Government

div class=”dkimg-c”img src=”http://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/191280/GOP-PrimaryDebate.jpg” alt=”GOP 2012 Debate” height=”100″ width=”550″ / div defang_class=”dkimg-capquot;”Talk about it here. Watch it live on Bloomberg TV or a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics?hpid=z1″washingtonpost.com/a.br //div /div pspan class=”update”b5:11 PM PT/b:/span OWS makes it’s debate debut, in the form of a question about OWS from Tumulty to Gingrich.

The demonstrations now spreading virally from Wall Street immediately strike a chord: we all know that neither our economy nor our government is working for the benefit of the 99 percent.bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-van-gelder/we-are-the-99-percent_b_1001435.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/occupy-wall-street/”More on Occupy Wall Street/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/DmJoDhNvqovNI_w62SxqO_zaqf4/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/DmJoDhNvqovNI_w62SxqO_zaqf4/0/di” border=&#82

Today seems like one of those days intentionally designed to sap whatever faith you might have had left in politics. You did have some remaining faith, right? Just a bit? Well hand it over, because forget jobs, forget healthcare, forget the very scary deficit monster and everything else—we’ll be lucky if the members or wanna-be members of our government can even agree to meet with each other.

On NPR’s All Things Considered , Erin Killian reports, Parental Leave: The Swedes Are The Most Generous : Sweden has some of the most generous parental leave laws in the world — and the government not only considers the mother, but also the father. Parents are allocated a total of 480 days per child, which they can take any time until the child is 8 years old. They can share these days, although 60 are allocated specifically to the father. And they are entitled to receive 80 percent of their wages, although this is capped at a certain level.

Let’s try something new this week. Good news first : Guess who benefits from legalizing gay marriage? Other than gays, of course. Straight women : To paraphrase the great gay songwriter Stephen Sondheim: Straight women, rise! As same-sex couples marry, things get better for us, too. Remember the scary (and since-discredited) stories about how a woman is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband after she turns 40? Or the one about how suitors are fleeing from Maureen Dowd because they’re afraid of her Pulitzer Prize?

If the tea party movement isn’t racist, then at the very least, it’s not necessarily bright. And nothing displays the movement’s stupidity more than its ongoing dust up with the NAACP over the civil rights group’s resolution asking that the organization condemn racism in its midst.

We live in the world of work. But whether we hold onto our jobs or not, that world is being taken from us; taken by the blind forces of aging, science, and arithmetic. In the ’70s it was popular to say that work is how you survive, but your life was elsewhere. But that was even wrong then; aside from sleeping, work is how we spend our time and how we identify ourselves. For many of us, the rest of life is squeezed into the margins. And those margins keep shrinking, whether we work in an office or on a road crew.

Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics Marc J. Hetherington, Jonathan D. Weiler Cambridge University Press Paperback, 234 pages, $23.16 Kindle edition 9.99 August, 2009 Money quote: Considering our story up to now, we believe we have adduced powerful evidence for the increasingly central role that authoritarianism has come to play in structuring party competition, mass preferences and the relevant issue agenda of the past forty years.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin accused MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Sunday of conducting a “prejudiced” interview with Rand Paul, in which the Tea Party candidate infamously aired skepticism about the reach of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Speaking to “Fox News Sunday,” the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee said that Paul was being subjected to the same biased media coverage that marked her run for office, before offering her Tea Party-backed candidate a bit of advice.

I’ll take Rand Paul at his word. He’s opposed to racial discrimination. However, he obviously supports allowing businesses to engage in racial discrimination without impunity. Evidently, if the government says it’s against the law to run a whites-only business, this is a bridge too far for Rand Paul. Congratulations, Republicans. The man you chose to run for the vacant U.S. Senate seat from Kentucky and the man who delivered the highest profile political victory for the tea party movement has turned out to have some very twisted ideas about civil rights and race.