State's office. Page One, a Kentucky politics blog, first noted the group's existence last month.

Annual filings for NBO list Paul -- a Tea Party favorite, who days after an upset win in the GOP primary for Kentucky's U.S. Senate race ignited a firestorm last week by criticizing a key provision of the Civil Rights Act -- as the group's "owner and president." Paul's wife, Kelley Paul, is listed as its vice president, and his father-in-law, Hilton Ashby, is listed as its secretary. But it's not clear how involved Kelley Paul or Ashby have been. Reached at his home in Russellville, Kentucky, Ashby told TPMmuckraker: "I can't tell you what the organization does." Informed that he was listed as the group's secretary, Ashby said: "I was at one time involved as a secretary on something. But I don't know whether it was about that specifically or not."

Officials for two other eye-doctor groups -- the American Academy of Ophthalmology and the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery -- told TPMmuckraker they'd never heard of Paul's group. "I think it's fair to say that we would have heard of most organizations involved in ophthalmology in the US," said John Ciccone of ASCRS.

An internet search turned up eight ophthalmologists, from California to Virginia, who claim that they're certified though NBO. All also claim certification through ABO, the established certification group.

Now that really doesn't sound good at all.

Although I don't know how anyone could get anywhere with it, investigatively speaking. The annual filings referred to are just the virtually info-free forms that go to the Kentucky Secretary of State, the NBO doesn't file with the IRS. (Which it doesn't have to, if it has revenues of less than $25,000 a year. Or is a church or religious organization, though that's just by the way).

Nevertheless. Having a tax-exempt organization that does nothing -- and the philanthropic mission of which there wouldn't be any need at all for even if it did -- that has a board member who isn't aware he's on the board in your own professional specialty really does kind of make it look like something that could be of great interest to the IRS. At a minimum, and assuming that it's just about something as mundane as taxes.

But it almost has to be about something other than certifying opthamologists. Because (a) it doesn't; and (b) what ordinary, innocent reason can you think of for a well-to-do man from a well-to-do family who works for and in the family business (in addition to whatever eye-examining he does) even wanting to have what appears to be a 501(c)(3) that only exists on paper, really?

There just is none. It's even more of an attention-getting anomaly than a doctor with a practice in Texas who's temporarily on hiatus from his job as a congressional representative due to having lost a run for the senate suddenly deciding to co-found a co-own a gold and silver coin dealership in California for twelve years.

Because....Although I've always known that was a part of Ron Paul's resume, it never really captured my attention for long enough that I gave it any thought until last week. And now that I have, I can't help observing that that too was not the kind of thing people in Ron Paul's position and approximate tax bracket do just for fun. Per what I read, anyway, it wasn't a rare-and-collectible-coin-geek type of joint. It mostly just dealt in any old kind of coins as long as they were made of precious metals. And anyway, it was in California. So it doesn't appear to have been his little hobby shop on the side, at a casual glance.

And nor is it really very likely to be the kind of thing a man with a medical practice who's got some fairly serious political currency in the state of Texas would do because co-owning a little coin-dealership was simply the best and soundest investment available to him.

I do kind of want to know what was up with that, therefore. Hmm. Does anyone know anything about Ron Paul'service in the air force beyond the standard one-or-two line summary? Who he served with and/or for, where he did his training, whether he did any training beyond qualifying to serve, how/why he joined up, how/why he entered the air force rather than one of the other branches of the military, and so on?

I'd be interested in hearing it, if so. I mean, I'm just chasing a possibility with no assigned odds, I do admit.

But I'd still be interested.

[American Dream]

AlterNet Reader Utterly Destroys Rand Paul’s ‘Consistent Philosophy’

Posted By Joshua Holland On May 30, 2010

We’re a big website, so naturally we get our share of unhinged wannabe demagogues and barking, semi-literate lunatics in the comments. But, thankfully, we also have a lot of very sharp and insightful readers who contribute so much to our little community here at AlterNet.

Darklady is one such commenter. And, by the power vested in me as the only staffer whose book deadline requires him to work this holiday weekend, I hereby declare this Darklady comment to be AlterNet’s Reader Comment of the Day*:

Rand Paul believes that the government should allow all private business owners to deny food, lodging, clothing, employment, etc. to members of whatever groups they don’t like.

He claims that this is because it’s not fair for the government to force private businesses to do things they don’t want to do.

Meanwhile — Rand Paul also believes that the government has a *responsibility* to force private citizens to feed, house, care for and potentially be placed at great personal risk by a fertilized egg, zygote, embryo, etc.

What if the woman could declare herself to be a private business? Could she then abort based on the fact that she doesn’t want to provide services?

As a writer, I find this kinda brilliant because it says so much about Paul’s worldview in so few words. I bow.



URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/201 ... hilosophy/

[nathan28]

Rand Paul Not A Doctor

lulz@psyopfail

It's pretty amazing watching the Ron Paul Show, Season 2, jump the shark so soon. What's next, a Hollywood tabloid expose of Galt Paul's alcohol-and-coke-fueled fling with Bristol Palin? Jeez, at least Ron was going to legalize weed and do something about heart-attack inducing, neck-fat producing corn subsidies and maybe even open up US markets to third world products. But that just looks like it was attention getting to reel in the audience... turns out dad was Mini-Me in this Far Right Republican Soap Opera.

I meant, "stop WHINING about BP, America, we have to PROTECT the SHAREHOLDERS who had the GENETIC SUPERIO--I mean, ENTREPRENEURIAL RISK-TAKING-NESS-THING to dump toxic shit all over the entire fucking Gulf of Mexico."

Kind of a repeat of what c2w said, but...

Rand Paul also has a little problem with a non-profit that does nothing, apparently.

