Barack Obama announced plans Friday to send $1.5 billion to Pakistan every year for the next five years, to build schools and roads and hospitals. That’s $7.5 billion dollars. As far, as we know, the Pakistanis haven’t rejected the funding.

Compare that to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Texas Governor  Rick Perry, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who are all Republicans and who all have announced plans to refuse Federal stimulus funding on grounds that there are strings attached. Sanford is rejecting $700 million, Palin is rejecting $288 million, Perry, $556 million, Barbour, $56 million, and Jindal, $98 million. That’s a total of almost $1.7 billion. (Perhaps we can just send it over to Pakistan as a sixth-year payment.)

It’s quite possible that at the end of the five years, the children of Pakistan will be more healthy and better-educated and have better prospects for the future than all the children in South Carolina, Alaska, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

From today’s New York Times’ editorial:

“It would be best, therefore, for Mr. Sanford to find a face-saving way to reverse himself. If he does not, voters should remember that their governor placed politics ahead of schoolchildren and the schools that are struggling to save them.”

Look at these facts:

“Number of South Carolina teachers that a state Republican official estimates will be laid off if the federal stimulus funds are declined: 4,000

Number by which the number of unemployed people grew each day in Louisiana in December: 430″

“Unemployment rate in some counties of Mississippi: 19%”

And then, consider this:

“Number of homeless children in the United States: 1.5 million

Percent of America’s identified homeless children that live in just 11 states: 75

Number of those states in the South: 9

Number of children homeless in Louisiana, the state with the highest percent rate of child homelessness in the nation: 204,053″

Heart-breaking, especially when you consider the role money plays in all of this, and that governors are turning millions of dollars away. Turning away money for schools and teachers and unemployment. Ironically, those 4000 teachers will most likely end up on… yes, that’s right, unemployment. It’s almost as if the governors want to keep their constituents uneducated, unemployed,  and hungry. And they’ll turn around come election time and say, “You think you’re poor now, wait until ‘Joe The Democrat’ becomes Governor and taxes you even more.” And the cycle continues into the next generation, and the next, and the next.

Governor Palin, in a nod to secessionists, said, we won’t “sell our birthright for short-term gain.” I suppose if greater unemployment, more people hungry and on welfare is their birthright, well, so be it.

Turns out, these governors will end up looking like asses, the children of their states will have less-prosperous futures, and be less-healthy and less prepared to know how to deal with all of the world’s additional challenges, all because these five governors have presidential aspirations, fear educated citizens, and just plain care more about an antiquated and erroneous interpretation of principle than the people they were elected to protect.

Looking at exit poll data, a composite of the person who voted “yes” to ban same-sex marriage in California is someone who is married (60%), and has children (68%), attends church weekly (84%), does not work full-time (57%), is an Independent or Republican (66%), and voted for Bush in 2004 (80%). This person also is likely to live in the suburbs (59%), and is very worried about another terrorist attack (65%).

None of these results should be surprising. Nor should these, given what we know about voting groups overall. 75% of black women, 54% of latin men, and 51% of white men voted to ban same-sex marriage. Overall, 70% of blacks supported the ban.

Interestingly, by approximately the same 52% to 48% margin, Californians voted that doctors do not have to notify a minor’s parents before performing an abortion. 

Overwhelmingly in both measures, the less-educated were more likely to vote against gay marriage and vote for parental notification. So, it seems Californians trust minors to decide to get an abortion but don’t trust gay adults to marry. Specifically, one could ask, are Californians willing to allow (what they see as) murder more readily than they are willing to allow (what we see as) love and marriage? Where is the logic in that?

Were gay marriage for Californians solely a religious issue, one would have to assume the parental notification ballot would not have passed. Historically we know that notification leads to less abortions, and would therefore be supported by more conservatives and the religious right. 

Unless we’re just willing to say that there were more voters who voted for the marriage ban who have girls at home. Which is possible looking at the numbers. The majority had children, but not, evidently, homosexuals.

America’s Economic Crisis Is Merely A Symptom Of A Greatest Crisis To Come.

The Road To Civil War. Part One.

The House’s failure Monday to pass the historic federal bailout bill is a failure of our government to do its most essential job: protect the people it was elected to represent. This was not democracy in action. This was a concerted, organized revolt against a perceived bi-partisan success by a small group of truculent Republicans and yes, some Democrats as well, who were more concerned with public perception, and fear that a “yes” vote would mean losing their jobs, than with doing the people’s business in an effective, efficient, responsible, manner. No doubt, the job losses will come, not only for them, but for millions of Americans who will suffer because every branch of our society failed in its duty to understand and present properly the true facts of the proposed financial bill, and its impact on the American and world markets.

Despite its ineptitude, or perhaps because of it, Congress knows that 34 days before an election it cannot go on vacation, without a solution in place to the gravest financial, indeed, gravest crisis, period, we have seen since the Great Depression. The problem is that few in Congress understand this economic crisis. Granted, few, if any, anywhere, truly do. But, as Tom Friedman wrote in today’s New York Times,

“We have House members, many of whom I suspect can’t balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don’t understand, swamped them with phone calls.”

This is the crux of a larger issue: Our society has become too complex and out-of-control for anyone to understand what is holding it together and driving it. Worse, overall, Americans are becoming less, not more, intelligent and educated, “reading and understanding what they read less as well”. We have a sitting president and a current vice presidential candidate who clearly do not read newspapers. When asked in an interview with Katie Couric, which aired Monday, what sources she uses to keep herself up to date, Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate, could not name one newspaper or magazine or television news show she follows to “stay informed and to understand the world”.

Some Conservative Republicans are so in love with their faith that the bible, or their interpretation of the bible, has replaced the news for them. Republicans are so intent on allowing our children to wallow in religion that they want to dismantle the US Department of Education, teach Creationism in schools, and elect a president who had to get his father, an Admiral, to help him get into military college, where he subsequently graduated fifth from the bottom of his class. John McCain acknowledges this, and yet chose a vice-presidential candidate who took six years and five colleges to get her degree. Obviously, intelligence and education are not pre-requisites to the Republicans. Their response? The liberal, elite left and the liberal, elite media don’t love America. But whose America?