May Contain Nuts

So it was announced today that Spokane would be getting $35 million in funds from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (aka the stimulus package) to complete the southbound lanes of the North Spokane Corridor parallel to the existing operational northbound lanes which are currently servicing both directions of travel.

“Interestingly”, one of the people who wrote a letter to the US Department of Transportation secretary requesting that the NSC receive these funds was Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R), who represents Washington’s 5th district, which includes Spokane. Here’s what she had to say about the funds she was requesting in her letter (PDF):

As we look to the future, investment in our transportation infrastructure helps ensure successful economic growth, development, and global competiveness . Locally , the funding request will support the on going project which is expected to expand the economy through the creation of  750 new jobs and the addition of  $ 140 million in revenue. Regionally, Eastern Washington remains an essential hub facilitating the movement of goods and people throughout the Pacific Northwest, connecting major trade centers such as Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Edmonton, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. Residents and others traveling in the region depend on the highway system to transport agriculture commodities and business goods to other areas of our country.

Once completed, the corridor will connect trade routes through Eastern Washington reducing travel time by approximately two million hours each year, which computes to about $28 million in savings, and will reduce gasoline use by approximately 1.7 million gallons annually.

Now, here’s what Representative McMorris Rodgers said about the bill that created these funds when it was passed in February of last year:

Unfortunately, today’s vote represents more of the same, borrow and spend mentality. This bill increases our debt to $12 trillion. It ignores the will of the House and breaks promises to have 48 hours to review legislation. And the result is a big government, big spending piece of legislation that does nothing to create jobs.

Does this strike anyone else as incredibly hypocritical? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…

Incidentally, I’ve pointed this hypocrisy out to one of our local news stations in Spokane via their Twitter account. We’ll see if anything comes of it… meanwhile, I’m emailing Representative McMorris Rodgers to see what she has to say about this.

I really don’t get how much cognitive dissonance there is in conservative ideology (and, by extension, policy). Here’s a few examples with obvious counterpoints, both taken straight from conservative talking points:

1. “Government should stay out of people’s personal lives!” / “Government should ban gay people from getting married!”
2. “Government should have no say in your medical treatment!” / “Government should ban abortion!”
3. “Everyone has a right to privacy!” / “Why be upset about warrantless wiretapping unless you have something to hide?”
4. “Taxpayer money shouldn’t go to pay for abortions, which is murder!” / “OMFG MILITARY SPENDING ORGY!!!!” (I may be slightly exaggerating the counterpoint, but not by terribly much…)
5. “Respect the Constitution!” / Warrantless wiretaps, destruction of due process, shunning of international treaties, which the Constitution says are the law of the land once ratified. (These are not quoted because I can’t think of a witty way to write them as though they’re being said by a conservative… this is just too hard to snark about.)

I could probably think of more, but it’s almost 4 AM at the moment, so my thinking is a bit sluggish. Besides, these are plenty enough to make me want to smack the next person I hear saying either one.

Further, it continues to boggle my mind just how little thought seems to be put into the actual policy positions of conservative politicians. Everything seems to be tailored to being said in the fewest number of syllables possible. Perhaps this is why conservatives seem to be so good at arguing via Twitter… none of their policy points are longer than 140 characters. Examples:

1. Drill, baby, drill.
2. Smaller Government.
3. Tax Cuts.
4. Privatize medicine (since that’s working so very well right now… *ahem*)
5. Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran. (I don’t think I could conceive of a less tasteful policy position…)
6. The aforementioned “respect the constitution!”
7. Less regulation.
8. American exceptionalism! (you do know this is not a policy point, right?)
9. Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist nazi fascist communist witch doctor Chicago crony! (This actually isn’t a policy point, but it seems to be pretty popular on the right side of the country… and there’s still room in there for “nigger” before you run out of room on The Twitter. Not that a black guy running the country rubs anybody in the Southern-dominated Republican party the wrong way or anything… they even have a black guy of their own running the RNC! He’s the black guy every Republican can say they know, so they aren’t racist!)