Highlights from the post at link:

In 1999, Paul created a new non-profit organization, the National Board of Ophthalmology (NBO), headquartered at his home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in order to "provide information to the public concerning physicians with exemplary qualifications in the medical specialty of ophthalmology," according to the organization's founding document, filed online with the Kentucky Secretary of State's office. Page One, a Kentucky politics blog, first noted the group's existence last month.

...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37672158

MSNBC: Panel says candidate Paul not board certified

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The national panel that approves doctors as board certified said U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul isn't on the list, even though he has campaigned as holding the endorsement.

The Louisville Courier-Journal reports that the American Board of Medical Specialties, which works with the American Medical Association, doesn't recognize certification by a group Paul founded in 1991 and heads.

Paul, a Republican from Bowling Green and an opthamologist, says he's certified by the National Board of Opthamology. But, Lori Boukas, a spokeswoman for the American Board of Medical Specialties, said the organization considers certifications valid only if they are done by the two dozen groups that have its approval and that of the AMA. The American Board of Opthamology said Paul hasn't been certified since Dec. 31, 2005.

How awesomely libertarian is that? Didn't get out of med school? Just incorporate! It's way cheaper than tuition.

And on edit, R. Paul 1 & 2 are now on my Shenanigans Radar Tracking System. Any $cientology connections?



=================

What if the woman could declare herself to be a private business? Could she then abort based on the fact that she doesn’t want to provide services?

This is actually an old feminist reductio ad absurdum gem from the '80s... only it's coherent with the thinking of the more extreme libertarian authors.

[Simulist]

Rand Paul Has a Little Problem w/ the Civil Rights Act

And, like his father, Rand Paul also has a little problem with the truth.

[MinM]

Rand Paul aide has history of neo-Confederate sympathies, inflammatory statements

A close aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) who co-wrote the senator’s 2011 book spent years working as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist, raising questions about whether Paul will be able to transcend the same fringe-figure associations that dogged his father’s political career.

Paul hired Jack Hunter, 39, to help write his book The Tea Party Goes to Washington during his 2010 Senate run. Hunter joined Paul’s office as his social media director in August 2012.

From 1999 to 2012, Hunter was a South Carolina radio shock jock known as the “Southern Avenger.” He has weighed in on issues such as racial pride and Hispanic immigration, and stated his support for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

During public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag.

Prior to his radio career, while in his 20s, Hunter was a chairman in the League of the South, which “advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.”

“The League of the South is an implicitly racist group in that the idealized version of the South that they promote is one which, to use their ideology, is dominated by ‘Anglo-Celtic’ culture, which is their code word for ‘white’,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research at the ADL. The ADL said it does not necessarily classify it as a hate group.

The League of the South maintains that it is not racist and does not discriminate in terms of membership.

“When I was part of it, they were very explicit that’s not what they were about,” Hunter said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon. “I was a young person, it was a fairly radical group – the same way a person on the left might be attracted in college to some left-wing radical groups.”

He does not recall when he left the organization but said it was probably in the late 1990s. Hunter was last listed as chairman of the Charleston chapter of League of the South in 1999, according to the group’s website.

By the early 2000s, Hunter was providing anonymous political commentary under the moniker the “Southern Avenger” on local rock radio station 96 Wave...

http://freebeacon.com/rebel-yell/

[The Consul]

Racists have learned to disguise themselves as well as the fascists who use them. Anyone who fails to question the racist connections to the Pauls is not paying attention to who they are, where they've been, what they've said, who they appeal to and why it matters is not being honest with themselves. I would think true libertarians would want to denounce them because ultimately the Pauls erode the actual political potential of libertarianism.

Maybe that is their real function, to keep sway of that energy toward the gop, to engender it, develop it electorally and denude it. I can just imagine a mind like Lee Atwater's playing with Rand Paul like a gob of silly putty.

[Joao]

Racists have learned to disguise themselves as well as the fascists who use them. Anyone who fails to question the racist connections to the Pauls is not paying attention to who they are, where they've been, what they've said, who they appeal to and why it matters is not being honest with themselves. I would think true libertarians would want to denounce them because ultimately the Pauls erode the actual political potential of libertarianism.

Maybe that is their real function, to keep sway of that energy toward the gop, to engender it, develop it electorally and denude it. I can just imagine a mind like Lee Atwater's playing with Rand Paul like a gob of silly putty.

I admit I once thought libertarianism was a Good Thing (more "freedom" must be good, right?), although I've since come to see it as illegitimate and a cynical creed of the (racist) ruling class. As such, I'm skeptical that any "true libertarians" capable of denouncing the Pauls actually exist, especially in this day and age when the oppressiveness of private capital is increasingly undeniable.

To be sure, everyone who likes Atlas Shrugged may not intend to support racism, but insofar as we live in a repletely racist society that would only be reinforced by libertarian ultra-elitism, I see "non-racist libertarian" as an effective oxymoron and, at best, a sign that a person doesn't grasp the realpolitik behind their ideology (not directed at anyone personally). In fact, the blatant racism of Ron Paul and so many of his supporters was one of the factors that helped me realize the shallowness of my own understanding. (Thankfully I've seen the light and am once again infallible.)

As far as Lee Atwater goes, this 1981 interview seems to suggest he wasn't under any delusions:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

[The Consul]

I just dont want to say someone who is libertarian is racist by default, rather they have more than their fare share. Being inside bigot consciousness is not an easy thing to escape. I cannot believe for very long that I have completed my own liberation from the river of hate I was thrown in at birth. How many of us get to the banks often depends on being saved by the very people we have been conditioned to despise. Then one day it's like Miles Davis, and before you know it, in little ways the vibe changes and the killers of the dream run screaming from the prisons of your mind, because you got a slice, however small, of what is really going down.