May Contain Nuts

I am so so so so so SO tired of Obama’s bizarre insistence that the people in charge on the other side of the aisle are even remotely sane. The people who already know there’s nothing to be gained (and SO much to be lost) from ongoing capitulation to Republican demands are just utterly sick of watching it happen over and over again, and he’s not going to win over anyone else by keeping it up.

The Republicans in government don’t give a flying fuck about jobs, or poor people, or old people, or the sick, or the hungry, or the young, or the underprivileged, or the disenfranchised. They haven’t passed a single jobs bill since the election. Instead, they live in a fantasy reality where everyone could afford gold-plated health insurance if they weren’t so damn lazy, scary immigrants have taken every job in the country, gay people are destroying families and the military, the unemployed are (again) lazy, mooching slobs, and a secret Muslim socialist fascist nazi foreigner lives in the white house. They believe we can solve the debt crisis they’ve manufactured by dismantling Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP, WIC food stamps, children’s literacy programs, the national parks, NASA, the FAA, the EPA, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Education… but NEVER by taking ONE FUCKING CENT from our IMPOSSIBLY MASSIVE war machine, or asking the 1% of people with more wealth than the other 90% of us COMBINED to do anything with all that money but SIT ON IT (ideally in offshore accounts so it can’t be taxed at all, of course).

The Republican party is about one thing, and one thing only: power. The power to control who you can marry. The power to force you to have your rapist’s child, to prevent you from voting, to keep you under the crushing thumb of your corporate employer, to stop you from getting an education, to bar you from getting health care because you’re poor. They sell a vision of success by rugged individualism, where everything would be fine if the government just stopped doing its job. But the cold, hard truth of the matter is that they don’t care about you. They want to be in charge, and anyone else’s success puts that in jeopardy. So the rugged, freedom-loving patriots in the Republican party pass laws banning abortion, banning gay marriage, barring gays from serving their country, requiring a photo ID to vote, making it harder to unionize in the workplace. They rail against immigrants heeding the call of Lady Liberty. They argue against giving you a decent minimum wage for your work. They decry the common decency of caring for the old, the sick, and the young when they cannot care for themselves. They demonize peaceful religions to feed their engine of fear and bloodlust. They mock the idea of sharing anything with anyone.

You can’t build a functioning society with 300 million rugged individuals all just looking out for themselves with an attitude of “I got mine, jack”. It’s a lie. That’s all it is: a lie. Because it’s the only way they can hold onto their power: by promising over and over again something they know they will never deliver, all the while distracting us from their broken promises with fear and division.

And the truly, truly maddening part of this whole nonsensical charade we call a government is that the Democrats have decided to buy into the Republican lie and follow it all the way down the rabbit hole. There is so much moral high ground being abandoned in the name of bipartisanship with a party that wants to do nothing but drive this country into the ground so that they can be heralded as its saviors come election time. The Republicans have been allowed to frame the debate in our corrupted “marketplace of ideas” for years now, where multinational companies interested in nothing but profit drown out the voices of the actual human beings who live and work here.

All of the brilliant accomplishments of this country, past and future, now stand utterly beyond our reach, because as a nation, we’ve stopped caring about each other and the rest of the world. We are reduced to arguing over how many lives we have to destroy so that the rich can swim in their oceans of money, and the military can destroy even more lives abroad. Is it any wonder nobody cares what happens in government anymore?

Passing this along from elsewhere on the internets…

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Yeah, me neither. Pass it on.

Senator Ben Nelson asks:

“Who wants to go backward and tell 220,000 Nebraskans they can’t have health insurance? Who wants to deny young adults coverage on their parents’ plan? Who wants to deny children health insurance because they have pre-existing medical conditions?”

Um, that would be the Republicans, sir. 47 Republican senators voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act today. Zero (that’s zero with a 0, or perhaps 0 with a “zero”) Republicans voted against the repeal amendment.

On the subject of stupid, I should point out that this repeal amendment was being attached to a bill authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration. Because that’s relevant (and to be fair, the amendment to repeal the widely-derided 1099 tax provision portion of the ACA was also attached to this bill by a Democrat, and was passed).

Knowing as much as I do (which admittedly still isn’t much) about how this works, I would expect to see this repeal amendment added to every bill Mitch McConnell reasonably expects he can get away with.

Notice, however, that while Republicans are SUPER EAGER to take away the protections and advances in availability and care that the ACA provides, they haven’t said a single word about what they actually plan to do once they get rid of it. They have no plan. Which makes their “repeal and replace” strategy sound more like a “repeal and then hope everyone just forgets about it” strategy. The ACA may not be perfect (though it is certainly better than the FUD and bullshittery from the right would imply), but it’s still a far sight better than what we had before, so let’s keep moving forward and stop trying to go backwards, shall we?

(I debated writing that as “repeal and replace” “strategy”, but I felt that the sarcasm quotes around strategy were ultimately unnecessary, damaged the flow of the sentence, and defeated the efficacy of the actual quotation marks around repeal and replace. We need more punctuation… maybe we could make little superscripted ‘S’es for sarcasm quotes! ^sstrategy^s!)