Almost without fail, I have been unable to engage a conservative-leaning individual to elucidate on these policies or approaches to government beyond the basic 140-character talking points themselves. My efforts to elicit responses in a previous blog post netted me exactly one comment, which consisted of the typically vague “smaller government” and “respect the constitution” nonsense, with no justification, specifics, or detailed analysis.

It’s as if there are no policy positions or thoughts on governance in conservative thinking, but rather that their entire political ideology is bent on dismantling the government entirely. Seriously, what do Republicans do besides complain about government being the problem, and government not doing anything, while simultaneously doing everything in their power to grind the gears of the legislative branch to a halt as frequently as possible? What actual legislation have they proposed in the last 3 years? What positive actions have they supported? I mean, when you can’t even get beyond petty partisan politics when voting to strip government contracts from companies that prevent rape victims from having their day in court, what exactly are you even doing in government besides acting as a complete hinderance to progress?

Also, while I’m raving like a lunatic, can I ask what the hell is up with this American exceptionalism crap? America is not inherently better than every other country by virtue of it being America. We as a people are not some god-anointed civilization gifted with superior anything, for the purposes of accomplishing anything.

Given how willing we are to trample all over our own founding documents (by initiating warrantless wiretaps, making it possible for the President to have anyone in the country detained indefinitely without cause, and torturing prisoners) because a few guys managed to get past our absurdly lax security precautions and fly a couple of planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and how eager we seem to be to deny basic rights to those in our society who are different from us (be it gay marriage or health care for poor people), we have no moral authority to speak of on the subject of human rights or equal treatment. Our economy nearly collapsed last year because of our inability to properly regulate it, our infrastructure is about a hailstorm away from collapsing at any given moment, we rely so extensively on foreign energy that our national security is constantly at risk because of where that energy overwhelmingly comes from, our interactions with foreign governments are strongly biased toward whether or not they’re selling us said energy (tell me why else we didn’t bomb Syria, where most of the 9/11 hijackers were from), our status as a scientific, economic, education, public health, and human equality champion is nowhere near first in the world, and our production of greenhouse gases is very probably second-only to China, to whom we are so massively in debt that we couldn’t even get them to let us keep one of their pandas at the National Zoo in DC.

What, exactly, is so exceptional about America anymore? I mean, besides our obesity rate and the sheer mind-crippling scale of our national debt and military budget? For crying out loud, we can’t even get morally indignant with Switzerland for banning the construction of minarets in their country, considering how awfully we’ve been treating Muslims in this nation since 9/11, and nobody in our government has said a damn thing publicly about the horrific law being proposed in Uganda to permanently jail and/or kill by hanging anyone who is caught (or better yet, turned in) for being gay.

How exceptional of us.

The following is a letter I just sent to my representative in the House, Cathy McMorris Rogers (R, WA-05), on the news that she and a fellow Republican are now trying to terrify parents of disabled children into opposing reform on the unfounded fear that it would kill their children. I’m not playing anymore. This is serious, and the behavior of Republicans (and even some Democrats) in Congress is disgusting and completely inappropriate. Anyway, on with the letter.

Representative McMorris Rogers,

You have embarrassed yourself and our district by trying to intimidate parents of disabled children, many of whom already take advantage of government-run health care in the form of the S-CHIP program, into opposing reform of our health care system with baseless accusations against provisions and restrictions that do not exist in the bill, as you yourself have been unable to point out specific examples within the legislation of the threat you are pushing on these vulnerable parents.

I eagerly await your explanation of your behavior today, and fully expect factual justifications, not rumors and unfounded, un-sourced suspicions, justifying your stance against a public health care option.

Further, I wish to register my disgust at the clearly biased poll you have provided on your health care reform page on this website. Your distortion of facts and willingness to ignore the reality of the legislation currently being debated in the House speak volumes of your attitude towards reform, and your willingness to deceive the people whom you represent.

