Meet Virginia's Todd Akin

By Josh Israel, ThinkProgress

04 December 12

irginia's Republican Party appears poised to nominate state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to be its candidate for governor in 2013 - embracing a man whose extreme political views bear striking resemblance to those of unsuccessful 2012 Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO).

With his fervent anti-science, anti-choice, and anti-LGBT, anti-federal government activism, Akin's extreme positions were well known long before his infamous August pronouncement that victims of "legitimate rape" are unlikely to become pregnant helped derail his 2012 U.S. Senate campaign. Cuccinelli's views closely mirror Akin's in all of those areas.

Over seven-and-a-half years as a Virginia state senator and three years as the commonwealth's attorney general, Republican Ken Cuccinelli II has been, in the words of the Washington Post's editorial board, "the most overtly partisan attorney general in Virginia's history." Though he claims he is "best known for his efforts to preserve liberty and defend the US Constitution," it is his opposition to liberty for women and LGBT Americans and his frequent court losses based on his flawed constitutional theories that have defined his political career to date.

While perhaps not as careless as Akin with his rhetoric, Cuccinelli has embraced many of the same extreme positions:

1. He wants an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. His 2002 campaign website laid out Cuccinelli's abortion views clearly: "Ken believes that human life begins at conception, and that human beings should be respected and protected from conception to natural death," it said. "Ken would seek to require sonograms to be part of a 24-hour waiting period with an informed consent requirement. Ken opposes abortions that are not for the purpose of saving the mother's life." Over his political career, he has pushed to defund Planned Parenthood and embryonic stem cell research. He pushed for a ban on third trimester abortions - making no exception for serious health risks on the woman - and for "safety" regulations for abortion providers designed to force clinics to close. He has also highlighted his opposition to RU-486 and his support for a "conscience" law protecting the "right of professionals to refuse to perform an action that is inconsistent with their moral convictions" - such as providing emergency contraception - "without losing their job." Cuccinelli frequently attacks Planned Parenthood and has suggested that the fact that abortion clinics in Virginia are in urban areas with large African American populations is an example of white racism. His "ultimate goal," he has said, is to "make abortion disappear in America."

2. He does not believe LGBT people deserve legal protections. Cuccinelli has made it clear that he believes same-sex relationships are immoral. In 2009, he told a Virginia newspaper, "My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They're intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it's appropriate to have policies that reflect that." After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case that such bans were unconstitutional, he still voted against repealing a state law making consensual sodomy a felony. He has actively pushed for state and federal constitutional amendments to prevent any legal recogntition of what he terms "what they'd like to refer to as ‘homosexual families,'" authoring a resolution calling for a federal amendment to invalidate any same-sex marriage, civil union, domestic partnership, or "other relationship analogous to marriage." He has opined that "giving public sanction to homosexual marriage ends up redefining marriage and it's certain to harm children." He even opposed a state bill that allowed private companies to voluntarily provide health insurance benefits to employees' domestic partners, warning it might "encourage this type of behavior." His advisory opinion that Virginia's public colleges and universities should rescind their non-discrimination policies was called "reprehensible" by a former Republican state legislator.

3. He is a climate-change denier. As part of his efforts to cast doubt on climate-change science, he used his position to launch an inquisition against a former University of Virginia climate scientist. Citing possible "fraud against taxpayers," Cuccinelli demanded the university provide him with a wide range of records relating Dr. Michael E. Mann's grant applications. A circuit judge and then the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the Attorney General was incorrect in believing he had the legal authority to undertake such a fishing expedition. He blasted the ruling, newspapers blasted him for wasting Virginia tax dollars. He also failed in his federal lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's power to regulate carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas - a unanimous appeals court upheld the agency's regulations as based on an "unambiguously correct" reading of the law. Since his legal efforts for climate-change denial failed, he often relies on mockery, asking audiences to exhale carbon dioxide in unison, during his speeches, to annoy the EPA.

4. He suggested President Obama stole the 2012 election. In a radio interview, Cuccinelli told the host he completely agreed with her assertion that investigations are needed to determine why President Obama lost "every one" of the states with photo identification requirements for voting, yet won re-election. Though studies have shown Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud, he told the host she was "preaching to the choir" with her unfounded theory.