So Proposition 8 has been overturned, thank the gods. And now the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the rending of garments, and the demonizing of innocent, upstanding Americans by the bigots has begun. Again.

There’s a storm coming, and it’s in your teapot.

Read more…?

So earlier this week, al-Qaeda apparently released another one of their bizarre anti-American videos. This one, notably, was in English, and had production levels not dissimilar to a news report filmed for a high school broadcasting class. It’s really ridiculous. This video prompted Rachel Maddow on Monday to say this:

I know al-Qaeda is al-Qaeda, right? But is it OK to point out that they‘re ridiculous, that their propaganda is inadvertently funny as in, “Ha-ha, I‘m laughing at you”? These guys are like the reject pile at talk radio tryouts.

My response: yes. It is absolutely OK to point out that they’re ridiculous. In fact, that’s perhaps the best thing that we and the media could possibly do. I’m not suggesting that our government not take them seriously as a threat, because they’ve proven themselves to be a lot deadlier in the battlefield than they are in front of a video camera. However, I think it gives al-Qaeda far more power than they actually have to continually portray them in public and in the media as some kind of superhuman fighting force the likes of which no man has ever seen; an existential threat to the very fabric of society unlike any the world has ever known, and against which all of our quaint notions of criminal justice and civil liberties are useless impediments to victory.

By all means, laugh at them. It takes the wind out of any asshole’s sails when you refuse to be intimidated by them, and this is doubly true of terrorists. Yeah, they destroyed the World Trade Center, made a good try at destroying the Pentagon, and could very well have been aiming to destroy the Capitol Building or the White House with United 93 on 9/11. They’ve killed thousands of American soldiers and native civilians in the countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

However, they also seem to have been getting increasingly desperate and incompetent in their attempts to launch assaults on foreign targets. There was the guy with explosives in his shoes who failed to blow up a plane in 2002 (thanks, asshole, for giving the TSA one more way to make it a pain in the ass to get through security). There were the guys who thought they could blow up JFK airport by igniting the pipe that fed jet fuel to the airport over a mile away (news flash: Mythbusters has shown us that jet fuel doesn’t burn especially readily. Also, you’re idiots). Back in October, someone apparently tried to blow up the Saudi royal family by stuffing a bomb up his own ass to sneak it past security (he only succeeded in blowing himself up, ass first of course, and not much else). More recently, there was the guy who stuffed explosives in his underwear to try and blow up a plane (I swear to god, if the TSA makes me take my pants off on my way to Mysterium, I’m going to go find that Nigerian punk myself and give him the biggest atomic wedgie in the history of mankind). And let’s not forget the moron who tried to blow up Times Square with an SUV full of unopened propane tanks and non-explosive fertilizer, left the keys to his getaway vehicle in said SUV, and had to call his landlord to let him back into his apartment when he finally made it home at 3:00 in the morning. Al-qaeda in Pakistan disowned that guy, he was such an embarrassment to their cause.

How do they expect us, the public they’re trying to scare the shit out of, to take them seriously when they’ve been so astonishingly bad at their primary objective of inciting terror since 9/11? It’s like watching an Austin Powers bad guy or something. Perhaps the thing that confuses me most is that there are so many people in this country still convinced that we can’t risk putting these people on trial after we catch them being complete dipshits because somehow they’ll execute some bizarre X-Men-type stunt of sucking all the iron out of the court bailiff’s blood, escape into the street, and become American citizens on the spot (as if this would incur some additional level of magical protection against being found guilty as fuck).

For god’s sake, laugh at them. The point of terrorism is to scare the shit out of you and make you do things you would otherwise not do in a rational state of mind, in an effort to drive you to your own brand of extremism in response to theirs, thus perpetuating a cycle of violence and destruction. Osama bin Laden’s own publicly stated goal was to draw the United States into an amorphous conflict it couldn’t win, thereby bleeding it dry and destroying it from within without expending anywhere near the same level of resources. If you refuse to actually be terrorized by their actions, however occasionally horrifying and devastating they may be, you undermine their goals and purpose far more successfully than any bomb or bullet ever could. Also, laughter is way cheaper than guns, tanks, ammo, bulletproof vests, and human lives.

The full video segment from Rachel’s show is after the break.

Read more…?

So I asked this a while ago, but didn’t get a whole lot of responses, and in the wake of the passage of health care reform and the pledges by Republicans to repeal it, I’m all the more curious.

What do conservatives (and Republicans in particular) think is the role of government in America? As with the previous post, I ask respondents to avoid meaningless platitudes like “uphold the Constitution” and “stay out of our lives”. These are worthless talking points and campaign slogans that have no meaning, and express no actual, serious opinion on governance. I’m looking for positive, affirmative stances on what Republicans think government should do in America; not meaningless, angry, all-caps screeds about what government shouldn’t do.

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.