The poll I’m referring to is on this page of Representative McMorris Rogers’ website, as part of her “what are your thoughts on health care” feedback form, which for those of you who don’t want to trek to her site to check it out, asks:

When thinking about health care, would you rather…

Pay the costs you pay today for the quality of care you currently receive

Pay less for your care, but potentially have to wait weeks for tests and months for treatments you need

There are no other options provided as answers to this question. No representation of the millions of Americans (and doubtless thousands of WA-05 residents) who don’t even have health insurance because they can’t afford it, and are unable to receive the “quality of care” she seems to think everyone in her district is already receiving. No presentation of the public option beyond the leading and obviously partisan second choice. No recognition that quality of care does not need to be sacrificed in order to bring down costs.

Representative McMorris Rogers, like many of her Republican colleagues in Congress, is in no way serious about reforming health care in any meaningful. It’s time that this fact got pointed out, and it’s well past time the Democrats in Congress figured this out and went ahead with their own plan, since Republicans aren’t going to vote for a gods-damned thing anyway. They’re more interested in scoring political points against the President and terrifying seniors, veterans, women, and parents of disabled children into opposing Democratic legislation based on nothing but FUD than they are in actually helping their constituents.

Republicans have made it very clear lately that the government should in no way be involved in heathcare, market regulation, or even, seemingly, maintaining and expanding our nation’s infrastructure. Their mantra over the past 30 years has been that government is not the solution, it’s the problem.

So here’s my question: What do Republicans think the role of government is?

I have only one rule for responses, and that is that your responses should be affirmative in nature. In other words, a screed about everything that government shouldn’t be doing doesn’t count, because it doesn’t help to actually answer my question of what you think government *should* do (and further, “get out of the way” is also not a valid response, it’s a meaningless platitude).

I am honestly curious about this. Republicans have been on TV a lot lately arguing against pretty much every piece of legislation that’s been introduced since January 20th, but I’ve heard very little in terms of actual policy alternatives; the bulk of their argument has simply been “NO”. In the interests of my own illumination, what do you, oh reader and potential Republican, think the role of government is or should be?

Oh, one other rule: I’d like to hear from actual Republicans. If you aren’t one, please refrain from voicing what you think Republicans think.

Beware: largely pointless rambling ahead. Just need to vent…

I’m doubtless the only person who has been frustrated lately by the behavior of Congress. I’m not simply referring to their behavior in private matters such as marital fidelity; I’m also referring to the frankly whorish tendency to accept extremely large sums of money in donations and campaign contributions from major special interest groups. The amount of money shoveled into Senate and House re-election campaigns by groups like health insurers and the coal industry is absolutely obscene. Anyone who argues that the millions of dollars in special interest money these representatives receive doesn’t affect their vote is full of crap. If I’m getting millions of dollars from – to choose an example purely at random – the health insurance lobby to finance my re-election, I’m naturally going to be less willing to do something that could jeopardize that revenue, like vote for stricter regulation of that industry, or vote for a bill which would increase the amount of competition in their marketplace. Anyone who wouldn’t do that is far more noble than I am, and judging by the people we have in Congress these days, I doubt anyone there would fit that bill.

Congresspeople are interested in getting re-elected first, and doing the right thing second, it seems. I think this is something that could be primarily alleviated by actually setting term limits on all elected offices; really, there’s no reason anyone should be a 12-term Representative, or an 8-term Senator. Career politicians are ultimately useless on either side of the aisle, because they’re more interested in remaining employed than passing effective legislation, and when their biggest re-election contributors are large corporations and not the public at large who actually votes for them, it’s not hard to guess whose interests they’re likely to serve first.

The second largest problem, campaign contributions and other lobbying money, is something that Congress has shown they have no business regulating for themselves. There are terms and conditions in the Constitution regarding regulation of compensation (and kudos to the 1992 Congress for passing the “no pay raises until after an election” amendment), but beyond that, Congress is in charge of policing itself and setting its own rules, which if you ask me is a bit like letting the fox guard the hen house.

It’s occurred to me that the only way to seriously address the issue of special interest money in Congress is to have a separate body, independent of Congress, responsible for at least overseeing and regulating the campaign finance and lobbying processes. The only problem is that this body would have to be elected/appointed by someone, and short of having another batch of (ideally non-partisan) candidates stuffed onto a ballot that nobody will read every election, there doesn’t seem to be any terribly effective way to regulate the regulators without leaving the possibility open for Congress to neuter their authority through legislation. I guess you could simply relegate the regulatory body to a position of recommending violations for action by the relevant chamber of Congress, but that just turns them into a more independent but ultimately just as ineffective ethics committee, since final punitive action would still be up to the chamber itself to consider.