5. He wants Arizona-style anti-immigrant policies and self-deportation. On his 2007 campaign website, he explained that since the federal government "has been negligent in its responsibility to secure our borders," he was "committed to passing legislation that removes the economic incentives that fuel illegal immigration." To do this, he opposed in-state tuition for undocumented students, embraced limits on the number of people who can live in a house, and supported civil litigation so competitors could sue when a rival "employer knowingly hires illegal aliens." He opposed bipartisan immigration reform efforts as "amnesty" for the "illegal aliens in the job market" who are "depressing wages and reducing American's standard of living." In 2010, he wrote in an opinion that "Virginia law enforcement officers, including conservation officers may, like Arizona police officers, inquire into the immigration status of persons stopped or arrested." And Cuccinelli joined an amicus brief defending key provisions of Arizona's immigration reform law which were later ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

6. He is a "tenther." Cuccinelli has embraced a radical interpretation of the constitution that the federal government should cede much more power to the states under the 10th Amendment. At a 2010 Tenth Amendment rally in Richmond, he told supporters of the view that "what we can do, where we live, is advocate again to bring back to life the 10th amendment, to bring back to life those boundaries in our constitutional system that were supposed to be the critical checks in the checks and balances system. Without them, we lose – gradually, we lose our liberty." In one of his briefs challenging health reform, Cuccinelli suggested that Congress is allowed to regulate "commerce on one hand" but not "manufacturing or agriculture." This is exactly the same discredited vision of the Constitution the Supreme Court implemented in the late 19th and early 20th century, and it would strike down child labor laws, the minimum wage, the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters, and countless other cherished laws.

On top of all of this, he also opposed a 2004 bill to require members of the clergy to report child abuse - a bill supported by almost every religious group in the state - and was the lone vote against another bill aimed as strengthening domestic violence protections.

Why It's Hard to Replace the 'Fiscal Cliff' Metaphor

By George Lakoff, Reader Supported News

04 December 12

riters on economics have been talking since the election about why the "fiscal cliff" metaphor is misleading. Alternative metaphors have been offered like the fiscal hill, fiscal curb, and fiscal showdown, as if one metaphor could easily be replaced by another that makes more sense of the real situation. But none of the alternatives has stuck, nor has the fiscal cliff metaphor been abandoned. Why? Why do some metaphors have far more staying power than others, even when they give a misleading picture of a crucial national issue?

The reason has to do with the way that metaphorical thought and language work in the brain. From a cognitive linguistics perspective, "fiscal cliff" is not a simple metaphor bringing "fiscal" together with "cliff." It is instead a linguistic metaphor that is understood via a highly integrated cascade of other deeper and more general conceptual metaphors.

A cascade is a neural circuit containing and coordinating neural circuits in various parts of the brain.

Because we think with our brains, every thought we have is physical, constituted by neural circuitry. Because about 98 percent of conscious thought has an unconscious neural substrate, we are rarely aware of conceptual metaphors. And because the brain is a physical system governed by conservation of energy, a tightly integrated cascade of neural metaphor circuits is more likely to be learned, remembered, and readily activated.

Let's take a look at the metaphorical complexity of "fiscal cliff" and how the metaphors that comprise it fit together. The simplest, is the metaphor named MoreIsUp, which is a neural circuit linking two distinct brain regions, one for verticality and one for quantity. It is a high-level general metaphor widespread throughout the world, and occurs in a vast number of sentences like "turn the radio up," "the temperature fell," and so on.

The economy is seen as moving forward and either moving up, moving down or staying level, where verticality metaphorically indicates the value of economic indicators like the GDP or a stock market average. These are indicators of economic activity such as overall spending on goods and services or the sale of stocks. Why is economic activity conceptualized as motion? Because a common conceptual metaphor is being used: ActivityIsMotion, as in sentences like "The project is moving along smoothly," "The remodeling is getting bogged down," and so on. The common metaphor TheFutureIsAhead accounts for why the motion is "forward."

In a diagram of changes over time in a stock market or the GDP, the metaphor used is ThePastIsLeft and TheFutureIsRight, which is why the diagram goes from left to right when the economy is conceptualized as moving "forward."