Incidentally, the Federal Funds Accountability and Transparency Act does something akin to this with earmarks by putting all of the information about who requested what earmarks on a public website for the general populace to watchdog. I don’t think it’s a terribly effective way to approach this problem, though, because aside from voting the Congressperson out (which seems to rarely happen, even when the Congressperson has shown considerable indiscretion), the public has no way to actually hold Congresspeople accountable for their actions while they’re still in office. Relying on shaming tactics by outing sordid information to disgrace a dirty politician is pretty much all this transparency act enables, but shaming a shameless person is a pretty fruitless endeavor.

I’ve occasionally wondered if the revised Constitution that Jamie Hyneman drafted while testing the cabin fever myth in Alaska addresses this point. I kinda wish that he’d post it just so other people could read it, but I understand why he hasn’t… politics is not a subject they seem at all interested in endorsing as a point of conversation on the fan site – for good reason – and posting it anywhere would inevitably attract that sort of discussion there.

I guess it’s ultimately a case of “you get the government you deserve”, though I’ve always felt “you get the government you vote for” is a better way of putting it, because by and large I think Americans deserve a better government than they tend to get. I may just still be operating under the false idealism of youth, civics class, and Schoolhouse Rock though. To be sure, the behavior of the Republican party over the past 6 months has done a great deal to dampen my enthusiasm for the political process. After all, it’s hard to have a legitimate discussion about serious issues affecting this country when your opponent is only interested in three-word chant-able slogans (which do not make good policy, and don’t even address the issue half the time… since when was “just say no” a good policy position on anything but crack cocaine [and even then...]?), questioning the legitimacy of the President’s birth, and using campaign-level smear tactics and falsehoods like “the government is going to kill your grandmother”. You spend so much time trying to cut through the bullshit that you can never actually get your own point across articulately. But this is drifting off into another rant entirely about the responsibility of the media to report information, so I’d better stop before I hurt myself…

So today at a planning meeting forAll Fur Fun, I picked up another “Obama is an evil tax-hungry liberal who passes secret taxes burried in his thousand-page bills” rumor that I’d crowdsuirce straight through Twitter, but I can’t trim it to 140 characters without sounding like a wingnut.

This one goes like so: Obama, seemingly all by himself, has enacted a new tax on Internet usage (I believe the exact phrase was “a tax on your bits and bytes”) in a recent energy and transportation bill that was signed into law. The Google has thus far gotten me nowhere. All I’ve managed to find by searching for “2009 Internet tax” have been references to the cybersecurity act of 2009 – which isn’t an energy and transportation bill, and seems to be eliciting its own completely different and valid criticisms – and the Internet access tax moratorium, which was extended for 7 years in 2007, seemingly making any chance of this mystery new “tax on your bits and bytes” utterly impossible to enact. In fact, the only other thing I could find on “2009 Internet tax” was a bill currently in a House subcommittee to make the tax moratorium (a.k.a ban) permanent.

Does anyone have any idea what the hell these guys were babbling about?

I’ve been mulling over exactly how to express my numerous thoughts on health care reform for some time now, and after finally managing to catch Keith Olbermann’s special comment from Monday on the subject, I’ve got it in my mind to write something now before I get otherwise distracted again. I might leave out the bits explaining the public option since I’d hope they already know what it’s really about, but I might leave them in anyway, just to be fully forthright in my communication to them. I will be sending something similar to this (probably condensed somewhat) to my senators, my representative, and to President Obama once I’ve posted it here.

First, let me start by establishing something. I’m married to someone with hyperthyroid and IGA immune deficiency. These are pre-existing conditions as far as the health care industry is concerned, and would either bar her entirely from coverage, delay her coverage entirely by an unconscionable number of months while I pay absurd premiums to NOT get the insurance I’m paying for, or delay the coverage of her treatments for those conditions and anything the insurance company deems to be related (which, as above, would probably be everything) for the same aforementioned period of time. I find it morally reprehensible to discriminate against people who need coverage simply because they actually need it. It’s absurd, and it ought to be completely illegal. An insurance company can certainly make a lot more money by only taking money from people they know will never cost them anything, but at that point, why not stop bothering with the “insurance” moniker and just start taking donations on the street corner?

I am actually offered health insurance through my employer. Unfortunately, while I could probably afford the 75% discounted premiums for myself that my employer offers, I don’t make anything even close to the amount of money needed to also cover the 100% of premiums it would require to pay for my wife’s coverage as well. Yet because I’m offered health insurance but “elect” not to take it (because doing so would prevent us from buying things like food), I’m considered by Republicans and even some blue dog Democrats as being someone who has freely chosen not to have health insurance, and thus not worth worrying about as one of the 50 million Americans left out of the current system. Furthermore, since that 75% discounted premium makes up most of what we spend each month on my wife’s health care in an already tight budget, even insuring just myself is a prohibitive expense, and one that I would feel unimaginably guilty about taking on at the potential cost of my wife’s health. Even this offer of insurance is ephemeral, though. My employer is looking at possibly having to cut benefits due to rising costs and the poor economy, so even if we were both insured through my job, there is absolutely no guarantee that we would receive the same level of coverage, if any, over the next few years.

I can’t even get on the Washington State BASIC health insurance program, because our limited income is still about $100 per month above the maximum permitted income level. Unfortunately, there is still a huge gap between the maximum eligible income for BASIC Health and the minimum required income to afford employer-provided or privately-purchased health insurance.

In my frank opinion, health care is a public service, like the police and fire departments, and should not be a for-profit industry that places more importance on money than the well-being of human lives. However, I also understand that moving from our current system to one more similar to those in Europe or Canada in one massive step is politically, socially, and economically impractical. Thus, I think that a public option for health insurance is the best option for people such as myself: a guaranteed program that can never be taken away for those who either do not care for or cannot afford to participate in the private insurance market.

Republicans have been making a huge stink about the public option, making all sorts of wild accusations about it being a government takeover of the health care system, or an intrusion of government bureaucrats into the health care decision-making process. They ask if we like going to the DMV, or the Post Office, and to imagine what health care would be like if it were similarly operated (some even bizarrely threaten that the public option will turn Medicare into a government-run system, when it already is, and enjoys widespread popularity despite this tragic “handicap”). I believe they are being disingenuous at best, or are outright lying at worst, about the purpose of the public insurance option, and do a disservice to the public discourse by spreading misinformation to their constituents and their colleagues. Its purpose is not to take over the health care industry, or even the health insurance industry. In fact, if it works as poorly as they claim it will, their fears about en masse migrations to its coverage seem bizarre and contradictory.

The public option will not replace employer-provided health care. In fact, provisions would exist to prevent most employers from switching to it (I believe there are exceptions for small businesses because paying private insurance premiums as a small business owner is very difficult – I know from observations at my own company – in which case switching would probably be preferable to losing your coverage entirely due to rising premiums, I would think). While the health care reform bill would also mandate that coverage be provided by employers, again small businesses (the ones Republicans are always concerned about) would be exempted from this mandate and the ensuing fines for non-compliance.

Yes, it will cost money to fund the public option, but if planned wisely, and given sufficient bargaining power, those costs can be properly controlled, and money can in fact be saved over the long term as the uninsured become the insured, and the average taxpayer stops footing the thousands of dollars in medical bills that are incurred every time someone unable to pay for a trip to the doctor has to go to the emergency room. Insuring everyone will lead to an overall more healthy country as illnesses can be caught in their early stages with inexpensive screenings, not when they’ve fully presented and are more difficult or even impossible to treat with advanced medications, therapies, and surgeries. And a healthier nation is a more secure nation, a more productive nation, and a happier nation.