When Ben Bernanke spoke of the "fiscal cliff," he undoubtedly had in mind a graph of the economy moving along, left to right, on a slight incline and then suddenly dropping way down, which looks like a line drawing of a cliff from the side view. Such a graph has values built in via the metaphor GoodIsUp. Going down over the cliff is thus bad.

The administration has the goal of increasing GDP. Here common metaphors apply: SuccessIsUp and FailingIsFalling. Hence going over the fiscal cliff would be a serious failure for the administration and harm for the populace.

These metaphors fit together tightly in the usual graph of changes in economic activity over time, together with the metaphorical interpretation of the graph. From the neural perspective, these metaphors form a tightly integrated neural cascade -- so tightly integrated and so natural that we barely notice them, if we notice them at all.

There is, of course, more content to the "fiscal cliff." Imagine driving toward a cliff with the possibility of going over. The car you are in is out of control. The cliff is a feature of the natural environment. If the car goes over, everyone in it would be harmed or killed. Thus, if the economy is a vehicle moving forward without control toward the cliff, there is great and immediate danger, and so the "fiscal cliff" metaphor engenders fear. Thus, knowledge about driving out of control toward a cliff, together with the metaphors cited above, characterizes the implications of the "fiscal cliff" metaphor.

Because the conceptual metaphors constituting the fiscal cliff fit together so well and so naturally, it is hard to just jettison it and replace it with an even better integrated metaphor for our economic situation.

Progressive economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich have rejected the fiscal cliff metaphor, but with different arguments and different alternative metaphors. Krugman points out that the idea of the fiscal cliff is tied to an economically false argument about the dangers of the deficit. He argues instead that the deficit is too small and that we need to invest more, not less, in the development of the economy. The real danger, he argues is that what is called the "fiscal cliff" is really an "austerity bomb." The result would be dangerous cuts in necessary economic investments and safety nets, which would hurt many people and the economy as a whole as well, just as austerity programs in Europe have done. And Krugman has correctly pointed out that using the fiscal cliff metaphor helps conservatives because it accepts their economic theory of deficits.

Reich suggests "bungee-jumping over the fiscal cliff." He argues that President Obama should be willing to accept the drastic fiscal cliff cuts in the budget as of January 1. This could either be a "bluff" to scare the Republicans into believing the cuts would be pinned on them. Or it could be his "trump card," since the new Congress could reverse the cuts after January 1.

I agree with Krugman's economic analysis and think that Reich's political strategy is well worth considering. But from a cognitive linguistic perspective, their alternative metaphors, whatever their policy value, are not going to make it. Take "austerity bomb." The Austerity Frame is about self-denial. As used in Europe, it assumes two conceptual metaphors, TheNationalBudgetIsAFamilyBudget and TheNation'sWealthIsTheGovernment'sCashOnHand. Both are terribly misleading. Great Britain is richer than it has ever been, just as America is, if you count the total wealth of their corporations and citizens. The nations are far from broke, but the requisite money is not in the government's coffers. A family budget is nothing like a national budget, because the nation has vastly more resources and possibilities than any typical family. These are the austerity metaphors. The causal structure of austerity contradicts the causal structure of bomb. Austerity implies a long-term responsible form of self-denial that makes your situation better. Bombs blow up instantly and harm or kill you.

The idea is that austerity as a national policy would be destructive, and it most likely would be, but the metaphor doesn't have anything like a tightly integrated cascade of component metaphors.

Reich's "bungee-jumping" contradicts the inferences that arise from the tightly fitting component metaphors of the "fiscal cliff." And though Reich's "bluff" and "trump card" metaphors are instances of the commonplace BargainingIsGambling metaphor, it suggests a political strategy, but does not characterize our economic situation.

There are two morals here. First, metaphors cannot be proposed at will and be expected to work, even if they are intended to fit reality better than existing metaphors. Second, when metaphors are tightly integrated, they are going to be hard to replace and we may have to live by them, as misleading as they may be. The national economic debate will most likely continue to be about the misleading fiscal cliff, not the reality that "austerity bomb" is intended to convey. This is a sad scientific truth.