Frankly, I would welcome the opportunity to have a government bureaucrat involved in my health care decisions if it meant I actually got to go to a doctor without it costing me an arm and a leg (the amputation of which would cost me further still, no doubt). It can’t be any worse than having an insurance company claims handler involved in the process for privately insured individuals… in fact, it might even be better, considering how good private insurance companies are at squeezing blood from stones. Unless you’re uninsured, there’s already someone standing between you and your doctor with a checkbook in their hand… if they don’t pay it, you have to, and if you can’t, you don’t get the care you need. Those who are afraid that the government is going to ration care should take a look around: insurance companies already do. The public option will not kill your grandmother or your unborn child, even if assisted suicide and abortion are procedures that may be covered. You, your loved ones, and your doctor will still be the ones making those decisions, just as if you were insured by a private insurer.

Quickly, I also want to make a point about the Post Office and the DMV. These places are often criminally understaffed, and/or run by the same apathetic people you encounter in ever other service-oriented industry in America. Think about it: how many more times has someone at McDonald’s treated you poorly compared to someone at the DMV? Sure, the DMV and the Post Office employees have no real motivation to care about you, but really, neither does the register monkey at Mc’Donald’s, FedEx, UPS, the concession stand at the theater, etc. It’s often just as hard to get fired from a customer service job in private industry as it is to get fired from a government job running a post office register. In fact, depending on where you work, it might be harder to get fired from a private industry job because of union protections. People have a bizarre tendency, it seems, to isolate only bad experiences as coming from government offices, while often minimizing the broad majority of decent (or even really good) ones, and at the same time doing the opposite with private industry. I think the constant Republican drumbeat of “government is always the problem” has contributed mightily to this, despite its demonstrable falsehood. A government is only as good as the people who run it, and if the people who run it are actively dismantling it from the inside, it’s obviously not going to work very well at all.

Those who favor deregulation of the health insurance industry rather than tighter checks on their behavior should look at the past decade and see what deregulation has gotten us. Health insurance premiums are skyrocketing while wages are not. Credit card companies engage in deceptive and even fraudulent tactics to extract money from people through late fees by changing payment dates without warning, or spiking interest rates when balances on other cards change dramatically (this one happened to me when we moved to Spokane, because we put a lot of the gas expenses on a separate credit card with rewards for buying gas). Mortgage lenders give enormous loans to people they know will be unable to pay for them. Lenders and their insurers repackage these crap loans until they seem to be made of solid gold, then sell shares of those loans as solid investments, destroying the entire economy when their bubble finally collapses. The SEC fails to investigate one of the largest Ponzi schemes in recent history. Food industries hire private contractors to inspect their food, and nationwide outbreaks of E.coli and salmonella result from contaminated spinach, tomatoes, and even peanut butter due to negligence and corruption in the inspection process.

Some argue that insurance companies should be allowed to offer the same plans nationally, and benefit from the economies of scale that come with a larger pool of insureds. The problem is that while it sounds good in theory, we already have a model for what happens when companies are allowed to incorporate in any state and offer services in another: the credit card industry. Many incorporated in Delaware, where the laws regarding credit cards are very lax, and their operations are regulated by the State of Delaware (and how many people in the US like their credit card company?). You can bet your left kidney that the same thing will happen with the health insurance industry if they’re allowed to go national: incorporation in the state with the laxest regulation laws and a continuation of their existing practices on a broader scale.

Private industry will always look for the quick buck, and cut any corners it needs to in order to make that happen. It’s just human nature, and industry is made up of nothing but people (very rich people who can buy a lot of influence and favors, but still people). When such corners start including things like food safety, or a person’s health, such behavior is inexcusable, dangerous, and deeply immoral. It is the responsibility of an independent third party with a vested interest in the common good, not the corporate good, to ensure that such corner-cutting abuses are prevented, because if they aren’t, people get sick, and people die. The health insurance industry has had years to get its act together, bring down costs, and actually insure the entire population of the United States. It’s well beyond the realm of second chances at this point. We’ve been talking about insurance reform since well before I was even born, for crying out loud, and none of the things people have complained about over the years have ever been fixed. It’s time for external corrective action, and the only mechanism large enough to drive such an action is the government.

We need a public option. It is borderline criminal that the richest nation in the world is millions, perhaps even billions of dollars in debt due to health care expenses; that 50 million people (that’s 16.7% of America) are uninsured, with millions more under-insured; that we spend more on health care than any other nation and have nothing to show for it; that one of the highest causes of bankruptcy in this nation is health care costs. Our system is broken, perhaps even fundamentally, and while this reform bill won’t correct the core problem of health care being a for-profit industry, it should at least level the playing field enough that everyone can afford to get the care they need.

The insurance industry is spending $1.4 million a day to defeat the bill being put forward by Democrats in Congress, just as they fought against the Clinton reform, just as they fought to prevent Medicare from negotiating prescription drug prices. The insurance industry will fight this reform tooth and nail because regulation and competition will cost them money and lower their obscene profits, not because it will harm patients or ration care. But the greatest insult and crime in all of this is that much of that money is going straight to our duly elected members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, in a desperate attempt to buy off their votes and thwart the will of the people who elected the Democrats in November to execute their agenda in overwhelming numbers. People want change (well, people who aren’t Republican, anyway), and they deserve to get what they voted for. Representatives, Senators, Mister President, don’t let the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital corporations take away our health care any longer. Don’t let them take away my wife’s health care any longer. Give us the public option, or get the hell out of Washington D.C.

This was posted in response to yet another bigoted anti-equality ad from the national Organization for Marriage and their “rainbow coalition” of hate, this time featuring the ever-popular children-as-political-mouthpieces stunt:

Yes, if laws promote equality, then we’ll have to teach our children not to be assholes. Think about it.

- NoWireHangers, Wonkette

I’ve been contemplating writing something like this for a while now, and watching the unedited tape of Jon Stewart’s interview Tuesday night on The Daily Show has finally motivated me to speak my peace (piece? stupid English…). (Incidentally, why is Stewart one of the only people in the media actually calling this shit out for what it truly is and saying, unequivocally, that it’s wrong?)

I’ve been frankly flabbergasted at the framing and tone of the debate being made in the US media about the efficacy of torture. That there are people in this country, in America, who think that torturing people is acceptable (let alone useful), honestly makes my blood boil.

Now, I am hardly what I think most people would define as patriotic; I don’t pray – for our country, its leaders, or in general. I don’t even own an American flag anymore (and before that, the only ones I had were a desk flag and the flag on my Boy Scout uniform). I don’t have bumper stickers expressing my love for my country. I don’t go around telling other people how great this country is. I live here. I think it’s a pretty nice place to live, for all its faults (and perhaps most telling of my “lack of patriotism”, I’m willing to admit that this country has its faults and its dark chapters of history). I don’t put a whole lot of thought into how lucky I am to be living here, or how much worse off I could/would be by being born somewhere else. I am, frankly, one of those assholes who takes this country and my freedom somewhat for granted.

Perhaps the fact that I take for granted the freedoms that we enjoy in this country is precisely why I have been so dumbstruck by the arguments being made in defense of torture lately. The fact that anyone in this country could even contemplate doing something so unfathomably contrary to everything I’ve ever been taught that this nation stands for is so incomprehensible to me that I’ve had considerable difficulty in expressing my confusion, frustration, and outright outrage at what’s been going on and what was done in our names. It runs completely contrary to common sense and logic, and I can’t imagine how the people getting on TV and defending what was done over the past eight years can even stand to look themselves in the mirror every day (obviously, Cheney doesn’t have that problem, because he’s a fucking vampire).

This nation was founded on the principles of freedom, equality, justice, fairness, and mercy. It has not always lived up to those principles, even from day one. But we keep getting better. “We can do better than this” seems to be the mantra of this country as it continues a steady march towards those ideal principles upon which it was founded.

Torturing people is something which fundamentally undermines these principles. I don’t care who you’re torturing; doing it to anyone is a debasement of the person doing the torture just as much as it is a dehumanization of the person being tortured. We destroy our moral standing, our moral credibility, and our moral authority by engaging in the same tactics we have so long criticized and even prosecuted other people both at home and abroad for in the past. We also endanger not only our troops but our citizens abroad, who could easily be subjected to the same practices by the governments of other countries, and at that point, all they have to do is point the finger back at us and say “you guys do this too, what’s the big deal?”. What would be the response then, I wonder?

Before I go any farther, I do want to note that I am in no way seeking to condone what the people we tortured did to the citizens of this nation. Being outraged at the fact that we tortured them does not in any way mean that I do not want to see them prosecuted for their crimes, or that I don’t want to find out anything they might know about future attacks. The people who make this false comparison are being disingenuous and dishonest, and are attempting to polarize the discussion in their favor by putting those with a reasoned and rational approach to the situation on the wrong side of human emotion. As human beings, we want to do whatever it takes to get information out of people. When those people have also either confessed to or been implicated in the worst terrorist attack on our soil in American history, the urge to exact retribution or revenge on these people for their actions is all the more potent, and all the more capable of pulling us off the road to the fulfillment of the ideals that this nation was built on.

We don’t torture American citizens who have committed heinous crimes, like rape, child molestation, or murder, though. We don’t subject kidnappers to torture to find out where they’re hiding their victims (no matter what Without a Trace or CSI might have you believe). We prosecuted and even executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded allied forces in WWII. We prosecuted a Texas sheriff for waterboarding people when Ronald Regan was president. Even George W. Freaking Bush said in 2003 that torture is inexcusable, and that anyone who did it would be prosecuted for war crimes (he was talking about Iraqis at the time, though, so hooray for double standards!). Despite the fact that more than one person I know would personally like to castrate child molesters and shove their *ahem* down their throats until they choked to death, they also realize that such behavior is against the law and that they would be rightly subject to prosecution themselves for doing so.

The law exists to protect ourselves and those around us from our baser nature, even if those being protected are fully deserving of our most inhuman retribution, because the risk of subjecting even one innocent person to those actions is, we’ve deemed, a greater risk than the potential harm a guilty person may do in their absence. We are a nation that prides (or maybe prided, it’s getting hard to tell sometimes) itself on the presumption of innocence, speedy and fair trial by jury, and the ethical treatment of prisoners, both civilian and military. It is sad, frustrating, and more than a bit depressing that a single attack on our country has undone so much because of the frightened, rash, and erratic reactions of our leaders at the time that we are now actually engaged in a debate over whether the United States of America should torture people, simply because it might work.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the venerated Founding Fathers, said that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”. I know it’s a quote that’s been used a lot by the Left over the past eight years, but it’s appropriate (I would re-phrase it in this situation to replace “liberty” with “humanity”, though). It also applies not just to our own citizens, but to everyone in the world. Yes, there are incredibly horrible people in the world who would probably kill us as soon as look at us. But to treat everyone like they may be one of those people, or to treat one of those people like they are less than human because of their actions, destroys our moral commitment to fair and equal treatment for all people. Torture is wrong not only for this reason, but because in conjunction with the other rulings and behaviors of the Bush administration, it became incredibly easy to round up innocent people and subject them to the same sort of treatment. Torture has no place in a free society, based in the rule of law and dedicated to the protection of freedom for all at the expense of absolute security. We can do better than this.

And I would rather die as a result of that statement being upheld than live knowing that the values this nation claims to hold so dear have been violated for my safety.

Y’know, I realize that the White House blog isn’t actually written by President Obama, and I realize that putting something on the White House blog isn’t any more indicative of the President’s priorities or interests than a State of the Union address (where are those billions of dollars of incentives for alternative energy and hydrogen-powered cars, or an increase in NASA’s budget to enable them to actually pull off the manned missions to Mars you promised us after the Columbia disaster, Mr. Bush?), but after the aura of anti-science that permeated the White House over the past 8 years, it’s at least nice to see that the White House and its staff are interested enough in what NASA is doing to post shuttle launch updates on the White House blog.

The $1 billion in stimulus funds to pay for climate observation and other exploration projects at NASA is also a rather substantial gesture, as is the $20 million to promote the benefits of astronomy, and the executive order overturning the ban on embryonic stem cell research.